Maktab

>You might want to read this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/12/iraq-invasion-vi....

While very persuasive (and an interesting read btw) that report still does not have the definitive weight of a UNSC resolution or UCJ ruling. And as I've said all along, the question of the legality of the original invasion is separate and irrelevant to the legality of the continued US presence in Iraq. I've been trying to avoid getting sucked into a discussion about the initial invasion only because I don't believe it's relevant to this specific discussion. That's all.

One last time: while the UN Security Council resolutions from UNSCR 1483 on, that you list, do not ipso facto make the occupation legal. There is not specific language declaring it to be legal, and absent that language, you cannot imply it to exist.

This is just it though, those resolutions (especially UNSCR 1511) are unambiguous and specific in making the presence of US-led coalition forces in Iraq legal. Your incorrect analysis of their content suggests that you don't have much experience in reading and interpreting UNSC resolutions and other instruments of international law. That's ok, but it might be worth scheduling a chat with an international law professor at a university near you if you want a deeper understanding.

(By the way, as I understand it, squatters rights only are possible when you don't break the law to enter.)

Not true, I mentioned that bit specifically because some countries have laws which enforce squatters' rights even when the initial occupation was unlawful. It makes sense though, as just because an initial action may be illegal it does not automatically render every subsequent action illegal.

I also think that Iraq is better off now, but that's an obtuse point.

I agree that it's pretty obtuse. I only mentioned it because you said that the people of Iraq will never see any of Iraq's wealth. I found that a curious statement. Perhaps I misinterpreted what you were trying to say.

In summary, I responded to your original post only because of one claim you made, which is that US forces are in Iraq illegally right now. The fact remains that even if you reject my assertion that the UNSC resolutions explicitly legalised the presence of US forces in Iraq under a Chapter VII mandate it still does not justify your claim that US forces are illegally occupying Iraq, because the US-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement created an entirely new and separate legal framework under which US troops remain in the country. As a treaty between two sovereign governments, the SOFA supersedes anything that came before it and is unaffected by remaining questions about the legality of the initial invasion. It just makes no sense to refer to the current presence of US forces in Iraq as an 'illegal occupation' in 2010.

In any case it's not relevant to the question of whether the current status of US forces in Iraq is legal. That was determined by UNSCR 1483 in conjunction with UNSCR 1511 (sorry, I forgot to mention 1511 and 1790, chalk it up to imperfect memory and a lack of time to research all this again), with the latter resolution explicitly authorising the presence of the Multi-National Force in Iraq as a mandate under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. This mandate was renewed annually until 31 December 2008, when it was replaced by the US-Iraqi SOFA, a treaty between the two countries which established a new baseline legal framework under which US forces are legally permitted to remain in the country.

So there is no occupation in Iraq, let alone an illegal one. If you continue to believe that US forces are occupying Iraq illegally your conclusions and understanding of the situation are going to be flawed and useless. It goes without saying though that accepting the legal basis for the US presence there is not the same thing as condoning it. Though I feel I should point out that I'm not trying to create a justification for the war here, I'm just trying to clarify some of the facts around the conflict. That US troops are in Iraq legally is a fact, it has no morality of its own. It should be enough to disagree with the US's presence without having to wrongly claim that it's illegal.

But for what it's worth, it actually is possible to illegally break into a house and have the legal right to resist eviction, with a number of countries having so-called 'squatters' rights' legislation that protects the rights of people to remain on a property, though usually only for a defined period of time and under certain conditions, even if they occupied it unlawfully in the first place.

As for your last bit, it's an emotional argument which still has no bearing on the specific point you raised earlier. I happen to think Iraq is better off right now than it was either under Saddam's regime or at the height of the war, with their economy improving at an impressive rate, but I'm not sure the bloodshed they went through to get here was worth it.

>Someone, anyone, tell me why the U.S. is still there and under what legal basis. Anyone. I dare you.

I quite clearly explained 'why the US is still there and under what legal basis'. Despite what you think, those resolutions did in fact make first the occupation and then the continued non-sovereign presence legal and represented the UNSC's explicit sanction for the coalition's presence in Iraq. Between 2003 and 2008 US and other coalition forces in Iraq operated under a UNSC mandate (read up on MNF I), so it's irrelevant that there were no blue hats in the country.

Whether the original invasion was illegal or not, Kofi Annan's word does not make it officially so. Like all UN Secretary-Generals, Annan was just an administrator whose opinion carried no legal weight. All binding declarations in terms of international law can only be made within the UN's participatory bodies, like the Security Council, or by the International Court of Justice.

I'm not willing to get into an argument about the legality of the initial invasion because that's not the point you raised in your original post and it's not relevant to the discussion being had about the legal status of US forces in the country right now. The current presence, as I pointed out, is without any shadow of a doubt entirely legal and has been since UNSC 1483. Times have changed, the issues are different and rehashing the arguments of 2003 won't get us anywhere.

The legal basis for the continued US presence is well-established and widely known, so I'm surprised you feel confident enough to dare anybody to explain it to you. Subsequent to the invasion, the presence of US and other coalition forces in Iraq was legitimised by, in turn, UNSC Resolution 1483 (2003), 1546 (2004), 1637 (2005) and 1723 (2006), IIRC. The last action taken by the UNSC with regards to multinational forces in Iraq was to extend the mandate authorising their presence till December 2008. Thereafter, the continued presence of US forces in Iraq has been legally authorised by the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, which calls for US forces to leave the country by December 31, 2011. Whatever the moral case for a continued US presence in Iraq may be, the legal basis is sound.

Something else that's worth noting is that the Wikileaks video dates from 2007, during the height of combat operations surrounding the surge. At the time those sorts of engagements were a daily occurrence. This is no longer the case; these days the remaining US forces in Iraq are involved in relatively few direct combat operations and the overall level of violence in the country has dropped to a level where a slow US withdrawal is now possible without causing a security vacuum. From a US perspective Iraq is now a solved problem and the war is just about over. I must give credit to General Petraeus and his sane and unorthodox counter-insurgency strategy for that, for what it's worth.

So the stuff shown in the Wikileaks footage seldom happens in Iraq anymore. I would suggest that your time is better spent not impotently demanding that US forces leave now based on your reaction to a three year old video, but rather applying pressure on your representatives to ensure the planned withdrawal from Iraq happens on time and that US combat operations in that country end as scheduled on 31 August. I see no reason why it won't though, and in my opinion Afghanistan is a far more pressing concern on which to focus at the moment.

For what it's worth I did not claim that the locals invited them in. That one's a straw man.

Nor do I believe the US military had an obligation to release the video, although they did have an obligation to conduct a serious and thorough investigation and make the results and key aspects of it public. I think it's clear this didn't happen, but it did not justify Wikileaks's heavily edited and flawed version of the video.

Gizmodo have chosen to not only imperil this guy's current job with Apple but also his future career prospects. First by providing a market for stolen Apple secrets and being a willing buyer and publisher of the prototype and its details and second by splashing his name all over the internet. Count me amongst those who will boycott Gizmodo and all other Gawker sites from now on.

Israel, like my own country, has laws in place which forbid the sale of any RF-capable devices until they have been expensively and painstakingly approved by some central regulatory authority. This sort of thing is common in state-heavy countries. The Israelis are just more competent about enforcing their laws and regulations.

That said, neither Palm OS or Newton OS could multitask. Android and the iPhone OS seem to have found a very elegant approach to that particular problem without compromising the user experience.

Is there any end-to-end security between my handset and — for example — paypal.com or my bank?

No. If you need full end-to-end encryption, you should use a full Web browser such as Opera Mobile.

Opera Mini uses a transcoder server to translate HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a more compact format. It will also shrink any images to fit the screen of your handset. This translation step makes Opera Mini fast, small, and also very cheap to use. To be able to do this translation, the Opera Mini server needs to have access to the unencrypted version of the Web page. Therefore no end-to-end encryption between the client and the remote Web server is possible.

[1]http://www.opera.com/mobile/help/faq/#security

No. My argument is that we are lacking a huge amount of context by virtue of having only a single narrow view into this event, through the targeting device of only one of the crewmen in only one of the Apaches, so it's foolish to assume that the statements made over the radio are fabrications based on what we're seeing in this video alone. There are at least six separate viewpoints here; those of Bushmaster 06, Hotel 26 and each of the four crewmen in the Apaches; we only have access to a portion of one of those. Just because something mentioned over the radio is not seen in this video does not mean it did not exist. Of course, it doesn't mean it did exist either, but that should go without saying.

I am convinced, based on what I did see in this video, that some of the men were armed. But I can't say that the crew of both Apaches were entirely in the right in the way they behaved or that they were entirely in the wrong, because I don't think it's possible to make such a definitive judgement without having additional context.

Leaving aside your argument, don't you find the voice track coming from the gunner shocking? The man actually had glee in his voice as he was gunning down people that obviously had no possible chance to defend themselves or harm him. An AK-47 vs. an Apache helicopter is no threat. As others have stated, at the range from the gunner's PoV, an RPG, even if he had one, cannot hit the helicopter.

If you think that all soldiers shoot their enemies with grim remorse and regret, you're naive about the realities of war. Those pilots & gunners were convinced those guys are all insurgents (which some appear to have been) and they were pumped with adrenaline which tends to produce a slightly euphoric feeling. It has always been like this; do you really think that bomber crews and fighter-bomber pilots in World War II didn't whoop with joy when they scored a direct hit and wiped out a bunch of enemy soldiers? Of course they did. The quiet introspection comes later, when the adrenaline wears off and they're alone with their thoughts back at base.

Your comments about there being no threat to the helicopters are irrelevant, because the perceived threat was obviously to the vehicles of Bushmaster element, less than 100 m from the street corner where the action took place. The Apaches were also flying in a hostile area, where RPGs had brought down Apaches before, so that would have amped the adrenaline up even further.

The fact that there are cold-blooded killers in the cockpit of a helicopter, that take joy in killing innocent civilians should shock each and every one of us.

It's very clear from the video and the investigation that the crew did not think they were killing civilians, so that's a false premise.

Aren't you sick of being an apologist for an unjustified killing in an unjustified war?

That's hardly a fair or honest question. I have made no statements about the Iraq War as a whole and it's your assumption, based on limited evidence, that the killing was unjustified. A reasonable case can and has been made that the killing, at least of the journalists, was excusable when considering the context.

I have not come down on either side of the argument, but I have on principle sought to oppose some of the more knee-jerk reactions that have made unjustified assumptions about the event based only on this video. This is an exceptionally explosive issue so it's very important that the debate which surrounds it is conducted in a careful and logical manner without excessive emotion. Posts like yours, with emotional arguments and inflammatory language, aren't helpful.

Unfortunately many people, both pro and anti-war, are still operating on the perceptions shaped by events seven years ago and they haven't noticed how much things have changed.

Regardless, this discussion is now irrelevant, as it has been confirmed elsewhere that the photo I posted above was taken at this scene, presumably while Namir was peeking around the corner. That photo shows US troops no further than 200 m away, if I recall that lens's capabilities correctly.

Your assertion that there were no Iraqi or coalition ground forces in the area is not supported by the video.

[1] http://duckbar.mirror.waffleimages.com/files/c7/c76f1e685afe...

So the quoted comment may not have been entirely accurate with regards to Iraqis as a whole, but it was in fact accurate with regards to Iraqis carrying weapons in the street and the fact that there was no such thing as an armed Iraqi escort for journalists.

What is clear is that the journalist and his driver were in the presence of armed Iraqis carrying AK-47s and RPGs at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It was common practice for Iraqi stringers for news agencies like Reuters to embed themselves with insurgents in the hope of being extremely close to the story and getting pictures they would not otherwise have been able to obtain, but it was a very risky thing to do. If soldiers have already seen the people around you carrying guns and RPGs, they're a whole lot more likely to misinterpret your camera lens as an RPG when it peeks around a corner.

There were also two Apaches at the scene, but it's not entirely clear which crew is making each comment on the radio and what they can see as we only have one viewport into this event, which comes from the gunner's sight of only one of the Apaches. It is entirely plausible that the other Apache crew did clearly see weapons and that, outside the field of view of the camera we're looking at, they saw the black van picking up weapons. Further, each helicopter also has a separate sight for the pilot which can be slewed on its own axis and which we cannot see.

In short, the video lacks context and it's difficult to make a conclusive judgement without that context. We are given only one limited viewport into this event and expected to pronounce judgement on four guys who at once had a much broader and more detailed view of the situation but who also, unlike us, had to process that information in real-time, not from a video which could be rewound and played back. Whatever happened here, I'm not as ready to call it murder as WikiLeaks and some of the commenters here have been.

But I agree with your main point. Context is everything, Wikileaks could have handled this better.

The problem has never been that the iPhone and iPad can't support multi-tasking, it's that Apple has only permitted some of its own apps to multi-task.

But DRM on movies still appears to be relatively effective, even though that might soon reach the same point music did and I don't think there's much doubt that DRM on apps has prevented a fair bit of piracy. If I think back to how easy it was to get pirated apps for an S60 phone a few years ago and how not one of the people I know who have jailbroken their iPhones has paid for any of the apps they own I can definitely understand why Apple would prefer a closed system with DRM.

Although the Britons weren't exactly allowed to develop independently. They were alternatively conquered by many stronger cultures, starting with the Romans and continuing through to the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and eventually the Normans. As far as cultural shifts go, that's quite a bit more extreme than that experienced by colonies during 19th and 20th century European colonialism, with British cultures being not only shocked by exposure to outside forces but in some cases completely obliterated. But they turned out ok. Strong cultures have been invading weak cultures for nearly all of human history, it has traditionally been one way for cultural innovations to spread.

If a culture is strong enough to be able to so comprehensively conquer another, it's obviously doing something right. I've often thought that the optimal strategy for a conquered territory in that sort of scenario might be to assimilate their victor's culture as far as possible, gradually take over the reigns of power and build up strength locally so as to eventually present the reigning power with a fait accompli. See for how example how the Boers (called Afrikaners later) in South Africa went from being mostly ill-educated and rural farmers who badly lost a war with Britain in 1902 to running most of the government when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 and being dominant enough to declare the creation of an independent republic by 1961 without significant opposition and no bloodshed. Ignoring apartheid and all the rest, that has always struck me as a particularly smart way to go about achieving independence. Whether the same approach would have applied in all situations is an open question, but it must surely have been better than overthrowing an external authority without any kind of viable replacement ready for it.

In neither case was the peacekeeping mission itself particularly successful. MONUC in the DRC stood impressive but ineffectual for over a decade as the violence continued raging around them and civilians continued dying and being terrorised. The violence has arguably died down only because President Kabila has proven to be fairly tenacious and the government army has managed to restore some level control in certain areas, thanks in part to training by Belgian and South African military advisors. UNAMID in Sudan did not seem to achieve much, though their reporting was valuable, with much of the progress in that country seemingly being due to the ongoing strengthening of the South Sudanese rebel movements and the severe international pressure that worked for once. In retrospect, we may be able to claim that both missions were ultimately successful, but it's clear that if it's a rapid end to violence and an improvement in basic human security you want then look elsewhere.

These conflicts are usually just too much of an intractable problem for peacekeeping to be of any real effect. For one, peacekeeping by its very nature tends to preserve the status quo, by slowing the conflict down and preventing either side from gaining a swift advantage, but this is what allows these conflicts to drag on for decades without any real winner. For another, peacekeeping forces are seldom capable of performing offensive missions to wipe out rebel forces and their leaders or groups of bandits, not only because they're not funded for it but because that would require deciding from the outset who to support and who to destroy and the UN, in order not to adversely effect possible negotiations, usually tries to avoid that. After all, what if you make the wrong choice? Finally, how do you build a state up without any kind of central authority around which to hang the authority, monopoly of force and institutions needed to ensure human security? This by the way was a large part of the problem in Iraq, where the US had to create a central authority from scratch and found it to be a whole lot harder than initially thought.

If you are willing to make a snap judgement about who is 'good or bad' in a conflict though, there are solutions that will result in short-term stabilisation. One of these is the use of mercenaries, who have proven in the past (see Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone and their proposed intervention plan for Rwanda) to be effective in this sort of scenario. However, the use of mercenaries is undoubtedly subject to abuses and it's a short-term solution in most cases, as the core civil and social dysfunction that permitted the breakdown in order in the first place remains present. However, they also only work best in cases where they're able to piggy-back off some sort of central authority and where they have a clear mandate and a clear distinction of who the good and bad guys are. And when they leave, as when Executive Outcomes left Sierra Leone to be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force, the violence can start up all over again.

In the end I think the sad fact of the matter is that this is not a simple problem to solve, despite surface impressions. Conflict, crime, poverty and sexual abuse in many African countries is all part of the same issue, of states and civil institutions that are either totally dysfunctional or entirely non-existent, a concurrent tendency for regions to produce warlords rather than self-sufficient federalist enclaves and the immense difficulty both the people living in the country and those from outside face in trying to build a viable and secure system of governance in a place that has little or nothing on which to build. So unfortunately, I think we're going to be living with this problem for a long time to come.

While there's much to criticise about Apple's approach with the App Store, I don't think it was unreasonable to require app signing and a developer fee in return for getting your apps hosted and easily available on the App Store. I would prefer it if there was also an alternative distribution mechanism available, but that aside I don't have any problem with the App Store as a concept.