An interesting case to watch

From the International Security Network:

Relatives of the nearly 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys who were massacred in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995, have filed a lawsuit against the Dutch government and the UN, seeking compensation for failing to prevent the genocide.

The 228-page complaint accuses Dutch troops securing Srebrenica under a UN mandate of abandoning their positions when Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces approached on 11 July 1995, and handing thousands of men and boys over to be killed.

The lawsuit, prepared over the past six years, alleges that although the UN was aware of a pending Bosnian Serb military offensive at least two weeks before it began, neither the Dutch forces nor the UN took steps to save the local population of some 40,000, and were instead concerned only about the wellbeing of their own forces.

Munira Subasic, who lost 22 immediate and extended family members in the Srebrenica massacre, is the president of the Mothers of Srebrenica nongovernmental organization. Subasic accompanied some 300 women from Srebrenica to The Hague, where they handed over their complaint. The case will eventually be heard in a Hague district court.

"Western nations talk a lot about rule of law and justice, they write books and it is time for them to show that Europe really respects the law. And it is time for victims and their families to find their peace," Subasic told ISN Security Watch in a telephone interview.

A Bosnian and Dutch team of lawyers representing the plaintiffs base the case on Dutch, French and UN reports on the Srebrenica massacre. The lawyers say they will prove that the Dutch state and the UN were responsible for the fact that the enclave fell and genocide took place and therefore liable.

However, Dutch officials are transferring the blame to the UN, which allegedly failed to provide sufficient support to defend the town. Dutch officials say compensation claims should be directed at the perpetrators of the massacre, Bosnian Serbs, whose several high-ranking officers have been sentenced for their roles in the Srebrenica massacre.

For its part, the UN said last weekend that it was immune from legal action, citing Article 2 Section 2 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN.

"The survivors of the Srebrenica massacres are absolutely right to demand justice for the most heinous crimes committed on European soil since World War II […] but this immunity in no way diminishes the UN's commitment to assist the people of Srebrenica," UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe told a press conference.

Okabe also said that the UN is learning from its mistakes and would not rest "until it's fully equipped to prevent such tragedies from occurring in future within its peacekeepers' midst."

A Bosnian lawyer representing the victims, Semir Guzin, told ISN Security Watch that the UN's argument did not stand up to scrutiny because although the world body is granted immunity for the fulfillment of its goals, genocide in Srebrenica genocide was not one of those goals.

"The UN and the Dutch government breached their obligations to prevent genocide as laid down in the Genocide Convention, and there is no immunity for that," Guzin said.

"After all, isn't it hypocritical that the UN, as the world's main moral authority and leader of the fight for justice, is trying to avoid justice by playing the immunity card?" Guzin told ISN Security Watch.

Visualizing the world economy

I love it when you can see facts in a new way. Here, for example, is a map of the U.S. where each state is labeled with the name of a country with a comparable GDP. Note that it is not GDP per capita, but the GDP of each state, without any consideration of population.

Thanks to the strangemaps blog.

Whether you like it or not...

The Mexicans are coming.

They're coming to harvest the produce you eat.

They're coming to work your gardens.

They're coming to nanny your kids.

They're coming to...do whatever the hell other jobs Mexicans do in the U.S.

They're coming because, despite what you tell yourself, you want them to come.

You want them to come, because none of you who are going to bother to read this ever had any intention of spending your lives in an orchard or in a field, 12 - 14 hours or more a day, five or six or seven days a week in the blazing sun breaking your back to harvest produce. Because you never had any intention of spending your days planting flowers and pulling weeds and spreading fertilizer and changing mulch in someone's garden. Because you never had a dream of taking care of someone else's kids for a living while their parents are gone. Because you never had any intention of doing the myriad other menial jobs you now think are being taken from you.

You went to college, instead. Or got any number and types of technical certifications. Or joined the military. Or started your own business. Or got a job that requires a higher skill level and/or a linguistic and cultural fluency that an immigrant doesn't have. You wrote off those jobs as beneath you, and assumed that there's a whole bunch of 'other' Americans (not you, or most anyone you know, of course...but out there, in some abstract sense) clamoring for them.

The thing is, though, it seems that those Americans we think of as 'others' consider Americans they don't know as 'others,' as well. And they all seem to think that those 'others' want those jobs and would be doing them if it weren't for the sneaky immigrants.

Oddly enough, I don't recall ever reading any stories about born and bred Americans, Minutemen included, lining up outside of farms and the like looking for that sort of work, despite the ~5% unemployment the U.S. has today. Nor do I recall reading any such instances years back when unemployment was much higher (bear in mind, I'm talking about the past 30 years or so. No need to bring the Great Depression to my attention). People were still eating in the recession, and crops were still being grown and harvested, so I can't imagine that those jobs simply didn't exist for a few years...

"A-HA! Because the Mexicans drive down the wages for those jobs!"

Indeed, they do. Because you want them to. Because just as you won't work those jobs for those wages, the employers won't pay you the wages that might make those jobs seem more enticing. Because if they did, you, and the vast majority of other Americans, wouldn't buy those goods at the resulting price. Not when there's always imports competing with them. And you and most others couldn't afford those personal and home services if they were provided by born and bred Americans.

Of course, low wages to us are several times what they'd make doing the same thing back home. Crowded, spartan living conditions to us are probably almost luxurious to them. A generally rotten, unacceptable deal to us must be a pretty sweet deal indeed to them, or they wouldn't be coming in droves like they are.

And make no mistake, they will continue to come as long as it is profitable for them to do so. They come because, whether you like it or not, there's a demand for them. They come because of the basic law of supply and demand. They come because our system works. Short of digging WWI-style trenches along the border, complete with minefields and machine guns nests and pre-sighted artillery and orders to shoot border jumpers on sight (none of which is ever going to happen, you and I all know), they will come. Anything we do short of the extreme, politically impossible and morally unacceptable, will be building a razor wire fence to stop a tsunami. A useless waste of time and effort on one hand, and an embarrassing display of impotence on the other.

So, instead of making fools of ourselves trying to prevent the inevitable, why don't we concentrate our energies on making the inevitable work out better for us?

Our immigration system can't process people at the rate they're coming in? Expand it, and/or streamline the visa process. More people want in than the quotas allow? Raise the quotas. If there aren't jobs, they won't come.

They're overwhelming our welfare state? Trim the welfare benefits (yes, I know, easier said than done).

They don't speak English, aren't familiar with the cultural norms? Teach them. Get an ESL job in Cali or Texas. Or volunteer. Or freelance.

Find a bunch of them and get a business loan or investment and open a genuine, gourmet Mexican restaurant, or simple diner in your area. Organize them to teach private Spanish lessons. Start a landscaping firm and use their cheap labor. What? Someone's already doing that in your neighborhood? Do it faster, better, cheaper.

Be a capitalist and entrepreneur and seek out and exploit opportunity.

Anything. Just stop lamenting the rising and setting of the sun.

$60 billion intel budget--70 percent to contractors

The FAS site on secrecy links to a DIA powerpoint and some recent articles on how to decipher the things left unsaid (including the use of the Powerpoint edit function--will these people ever learn?). The result: the intelligence budget is a lot larger than generally believed, and 70 percent of it is going to private contractors.

As a matter of principle, I have no problem with contracting it out. The contracted work could well be better--except when (a) the contractor, claiming "trade secrets," can avoid oversight, and/or (b) the contractor is so dependent on the renewal of a contract that it gives the client what the client wants to hear. Condition (a) means there's no way for Congress to know what's going on. Condition (b) turns the outside contractor into a yes-man for whatever administration is in power. Put (a) and (b) together, we have a self-reinforcing set of illusions--and everyone pays for it.

Zoelick to World Bank

Robert Zoelick is nominated to replace Wolfowitz at the World Bank. Not bad.

The Financial Times cites a "senior World Bank manager" who "said there would be mixed feelings about Mr Zoellick’s nomination, with respect for his diplomatic skills offset by
concern about his hard-driving management style. The manager said MrZoellick was “highly regarded” but seen as a “bit abrasive” with his staff."

You ask me, a "bit abrasive" isn't bad, especially around the club we call the World Bank.

Blake Hounshell at the Foreign Policy blog is downright ephusive:

It's true that Zoellick made little headway on Darfur or Doha, but
these are herculean challenges that require sustained presidential
engagement. (After all, the cossacks work for the Tsar.) On China
policy, Zoellick made a hugely positive impact as a thoughtful
counterweight to Pentagon hawks. His September 2005 remarks
to the National Committee on United States-China relations were the
most insightful comments made by any Bush official over the past six
years.

I wonder how this one slipped through the vetting process. Condi, did you push it?

Snakes on a plane

Somebody really should make a movie about this.

Walls

Thanks to The Strategist for this shot of the American fortress "embassy" under construction in Baghdad. He claims it's a sign of weakness: "isolated, under seige, and fated to fall." Yet sometimes forts do work--depending on the technology of the times and the political goals of the combatants. Another way to view a complex with 104 acres, bunkers, independent water and sewage treatment facilites, etc., is that it's a commitment to stay no matter who is formally in charge of the country. It's a base (one of many, I suspect) in which to sit out the worst of what the Iraqis will do to one another. It says our political goal is not "liberal democracy" but "permanant presence." It's a potential thorn in the side--a new Guantanamo in downtown Baghdad. I'd very much like to see the details of the agreement between the current government and the Americans. Legally, will any future government have the legal right to kick the U.S. out?

This is not a cheery analysis, I admit, but it's not hopeless--unless we assume the U.S. can't resupply it. This raises the possibility of a mini-Berlin airlift. Is that in the plan?

Peacekeepers get in the arms business

From Strategypage.com:

May 23, 2007: An all too believable accusation is making the rounds in the European media. The charge is that, last year, a UN investigative team learned that some UN peacekeepers had sold arms and bartered gold with members of an illegal militia in the Congo in 2005. Specifically, a Pakistani unit operating in the town of Mongbwalu (northeast Congo) was involved in the arms trade and illegal gold purchasing operations. The report said a "small number" of personnel were involved. The arms traded to the militiamen were arms that had been "harvested" (collected) from various militias. The "circular arms trade" is an old problem that has cropped up in numerous insurgencies. Guerrilla arms are seized and then sold back to the guerrillas by criminal gangs or soldiers operating with criminal gangs. In the case of the Congo, it looks like some of the peacekeepers were "freelancing" on their own.

Unconfirmed, but not all that surprising.

Social space and gravity wells

It's always probematic to apply physical metaphors to social phenomena. People plan and choose and anticipate and attach meanings. Nevertheless, the metaphor can be useful for a first pass at teaching an important idea. With that in mind, take a look at BLACKFIVE's analogy between networks/communities and curved space.

It's worth a look.

Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs

Our thought for the day comes from Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, in his book, On Combat:

One Vietnam veteran, an old retired colonel, once said this to me: “Most of the people in our society are sheep. They are kind, gentle, productive creatures who can only hurt one another by accident.” This is true. Remember, the murder rate is six per 100,000 per year, and the aggravated assault rate is four per 1,000 per year. What this means is that the vast majority of Americans are not inclined to hurt one another.

Some estimates say that two million Americans are victims of violent crimes every year, a tragic, staggering number, perhaps an all-time record rate of violent crime. But there are almost 300 million Americans, which means that the odds of being a victim of violent crime is considerably less than one in a hundred on any given year. Furthermore, since many violent crimes are committed by repeat offenders, the actual number of violent citizens is considerably less than two million.

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation: We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the pretty, blue robin’s egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue shell. Police officers, soldiers and other warriors are like that shell, and someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful. For now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators.

“Then there are the wolves,” the old war veteran said, “and the wolves feed on the sheep without mercy.” Do you believe there are wolves out there who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in denial.

“Then there are sheepdogs,” he went on, “and I’m a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.” Or, as a sign in one California law enforcement agency put it, “We intimidate those who intimidate others.”

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath--a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.

Where do you stand?