Whose side is the peace movement on when it condemns warnings to civilians to evacuate immediately?
15 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Amnesty International, Hamas, human shields, Israel, laws of war, temporary doves, war crimes
The clip shows the small missile that strikes a building as a warning to get out.
This “knock on the roof” technique has been condemned by Amnesty International’s Philip Luther:
“There is no way that firing a missile at a civilian home can constitute an effective ‘warning’. Amnesty International has documented cases of civilians killed or injured by such missiles in previous Israeli military operations on the Gaza Strip,” said Philip Luther.
Google maps shows that much of the Gaza Strip is rural – ideal for Hamas missile bases away from civilians as required by the laws of war
14 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, war and peace Tags: Gaza Strip, Hamas, war crimes
see the Google map at http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/google_map_palestine.htm which shows that much of Gaza Strip to be rural – ideal for Hamas military and missile bases away from civilians as required by the laws of war.The laws of war also call for uniforms and the carrying of weapons openly so the fact that compliance with these laws of law would make Hamas more exposed to air attack is beside the point.
PAT CONDELL: “Why I support Israel”
13 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in laws of war, liberalism, politics, war and peace Tags: Israel, war crimes
The deliberate intermingling of civilians and combatants is a breach of the Law of International Armed Conflict
12 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
The value of a statistical life through time in the USA
06 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, environmental economics, health economics, technological progress, Thomas Schelling, transport economics Tags: Thomas Schelling, value of life
Thomas Schelling’s crucial contribution in 1968 at RAND was the notion of statistical lives—mortality risks—in contrast to valuing the lives of specific, identified individuals. His insight was that economists could evade the moral thicket of valuing life and instead focus on people’s willingness to trade-off money for small reductions in the risks they face.
Freedom of religion and equality before the law in a democracy
04 Jul 2014 4 Comments
in liberalism, politics - Australia, war and peace Tags: democracy, democratic equality, Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, rule of law
An individual’s religious beliefs does not excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law of general application prohibiting conduct that governments are free to regulate.
Allowing exceptions to every law or regulation that directly or indirectly affects religion would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from legal obligations of almost every conceivable kind. Examples are compulsory military service, payment of taxes, polygamy, vaccination requirements, and child-neglect laws. some parliaments do provide exemptions and accommodations but that does not say they must.
Justice Frankfurter wrote in 1940:
conscientious scruples have not in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs.
The mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns of political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities
Religious freedom bars laws that prohibit:
- the holding of a religious belief,
- the right to communicate those beliefs to others, and
- the right of parents to direct the education of their children.
This approach also has the advantage of not placing courts into the position of having to determine the importance of a particular belief in a religion or the plausibility of a religious claim when weighing it against other government interests and the objectives of the disputed law.
It might be said that there should be a compelling government interest before a religious objection can be overridden. Deciding what is a compelling government interest raises questions of public policy.
Men and women decide what is more or less important in the course of making legislation goes to the very heart of democratic decision-making. This clash of opinions and visions of the good society and what laws should be passed or not are all resolved peacefully through the ballot box and free speech even in the most desperate times.
This is not to say that a parliament may if it wishes exempt people from certain obligations on the basis of religious objections or making other accommodations. What it does require is that religions take their chances in democratic politics like the rest of us when seeking exemptions from a law.
Minorities with strong feelings about an issue regularly prevail in legislative battles because they are willing to vote as a block on one issue and trade their block support with other groups in the society to assemble the necessary majority for what they want.
Indeed, a major discontent with contemporary democratic politics is minorities and special interests have too much say, not too little.
It is up to the political process to decide whether to disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in, but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself. To quote Frankfurter again:
Its essence is freedom from conformity to religious dogma, not freedom from conformity to law because of religious dogma.
Religious loyalties may be exercised without hindrance from the state, not the state may not exercise that which except by leave of religious loyalties is within the domain of temporal power. Otherwise each individual could set up his own censor against obedience to laws conscientiously deemed for the public good by those whose business it is to make laws…
The validity of secular laws cannot be measured by their conformity to religious doctrines. It is only in a theocratic state that ecclesiastical doctrines measure legal right or wrong
Anything by Tom Schelling is worth a listen
01 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in Thomas Schelling Tags: arms control, game theory, mutual deterrence, nuclear strategy, strategy and conflict, Tom Schelling
Table of Contents:
1) Early Life – 0:37
2) Outbreak of World War II – 2:32
3) Studying During the War – 5:45
4) Negotiating the Marshall Plan – 7:40
5) Academia and Government Service – 11:14
6) Self-Taught in Game Theory – 13:14
7) “Games and Decisions” – 14:47
8) The RAND Corp. & Nuclear Strategy – 16:00
9) “Strategy and Arms Control – 18:34
10) The “Red Telephone” – 21:37
11) Arms Control & Mutual Deterrence – 24:46
12) Influence within the Kennedy Administration – 30:05
13) The Problem with Ballistic Missile Defenses – 31:51
14) Dr. Strangelove – 35:42
15) The Kennedy School – 43:20
16) Expansion of the Kennedy School – 47:44
17) The Early Faculty – 49:51
18) Evaluation of Human Life – 51:42
19) Organized Crime, Beer and Laundry – 53:13
20) Modeling Racial Self-Segregation – 58:04
21) Winning the Nobel Prize – 1:00:21
22) Contributions to Scholarship and Public Policy – 1:06:03
The origins of World War I – Ralph Raico
30 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: origins of World War I
European time lapse map
28 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in International law, war and peace Tags: fluid national borders, maps
Counter-insurgency myths
22 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in war and peace Tags: counter-insurgency tactics, France, Iraq
Compare occupied France with Iraq when the U.S. military were in that country:
- American forces in Iraq bunker down and move around in armoured convoys.
- German officers walked around occupied France with no more than side-arms because any mischief would be dealt with by savage reprisals.
Perfectly ordinary regular armed forces, with no counterinsurgency doctrine or training whatever, have in the past regularly defeated insurgents, by using a number of well-proven methods.
The simple starting point is that insurgents are not the only ones who can intimidate or terrorise civilians.
For instance, whenever insurgents are believed to be present in a village, small town, or city district, the local notables can be compelled to surrender them to the authorities, under the threat of escalating punishments, all the way to mass executions.
That is how the Ottoman Empire could control entire provinces with a few feared Janissaries and a squadron or two of cavalry.
The Ottoman troops were simply too few to hunt down hidden rebels, but they did not have to: they went to the village chiefs and town notables instead, to demand their surrender, or else. A massacre once in a while remained an effective warning for decades.
Terrible reprisals to deter any form of resistance were standard operating procedure for the German armed forces in the Second World War.
Occupiers and tyrants can be successful without need of any specialized counterinsurgency methods or tactics if they are willing to out-terrorize the insurgents and rebels so that the fear of reprisals outweighs the desire to help the insurgents and rebels.
The U.S military were not without their own subtleties. They learnt that Iraq resistance fell off in a district if power and water and other utilities and facilities were more reliable.
The Communist Party in the good old days
16 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in politics, war and peace Tags: communist party
The Communist Party was a conspiracy controlled and financed by a hostile foreign power that recruited members for clandestine work and used that apparatus to collaborate with espionage services of that power. Communist party treason from 1939 to when Germany attacked the USSR is one of many examples.
A close contemporary analogy to the Communist Party in its heyday would be a Fundamentalist Muslim party running for elected office while partly funded by Al Qaeda, whose policies are dictated by Al Qaeda, and whose leaders and members have aided Al Qaeda via espionage activities. It is hardly clear that free speech requires a government to tolerate the existence of such a party, and that the government could not close it as a criminal conspiracy.
The Venona intercepts revealed Wally Clayton, a leading official within the Communist Party of Australia, was the chief organiser of Soviet intelligence gathering in Australia. It was Venona intercepts that led Chifley to set-up ASIO.
As Bob Carr recently recalled, Paul Keating, as president of Young Labor in 1968, always referred to the Left of the ALP as “the comms”. Important figures in the ALP Left were dual members of the Communist Party of Australia.
John Rawls and war and peace and temporary doves
15 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in economics, laws of war, Rawls and Nozick, war and peace Tags: international law, John Rawls
John Rawls’ Law of Peoples had as its key point that the fundamental division is not between democratic and non-democratic peoples or liberal and non-liberal, but decent and non-decent or outlaw peoples. Decent peoples allow toleration and subscribe to eight principles:
- Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples.
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Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.
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Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.
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Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.
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Peoples have the right of self-defence but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defence.
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Peoples are to honour human rights.
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Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war.
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Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavourable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.
Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard define a just war thus:
· A just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination; and
· A war is unjust, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.
A condition for a just war is force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted or are clearly not practical.
Most of all, save me from self-styled anti-war activists what Matt Welch called temporary doves. Temporary doves spit bile at those that support the wars they oppose – denouncing them as moral pigmies. The temporary doves then make exceptions for the wars they support and spite bile once again at those that question the whimsical nature and application of their values about just and unjust wars and the just conduct of wars.
The wars championed by the temporary doves can be equally or more bloody in civilian casualties as the wars they oppose either because of the reasons they were started or because of how these wars are conducted – civilian casualties In Iraq and Afghanistan.
Civilian casualties are put forward by the temporary doves as a moral trump card against the Iraq and Afghan wars and the atomic bombings. Many of the architects and champions of the NATO bombings in the Kosovo war opposed Gulf War II. Slobodan Milosevic, like Saddam Hussein, was described as a modern-day Hitler, eager to practice genocide against minorities and menace peaceful neighbours.
Is Bill Clinton a war criminal because he bombed Iraq and Sudan, but a human rights hero because he bombed Serbia? All of these bombings resulted in civilian deaths.
The supporters of both wars frequently invoked the Munich Agreement of 1938 and sought regime change. Perhaps less bloody but certainly slower social and political emancipation from oppression and mass murder is OK for the temporary doves for Iraq and Afghanistan but not for Kosovo. Temporary doves are just as prepared to wade up to their armpits in civilian casualties as the next warmonger, but they then put themselves forward as free of sin when they call for war crimes trials and citizen’s arrests of those that supported and conducted equally bloody wars.
Edward Luttwick argued that the Kosovo war proved that precision modern air bombardments can be effective as humanitarian interventions only in unique circumstances:
• An enemy sufficiently economically developed to offer targets worth bombing, and
• sufficiently democratic to respond to the inconvenience thereby inflicted on civilians at large; and
• yet sufficiently primitive and authoritarian to become the target of a humanitarian bombing campaign in the first place.
In most cases, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Zaire and from Rwanda to Sierra Leone, there were no identifiable, high-value, and relevant targets. In Bosnia, the post-heroic behaviour of almost all peacekeeping troops in UN service ranged from doing little or nothing to protect civilians while engaging in every possible form of misconduct, from black-market trafficking to cowardly passivity in the face of mass murder.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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