Opinio Juris

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.

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.

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.

Despite this illegal conduct, not everyone can sue OPEC and succeed. In 2002, a federal court dismissed a class-action lawsuit brought against OPEC by a gas station owner. An appeals court agreed, noting that “under the current state of our federal laws the individual member states of OPEC are afforded immunity from suit brought for damage caused by their commercial activities when they act through OPEC.”

The “current state of our federal laws” refers to the “act of state doctrine,” which was first enunciated by the Supreme Court in 1897 with the following words: “Every sovereign state is bound to respect the independence of every other sovereign state, and the courts of one country will not sit in judgment on the acts of the government of another, done within its own territory.”...

Fortunately, there is another way to sue OPEC. Even if actions by individual citizens fail, a seldom-used provision of Article III of the Constitution grants original jurisdiction to the Supreme Court over lawsuits brought by states against “foreign states” and, as expanded by the United States Code, over “aliens.”

The attorneys general of the various states should sue OPEC as an alien or, pleading alternatively, as a foreign state.

The states should contend that Article III of the Constitution outweighs the act of state doctrine. Respect for the sovereignty of a foreign government for acts “done within its own territory” does not, even if very liberally construed, protect decisions reached by a cartel based in Austria that directs 13 nations to sell their product at inflated prices to customers outside their boundaries.

As Thomas Walde, a professor at the University of Dundee, [has explained], OPEC is not a "cartel" in the legal sense of the word because it is a collection of governments, not private companies. A plausible defense could be that OPEC actions constitute a "joint resource conservation effort" and not market manipulation per se.

… 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.

it had found by 12 votes to four that Pedra Blanca/Pulau Batu Puteh, a granite island in the Straits of Singapore on which a lighthouse stands, belongs to Singapore and has done so since at least 1980, when the dispute between the two countries crystallized.

In the case of Middle Rocks, which consist of a group of rocks that are permanently above water, the ICJ … ruled 15 to one that it belongs to Malaysia.

The court also noted that South Ledge, a nearby low-tide elevation, falls within the apparently overlapping territorial waters generated by Pedra Blanca/Pulau Batu Puteh and by Middle Rocks. Given that the two countries have not asked the court to draw the line of delimitation, the judges said, by 15 to one, that sovereignty belongs to the State in the territorial waters of which it is located.

Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy…

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

Mr. Zakaria’s central thesis is that while the U.S. still has many unique assets, “the rise of the rest” — the Chinas, the Indias, the Brazils and even smaller nonstate actors — is creating a world where many other countries are slowly moving up to America’s level of economic clout and self-assertion, in every realm…

For too long, argues Zakaria, America has taken its many natural assets — its research universities, free markets and diversity of human talent — and assumed that they will always compensate for our low savings rate or absence of a health care system or any strategic plan to improve our competitiveness.

“That was fine in a world when a lot of other countries were not performing,” argues Zakaria, but now the best of the rest are running fast, working hard, saving well and thinking long term. “They have adopted our lessons and are playing our game,” he said. If we don’t fix our political system and start thinking strategically about how to improve our competitiveness, he added, “the U.S. risks having its unique and advantageous position in the world erode as other countries rise.”

a small group of players — “the superclass” — a new global elite, who are much better suited to operating on the global stage and influencing global outcomes than the vast majority of national political leaders.

Some of this new elite “are from business and finance,” says Rothkopf. “Some are members of a kind of shadow elite — criminals and terrorists. Some are masters of new or traditional media; some are religious leaders, and a few are top officials of those governments that do have the ability to project their influence globally.”

Second Life has a Darfur, so it’s sad (though not surprising) that it has its own janjaweed, too.

Activists recently built a virtual world information site on a private island called Better World, to raise awareness of the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Sudan. Called “Camp Darfur”, it features the recreation of a refugee tent city with a tiny campfire, and large display photos of the real thing, where the tents seem to go on for miles.

Shortly after it was unveiled, however, the place was hit by griefers [vandals and hackers]. The first marauder found an exploit in the Camp’s building method, and used that to raze the place to the ground, strewing tents and images of refugees everywhere. According to Zeke Poutine, officer in the "Not on our watch" Darfur activist group, he shouted racial slurs while he trashed it. The Camp was rebuilt, but copycat attacks by others followed.

But if Camp Darfur has its janjaweed, it has its guardians, too. For shortly after the raids began, a Better World visitor who’d learned a lot about Sudan’s genocide from the Camp called a group of his to the island, to offer their protection.

And that’s why Camp Darfur is now under the vigilant eye of the Green Lantern Core [sic — they have chosen to be “core” rather than “corps”], a band of superheroes who patrol Second Life with masks, tights, and magic lamps.

Zeke Poutine isn’t sure the attacks on their websites and their Second Life site are related, or if they’re politically motivated. “Who knows? Some people just do stuff because they can,” she muses. “'Cause they have issues? ‘Cause they don't like Africans?”

"It doesn't sound like they just did it for fun," Matador observes. “It's a hate crime.”

When the attacks first began, the Green Lantern Core helped them secure the Camp. Their lead officer Jeff Beckenbauer built a security script that scans the identity of avatars who visit, and showed the Better World owners how to read it. Jeremy patrols the island in the morning, and Matador at other times, as do other Core members.

In the beginning, they tell me, the GLC was founded by Cid Jacobs as a way to show off devices and builds inspired by the Green Lantern comic. From there it evolved into a roleplaying group, with members pretending to “patrol” sectors of Second Life. This began as fun, but lately it’s started to involve monitoring actual violations of Community Standards and Terms of Service-- the live and let live rules of conduct that Linden Lab [the company that runs Second Life] has its subscribers agree to, when they get an account.

“It's unfortunately turned into a lot of watching for CS/TOS violations,” KallfuNahuel Matador acknowledges. “The roleplay aspect kinda fell to the wayside. Certainly it started as a group of fans of a comic book, but it's grown and growing into something more.”

In this, one sees trend for the future of Second Life-- as the world grows ever larger, the sheer population size will make it impossible for Linden staff to meaningfully regulate it. Into this gap will rise neighborhood watch groups and private security forces, acting as the first line of defense while citizens wait for the Lindens to arrive. [Emphases added]

...it's hard to imagine a regime this insular and paranoid accepting robust aid from the US military, let alone agreeing to the presence of US Marines on Burmese soil — as Thailand and Indonesia did after the tsunami. The trouble is that the Burmese haven't shown the ability or willingness to deploy the kind of assets needed to deal with a calamity of this scale — and the longer Burma resists offers of help, the more likely it is that the disaster will devolve beyond anyone's control. "We're in 2008, not 1908," says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. "A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent."

That's why it's time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the US to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — "I can't imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it's not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the US has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government's consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan.

"It's important for the rulers to know the world has other options," [Jan Egeland, a former UN emergency reloief coordinator] says. "If there were, say, the threat of a cholera epidemic that could claim hundreds of thousands of lives and the government was incapable of preventing it, then maybe yes — you would intervene unilaterally." But by then, it could be too late. The cold truth is that states rarely undertake military action unless their national interests are at stake; and the world has yet to reach a consensus about when, and under what circumstances, coercive interventions in the name of averting humanitarian disasters are permissible. As the response to the 2004 tsunami proved, the world's capacity for mercy is limitless. But we still haven't figured out when to give war a chance.