How to talk to the enemy: first, understand it’s an enemy

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been perplexed by the weak reaction of so many officials in Britain to the ongoing hostage crisis.

Whoops! I used the “h” word. Apparently that’s a no-no; this Time article reports that President Bush was criticized roundly by John Williams, former Director of News for the British Foreign Service, for using the word “hostage” to refer to the—uh, hostages—during a press conference.

Williams prefers that the captured sailors be called “victims of a misunderstanding that could be resolved.” How nice. This was the way a far more minor incident occurring under his watch in 2004 was treated, and the hostages were released within days.

Williams shows a fundamental lack of comprehension of some basic differences between the two incidents. For starters, in the earlier one, the sailors actually had wandered accidentally into Iranian waters, and they were seized through what appears to have been the overreaction of a local Iranian commander. In the current crisis, however, there’s every reason to believe the incident was planned at the top. In addition, the situation between Iran and the world was quite different in 2004; the general conflict has escalated significantly since then, with sanctions looming for Iran’s nuclear program. Therefore the context for the seizure has changed, and one can assume the Iranians’ motivations and game plan have changed accordingly.

I can’t find a biography of Williams online, but my guess is that, as Director of News, he may have a background in journalism, and believes mightily in the power of words. Now, as a writer myself, I try to use my words carefully. But in a situation such as this it is laughable to think that it would make any positive difference to the fate of the hostages if we call them “unfortunate victims.”

Williams is not alone, however; his attitude has become more and more prevalent. And it is very dangerous when dealing with tyrants such as the ones who run Iran, who don’t respect it and consider it a softness to be exploited, symptomatic of the decline of the backbone of the West. Among other things, this hostage crisis is a form of theater staged to demonstrate Iran’s strength and Britain’s weaknesses to a Muslim culture that operates from an honor/shame perspective.

In my training as a marriage and family therapist, one technique I learned is what is known as the “reframe.” This is a way of using words to soften the harsh judgments family members might make about each other or themselves. Reframes can sometimes help lead to solutions by damping down the antagonisms among family members and help them see things in a different and more hopeful light.

But this presupposes some sort of basic goodwill and rapport that quite simply does not exist in the current situation. And members of families who come to therapy are actually coming to get help, and are usually predisposed to listen to the therapist’s suggestions with at least a modicum of respect and cooperation.

Iran and Britain are engaged in a power struggle, not a family squabble, and they are each operating from extremely different premises about human nature. “Come, let us reason together,” is not the mullahs’ motto, I’m afraid, although much of the Western world wishes it were so.

I wish it were so, also—it would make the prospects for humanity so much rosier. But wishes are not reality, and confusing the two is not a good thing either for individuals such as Williams or for nations such as Britain.

[COMING SOON: rules for negotiating from strength.]

Hillary needs to brush up on her Constitution

The New Neo Posted on by

Candidate Clinton seems to think a President ought not to exercise the veto power given the holder of the office by the Constitution. Today she criticized Bush for suggesting he would veto a troop withdrawal bill. That, said Hillary, would be “vetoing the will of the American people.”

A little civics lesson here for Hillary. This country is not and never has been a pure democracy, but rather a republic. That’s actually what our representatives in Congress (of which she is one) are all about. And the Constitution expressly gives the President the power to override the will of up to two-thirds of Congress, those representatives of the American people.

But of course Hillary knows that; I doubt she counseled Bill similarly when he threatened to veto legislation. Let’s see: President Clinton vetoed seventeen bills in his first term and twenty in his second, not to mention a fairly liberal (pardon the word) use of the line item veto, which he exercised freely during its short venue as a constitutionally allowed course of action.

Were Hillary to be elected to the Presidency in 2008 I somehow doubt she’d be so very respectful of the will of the people, were it to differ with the will of Hillary.

Scientists and the long and winding road of research: Star Wars and Arrow

The New Neo Posted on by

An article entitled “”Arrow can now fully protect against Iran” describes how Israel seems to have developed a promising anti-missile defense system.

Sounds good to me—if in fact it’s true. It may just be psych-ops bluster, of course, a way to say to Iran, “Don’t even think about developing nuclear weapons, because your efforts will be an expensive waste.”

The Arrow system may not be quite as good as the article indicates. Or, it may be exactly that good.

It takes me back to the time when Ronald Reagan was laughed at for proposing what critics referred to as “Star Wars,” a sort pie-in-the-sky (almost literally) dream of intercepting Russia’s missile system and ending the MADness of Mutually Assured Destruction. Reagan’s SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) was the much-mocked prototype of a system that, with many changes, is showing much promise for the US.

Why was it treated with such derision by most when first proposed? Part of that reaction was a subset of the mockery that greeted Reagan in general from liberals and the Left: he was stupid, ignorant, and simplistic, as opposed to their sophistication. They knew better; such a thing would never work.

But it also is probably true that many didn’t want it to work. And by making that statement I’m not accusing them of wanting America to be destroyed or Russia to win the Cold War (at least, not most of them). No, I think one reason they didn’t welcome the development of an effective way of defending against incoming missiles was fear that, if the technique were ever to be perfected, it might give our military license to launch an attack with impunity.

MAD made it difficult to even conceive of actually going ahead with the launch of an atomic weapon. The fear was that Star Wars would make the inconceivable doable—and even, perhaps, tempting. And, if the intercept system wasn’t as effective as it was claimed to be, the sense of protection it would have engendered would be a false one.

No; much better to let each nation believe there was no remedy, and that the first such launch would be the end of both nations.

Whatever the merits or lack thereof of that line of thinking, at any rate it is now officially obsolete. Although Russia is far from our friend, it’s not the relatively rational Russians or their vast arsenal of conventional nuclear weaponry with whom we are now dealing. It is the much less deterrable mullahs of Iran, or the rogue state North Korea, or a host of terrorist cells around the globe, eager to get their hands on the nuclear goods and cause a commotion.

One thing seems clear if one looks at the history of the objections to Star Wars, and that is that scientists are far from apolitical beasts. The well-known physicists Edward Teller and Hans Bethe squared off at the time on this issue as they had on so many others, in an old rivalry between the two. Bethe’s strange history was of doubting and/or opposing every single advance in atomic weaponry, even as he worked on many of them:

Bethe had been skeptical about the possibility of making a nuclear weapon from uranium (in fact, in the late 1930s, he had written a theoretical paper that argued against fission)……After the war, Bethe argued that a crash project for the hydrogen bomb should not be attempted, though after President Truman announced the beginning of such a crash project, and the outbreak of the Korean War, Bethe signed up and played a key role in the weapon’s development. Though he would see the project through to its end, in Bethe’s account he personally hoped that it would be impossible to create the hydrogen bomb.

Bethe doubted and opposed Star Wars as well in the 1980s, on practical and philosophical grounds:

Physicist Hans Bethe, who worked with Teller on both the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb, both at Los Alamos, claimed a laser defense shield was unfeasible. He said that a defensive system was costly and difficult to build, but simple to destroy, and claimed that the Soviets could easily use thousands of decoys to overwhelm it during a nuclear attack. He believed that the only way to stop the threat of nuclear war was through diplomacy and dismissed the idea of a technical solution to the Cold War, saying that a defense shield could be viewed as threatening because it would limit or destroy Soviet offensive capabilities while leaving the American offense intact.

Here were two extremely eminent scientists, one pro and one con, whose differing opinions seemed to depend primarily on their politics rather than the science of the matter. Twas ever thus; science for the most part is no ivory tower immune from the squabblings of politics.

Their Cold War arguments have become outdated, anyway. The nuclear situation being far different today, the defenses that have been developed—such as Arrow—are accordingly quite different from the original proposals of the 80s, as well.

No one can predict the path scientific research will take. It’s an old conundrum: almost every invention and discovery is a double-edged sword with both good and bad applications, many if not most of them unforeseen at the outset. And once the genie is out of the bottle, it cannot be put back in—nor, as recent terrorist attempts to get nuclear weaponry demonstrate, can it be kept indefinitely from the hands of the enemy.

Scientists such as Bethe and others—men (and women) of the mind, wrestling with powerful and fascinating ideas that have unforeseen practical and strategic applications—felt (and feel) a completely understandable ambivalence, and even guilt, about what their minds and efforts have wrought. These scientists deal with those emotions in different ways. Some, such as Bethe, resolve to spend their lives engaging in an ultimately futile attempt to undo what they have already done.

Following in Churchill’s footsteps: reratting

The New Neo Posted on by

[HINT: please note the date!]

If you’re a regular reader here, you probably already know that Winston Churchill is my idol—well, one of my idols, anyway, along with all the contestants on “American Idol,” Billy Idol, and idle chatter.

One of Churchill’s many famous quotes is “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to rerat.” Now, for those of you who don’t speak the variant of English known as British, the term “rat” refers to a change of political affiliation. Churchill started out as a Conservative, became a Liberal a few years later, and about twenty years afterwards returned to the Conservative Party.

Well, even though Churchill is someone I look up to, I really can’t follow in his footsteps. For one thing, I’m sure his feet were a lot bigger than mine. For another, I’ve never smoked a cigar. And it’s too late to follow his political trajectory, because I didn’t start out as a Conservative (although I most certainly would have if I’d known that he had; that’s how much I admire the man).

But there’s one way I’m already like him: I’ve ratted. Big time. And today I’m announcing another way I intend to be like Churchill: I’m going to rerat.

Yes, it’s official: neo-neocon is returning to her roots and becoming a liberal Democrat once more. I’m not sure what to rename the blog: perhaps “neo-exneocon?”

But I’m not going to worry about nomenclature at this point. In fact, I’m not going to worry about anything. I’m going to stick my head in the sand and put my fingers in my ears (although that might be difficult to do simultaneously) and I’ll Whistle a Happy Tune, as long as I don’t get sand in my mouth while doing so.

Because I am tired. Bone tired. And I can see it now: the prodigal daughter will return, and I’ll be welcomed with open arms. They’ll kill a fatted calf, and we’ll have a barbecue and some brewskis. I’ll lay down my weary load. And I can finally take that silly apple away from my face before the computer company or the Beatles or Magritte’s estate ends up suing me.

[NOTE: In the interests of clarity, and to any readers out there who may not be aware of this fact, I am hereby stating that today, April 1st (otherwise known as April Fool’s Day) is a day on which hoaxes and practical jokes are traditional in the English-speaking world, as well as in France.

So, there’s been no reratting; all of this was merely an attempt (and probably a feeble one, at that) at a joke. Neo-neocon will remain neo-neocon for the foreseeable future.

And the reason I’m publishing this with the huge “HINT” on top and this spilling-the-beans explanation on the bottom is that this is a modification of a longer essay I published last year, and so many readers took me seriously that time that I felt constrained to add disclaimers to it and even published this rumination on the subject of hoaxes that are believed.

So no, this neocon rat has not reratted, and has no plans to do so in the future.]

Podcast and iTunes

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of you have written to say that our podcasts can’t be downloaded through iTunes anymore. My apologies. It’s apparently some sort of technical problem that Pajamas is working on fixing, rather than a new policy. So it should be righted in a couple of days. Keep checking.

Who’s the audience for the show trial?

The New Neo Posted on by

Now the Iranians are saying the British sailors might be tried:

If Britain continued its current approach to the standoff, Larijani told Iranian state radio, “this case may face a legal path. British leaders have miscalculated this issue.”

I think there’s no question the Brits have made some miscalculations, beginning with the lack of firepower at the start of it. The actual details of the situation involved in the sailors’ abduction is unclear, though; I’ve read many conflicting reports.

I hope Iran has miscalculated as well, in its opinion that it has nothing to fear by actions of this sort. They seem to believe the West is, in the old phrase, a “paper tiger— a gargantuan Gulliver bound, tied, and rendered helpless by its own busy internal Lilliputians.

Who’s the audience for the latest show trial? Certainly not the West; all but the fringiest of the fringe is aware of the bogus nature of such a trial. My guess is that they are playing to their own masses, who may or may not be buying what they’re selling.

It used to be that propaganda of this sort had more effect back in the days when it was easier to regulate the dissemination of information to a population. A country such as North Korea still does this quite effectively, but the price North Korea pays is isolation from the rest of the world and economic stagnation. Iran ‘s people have more conduits of competing information through which to judge the truth or falsehood of the antics of their own government.

But of course there’s no need for a show trial to ever happen. Threatening one has another effect—making Iran seem powerful, and Britain and the West weak as we fumble around for the proper response, and as we say things like the following, from Britain’s Foreign Office:

This doesn’t change our position, we have made it perfectly clear that our personnel were in Iraqi waters and we continue to request immediate consular access to them and their immediate release.

Note the polite language: “request.” I can only hope they are doing more than “requesting” behind the scenes. But for public consumption, what we mostly hear is a sort of exquisite politeness from the Brits. Here’s Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett:

I am concerned. [Iran’s ambassador to Moscow] is not the first person to have made sabre-rattling noises…The message I want to send is I think everyone regrets that this position has arisen. What we want is a way out of it.

I personally don’t think that’s the right message to send. There’s a sort of wistful wishful thinking here, a refusal to understand the nature of the opposition, a denial that can only be described as potentially suicidal.

Blair has been a little more energized, but not very much more, considering the circumstances:

Blair told reporters in Manchester that the “parading and manipulation” of British service personnel would “fool no one,” and would only “enhance people’s sense of disgust with Iran.”

And another Foreign Office official called the parading “outrageous.”

Outrage and disgust are fine, but they are emotions, and fairly impotent ones at that. What are needed are credible threats of a certain course of events—economic and otherwise—that will be followed by the West if the sailors are not returned immediately. A bit of “sabre-rattling” wouldn’t be out of line, either.

The truth is that the precedent for this sort of thing favors Iran, and Iran knows it. Milk it as much as possible for the propaganda value, and know that the West will probably mouth platitudes while the show goes on.

Sanity Squad: on playing poker with Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

Here‘s the Sanity Squad’s latest podcast. Join Siggy, Dr. Sanity, Shrink, and me as we tackle the topic of Iran’s most recent game of high-stakes poker with Britain, the West, the UN, and the lives of fifteen British sailors and marines.

You might also want to take a look at Dr. Sanity’s informative history lesson comparing today’s antiwar movement to the Copperheads of Civil War times, Shrink’s analysis of the antiwar group, and Siggy on the fact that not all religious fundamentalisms are alike.

The chocolate Jesus and “Sensation” for sensation’s sake: art, culture, religion, and politics

The New Neo Posted on by

The news that a sculpture entitled “My Sweet Lord” (after the Beatles song, no doubt, crossed with Tom Waits)—due to debut at a New York Hotel and consisting of a six-foot tall anatomically correct chocolate Jesus—has been canceled, conjures up memories of the art show entitled “Sensation” that came to the Brooklyn Museum back in 1999. The latter featured the famous portrait of a black Madonna surrounded by elephant dung and what seemed to be a host of floating disembodied vaginas.

Ah, art!

“Sensation” was a sensation partly because it sparked a famous moment for then Mayor (and now Presidential candidate) Giuliani, who felt the content was insulting to the Catholic Church and that it was inappropriate to display the painting in a museum receiving municipal funding. He threatened to cancel the museum’s lease, although this never happened and the show went on. Clearly, even back then, he had a true if spotty streak of cultural conservatism; that doesn’t seem to be a recent addition to his personality.

If you think about the hue and cry created by the Left and by liberals in their attempts to keep the museum open and the show intact, it’s interesting to contrast it with the respect shown to Muslim concerns about the Mohammed cartoons. By this time such a double standard shouldn’t be surprising, and it isn’t. Christianity is supposed to be able to take insults in stride; Islam is allowed a special sensitivity.

The hotel gallery’s directors have withdrawn the chocolate Jesus sculpture voluntarily, but not without a few choice words. After Bill (not Phil) Donohue, head of the Catholic League, called for a boycott of the hotel:

…[t]he gallery’s creative director, Matt Semler, said the and the hotel were overrun with angry telephone calls and e-mails about the exhibit. Although he described Donohue’s response as “a Catholic fatwa,” Semler said the gallery was considering its options amid the criticism.

Semler’s description of the Catholic group’s perfectly legitimate and nonviolent actions as a “fatwa” is also no surprise, I suppose. It’s another example of a combination of kneejerk moral and cultural equivalence. Fatwas, of course, are not limited to death threats for art deemed to insult Islam, but they conjure up that image in Western minds because of famous fatwas such as the death sentence pronounced on author Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.

Here’s an article describing the 1999 “Sensation;” it says the show carried a “mock health warning.” The New York Times agreed that the warning was “fake,” describing it thusly:

But its fake “health warning” for “Sensation” (“The contents of this exhibition may cause shock, vomiting, confusion”) not only gave ammunition to the Mayor, it cheapened the institution and hurt the art in the show as well. If the museum’s own advertisement describes the work as nauseating, is it a surprise that people should assume, sight unseen, that it is?

No, no surprise. But the surprise to me when I actually viewed that exhibit was that it actually was offensive—very offensive—in a host of unexpected ways not limited to the religious or the Christian. Read both articles and their descriptions of some of the “artwork” on display if you care to, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the point of it all was to be offensive.

Yes, freedom of speech means that these works should not be banned. But protests such as that mounted by Donohue’s group are squarely in the tradition of freedom of speech, as well. Let the marketplace decide, and in the case of the chocolate Jesus it has apparently decided “no.”

In the case of “Sensation” we weren’t so fortunate. Here‘s the museum director’s description of the exhibit at the time:

…this is a defining exhibition of a decade of the most creative energy that’s come out of Great Britain in a very long time. And that’s why we did it, these works are challenging, and thought provoking, and some are beautiful, some are very difficult to look at.

If that’s the most creative energy to come out of Great Britain, Great Britain is in big trouble . And if he says some of the works were difficult to look at, you can believe they were. A picture is worth a thousand words, but even a picture doesn’t begin to do justice to the experience of viewing “art” such as these works, to briefly describe just two:

Damien Hirst’s “A Thousand Years” composed of flies, maggots, a cow’s head, sugar, and water, another Hirst work, “This Little Piggy went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed Home” a split pig carcass floating in formaldehyde…”

I seem to recall an entire room consisting of cow segments. Memory could be playing tricks on me, but the image I retain is of a large creature that had been cut into four or five sections, each of which was placed in a huge vat of greenish or bluish preservative behind plexiglass: one for the head, one for the forequarters, one for the midsection, and so on, crossing the entire room.

I suppose it was some sort of political statement. It also smelled, as I recall. Another sculpture didn’t actually smell, but it stank (and again, I’m relying on memory here, so I could have some of the details wrong): a large plaster installation of a group of children in a ring, displaying strange multiple penises coming out of odd and anatomically incorrect parts of their bodies.

At some point I just wanted out, and I voted with my feet: I left. My reaction surprised me at the time, but it wasn’t in the least political or religious. I had considered myself neither naive nor especially squeamish, but this stuff was not something I wished to spend time looking at; I’d had enough, thank you very much. And next time there is such a warning on an art show, I think I’ll respect it.

The larger questions are political and cultural. Why are Christian sensibilities not considered worth thinking about, while Muslim ones are respected? Well, it’s no puzzlement; if the Christians involved don’t actually turn the other cheek when insulted, they certainly aren’t about to blow up the hotel. And no, it’s not that certain people aren’t violent at times in the name of Christianity—witness the killings of abortion doctors—but these are isolated incidents.

The other question concerns what art hath wrought these days, and why? Is it so bankrupt—and so politicized—that it has become mere social commentary, the more shocking the better? Art doesn’t have to be pretty-pretty, or Norman Rockwell-esque; there’s a place for the ugly and the controversial. But when sensationalism and a sort of jaded “can you top this?” purposeful offensiveness is one of its major hallmarks, then the art world—and our culture—is in big trouble.

The British sailors and the UN: international law and the enforcement problem

The New Neo Posted on by

Many years ago I took a course to be certified as a volunteer divorce mediator in the state in which I lived. The profession was then in its infancy, and it sounded like such a good idea: the adversarial nature of the legal system probably escalated the difficulties involved in divorces, so why not try to take some of the destructive bitterness out of the process by going a different route?

I got the answer quickly enough when I observed couples actually trying mediation. My conclusion was that, except in rare cases, mediation tended to work for those who didn’t need it and to fail abysmally for those who did. It was especially inadequate when there was a great deal of rage and/or where the power differential between the spouses was too great—and those two situations covered an awful lot of couples. No, divorce was just a sorry and nasty business in most cases, and there was no use pretending otherwise.

Why bring this up now? I’ve been ruminating about international law lately in connection with the taking of the fifteen British sailors, and there are some similarities in the problems found in divorce mediation and in international law.

Today Britain “takes case against Iran to UN” and asks that the Security Council “support a statement that would ‘deplore’ Tehran’s action and demand their immediate release.”

This sort of thing would be almost risible if the issues weren’t so serious. And yet even that small and rather toothless step, “deplore” and “demand,” is running into trouble in the UN from Iran’s buddy Russia, which doesn’t like the language in the resolution stating that the sailors were in Iraqi waters when captured. Or at least, that’s the excuse Russia gives; my guess is that they just don’t want to anger their client Iran.

What is international law, anyway? A set of agreements between nations on a host of things. The “easy” parts of international law are those governing transactions such as trade, or deciding which country’s law should be applied in cases where several countries might have jurisdiction. That sort of thing is mildly analogous to what we call civil law in this country.

These areas of human endeavor are commonly less emotional than the criminal arena, and although there are certainly heated disputes on these issues they don’t tend to be resolved by violence. Countries involved in these types of dispute are usually somewhat like the couple who really doesn’t need mediation; they’re in some sort of basic agreement to abide by the court’s decision, and so no real enforcement is even needed.

And then there’s the law of war, another part of what’s known as international law. This is more like our criminal code, or like the couple who are so at each other’s throats that mediation isn’t going to lead to an agreement—or, if it does, it’s going to lead to an unfair result.

Both civil and criminal cases under our laws in the US and other countries have means of enforcement, but enforcement usually doesn’t have to be employed because most people are in voluntary compliance. This is so for several reasons. The first is that many people (especially in civil cases) are interested in following the law rather than in defying it, because they are basically law-abiding. It’s part of the societal contract many of us make as citizens of the nation. The second is that there is an implied threat for any noncompliance, enforceable relatively easily because the state/nation can find the offender and increase the fine or even imprison the scofflaw. Setting bail is another way (often successful) to attempt to enforce compliance by making the penalty for fleeing higher than the offender can afford. People can be made to comply with the law because they reside under the court’s jurisdiction, whereas fleeing (for example, to another country) would make it much more difficult to enforce the law.

In contrast, there is something almost oxymoronic about the phrase “the international law of war.” War is, almost by definition, a situation in which ordinary law has broken down. Also, wars are traditionally between nations, and no sovereign state has jurisdiction over any other, except by consent, and in a very limited way (treaties, for example–but these are between allies).

So how is international law to be enforced, then? Some nations are like those law-abiding citizens who simply comply with the law, and only look to the courts to settle simple disputes involving trade and other civil matters. These nations sign treaties that govern their behavior in war because they think it’s right (well, for a few), and because they want to create a community of nations that mutually respect each other and those laws. It’s in everyone’s mutual interest that this be so, at least theoretically.

Such a community exists. Once again, those who adhere to it and its rules are something like the couple who can mediate their own divorce with just a little legal help to look over the agreement. But there are many nations, and many rulers, who are outside that community and find the thought of abiding by its rules laughable. They are analogous to the couple who cannot mediate; some other method must be used to deal with them.

The signatories to the Geneva Conventions are not bound by those conventions in the sense we usually mean by the term “bound,” because there is no way of compelling them to follow the rules. “Enforcement” in such cases starts with a combination of the honor system and the fear of losing face among other nations. The real “teeth” in the conventions consist of the fact that, if a war occurs between signatories, each country will treat the other’s fighters well because it wants its own fighters to be treated well. A trial for violations of the Conventions could occur before or during a war, but it would be a joke, with no means of enforcement other than sanctions against the country involved (which are available even without a trial). A true trial with consequences and jurisdiction could only happen after a war, at which time those responsible for the violations involved would finally come under the jurisdiction of the world court (for what that’s worth), or the leaders’ former subjects (such as what happened with Saddam in Iraq).

In a case such as the present one concerning Iran, the nations of the world don’t quite know what to do—or aren’t willing to agree to do it—and Iran knows that. International law suggests that sanctions are the next step, and in fact right before the current incident the UN had just unanimously voted to apply sanctions to Iran for its nuclear defiance. Sanctions do in fact have some force if applied properly and drastically, but they rarely are (see: Oil for Food Program).

Iran has taken a financial hit recently from banking sanctions that actually do seem to have had some effectiveness (see this for a fuller explanation). But these sanctions were not the result of international law; they were the fruit of successful efforts by the US itself to enlist other world countries in the endeavor to stymie Iran financially (here is another good discussion of the intricacies of financial sanctions).

So, sanctions have their place, but they have their limits when dealing with a country bent on causing trouble, and one not all that concerned with the welfare of its people. They also have the drawback of having loopholes—there will probably always be countries (or individuals or groups) willing to get around them and trade with the shunned nation.

That brings us to alternative means of enforcement. Which brings us once again to that much-maligned (including by me) institution—the UN, and in particular its Security Council. Here is the relevant law:

Under the provisions of [Chapter VII of the UN Charter], the Security Council may determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression, and may impose mandatory sanctions to try to rectify the situation. The sanctions may be economic (such as a trade embargo against a country threatening the peace), diplomatic (such as severance of diplomatic relations) or military (the use of armed force to maintain or restore international peace and security)….

Military? Military? Well, not exactly:

Security Council sanctions involving armed force have never been used in quite the form contemplated by the UN Charter. As drafted in 1945, it set out a system by which member states would agree to hold armed forces and facilities ready to respond to the call of the Security Council. If the Council decided to use armed force, it would call on those forces in accordance with the agreements. No such agreements have ever been entered into. Thus, when the Security Council has authorized the use of armed force to counter an act of aggression-as in Korea and the Persian Gulf-it has simply authorized member states to “use all necessary means to restore international peace and security.”

And there you have it: ultimately, no real teeth except the teeth provided by member nations, which is the way it used to be before the UN was formed. The UN acts something like a cheering squad in these cases. “Go get ’em!” it says to the member nations–which, somehow, often ends up being one member nation: that much-maligned country the USA, and to a lesser extent its ally Britain.

It’s “parading for the cameras” time

The New Neo Posted on by

No surprise, really; those British hostages are being shown on Iranian TV apologizing for straying into Iranian waters.

There’s nothing like the propaganda value of a few show confessions in an effort (vain, I hope) to shore up sagging support for the Iranian regime and its chest-thumping. I wonder whether the mullahs feel the least bit threatened by Blair’s response:

It is now time to ratchet up the diplomatic and international pressure in order to make sure the Iranian government understands its total isolation on this issue.

What’s going on behind the scenes must be—interesting.

Those British sailors and marines, by the way, were apparently not considered to be high-risk for Iranian abduction, and were not given any briefings on how to behave in the event of such an occurrence. In this interview with British Admiral Alan West, he states the rules, for what they’re worth:

These particular people would not be trained in counter-interrogation techniques because they are not expected to be captured. But I think our guidance to anyone in that position would be to say what they want you to say, let’s not be silly about it. Don’t tell them secrets, clearly, but if they tell you: ‘Say this’, well if that’s going to get you out, then do it. It means absolutely nothing, what they say, to be honest.

I’m not sure it means nothing to the folks watching on Iranian TV. But perhaps most of them are fully aware of the nature of their own regime, enough to discount any remarks made by the sailors in the course of captivity.

But please, Britain, in the future, change those rules of engagement, and allow these people better protection against any repetition of such an event. And you might want to look into that interrogation resistance training, as well.