Nice column by Henry Porter about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko…

Casino Royale, which opened in Moscow last week, features an assassin operating on foreign soil with impunity and deniability, yet also with the undoubted backing of his government at home. The British do this in the movies; the Russians appear to be doing it for real. If they are, it constitutes state-sponsored terrorism because a man walking around London in a glimmering trail of radioactivity represents a considerable threat to others. This is quite apart from the revolting, calculated cruelty of his murder.

Litvinenko courted death and knew that living in Britain would not protect him. There have been too many downed helicopters and unsolved murders across Europe for that. He must have known that more than 20 journalists have lost their lives in the former Soviet Union since Putin came to power. But, not content with having accused the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), of planning to murder exiled financier Boris Berezovsky, and being tried on corruption charges as a result, he stuck his head out by accusing the FSB of masterminding explosions in 1999 which killed some 230 people and allowed Putin to go to war in Chechnya.

He was tried and convicted in his absence for abuse of office, a purely Soviet catch-all charge; his family was hounded by the FSB and he was told that his life was in danger. But still he continued to make allegations, most recently at the Frontline Club in Paddington, London, where he condemned Putin for the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. He stood in the club’s upstairs room making his points without emotion, waiting patiently for his translator to finish…

Henry’s right: Russia is, in fact, a rogue state — a corrupt autocracy. What happened to Litvinenko was state-sponsored terrorism (captured nicely by that phrase about “a man walking around London in a glimmering trail of radioactivity”). But Russia won’t — can’t — be treated as a rogue state. For one thing, it has nukes. For another, it’s where we have to get our gas (and maybe oil) from in the future. What surprises me at the moment is why the government isn’t making the link between energy policy and national security. Doing something serious about carbon emissions is also just about the best way of reducing the UK’s dependence on vicious despots like Vladimir Putin.

Martin Kettle’s column alterted me to something I had missed — a lecture given to the Cambridge Law Faculty on November 16 by Lord Bingham, Britain’s most senior judge, in which he set out the eight criteria that a society has to meet if it is to be said to be obeying the rule of law. It’s a fascinating and sobering read — sobering because he implies that the current UK government doesn’t understand what the rule of law requires.

Bingham’s starting point is the way the phrase “the rule of law” has become debased by casual over-use. “It is true”, he says

that the rule of law has been routinely invoked by judges in their judgments. But they have not explained what they meant by the expression, and well-respected authors have thrown doubt on its meaning and value. Thus Joseph Raz has commented on the tendency to use the rule of law as a shorthand description of the positive aspects of any given political system. John Finnis has described the rule of law as “[t]he name commonly given to the state of affairs in which a legal system is legally in good shape”. Judith Shklar has suggested that the expression may have become meaningless thanks to ideological abuse and general over-use: “It may well have become just another one of those self-congratulatory rhetorical devices that grace the public utterances of Anglo-American politicians. No intellectual effort need therefore be wasted on this bit of ruling-class chatter”.

Jeremy Waldron, commenting on Bush v Gore in which the rule of law was invoked on both sides, recognised a widespread impression that utterance of those magic words meant little more than “Hooray for our side!”.

Well, hooray for Lord Bingham, say I! It’s a terrific lecture.

An audio recording is also available — see here.

Louise Richardson is a Harvard professor who has been teaching about terrorism for a decade, and who had always thought it wise for academics to stay out of politics. But the boneheadedness of the Bush regime, which has ignored decades of accumulated wisdom on her subject, prompted her to write a belated primer.

The result is, according to Max Rodenbeck’s review in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, “a book that reads like an all-encompassing crash course in terrorism: its history, what motivates it, and the most effective ways of treating it.”

Rodenbeck offers a summary of a dozen of her basic points. Here’s my distillation of his distillation.

1. Terrorism is anything but new. Violence by nonstate actors against civilians to achieve political aims has been going on for a long, long time.

2. Terrorism is obviously a threat, and the deliberate killing of innocent civilians an outrage, but it is not a very big threat. Six times more Americans are killed every year by drunk drivers than died in the World Trade Center. (And more Americans have now died in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Excepting a few particularly bad years, the annual number of deaths from terrorism worldwide since the late 1960s, when the State Department started record-keeping, is only about the same as the number of Americans who drown every year in bathtubs.

3. The danger from terrorist use of so-called weapons of mass destruction is not as large as scaremongers profess.

4. Many terrorists are not madmen. The choice to use terror can be quite rational and calculated.

5. Groups that commit terrorism, in many cases, believe they are acting defensively, using the most effective means at their disposal. Their justifications can be self-serving and morally repugnant, but are often carefully elaborated. It is, Richardson emphasizes, important to distinguish these differing approaches, since they suggest different remedies.

6. Suicide attacks can also represent a rational policy choice. They are cheap. They can be a means of access to difficult targets. They are effective in frightening people, and in advertising the seriousness and devotion of those who undertake them.

7. There is no special link between Islam and terrorism. Most major religions have produced some form of terrorism, and many terrorist groups have professed atheism.

8. Electoral democracy does not prevent terrorism, which has flourished in many democracies, typically being used by groups representing minorities who believe the logic of majority rule excludes them. The Basque separatist group ETA and Greece’s November 17th urban guerrillas started under dictatorships, but continued their attacks following transitions to democracy in both countries.

9. Democratic principles are no impediment to prosecuting terrorists. On the contrary they are, Richardson asserts, “among the strongest weapons in our arsenal.”

10. Military action is sometimes necessary to combat terrorism, but it is often not the best way to do so.

11. Armies, in fact, often create more problems than they solve. When Britain sent its army into Northern Ireland in 1969 in response to the Troubles, it took just two years for the majority of Catholics, who were at first relieved by their presence, to turn against them. The turnaround for the US in Iraq was far shorter.

12. To address the issues terrorists say they are fighting for cannot automatically be dismissed as appeasement.

Rodenbeck goes on:

Because terrorists tend to be aspirational rather than practical, their practices typically amount to what Ms. Richardson calls a search for the three R’s of terrorism: revenge, renown, and reaction. As she puts it, “the point of terrorism is not to defeat the enemy but to send a message.” This simple insight is important, because it suggests ways of dealing with terrorism: you must blunt the impulse for revenge, try to limit the terrorists’ renown, and refrain from reacting in ways that either broaden the terrorists’ appeal or encourage further terrorism by showing how effective their tactics are.

Richardson’s three R’s go a long way toward explaining why American policy has become so disastrously askew. As she notes, an act such as September 11 itself achieves the first of her three R’s, revenge. So spectacularly destructive an attack also gains much of the second objective, renown. But the Bush administration’s massive and misdirected overreaction has handed al-Qaeda a far greater reward than it ever dreamed of winning.

“The declaration of a global war on terrorism,” says Richardson bluntly, “has been a terrible mistake and is doomed to failure.” In declaring such a war, she says, the Bush administration chose to mirror its adversary:

Americans opted to accept al-Qaeda’s language of cosmic warfare at face value and respond accordingly, rather than respond to al-Qaeda based on an objective assessment of its resources and capabilities.

In essence, America’s actions radically upgraded Osama bin Laden’s organization from a ragtag network of plotters to a great enemy worthy of a superpower’s undivided attention. Even as it successfully shattered the group’s core through the invasion of Afghanistan, America empowered al-Qaeda politically by its loud triumphalism, whose very excess encouraged others to try the same terror tactics.

By this criterion, today’s Queen’s Speech setting out Tony Blair’s last legislative programme — which is obsessed with ‘security’ — amounts to another massive puff for bin Laden.

In the run-up to the mid-term elections I was puzzled by why UK media outlets were regularly consulting an odious, right-wing fanatic called Grover Norquist.

Just reading Paul Krugman’s reaction to the electoral results makes me even more puzzled. He mentions our friend Norquist:

I’m not calling for or predicting the end of conservatism. There always have been and always will be conservatives on the American political scene. And that’s as it should be: a diversity of views is part of what makes democracy vital.

But we may be seeing the downfall of movement conservatism — the potent alliance of wealthy individuals, corporate interests and the religious right that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. This alliance may once have had something to do with ideas, but it has become mainly a corrupt political machine, and America will be a better place if that machine breaks down.

Why do I want to see movement conservatism crushed? Partly because the movement is fundamentally undemocratic; its leaders don’t accept the legitimacy of opposition. Democrats will only become acceptable, declared Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, once they “are comfortable in their minority status.” He added, “Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.”

Norquist is famous for his desire to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” According to his Wikipedia entry, “his close business and political ties to recently indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff are the subject of a current federal investigation.”

From Scott Adams’s The Dilbert Blog…

Years ago when I worked at a big bank, one of the hot issues was that many customers didn’t trust our new-fangled ATM machines. Amazingly, this fear had almost nothing to do with the fact that I worked in the ATM department. Indeed, my suggestion to include a paper shredder hole right next to the deposit hole was barely even considered. In the end, ATMs rarely stole anyone’s money and kept it for long. Now most people trust ATMs.

I think about the history of ATMs when I hear all the nervous Nellies wetting their pants over electronic voting machines. I believe those worries are totally misplaced. Now don’t get me wrong – there’s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged.  But that doesn’t mean we’ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?

Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish…

Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link.