Opinio Juris
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en-us2008-06-29T17:06+00:00There Will Be Blood
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1214760889.shtml
The NY Times Week in Review has an article written by Graham Bowley on the effect of recent attacks by Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) on...Chris Borgen2008-06-29T17:06+00:00an article written by Graham Bowley on the effect of recent attacks by Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) on Nigeria’s oil infrastructure and the effects of these attacks on world oil prices. The piece begins:
When armed rebels from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta attacked an enormous oil facility 75 miles off the swampy West African coast on June 19, traveling hours by speedboat under cover of darkness and kidnapping an oil worker, their brazen assault underlined the perhaps underappreciated dependence of the United States — and the world — on oil from Nigeria.
Three days afterward, Nigerian officials said at a hastily arranged global energy summit in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, that recent attacks had cut Nigeria’s oil production to its lowest level in nearly two decades, giving oil markets the jitters and helping to send prices higher…
“We always focus on the Persian Gulf but this is one of the key oil security issues in the world today,” said Daniel Yergin, one of the nation’s best-known energy experts and chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. “It’s tied up with Nigerian politics, regional and national battles for power, and criminality.” When Mr. Yergin spoke to lawmakers at a hearing in Congress last week, he was asked what would most help stabilize world markets. “Helping bring peace to the Niger Delta would be a major contribution,” he responded.
The Times article continues that responding to the situation in Nigeria will need both a sound development policy and a counter-insurgency strategy:
According to J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, the government led by Nigeria’s new president, Umaru Yar’Adua, must break with decades of neglect and pay attention to the troubles of the southern delta region by promoting development but also cracking down on the rebels and “demonstrating that these guys cannot operate with impunity.”
He’s not very optimistic, however. “When you look at the delta, the overwhelming picture is that the situation has very little promise of being fixed,” he said.
While development policy is always a complex issue, the “operate with impunity” part is also a problem, as MEND has started attacking not just oil pipelines, but offshore oil platforms, as well. MEND even issued a press release that states, "The location for today's attack was deliberately chosen to remove any notion that off-shore oil exploration is far from our reach." Jeff Vail of The Oil Drum explains that this is especially significant as 90% of Nigeria’s oil growth is expected to be via new offshore platforms. Which now seem vulnerable to attack.
So, given production limitations and strong/concentrated demand, even small disruptions by guerrilla groups on light sweet crude production is likely to have a direct influence on global oil pricing (in contrast, disruptions aimed at heavy crude production should have little impact on global pricing). Further, there are already active groups in many of the most critical production areas.
Fortunately, from the demonstrated behavior of these groups it doesn't appear that guerrilla/terrorist groups have fully grasped their potential market power with small attacks (despite aspirational pronouncements from al Qaeda and large scale attacks in 2005/2006). Once they do, as bad as disruption is today, it could get MUCH worse.
Why? A direct connection to scalable profits...
As we saw with e-mail spam/phishing, even the faintest whiff of profits can turn a loose collection of individuals/groups into a torrential crime-fueled marketplace generated billions and attracting tens of thousands of participants. Are we about to see the same occur with oil?
Disruption isn't limited to Nigeria. A remote control bomb by the FARC on Occidental Petroleum's pipeline in Colombia just knocked out 100,000 barrels a day. It's also interesting to note how irrelevant the US military/national security system has become in regards to global energy security. The entire paradigm of warfare has changed but the $1 Trillion behemoth has barely budged.
While I doubt that the end is nigh, the situation is obviously serious and it won’t be solved by a combination of a dithering domestic energy policy and a foreign policy of “assisted” regime-change. So, for now, only one thing is certain…
]]>Thanks to Haider Hamoudi
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1214191362.shtml
We at Opinio Juris want to thank once again Haider Hamoudi for guest-blogging with us this past week. For more on the issues he has raised, be sure to visit...Chris Borgen2008-06-23T03:06+00:00Opinio Juris want to thank once again Haider Hamoudi for guest-blogging with us this past week. For more on the issues he has raised, be sure to visit his blog, Islamic Law in Our Timesand read his memoir, Howling in Mesopotamia.
We hope he will soon join us again for another guest-blogging stint. ]]>Iraq(s?)
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1213896613.shtml
I have been particularly interested in Haider Hamoudi's observations in his book on cultural differences within Iraq. In two contratsing examples, Haider describes his visit to Basra in Southern Iraq and...Chris Borgen2008-06-19T17:06+00:00
A couple of vignettes were striking. First, there was a guard in Basra asking Haider to prove he was Iraqi by reciting the Muslim profession of faith… specifically the Shi’a version. But what if you are a Sunni? (Or a Christian?)
That same day he was in a faculty meeting in the law school in Basra and the faculty discussed the possibility of starting a graduate level program there, which they noted would be especially useful for female students. One of the other USAID consultants explained that funding was questionable as the CPA may simply say such programs already exist in Baghdad and that the female students could study there. The response was interesting:
Howls of protest interrupted him. A more conservative professor, Ali, said, “Our women aren’t going to Baghdad unaccompanied!”
“Not everyone has a relative in Baghdad,” another added. ‘What about the ones who don’t?”
“And there are cultural and social norms they have to respect,” chimed in a third…
What strikes me about these, and other observations in other parts of the book, is the description of the different communities in Iraq and how these differences affect day-to-day life. Of course we hear about the sectarian conflicts often from the punditocracy, but it is often couched in sensationalistic “they’re all killing each other” terms.
My question to Haider is this: how deep are the commonalities as opposed to the differences? Some U.S. observers argue that it took (and will take) an authoritarian regime to hold Iraq together. (This is essentially the "it took a Tito to keep Yugoslavia together" argument.) Based on your time there, what are your thoughts on whether Iraq is primarily a cohesive community (with some violent sectarian elements that are fighting each other) or three (or more) communities that really are separate? If the latter, how effective are the efforts to knit them together? And what do you think of this talk by some foriegn policy commentators of the near-inevitability of a soft partition, if not a hard break-up?]]>Life and Law in Iraq
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1213743101.shtml
First of all, my thanks are due to Professor Borgen, and to all of the editors of Opinio Juris, my favorite law blog (aside from my own, of course), for giving...Haider Hamoudi2008-06-17T22:06+00:00Howling in Mesopotamia, not Howling in Iraq. I emphasize this only because early on in the writing process, I had to fight rather energetically over this very point, whether to change the word Mesopotamia to Iraq on the theory that more readers would understand the latter. I won the argument and therefore feel compelled to make the correction, even at the expense of pedantry.
Howling in Mespotamia is a memoir, a personal experience of life in Iraq, as an Iraqi, beyond the protected walls of the Green Zone, by one with access to both the American administrators and the Iraqi people, of all sects and backgrounds. It was my purpose (and my editor’s mission in life, or so it seemed to me, to my eternal gratitude) to expunge political diatribes, legal exposition, tiresome exegeses of cultural differences, and to explain events as I saw them in as direct and unambiguous a fashion as I could, to relay a certain sense of humanity to the Iraqi people. How I was nearly shot for a terrorist by an American patrol while returning a generator to a manufacturer, what it was like for an Iraqi to eat at a restaurant at a time when several were bombed nearly every week, who these people were, waving their purple fingers at times, beating their chests at others—these were the questions I sought to address, to give a face, a name, a life, a family to the statistics, the numbers of dead and wounded, we see in the news nearly every day. Who was at fault for what, whether the invasion was a mistake, or what the role of Islamic law would be in the new Iraq were matters dear to my heart, and to my scholarship, but were not really the point of the book.
And yet, at every single forum in which I have participated, or interview I have given, concerning the memoir, these legal and political matters are discussed at some length, almost always in the context of the stories I have told in Howling. When it comes to Iraq, it seems to me, the personal is forever intertwined with the political, and life and law cannot so easily be separated from one another.
To give just one example, just last week I gave a talk at a fairly well known, and I think deservedly well respected, Washington DC based forum of Arab issues, Al Hewar. The Iraqi Ambassador and the cultural attaché were both in attendance, as were a number of prominent Arab Americans—professors, diplomats, doctors and the like. A rather nerve racking experience, given the prominence of the attendees and given that I spoke in Arabic, which presented its own unique set of challenges. Despite my penchant for attaching feminine adjectives to masculine nouns, I managed to convey the subject of the book, and, in that context, the work in which I was engaged in Iraq. These were, specifically, legal education reform through a DePaul University project run by the renowned Cherif Bassiouni and funded by USAID, and service on a Governing Council (GC) committee that was charged with advising on commercial legislation drafted by the American administrators at the time, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA).
With one exception, the questions I received were polite, cogent and well informed. They were also largely, though not entirely, adversarial, particularly as concerned my advisory work, where my role in reviewing commercial legislation was in fact quite minor, as I emphasized. I was given a period of hours to review quite often poorly drafted legislation that members of the Governing Council in some cases said quite openly would never be implemented in any significant fashion. I could as a result only correct the most embarrassing and egregious of errors. Had the CPA not dissolved in June of 2004, I am sure I would have quit shortly thereafter, less because I considered the work harmful and more because I found it largely pointless. I spent three hours offering comments on an intellectual property law that is so widely ignored that I needed to send someone to Amman to purchase legal copies of Microsoft to comply with a US government contract. Even the Iraqi government offices I visited did not quite understand what I wanted, until I managed to meet a Minister of Higher Education in Kurdistan who had spent time in France, heard my dilemma and smiled, gently offering Amman as the only solution she could think of.
Nevertheless, harmless as I found this experience, and compelling as I found the stories that arose out of it, the matter did create some controversy at Al Hewar. It also, in the opinion of some, cast some doubt on my ability to tell stories of the Iraqi people as an Iraqi. Hadn’t I in fact worked with the occupier? (I guess so, sort of.) Did they in fact have the right to pass all of this legislation under international law? (Probably not.) And even harder to digest, for me--did Iraq even need new commercial laws? (Absolutely, the laws on security for loans are quite outdated, to name the simplest example.) And couldn’t domestic Iraqi lawyers, real Iraqi lawyers (i.e. not me) make the necessary changes? (Absolutely, with international consultation, nobody had seen a real cross border deal in Iraq for decades.)
What made the matter even more striking however, is how much less controversial the drafting of the Constitution was. Some raised questions, to be sure, one raised a fuss about my supposed role in its drafting and how awful it was. I had no such role, but my uncle was head of the committee that drafted that document and so the document in Arab circles, where kin is king, is often indirectly attributed to me, I am finding. However, for the most part, and despite this attribution, the Constitution was not raised nearly as often as this quite silly and pointless legislation. This is not the first time this has happened, and it should give anyone pause—why is it that nobody asks whether Iraq’s foundational document should have been amended, whether it was necessary, whether it was legal, and yet the questions came concerning issues of far less consequence? Clearly much of the Iraq constitution was influenced by other constitutions, as the CPA orders were influenced by material taken from other jurisdictions. Why then this rather striking difference in treatment?
I think there is a clear enough legal answer as to why this was, and how it came to be that what was in fact a recitation of personal and familial experiences in Iraq led to a rather enlightening example on the nature of law and the legal transplant. The CPA laws were clearly drafted by an occupying authority and approved by a Governing Council that had been selected by that authority. As I have relayed elsewhere, the GC selection was largely competent, the major Iraq players at the time were largely represented, but still, it was an appointed body. The idea of that process leading to anything but disaster remains for many Arabs unpalatable, and examples in my ">scholarship of CPA successes are never kindly met in such fora.
By contrast, the Constitution was written by an elected body, through elections urged by Grand Ayatollah Sistani, no American appointee, and in connection with which the Grand Ayatollah decreed that to vote was an Islamic obligation. (More on this subject later in the week.) The Kurds and the Shi’a both enthusiastically participated. This was not the product of the occupier, it is hard to make a case otherwise. As a result, questions concerning its necessity disappear, and objections as to the necessity of any legal reform are shunted from an entirely rewritten constituent document to subsidiary statutes. In other words, we may have needed a new Iraqi constitution, if the Iraqis think so, but we don’t need new Iraqi commercial law (all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding), at least not unless the Iraqis say so.
This is not to say that there is no controversy attending the Constitution, but this relates to the sectarian nature of the drafting process, a matter I will turn to in another entry. That fact clearly does detract from the document’s authenticity and leads to Sunni accusations of a different foreign influence, Iran. For now, however, the point is this—a law is not controversial because it has been imported from, or at least influenced by, other jurisdictions. So much of Iraqi law already is. It is the process of importation, and the appearance of domestic legitimacy (ie urged by Sistani, drafted by an elected assembly) that is, I believe, dispositive. That in itself is not surprising, in fact I suppose it might be obvious, but the fact that it became manifest, in this context, not in an academic forum but rather in a presentation that was supposed to be about personal Iraqi lives and experiences was, to my mind, worthy of note. Nothing seems to escape law and politics in Iraq, I think, it is near to the minds of all Iraqis. No matter what else we might want to be thinking about, it looms always near in these difficult and precarious times.
This was by way of introduction, tomorrow I will endeavor to discuss some pressing legal matters in more depth.]]>Opinio Juris Welcomes Guest Blogger Haider Hamoudi
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1213722218.shtml
We are pleased to welcome guest blogger Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Professor Hamoudi is a prolific scholar on Islamic and comparative...Chris Borgen2008-06-17T17:06+00:00Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Professor Hamoudi is a prolific scholar on Islamic and comparative law and also has a blog, Islamic Law in Our Times.
… a groundbreaking insider's story about America's war in Iraq. His unique perspective and fresh insight into the conflict that has divided our country were informed by living with relatives in an average residential neighborhood in Baghdad during the war. Many of his relatives were intimately involved in the unfolding political process, such as his uncle, who became chair of the Iraqi Constitutional Committee, and his cousin, Ahmed Chalabi, one of the most prominent Iraqi exiles to return after the fall of the previous regime.
Hamoudi saw firsthand the frustrations and fears that plagued Iraqi civilians during a crucial period of the war. As an American in Iraq working on a USAID-funded contract, he also interacted with American administrators regularly, and was able to see the developing situation from their point of view as well. Howling in Mesopotamia is a critical look at what went wrong in Iraq from a person who was there. Hamoudi's gripping memoir will shed light on the events, mistakes, and misunderstandings.
We look forward to Professor Hamoudi joining us this week for a conversation about his book, the fate of Iraq, Islamic law, and other related issues.]]>Israeli Supreme Court Upholds Unlawful Combatants Law
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1213287684.shtml
As our Boumediene instant symposium gets underway, I thought it might be interesting to note that the Israeli Supreme Court has just upheld the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which...Kevin Jon Heller2008-06-12T16:06+00:00Boumediene instant symposium gets underway, I thought it might be interesting to note that the Israeli Supreme Court has just upheld the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which permits the indefinite detention of a person who does not qualify for POW status and "who has participated either directly or indirectly in hostile acts against the State of Israel or is a member of a force perpetrating hostile acts against the State of Israel." From Ha'aretz:
The Supreme Court yesterday upheld the constitutionality of the law allowing for the detention of "unlawful combatants," which Israel uses to hold Hezbollah fighters.
Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch and Justices Edmond Levy and Ayala Procaccia rejected an appeal by two Gazan Palestinians who were detained after their involvement in terror activity on behalf of Hezbollah was proved.
The Unlawful Combatants Law authorizes the state to detain foreign nationals who belong to terror organizations or have participated directly or indirectly in hostile actions against the State of Israel.
Its goal is to prevent their continued activities.
Beinisch wrote in the verdict that although the law involves substantial harm and the suppression of personal freedom through administrative detention, the harm is proportional.
She noted that it was passed in a "harsh security reality" that justifies the violation of to personal freedom.
"The law's harm to the constitutional right to personal freedom, although substantial, is no greater than necessary," Beinisch wrote.
"Therefore, we have concluded that the law meets the criteria of the limitations ruling and there is no constitutional grounds to intervene in it."
The Unlawful Combatants Law requires a District Court to determine every six months whether a prisoner's release "will not harm State security" or whether "there are special grounds justifying his release"; the court's decision can then be appealed to a single judge of the Supreme Court for review. Scholars question, however, whether the Law's review procedures adequately protect prisoners' rights. Here is what Ron Dudai of SOAS had to say two years ago, when the Israeli Supreme Court first upheld the detention of "unlawful combatants":
Yet how powerful can this judicial review be? Not only does the Illegal Combatants law create a new category not recognized in international law, it reverses the burden of proof. Once an order is signed by the Chief of Staff, the burden of proof is on the defendant: he has to prove to the court that he is not an enemy combatant. Moreover, he is expected do this when the charge against him is based solely on classified evidence, which he is barred from examining and is therefore unable to challenge. One of the defendants told the court he was arrested in his house, for no reason, and added that if he were exposed to the evidence against him he would be able to respond. But that, of course, did not happen. After the defense lawyers argued their case, they and their clients had to exit the courtroom, leaving the security services’ representatives to reveal their secret evidence to the judge.
Food for comparative thought.]]>Muslim Views of the United States
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1211902004.shtml
...Roger Alford2008-05-29T14:05+00:00
The Pew Research Center has a fascinating poll released earlier this month on Muslim perceptions of the United States. Here is a quick summary:
Simply put, America’s image in much of the Muslim world remains abysmal. Iraq, the war on terrorism, American support for Israel and other key features of U.S. foreign policy continue to generate animosity in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere. In many nations considered central to the war on terror, the general public deeply distrusts the United States. Even in countries like Kuwait that have long been considered relatively pro-American, the U.S. image has declined.
On the bright side, America seems to be winning the battle of ideas on some important fronts. First and foremost, support for terrorism has declined dramatically over the last few years in many Muslim countries. Fewer Muslims now consider suicide bombing justifiable, and confidence in Osama bin Laden has waned. Moreover, the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes survey revealed the extent to which there is broad support for democracy, capitalism and globalization throughout all regions of the world, including Muslim nations. Support for American ideas, however, does not necessarily translate into warm feelings for the United States. Instead, Muslims believe the United States fails to live up to its rhetoric on democracy, and they tend to blame the United States for the aspects of globalization they do not like.
]]>How Do You Chip out of a Mortar Hole?
http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1210113760.shtml
I'm sorry, I just can't let this one go:...Kevin Jon Heller2008-05-06T22:05+00:00I'm sorry, I just can't let this one go:
Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage in a luxury hotel, which would not look out of place in Sydney harbour. Then, as twilight falls, a pre-prandial stroll, perhaps, amid the cool of the Tigris Riverfront Park, where the peace is broken only by the soulful cries of egrets fishing.
Improbable though it all may seem, this is how some imaginative types in the US military are envisaging the future of Baghdad's Green Zone, the much-pummelled redoubt of the Iraqi capital where a bunker shot has until now had very different connotations.
A $5bn (£2.5bn) tourism and development scheme for the Green Zone being hatched by the Pentagon and an international investment consortium would give the heavily fortified area on the banks of the Tigris a "dream" makeover that will become a magnet for Iraqis, tourists, business people and investors. About half of the area is now occupied by coalition forces, the US state department or private foreign companies.
The US military released the first tentative artists' impression yesterday. An army source said the barbed wire, concrete blast barriers and checkpoints that currently disfigure the 5 sq mile area would be replaced by shopping malls, hotels, elegant apartment blocks and leisure parks. "This is at the end of the day an Iraqi-owned area and we will give it back to them with added value," said the source, who requested anonymity.
Potential investors are being encouraged to take a punt that years ahead, Baghdad's fortunes may mirror former war-torn cities such as Sarajevo and Beirut that have risen from the ashes.
Marriott International has already signed a deal to build a hotel in the Green Zone, according to Navy Captain Thomas Karnowski, the chief US liaison. Also in the pipeline is a possible $1bn investment from MBI International, a hotel and resorts specialist led by Saudi sheikh, Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber.
One Los Angeles-based firm, C3, has said it wants to build an amusement park on the Green Zone's outskirts. As part of the first phase, a skateboard park is due to open this summer.
The best thing about the "artist's rendering" is the complete absence of background. Wonder why that is?]]>
I'm sorry, I just can't let this one go: