One of the things people miss with insurgencies is that behind every insurgent is a family structure, and especially in the Middle East you are talking about extended families.
I’ve not read Henri Barkey before, however his views on amnesty in this CFR interview seem sensible to me.
Henri Barkey, a Middle East expert and head of the international relations department at Lehigh University, says Iraqi plans for an amnesty can seriously undercut the Iraqi insurgency by creating a rift between homegrown Iraqi insurgents, who are entitled to amnesty, and members of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who are not.
Even though many Americans oppose an amnesty if given to Iraqis involved in killing American troops, Barkey supports such an offer because “if we want Iraq to succeed, we need to figure out a way for them to have national reconciliation, and we should not stand in the way.”
You had an interesting op-ed in the Los Angeles Times a few days ago in which you advocated that the Iraqis offer an amnesty to the Iraqi insurgents, even if responsible for the death of American soldiers. What got you thinking about amnesties in Iraq?
I’ve been following the Iraq situation for a while, but I’ve also been following the situation in Turkey, and I’ve been convinced that in the case of Turkey, the Turks are really an amnesty away from resolving their problems [with their Kurdish minorities]. That said, of course the devil is in the details. It depends on the amnesty, it depends on the terms, and it depends obviously on other circumstances and the kind of deals you make with neighboring states.
Amnesties are important for one reason apart from national reconciliation. One of the things people miss with insurgencies is that behind every insurgent is a family structure, and especially in the Middle East you are talking about extended families. So for every person who is part of the insurgency there is an automatic support group. Even if the families don’t like what their son is doing, they will tend to support him. They will tend to provide him safe haven. They will tend to provide food and shelter, and God knows what else. And when you think about the close relations that exist in the Middle East, where your cousin’s cousin is seen as part of your family, insurgencies create their own natural support basis within the population.
And these extended families extend to tribes as well in Iraq, I guess.
Right. But the converse also works. When you offer an amnesty, pressure now arises. Many families don’t necessarily want to be involved in the insurgency business because there are costs to them. Their house may be raided, their kids may get killed. So the moment you give an incentive of an amnesty, then you’re putting pressure on the insurgent to take advantage of it not because he wants or he likes the amnesty but because now his mother, his father, his grandfather, his uncles, his nieces, everybody probably will try to say “Look, this is a good deal here, it’s time for you to come home.”
Obviously, al-Qaeda-type people and foreigners should not be given that incentive, in part because the family structure that I just discussed doesn’t work in that case. Secondly, when you talk about giving an amnesty to insurgents in Iraq, it should even include insurgents who may have killed Americans. In the end, we are going to want to leave Iraq, hopefully the sooner the better. But insurgents who are Iraqi will remain in Iraq. They have no other place to go. And if we want Iraq to succeed, we need to figure out a way for them to have national reconciliation, and we should not stand in the way. It is critical they create the institutions and the basis for a future, peaceful Iraq.
Technorati Tags: Amnesty
Our enemy prowls around us like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.
If you’ve not read Wretchard’s commentary on Philip Bobbitt’s Spectator UK essay We haven’t absorbed the lessons I recommend it strongly.
…The saddest part of the Bobbitt’s article comes when he is forced to spell out to the reader what it is all about. When in history since Greece did the West need to be told this?
The attacks were, very simply, about democracy. They were an attempt to impose an answer on this question: will democratically elected governments be able to pursue their policies on the basis of the judgment of their institutions or can their leaders be tempted into ransoming their population when the public is hostage to violence? … This is a modern, perhaps even post-modern, version of an ancient dilemma. The lesson was written for us long ago: Be sober. Be watchful. Our enemy prowls around us like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.
We were never ignorant of lions until today. Let the sunshine, let the sunshine, the sunshine in.
In the essay Bin Laden as Patrick Henry? Daniel Henninger tries to understand the reasoning of those who disbelieve there is an Islamic terrorist threat. For those still questioning the danger please see We haven’t absorbed the lessons.
So we got the Hamdan Guantanamo detainee decision yesterday, the turmoil over revealing the Swift surveillance of terrorist financing a week ago, the FBI’s capture in Florida of the would-be al Qaeda bombers of the Sears Tower before that, and oh yes, those 17 Muslims in Canada who wanted to invade Parliament and behead the prime minister. We seem to be thoroughly entangled just now in never-ending tensions over civil liberty concerns on one hand and manifest national security threats on the other. Nearly five years after September 11, it’s a little stale to argue that this much confusion is just the way a vigorous democracy functions. Or not.
It was good to see that the FBI could catch a group like the Florida bombers. By coincidence about that time, the director of the FBI in New York, Mark Mershon, visited our offices. Mr. Mershon made it clear that the FBI will not monitor or surveil anyone, including Muslim extremists, without a “criminal predicate.” Generally, probable cause is the gold standard for watching. Mr. Mershon said that if someone keeps his head down and nose clean in the U.S., he can function with a great deal of freedom. That’s a rough but workable description of our system.
This traditional, all-American tradeoff between liberty and risk works OK in a country populated with standard criminal types; most eventually work their way up to a police database. But what about the world of Islamic fanaticism whose recruits, notably suicide bombers (or pilots) are nearly all first-timers? Does “our system” mandate that we allow an Islamic fifth column to fly beneath the radar of probable cause and into buildings? Do we have to settle for catching bottom-feeders like the Florida plotters while the smart boys, planning a smallpox attack in Detroit, stay below what they’ve read is the threshold for FBI curiosity or a FISA warrant?
[…]
It is possible to sharpen the focus of this matter further. The critics of the anti-terror surveillance programs such as the NSA’s warrantless wiretaps give the impression that these efforts somehow violate principles laid down at the ratification of the Bill of Rights. The legal arguments, however, revolve around the requirements of Title III (establishing probable cause for electronic surveillance) and the FISA statute. Both laws, from the 1960s and ’70s, in part were a reaction to government wiretapping of individuals involved in the civil-rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests.
Many of those in the opposition on these surveillance issues–in Congress, the legal community and the press–are people whose personal and intellectual formation is rooted in the events of that era. This is the prism through which they transmute any political event; does it pass or fail the commandments carved in the ’70s? But this is 2006, not 1974. Islamic jihad and al Qaeda are not the Montgomery marchers or Kent State, and our debate and laws should reflect that. Applying transaction analytics to telephone traffic is not the same as two cops with headphones in a hotel listening to the people in the next room.
Perhaps there’s a silver lining. The public demonizing of Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Gonzales as ruthless tramplers of civil liberties is a throwback to the anti-LBJ, anti-Nixon style of Vietnam-era protests. This has been catastrophic for shaping public policy around this issue. But if the bad guys go slow because they think that George Bush and Dick Cheney are RoboCops willing to do what they gotta do track, trap and catch them, hey, maybe our crackpot “system” works after all.
See also This is a columnist in a serious publication? for a truly awful Newsweek example.
The New York Times is attempting to defend their disclosure of the highly classified terrorist-financing-tracking program by the “the Wall Street Journal did it too…” The Wall Street Journal editorial page editors explain why that is complete rubbish. They also detail the complete separation between the decision-making of the news and editorial sections of the WSJ.
“Not everything is fit to print. There is to be regard for at least probable factual accuracy, for danger to innocent lives, for human decencies, and even, if cautiously, for nonpartisan considerations of the national interest.”
So wrote the great legal scholar, Alexander Bickel, about the duties of the press in his 1975 collection of essays “The Morality of Consent.” We like to re-read Bickel to get our Constitutional bearings, and he’s been especially useful since the New York Times decided last week to expose a major weapon in the U.S. arsenal against terror financing.
President Bush, among others, has since assailed the press for revealing the program, and the Times has responded by wrapping itself in the First Amendment, the public’s right to know and even The Wall Street Journal. We published a story on the same subject on the same day, and the Times has since claimed us as its ideological wingman. So allow us to explain what actually happened, putting this episode within the larger context of a newspaper’s obligations during wartime.
We should make clear that the News and Editorial sections of the Journal are separate, with different editors. The Journal story on Treasury’s antiterror methods was a product of the News department, and these columns had no say in the decision to publish. We have reported the story ourselves, however, and the facts are that the Times’s decision was notably different from the Journal’s.
According to Tony Fratto, Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, he first contacted the Times some two months ago. He had heard Times reporters were asking questions about the highly classified program involving Swift, an international banking consortium that has cooperated with the U.S. to follow the money making its way to the likes of al Qaeda or Hezbollah. Mr. Fratto went on to ask the Times not to publish such a story on grounds that it would damage this useful terror-tracking method.
Regular SeekerBlog readers will recall the Groseclose/Milyo study “A Measure of Media Bias”. One of the conclusions of that study was that the Wall Street Journal news pages are slightly to the left of the New York Times. There is in fact a “wall” between the news/editorial page content at the WSJ.
Boston University historian Richard Landes found a very interesting essay translated from the Arabic by the invaluable MEMRI:
…Iraqi reformist Dr. Abd Al-Khaleq Hussein, who writes on several reformist websites, argues that Arab society suffers from “social schizophrenia,” — the symptoms of which are similar to those of individuals suffering from actual schizophrenia. He further argues that the Arab governments must immediately launch social and political reforms which will gradually lead to democracy in the Arab world. If significant reforms are not carried out, he says, disasters will continue to strike the Arab word, and democracy will ultimately be imposed upon it through violent upheavals, as occurred in Iraq. In the article, he also called upon the Arabs to accept the help offered to them by the West - and especially by the U. S. - with the aim of facilitating positive change that will permit them to integrate into the international community.
Landes closes with this summary paragraph:
I guess most Arabs and western “progressives” would consider this man the Arab equivalent of an Oreo. I, of course, think he’s right on. What we need now is a) an analysis of the relationship between humiliation and schizophrenia, and b) an explanation of how our “progressives” could find this schizophrenic personality so attractive.
Economist Thomas J. Holmes is studying the economies of density. One of the supporting graphics to his working paper “The Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density” is an animation of the Wal-Mart store openings per year.
Very interesting.
This short Cato Institute commentary provides a useful perspective on the history of US gasoline prices. E.g., gasoline would have to cost $5.17 per gallon today to have the same impact on the consumer’s pocketbook as 29 cents in 1955 [adjusting for inflation and changes in disposable per capita income.
To be completely accurate, we also need to adjust for the improvements in energy efficiency. Very roughly, a 1955 vehicle burned at least 70% more fuel than today - so $7.40/gal today would be apples-apples equivalent to the $0.29/gal 1955 price.
…There are probably three reasons that gasoline prices appear so high to us today. First, many don’t fully appreciate the long run effect that inflation has on prices. Second, many don’t appreciate how much our incomes have increased relative to prices. Finally, we still remember 1998 very well, the year in which we encountered the lowest gasoline prices since 1949. Gasoline in 1998 sold for $1.03 per gallon, the equivalent of $1.21 in today’s currency. Adjusting for growth in per capita income yields a price of $1.35 per gallon in today’s terms. Today’s price is more than double that and people resent the increase over the last several years, in part, because they think that 1998 prices were normal. But they were not.
Now let’s put the recent price increase in terms of real outlays. The average household is spending $136 more on gasoline every month than it was in 1998 and $114 per month more than it were spending in 2002. But, believe it or not, real (inflation-adjusted) disposable income per household has increased even faster than have pump prices; by $800 a month since 1998 and $279 a month since 2002.
Accordingly, Americans are still, on average, economically ahead of the game.
No one likes high gasoline prices. But they are not as bad as most people think. Keep that in mind the next time some politician or media populist starts handing out the pitchforks.
Technorati Tags: Oil Price Elasticity
Economist James Hamilton on oil price trends:
The graph below plots the weekly average U.S. retail gasoline price (red line, units on left axis) and the average U.S. gasoline demand over the four weeks ending at the indicated date minus the average demand of the corresponding 4-week period of the preceding year (blue line, units on right axis). For the past year, we’ve seen a consistent pattern– whenever the retail price is above $2.50 per gallon, U.S. gasoline use has been kept at or below the levels of the previous year. Motley Fool notes related developments in Asia. I continue to believe that $70 oil generates lots of incentive for consumers to change their habits. For this reason, I have a hard time seeing strong demand as the factor supporting an oil price above $70 a barrel.
On the supply side, most of the discussion in the financial press seems to focus on Iran or Iraq. That is understandable, given the drama of geopolitical events unfolding in those locations. But from the perspective of global oil supplies, I’m inclined to pay attention to two other suppliers– Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.
Conflicts in Nigeria reduced that country’s production by over 300,000 barrels a day in March compared with where it had been in December. More recent attacks may have increased that loss to 800,000 barrels a day. Remembering the scale on the right-hand axis in the figure above, it takes a lot of conservation to try to make that up.
And the Saudis yesterday announced their intention to increase capacity to 12 million barrels a day (mbd) by 2009, which would be 2.5 mbd above the 9.5 mbd they have been pumping for the last year. On the other hand, if one looks at actions rather than words, they apparently only produced 9.1 mbd in April, which would be a production decrease of 400,000 barrels a day, and this could have dropped further to 9.05 mbd in May. I’m surprised that nobody else is talking about the latter development– perhaps like me, they’re not sure just what it all means. But if, for whatever reason, Saudi production is headed down rather than up over the near future, it will be a much bigger story than any of the others. All the more reason it would be nice to see some more people doing some investigating here.
Technorati Tags: Oil Imports, Oil Price Elasticity
“Reckoned in terms of present value using a discount rate of 4.5%, the costs of U.S. oil dependence since 1970 are $8 trillion, with a reasonable range of uncertainty of $5 to $13 trillion.” That is from the report-summary of Costs of U.S. Oil Dependence: 2005 Update [PDF], by Oak Ridge Laboratories. The report is stuffed with useful data, analysis and observations. I found this analysis of the report by economist Menzie Chinn to be a useful guide to key issues.
The graphic at upper left is Figure 27 from the report, which shows the aggregate cost of energy imports in 2005 to be about US$250 billion [constant 2000 US$].
I found this report looking for hard data on supply and demand elasticity. Anecdotal observation is that the current gasoline price spike has had little short-run impact on consumer demand, so I’ve wondered what is the real long-term demand elasticity? Here are some of Chinn’s comments:
What I found most interesting is the relatively high (at least compared to what some people think) long run price elasticities of oil demand, combined with relatively low long run supply elasticities (the typically cited figure is slightly lower than the average here, 0.3, which is close to the EIA figure). This suggests to me that there is considerable scope for reducing demand via taxes, while attempting to increase domestic supply by way of subsidies would be more difficult…
Technorati Tags: Energy Dependence, Oil Price Elasticity
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