Month: October 2009

“They’re opening them [oil fields] up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it. Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars," – T. Boone Pickens, speaking to Congress about Iraq.

Christian Bale had a model for his memorable screen performance in that movie: Tom Cruise.

Henry Farrell ponders different sorts of international law:

[T]he ‘but he did it first’ excuse is not, and cannot be a justification for committing war crimes. Nor does the ‘self-hating Jew’ claim, or other ways of attacking the messenger … really stick – if you are unnecessarily killing or seriously injuring hundreds or thousands of civilians, you are unnecessarily killing or seriously injuring hundreds or thousands of civilians, and there is no very good way of getting around this awkward fact.

Both Gideon [Rachman] and Eric [Posner] would point to the undoubted fact that the leading politicians of great powers (or their important clients) are highly unlikely to find themselves in the dock for war crimes. But direct punitive sanctioning is not the only effect of law. It can influence the perceived legitimacy of a particular state, its actions and its leadership. It is quite clear that Israel has taken a substantial reputational hit from the Goldstone report, even if it will never be condemned by the UN Security Council, and that Israel’s leaders are worried and upset about this.

And that is a good thing (even if it is inconceivable that Hamas' leaders would ever begin to feel something similar).

Marc Lynch brings us the latest on the Palestinian unity front. It's not pretty:

What about Abu Mazen's call for elections? Very, very few Palestinians with whom I've spoken, or who write in the Palestinian and Arab media, believe that elections absent a prior political agreement on the ground rules will solve anything.  I've advocated for holding Palestinian elections in the past, but on the premise that they would follow rather than precede a political agreement.  Those Palestinian analysts who I've seen supporting the call for elections generally premise that support on their hopes that it will generate political consensus first. 

 With such a political agreement, then elections could provide a route towards creating a legitimate and effective government capable of both peace negotiations and institutional development.  Without a political agreement, elections will either be a sham or will badly inflame intra-Palestinian conflict.  The lessons of this year's Iranian, Afghan, and Lebanese elections should be taken very seriously by those  weighing the merits of Abu Mazen's call for early elections without a prior political consensus.

Felix Salmon has no sympathy for bank executives facing pay caps:

[T]hese guys are effectively civil servants now, and they deserve to be paid as such.

Alex Tabarrok counters:

If the administration actually follows through, most of these executives will quit and get higher paying jobs elsewhere…Chaos will be created at these firms as top people leave in droves.  Will the administration then order people back to work?

Time for a Bainbridge rant.

The latest rhetorical brilliance from Michele Bachmann, with a little prodding from Laura Ingraham.

Susan Sarandon doesn't know what Wikipedia is.

It's a far right, racist organization, but its success in recent local and European elections has made it impossible to ignore. Last night, its leader, Nick Griffin, went on BBC's Question Time in a big breakthrough for his party's legitimacy. It did not, however, go smoothly for him:

The BNP leader, seeking legitimacy on a national stage, was challenged repeatedly during the programme. His comment that a Ku Klux Klan leader was “almost totally non-violent” drew titters from the audience. When he said that he found public displays of homosexuality repulsive, an audience member said that the “feelings are mutual”. Another audience member suggested Mr Griffin should be consigned to the South Pole where “the colourless landscape will suit you”.

From Wiki:

According to its constitution, the BNP is "committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948". The BNP proposes "firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home". The party also advocates the repeal of all anti-discrimination legislation, and restricts party membership to "indigenous British ethnic groups deriving from the class of ‘Indigenous Caucasian’". The BNP also accepts white immigrants that are assimilated into one of those ethnicities.

Last night, Griffin called Caucasians Britain's "aborigines". Here's some debate you'd be very unlikely to see on US television – both more civil and somehow more blunt:

Yglesias explains why the US needs Karzai to win:

For Abdullah to win, he’d basically need the Taliban to successfully scare enough Pashto into not voting to overcome his intrinsic disadvantages. That would, in turn, be a boon to the Taliban war effort. Karzai’s government has long suffered from the perception that he’s just a Pashto face on a US/Turkic regime but if you turn that into a Tajik face that only won thanks to Pashto non-participation you’ll be looking at a real disaster.

Realistically for Afghanistan to be governed successfully you need a Pashto at the top working in alliance with a few key Tajik and Uzbek power-players. The talk about election processes and recounts seems to be to obscure the basic real shape of semi-feudal Afghan politics. The real legitimacy issue, meanwhile, probably will be decided less by national elections and more by practical results on the ground—are the people running your town honest and competent?

At any rate, this is all sort of too bad. I’m a long-time Abdullah fan since back pre-9/11 when he was the only senior member of the Northern Alliance who could speak English and you see him quoted on A-7 New York Times stories about Afghanistan. And his platform (PDF) calls for Afghanistan to abandon its presidential system in favor of a parliamentary one which is absolutely correct and also exactly the kind of thing I like to go on-and-on about.