Wednesday, January 31, 2007

A new low

Nine Britons have been arrested in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap and behead a British soldier who had served in Afghanistan live on the internet, West Midlands Police said this afternoon. As someone who studies contemporary security issues for a living I am not surprised at this development. As Herfried Munkler wrote in his book New Wars,
War ‘smoulders on’, ‘spreads out’, ‘extends over’ and so on… War as the subject of events will not stop at the frontiers of Europe and North America but will sooner or later move beyond them.[1]
In other words, if it works elsewhere sooner or later it'll be tried here. Still, I'm shocked by this appalling thing. And angry, which of course is the point... It's getting increasingly harder to keep one's head, literally and metaphorically.

UPDATE: 'MI5, police and SAS practise for a 'Beslan' siege'

[1] Herfried Munkler, The New Wars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 31-34.

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16 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am not, by and large, a supporter of capital punishment but if these people are guilty I'd be quite happy to see them strung up. And further. In fact, I'd pull the lever myself.

Goody, if everything goes wrong I could become a taxi driver with this attitude.

11:18 pm
Theo Farrell said...

Common guys - the enemy is simply exploiting a soft spot. Entirely predictable (indeed I know this has been predicted by US intell). Al Qaeda is operating to a different set of norms to ours - they do not recognise the rules of international law (which, after all, outlaw use of force by non-state actors). So as much as one may condemn such plots - and condemn we shld to affirm our values and norms - let's not get too high and mighty. It's a war. We play rough. They are weaker, so they play dirty. Ultimately, our liberal values are our strength and give us purpose in this war. No matter how dirty the enemy fights, we should not allow ourselves to be pushed into responding in an illiberal fashion.

1:51 am
Anonymous said...

I wouldn't contest this, save to note that I'm not sure that stating that on an emotional level I'd happily string the buggers up is an illiberal response.

Torture, yes. Stripping away civil liberties, yes. Buggering up our democratic structures, yes. Blitzing free speech, yes. Saying that if guilty they deserve to hang, I don't think so.

3:28 am
Theo Farrell said...

Of course some liberal democracies (hint: across the pond) still practice the death penalty. We are prevented from reintroducing it by the ECHR.

I completely understand the emotional attraction of wanting to string up those living in our own community that seek to target our service personnel in their homes. Certainly justice should be fierce - fair but fierce - for such a crime. But god knows we have often convicted the wrong people on terrorist offenses.

On a related note - unless I am mistaken, the Koran does not permit acts of violence against members of a community in which you are living.

11:46 am
David J. Betz said...

Theo, you're right of course that the tactic is a classic insurgent come on--functionally the equivalent of four burnt blackwater contractors dangling from a bridge in Fallujah--and as such in itself not a surprising dev't. Yet it is a shocking new step because until now the public rhetoric in this country has been about inter-'community' relations--even after the 7/7 bombings--whereas if this is the pattern of things to come then we will be talking of something else, insurgency in Old Blighty. That's a different kettle of fish. I can't exactly put my finger why a public beheading should have more impact than four bombings which killed 50+ butu I think it does. Perhaps it has something to do with Martin Amis' 'horrorism' idea--it just seems more horrific. Perhaps it's just me.

So, what to do? Well, keep our heads for one thing. As you say they fight dirty with the intention of getting us down to their level which is a terrible mistake--it was a mistake in Fallujah and it would be a mistake in Bradford too. I guess what I'm saying is that I think this story is a harbinger of the fact that we're going to start using exotic place names like Al Anbar and Helmand where awful things are done by and to incomprehensible foreigners in the same sentence as familiar place names where awful things are done by people who are putatively fellow citizens. That I and others saw it coming doesn't lessen all that much the chill of realizing it has now arrived.

Capital punishment is a bit of a digression. FWIW, however, my view is that it's perfectly compatible with democracy: given a popular choice we'd still have the gallows. Fact. It's elites who think that they know better and have decided that this one ought not to be a matter of popular choice. Personally, I'm ambivalent about it. I have profound doubts about rehabilitation. There are a lot of people out of jail who should currently be in jail. But I think it's absurd that it costs so much to incarcerate people. Anyway, with capital crimes the difference between Hang 'em high or lock 'em up and throw away the key is a matter of degree--if you're innocent they suck equally.

For me the problem with capital punishment is that when mistakes are made the responsibility is borne by the state which has no capacity for guilt or remorse. This is why I believe that punishment should be determined by the victim or next of kin in major crimes. If something awful was done to my children, the normal example of capital punishment advocates, I would surely want the cuplrit killed, slowly in some excruciating manner right? Maybe, maybe not. Either way the choice would be mine and the guilt should the conviction be proved false would be on the head of a real live person able to make something of it.

12:25 pm
Theo Farrell said...

David - you and I are in agreement on Fallujah, and the stupidity of the WH is falling for the insurgent come-on. But on capital punishment, I'm afraid that we part company. I find the idea pretty repulsive. Also in the same way that one shldn't hit a child if you want to teach him/her not to hit others, the state ought not to be killing those under its jurisdiction if it wants to hold true to the norm that prohibits killing (outside the context of war).

11:42 pm
David J. Betz said...

That's a false analogy, Theo. The state is not a parent. OK, I am under its jurisdiction but not its tutelage. I'm a citizen and strictly speaking the state is my servant, albeit one I share with 60 million others. Anyway, I'm not saying the state should be deciding. Quite the opposite I am proposing that we have a set of rules for a contingency in which one individual measures their own personal conscience and decides whether someone who has wounded them should live or die. It's up to them--the state in this case is merely an executor.

11:57 pm
Theo Farrell said...

Actually, I think the analogy does stand. The state does in fact socialise its citizens in many areas of social life. Think about it: many if not most rules are decided by political, policy, and legal elites, and then ordinary citizens are socialised into following these rules thru a combination of education and the threat of sanctions.

The notion that victims shld determine the sentence is iffy, to say the least. It wd produce gross inequities in sentences for similar crimes. It wd also probably breach European HR law. It's all so old testament.

On a completely different note - Eloise wants to write a line. So here it is:

I love you and maman and me

I believe the 'you' in question is her Papa. Now that's new testament.

2:17 pm
David J. Betz said...

'The state does in fact socialise its citizens in many areas of social life. Think about it: many if not most rules are decided by political, policy, and legal elites, and then ordinary citizens are socialised into following these rules thru a combination of education and the threat of sanctions.'

You know it scares me that this might be true. No, I can put that differently, it makes me sad that this is a nearly true reflection of the way British society has been going for about four decades now. What it conjures up is a vision of Orwell's Big Brother done up in drag like Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie. The Nanny State with combat boots and what it produces is an inert society unable to think or do anything for itself and unable to make any moral, intellectual or aesthetic judgments, a whole society literally stupefied by relativism and a lifetime of elites lulling them to sleep.

Thankfully, I think that this state of affairs--states socializing their people--of affairs is already past its apogee. The edifice is crumbling every day which you can see in the increasing inability of elites to set the rules and enforce (socialize) them as you suggest.
Good riddance, I say, but it's going to a rough interregnum between the old system and the new one. Which of course raises the question what is to be the new relationship between citizens and states? The best and most sensible thing I've read on this is Philip Bobbitt's 'market-state' thesis which he expounds in Shield of Achilles.

As for gross inequities in sentencing appearing, so what? Seriously. What's the problem with that? I can see that it would complicate the rational cost-benefit/opportunity cost analysis of people contemplating crimes. But why should I care about that?

And contravening European HR Law, well, you can guess how you feel about that. Of all the acts of political vandalism committed by this current government I think signing up to ECHR is near the worst. Why oh why if Number 10 needed some outlet for its Europhilia did they not sign up to the Euro (shudder)? It would have been the lesser evil.

1:34 pm
Anonymous said...

"You know it scares me that this might be true. No, I can put that differently, it makes me sad that this is a nearly true reflection of the way British society has been going for about four decades now. What it conjures up is a vision of Orwell's Big Brother done up in drag like Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie. The Nanny State with combat boots and what it produces is an inert society unable to think or do anything for itself and unable to make any moral, intellectual or aesthetic judgments, a whole society literally stupefied by relativism and a lifetime of elites lulling them to sleep."

Seconded. I was having this discussion with a friend (of liberal sympathies) in the pub over Christmas. I noted that in a recent report on BBC News 24 in which the death penalty was discussed, not one of the four people on screen (two hosts and two commentators) engaged with or even recognised the fact that from the abolition of the death penalty until arguably the present day (whether there's still an absolute majority in favour is now open to debate but there is at the very least still a substantial plurality in favour), the bulk of the British population has supported and continues to support hanging for murder. The matter wasn't even raised.

I said to my friend that I felt this was unhealthy.

He said that it was just "right" and that the public would have to live with it.

I noted that it seems to me that if that's the case, liberalism has strayed quite a long way from the path and wondered what the hell has happened to John Stuart Mill's notion that the answer to bad arguments is more and better argument, not shutting the debate down.

And people wonder why the public is apathetic. I can tell you why, in large part. It's because a large amount of our laws come from the EU (I'm not making a value judgement here, I just note that fact) and the British public are basically powerless to have any sway over it and of those areas that are not ceded to Brussels, many areas of debate have simply been shut down in the name of catch-all nominally liberal but actually extremely illiberal do-goodery. I hesistate to sound like a right-wing American radio host banging on about the liberal media here, but rather than suddenly going on about internet voting and forcing people to vote as a solution to voter apathy, the government might look at the fact that the metropolitan political and media classes have drastically narrowed the terms of most debate, while floating as an unrepresentative crust on top of a population at large that feels completely disconnected.

Again - I feel that I need to highlight this fact because I know that I sound like a moaning git - I speak as somebody who is not in favour of the death penalty and is in favour of various other things that are popular with the cosmopolitan classes and not very popular with the man on the Clapham omnibus. I just happen to think that if you've got a good argument you owe it to the political health of the country to offer it up to freewheeling debate.

The fact is that this country is going on the skids and it's doing so in large part because well-meaning (and quite possibly right on the issues) liberal people are increasingly inclined to simply bypass the awkward impediment of having to fight and win the argument.

1:41 am
Theo Farrell said...

Geez...never know what you might kick off just by mentioning ECHR! Anthony is right, in my view, in implying there are (at least) two liberalisms in world politics. The free-economics rational-actor liberalism of Mill, and the rights-based crusading liberalism of C20th. The former would do bugger all about nasty and dangerous regimes around the world. The latter would say: right, let's sort 'em out. Iraq reveals the dangerous of so doing. But AFG (and Sudan!) illustrates the moral if not strategic necessity. I'm with the crusading type, albeit tempered with some strategic realism.

As for the benefits of ECHR - it's an open and shut case for me. The growth of the global HR culture is probably the most progressive development in human society of the C20th. David - I may have to instruct you in this over several bottles of wine. Since this would be staff training, I would if we could get the department to pay...?

6:28 am
David J. Betz said...

I know what you mean Theo. A while back I said some truthful things about the Olympics (naff and expensive). Next thing I know Nick and Ivan are speculating what kind of twisted psyche could dislike it.

'The growth of the global HR culture is probably the most progressive development in human society of the C20th. David - I may have to instruct you in this over several bottles of wine.'

I don't buy it. At best it's impact has been neutral where it has overlaid pre-existing liberal traditions. At worst it interferes with those pre-existing traditions adding nothing to overall liberty while contributing much to the overwheening bureaucratization of society and the excessive meddling of government therein. I'm inclined to give HR culture a main role in the end of the Cold War in that the USSR ended up hoisted rhetorically by the Helsinki Accords to which it agreed for the most illiberal reasons. But the autocrats and theocrats have all learned from that mistake now--it won't happen twice. Actually it looks to me like it's going the other way as the globalization of HR norms makes the already liberal places less liberal than they were (witness none too subtle restriction of freedom of expression).

Anyhow I'm game for reeducation on this point. I fear however that in the race between you and the alcohol to rearrange my neurons the booze will win.

Incidentally, I too consider myself a liberal of the crusading sort. 'Attack Liberal', my term for my philosophy, never caught on, however.

11:23 am
Theo Farrell said...

"Actually it looks to me like it's going the other way as the globalization of HR norms makes the already liberal places less liberal than they were."

A really good book, that provides a theoretical account of how transnational HR norms liberalise autocratic societies, and then empirical tracks this effect in several Latin American states is:

Thomas Risse et al, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge UP, 1999).

But, alas, I fear that you will not be persuaded by mere words. No, only the educative power of fine wine will work. At least, that's my pitch to BHR...

10:48 pm
Anonymous said...

Tangentially related, but I found this Hitchens debate argument at YouTube in four parts - worth a shufti. I don't quite share Hitchens' blistering contempt for all religion (and I question how we can win the GWoT with such an absolutist stance) but beyond that I enjoyed it a lot. Four parts, each about 5 mins long:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bathe87kNFU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgn9NJEoQsE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crupqf8j6uw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJExwAQP4Eg


In fact, I think I might set the links as my email signature, to replace the current rather combative Martin Amis quotation. In fairness, I think it speaks well of KCL that I've been here for 2 and a half years with a string of fairly strident quotations going out at the end of all my email and appear to have survived without having my balls cut off.

8:24 pm
David J. Betz said...

Thanks Anthony, I'll have a look.

'Strident'? Really? Naaaahh. I'm waiting to hear what you REALLY think.

BTW, read one of the Iran chapters on the way home--the Shaffer one. Interesting, but I'm not sure it actually proves what it purports to be proving. The tension between Iran's statist-Republican aims and its transnational Islamic ones does, however, go a long way to explaining its desire for a nuclear deterrent.

11:42 pm
Anonymous said...

if like info on iraq or afgh go to
www.military-world.net

Thanks

2:55 pm

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