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A ‘legal opinion’ about the incident that made our Jonathan Pearce “mighty queasy”.
The adverts to UCMJ and the U.S. Army Field Manual only prove that hostage taking is illegal under U.S. law, but don’t prove that the action in question here was in fact a hostage taking.
So far I’m not convinced that there was a violation of either international or U.S. law — not in spirit nor letter. The only thing I’m convinced of is that lots of people are wanting to make a big deal out of an incident that doesn’t deserve the attention.
Via Instapundit
This is from the ‘The Basra Rose’, the Iraq deployment section of the Red Rose, the newsletter of the 1st Battalion The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment:
WEATHER
Mon – HOT
Tue – VERY HOT
Wed – UNBELIEVABLY HOT
Thu – SO HOT YOU’LL CRY
Fri – AS HOT AS THE SUN
Sat – SO HOT LOCALS BURST INTO FLAMES
Sun – AS HOT AS THE DEVIL’S SCROTUM
In other words, it is a tad hot in Basra. Just so you know.
And I agree with most of what he says!
Norman Geras, who I had not previously encountered until he recently fired up his blog , has an interesting take on things from what appears to be pretty well left of center. I was particularly taken with his thoughts on the war, which echoed some of my own but were much better put (less spluttering and profanity, for the most part).
But opposition to the war – the marching, the petition-signing, the oh-so-knowing derision of George Bush and so forth – meant one thing very clearly. Had this campaign succeeded in its goal and actually prevented the war it was opposed to, the life of the Baathist regime would have been prolonged, with all that that entailed: years more (how many years more?) of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the children’s jails, and the mass graves recently uncovered.
This was the result which hundreds of thousands of people marched to secure. Well, speaking for myself, comrades, there I draw the line. Not one step.
A spot of googling reveals that Mr. Geras is Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Manchester. His books include Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, and Men of Waugh: Ashes 2001, and he shows up in rags like Imprints: A Journal of Analytical Socialism (I confess to Windexing my computer screen after that web page opened up). One is always searching for sane lefties to try to gain some insight into the cult of the state, and Norm looks like he may be worth keeping an eye on.
You don’t have to hold an anti-interventionist stance regarding Iraq to feel mighty queasy about this story in the Washington Post, which covers a case where the U.S. Army seized the family of an Iraqi officer, threatening to hold the family until the person concerned co-operated with the Army’s requests.
Lovely. If the coalition wants to hand propaganda material on a plate to those who would have preferred Saddam to remain in charge than that we should have liberated that country, then this sort of thing is just ideal.
I hope the persons responsible are dealt with harshly for this.
And I don’t want lots of comments about how “Pearce has turned into a peacnik idiot yada-yada”. Kidnapping is wrong. Period.
The Pentagon funded research agency DARPA are launching something called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) which is in its own words…
A Market in the Futures of the Middle East..
and will provide…
insight into the interactions among Middle Eastern and U.S. interests and policy decisions.
This is done by letting you trade…
on data indices that track economic health, civil stability, military disposition, and U.S. economic & military involvement in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey.
…as well as other contracts. There has been some opposition to the idea. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota have urged the Pentagon to drop the idea stating that…
The idea of a federal betting parlour on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque.
and …
useless, offensive and unbelievably stupid.
Trading begins October 1st
The third of a series of interesting although irregular ‘letters‘ from Our Man in Basra.
I promised to tell you more about the situation here. I will tell you loads when I get back. It’s absolutely fascinating, like a real time experiment in political theory. Except it’s a bugger for the people we are ‘experimenting’ with.
Basra now is effectively an anarchy, a sea of conflicting power groups. As I briefed the CO and the Bde Comd (ed. Commanding Officer and Brigade Commander), you can’t have politics without first having security, and you can’t build security through political systems. Interestingly enough they both agreed. We are trying to police Basra as if it was somewhere in England, policing by consent. That does not work after thirty five years of dictatorship and in a country where people think democracy means “the people will decide”.
The worrying comparison we now get is with Saddam Hussein (SH). After the 91 uprising Basra was far worse damaged than anything we did to it – we barely touched it. Yet in one month he had basic amenities back because he shot looters. After three months we still haven’t got reliable electricity or clean water, because we try to arrest them. Every Iraqi I have met agrees on two things, no matter what group they come from:
You must shoot more people Not imprison, not arrest, you must kill them. Otherwise they will not stop.
The other thing is they all hate SH and BP (Ba’ath Party) with a passion. Consider it from the point of view of the looters. You live in shit, your life expectancy is low, there is – at the moment – no economic activity you can improve by, and your only experience is of a gangster economy, so without influence you have no chance. So why not loot? After all, the CF (Coalition Forces) won’t shoot you. You have to really work at it to get shot by the British. If we catch you we now hand you over to the Iraqi (IZ) judicial system. Except there isn’t one yet, not really, and all the Judges are corrupt or threatened. If you’re caught you spend about two nights in jail and get released. And while you are in jail we feed you, shelter you and give you water. This is like trying to deter crime in London by banging shoplifter up for two nights in the Ritz. So the locals think we aren’t serious about crime. Result is we are losing support.
The looting is incredible – they have done 99% of the damage to this city. The only reason the electricity isn’t fully back on is because they have been ripping up the electricity cables, burning off the insulation, melting down the copper and selling it on the black market. They light fires at either end of the cable to short it out first. Occasionally they get it wrong and get electrocuted, but if you live like they do it’s a perfectly rational risk to take.
The result is that people are turning elsewhere for security, away from us. Everything hangs on security, all infrastructure, all economic activity, everything. We don’t provide it, we just physically haven’t got enough troops. (We could do it if we shot people whenever they upset us. Everyone would stop upsetting us then, and we could build all the other security forces, i.e. police and judiciary, keep them safe from intimidation and build authority. This is a statement of fact, not a policy suggestion.)
The IZ police are corrupt, frightened, incompetent or all three, so people turn elsewhere. The tribal Sheikhs never used to have very much power in Basra because, unlike the countryside, the population was so mixed up. But now only the Sheiks are willing to kill your enemies or intimidate the police etc, so people go to them for help. This is a self-generating snowball effect, so we are creating a sort of tribal mafia, although not necessarily dishonest (though many are).
In my next letter I will give you a potted description of the breakdown of Basra society. And I do mean breakdown.
Apologies for the sparse style but I have my ‘yellow brain’ on all the time. That’s like a ‘green brain’ only cooked by the heat…
Editor’s note: An account of his recent visit to Basra by the now famous Salam Pax.
I’ve heard and read some media pundits who after looking at the photos of the Hussein lads suggested one may have committed suicide. I cannot make a definitive judgement from a single angle and a not terribly good photograph… but I think not.
A bullet makes a small entry wound and a large exit wound. The photo shows a large hole in the right side of the head. If this were due to a bullet, the entry wound would be on the left. If it was a suicide, he held the pistol in his left hand.
Since I’ve never heard either of the two was a left hander, I will presume this was not the case. I’d bet on shrapnel from one of the missiles as the source of the wound.
What’s this about?
Meanwhile, mobile-phone services were mysteriously available in Baghdad yesterday, bringing cellular service – banned under Saddam Hussein – to ordinary people in the Iraqi capital for the first time.
Officially, a tender for the three mobile-phone licences the US-led administration plans to offer across Iraq has yet to take place.
A US military spokesman could not explain why the lines turned on or what that meant for the tender.
Users of foreign mobile phones were able to make and receive calls and send text messages. Currently, few Iraqis have suitable phones. Foreign workers in Baghdad, who have widely relied on expensive satellite telephones to stay in touch, were greeted with the words: “MTC-Vodafone wishes you a pleasant stay in Kuwait.”
Those are the concluding paragraphs of a Scotsman story, a story that is mostly about happy reactions in Baghdad to the Uday/Qusay killings.
David Masten of Catallarchy, to whom thanks for spotting this twist at the end of this story, thinks it’s the free society doing its thing.
In other words while occupation forces are trying to set up the new addition to their mercantilist empire, some people are just doing what is necessary to make life and society better, without any centralized direction or even permission. In a land where landwire communications infrastructure has been little more than rubble for over a decade, cell phones are a quick and easy way to build up communications networks.
If licensing and nationalized services are the US government’s idea of ‘freedom and democracy’ for Iraq, bring our boys and girls back home.
Well that could be the story. But couldn’t it merely be that one bit of the new administration (the bit that was setting up this auction) was operating in ignorance of what another bit (a bit that was just setting a system up regardless) was doing? Much as I’d love to praise this as free market anarchy in action, I have my doubts. It could surely just as easily be the other anarchy, state anarchy. Anyone who has ever worked for a state will know that anarchy never goes away.
Michael Jennings knows everything about portable phones, but he’s in Provence right now, and so may not comment as quickly as he would normally. But eventually he’ll clarify everything for us.
Meanwhile, the general point that portable phones are great news for the poorer and less stable parts of the world is reinforced once again. In that sense this is definitely yet another for the Samizdata Triumphs of Capitalism collection.
Regular phones depend on wires. And not just on any old wires – on wires that have to stay connected throughout their entire length. Portable phones rely on only a few fixed installations, which can be defended against marauders and can therefore stay in business. They are also, even in a totally law-abiding place, quicker to get started. I recall how they were able to crack ahead fast with the reconstruction of East Berlin, immediately after the Wall came down, thanks to the magic of the portable phone.
I do love a good technical fix. Just who presided over this one I for one am not clear about, but a technical fix this nevertheless is.
Reports are coming in that both of Saddam Hussein’s mass murderous sons may have been killed during an attack by US Forces on a house in Mosul in Northern Iraq. Early reports said ‘seized’ but SkyNews is currently (17:40 GMT) reporting live from Mosul saying US reinforcements are “pouring into the area” and bodies at the house “have a strong resemblence to Uday and Qusay”.
Let’s hope the reports are confirmed soon!
 Yes! it is being confirmed that Uday and Qusay are dead. Good riddance to two of the most evil psychopaths to walk the earth in recent times…
…and to the US forces who did it: way to go, guys! 
On his culture blog, Brian Micklethwait provides a reference to a preview of an American television program about the reactions of the muslim world to a perceived onslaught of American television and movies, and how they are perceived by many as “overt propaganda created to undermine their religious and cultural identity”, and yet that at the same time, people love to watch them.
Brian has some has some wise thoughts on the subject himself, and concludes by observing that inevitably the culture must move in two directions.
But all will eventually be well. They’ll make their own shows, that satisfy their young, but deflect the complaints of the complainers.
And then we’ll watch their shows too.
This all invites questions about just how cultural programming – television and movies – propagates around the modern globalised world, which is ultimately much more interesting than simply “America is trying to dominate the world with its propaganda”. It’s both simpler and much more complex. For one thing, American programs are not meant as overt propaganda, and they are certainly not aimed at the Muslim world. Hollywood is trying to make money, and that is all. The Muslim world is such a small market that Hollywood is essentially not paying attention at all, and this is even more so in the case of television than in the case of movies.
For there is a huge difference in the overseas reception of American television and American movies. American movies dominate the box office everywhere pretty much without exception. Local movies have a much smaller market share than American movies virtually everywhere, and Hollywood is selling the same movies to the entire world. Hollywood movies today make more money outside the US than they do inside the US (almost all of which comes from Europe and East Asia), so Hollywood is very conscious of what foreign audiences will want to see when making movies. Often this leads to what may be described as “lowest common denominator” film-making. Movies containing lots of explosions are popular everywhere. (Comedies travel far less well, which is why Hollywood makes fewer of them than it used to, and is why they have smaller budgets). However, rather than turning movies into “overt propaganda”, this tends to make movies bland. American film production does interact with the rest of the world, but in a slightly less direct way. Hollywood has a ferocious appetite for talent. Anything good that is done by filmmakers in the rest of the world tends to get co-opted by Hollywood. If audiences like Hong Kong style action sequences, then these will find their way into American film. The people making the films in America will often be the same people who made the ones in Hong Kong, working in Los Angeles and being paid far more (and working shorter hours) than was ever the case on the other side of the Pacific. When a film financed by a Hollywood studio but made by a Hong Kong filmmaker and filmed in Canada is shown in Spain, it’s a bit hard to tell just whose culture is being influenced by what. (I will be intrigued to see what happens when Iran becomes less oppressive, and some of the country’s many talented film-makers get the opportunity to make films in Hollywood. The thing stopping this is the political situation in Iran and certainly not that in Hollywood.)
The propagation of American television is totally different, although the final conclusion is perhaps the same. → Continue reading: Movies, Television, and Globalisation
Another letter from the source in the British Army stationed in Basra.
I am sorry about the handwriting but I am very tired, haven’t slept much for a couple of days. I keep getting woken up in the night to reach to events because they want my input on what I know and I work long hours to begin with. But it is absolutely fascinating. I love the work out here. The patrolling is interesting although I do not get to do much of that, but the work I am doing now is great.
I am ‘interviewing’ people to find things out, using as much knowledge of Arabic culture as possible and in the long term cases ‘getting inside their heads’. With each one, it is like a performance in which you try to build a connection, a friendship, so you must find the things you agree on. At the same time you must keep a core that is remote and calculating, wondering why is he telling me this, what is his motivation?…
A lot of the rest of the time I am analysing information, explaining it to others and briefing, dealing with ‘specialist agencies’. Sometimes I get to go find some things out myself, ‘discreetly’. And I also work out what we should do to catch the enemy, and recommend it. Yesterday afternoon we carried out an op [ed. operation] based on a suggestion from me to hurt the oil smugglers. Normally, we catch at very best a tanker. Yesterday we caught four and two ships. A team effort, but my idea, so satisfying. The idea is now being continued. Prison sentences last one day so don’t deter these people but losing that much stuff will hurt!
I was called in to co-ordinate the actual capture (or rather what to do once we got them). I made the decisions, ‘interviewed’ people through my interpreter, made the plan and even kept the smugglers reasonably co-operative. That is what I call a good day’s work.
I have ‘acquired’ a British army ‘source’ currently stationed in Basra. I decided to share some of the information on the blog as it comes from a rather different perspective than media reporting. It may not be as topical or ‘political’ as the headline news but I hope you will find it interesting:
This is my first letter from lovely Basra, city of a thousand exotic smells. I’m actually really enjoying myself so far. This country is seriously bizarre. Take the kids. Up to the age of five they are so cute it’s unreal. Every one of them could star in an Oxfam advert. They all look pretty, they all have huge grins, and they all seem really pleased to see us. “Hey meester! Hello meester!” And yet they are living, literally, in shit. In the poor areas the streets run with sewage. Saddam never bothered to put in a sewage system for these areas – or rather he didn’t maintain the one the British put in. I have never been so grateful for a poor sense of smell.
Most of the people are really friendly. True, in the poor areas the kids throw bricks at us when we are in vehicles, but that’s just their idea of fun(!) It’s really fun driving around the city at night or in the evening, standing up in the back of a Landrover with the hot air blowing past as you cruise around. Mind you, you have to be careful because the Iraqis drive like madmen. I think maybe the Americans in Baghdad have confused normal Iraqi driving with suicide bombing tactics. They just cut up everyone, driving is based on aggression, and they drive both ways on either side of the road. They just take the shortest route between two points regardless of what is in the way, so it’s not surprising that virutally every vehicle has a broken windscreen and looks like a junkyard refugee.
The only exception to the bad driving is when our armoured vehicles are on the road. Those they treat with respect. But Landrovers they now cut up like anything else. We are trying to get the traffic cops back to work, but they’re frightened to come back, and they aren’t generally much use when they do.
But patrolling around the streets is fascinating. It’s just really interesting to see a completely different culture, a totally different way of life. And it’s far more interesting than Northern Ireland, because here we can really do stuff. If we think a house had weapons in it, we can just go in and search. The other day, on a tip off, we collected an RPG launcher. The follow on search found a load of mortar bombs. And that’s just routine here.
Otherwise I have been in my office stuffing my head full of information on SADR, SCIRI, INC, INA, Imams, tribes, crime gangs, politicians and every other madman around here. They all seemed to be called some combination of Ahmed Mohammed Al Unpronouncable. Arabic names will be the death of me, not least because they have about nine different spellings. But I’m getting there – I know far more about the politics of Basra than any sane man would ever want to. In another letter, I’ll tell you about WMD sites and arresting looters.
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