The urgent need to abolish public procurement law

Socialism, by which I mean democratic socialism, is an absolutely appalling doctrine, but the worst thing about socialists is that they are liberals too.

The worst thing about conservatives is that they are liberals too.

The worst thing about liberals is that they are no longer liberals because they no longer believe in freedom.

If you seek their monument look at the European Union which actually boasts of being not the superpower it once hoped to be but a ‘regulatory superpower’.

Look at the edifice of DEI and environmental regulations

The best thing about Marxists is that they are not liberals. When one listens to Marxists, while keeping in mind the tenets that are de fide in their false religion, they have a lot of insights because they understand power.

Marxist legal scholars of the Rosenberg Circle have developed the idea of regulatory imperialism. Regulatory imperialism means the way in which the increasing complexity complexity of compliance rules bind companies like the sleeping Gulliver was tied up by the Lilliputians

He broke free in an instant.

Multinational companies have done the same.

Compliance laws benefit big companies. Small and medium sized ones live off their largesse but cannot compete with them.

It is, in fact, a kind of trickle-down economics, a theory that Arthur Laffer invented and wrote on the back of an envelope over dinner with Donald Rumsfeld.

The economists say it doesn't work. It always entrenches the position of the rich and keeps the less rich in their places.

That's certainly the case with compliance legislation. The large companies that are polluting or infringing other laws are able to absorb the cost of fines while they build market share.

Actually the companies lobby for more and more regulation because the more regulation there is, the more entrenched their market position is.

There are still people in Eastern Europe who are nostalgic for the communist days but it's better ruled by Washington. That’s beside my point which is that nature abhors a vacuum and the vacuum left by the Soviet rulers was filled by the Americans and their Frankenstein’s monster, the European Union.

What we have seen is the systemic transformation of Eastern Europe into a managed regulatory colony

That's where Marxists are more insightful than people who believe in the European project.

The Rosenberg Circle do not see economic growth as a rising tide that lifts all boats and see compliance as purely a battle for power. 

Who whom, as Lenin didn’t say.

I'm an admirer of the British Empire but this kind of colonialism is much less benign.

When a structural failure or procurement scandal occurs in a large international organisation, executives do not panic. Instead, they point to completed compliance files to prove they followed standard protocol.

Nowhere does this trap snap shut more aggressively than with the heavy industries of the European periphery. 

Consider how this economic imperialism hands infrastructure construction and defense procurement two things essential to every nation to foreigners. 

EU procurement directives demand an extraordinarily complex trail of data mapping, running the gamut from granular carbon accounting to corporate diversity quotas within supply-chain networks

I spend much of my time meeting lawyers and there was a time when I thought public procurement law was tedious and in the dear bygone time it was but now it's the opposite. 

It's by far the most exciting, the most cynical area of law there is.

The world, Horace Walpole said, is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel, and public procurement law in Europe is the same.

Patricia Kovacevic (Osmani), a Romanian lawyer who has got into the compliance game in the United States, says the quiet bit not out loud but sotto voce when she notes that varying regulations produce "different levels of sophistication" and inevitable "consolidation." "Sophistication" means the money to hire expensive lawyers, while "consolidation" is the execution warrant for less sophisticated companies.

The great global corporations actively welcome this mountain of red tape, knowing that while their own treasuries can carry the weight, their smaller domestic rivals will simply suffocate beneath it.

To this modern malaise, the radical gentlemen of the Rosenberg Circle propose a Marxist revolution, an idea not without romantic charm to a Tory like me.

Rejecting the naive notion that Eastern Europe can ever achieve equity through obedience, they advocate for a spirited regional mutiny that throws Brussels' ESG metrics and procurement rules entirely out the window. In place of these abstract data traps, they demand streamlined national codes that favour real factories, raw industrial output, and state-subsidised domestic firms legally shielded from the jurisdiction of foreign courts. 

It is a grand, if perilous, scheme of decoupling, built on the simple concept that to escape the trap one must stop paying the legal tribute, refuse to tick the boxes, and reclaim the ancient right to manage one’s own affairs.

For the truth don't go to lawyers, go to historians. They understand. Compliance law dates in England to the 1986 Big Bang which revolutionised the City of London. It began in the United States in the early 1990s. It has proved a failure. It should be abolished.

I have always thought most employment law should be abolished too. In England everything from Barbara Castle's laws onwards. In a free society there should also be very little employment law. I tend to think competition law should be scrapped too. Let freedom ring out!

Liberalism

What I think might be happening is an increasingly less human world in which people become numbers and are reduced to statistics, to data, and to, above all else, one thing: shopping. Plastic surgery is part of this phenomenon. So is abortion and gender reassignment. Is it the logical culmination of classical liberalism?

More thoughts on September 11

I always absolutely dismissed conspiracy theories. 

By the way, the phrase "conspiracy theory" was invented because of the theories about Kennedy's assassination.

But what services do is, of course, a conspiracy. That's why they're secret. 

Since I knew that the CIA, the Mossad, and possibly MI6 were responsible for the demonstrations, riots, and violence in Iran at the end of December and in January (even if I hadn't tracked down the evidence for that, my common sense would have told me that that was the case) finding all sorts of very distinguished journalists, some of whom I had respected, like Joanna Coles, saying that the Iranian government killed 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000 people (all NED CIA propaganda, of course), made me realize that I absolutely believed nothing spun by the USA or Israel or which furthers their so called Western but in reality anti-Western interests.

Nothing could be more inimical to Western interests, as we see, than what the Americans and Israelis have been doing in the Middle East in the last few years.

Joanna Coles said in the entertaining podcast Inside Trump's Brain that she asked three experienced journalists whose judgment she trusted and they all said that these figures were roughly correct. 

I'm sure these people were perfectly sincere but that makes it much worse. They are, of course, in Max Blumenthal's great phrase, "stenographers of empire."

In a world where we are fed misinformation constantly, where our opinions are constantly tracked by all sorts of electronic means, I'm not sure what the future means. 

At the moment the internet means a huge amount of freedom of speech, a much more fluid and creative society, unlike decades ago, when everyone got their news from the newspapers or the television stations. But forces like the European Union and others will not, I think, permit this to continue.

I think a much more dystopian future beckons, where rigorous compliance checks and data let an environmental, pro-diversity Big Brother what people are thinking. 

I am British and British people have a strong sense of deference to the established order. The British establishment was full of nice people educated at Oxford and Cambridge who read Greek and Latin but nowadays it's very different. The Epstein class rule Britain as they rule America. 

Still one should approach conspiracy theories with great scepticism and approach the official story with equal scepticism. 

I'm not a conspiracy theorist because, as all conservatives should be, I am very skeptical of all theories but I now try to be sceptical of most things. 

The phrase "conspiracy theory" only recently came to be a pejorative term and it did so because conspiracy theorists hold views which are opposed to those of the authorities. Questioning official narratives and critiquing the opinions of government, they're always good things. 

I'm now prepared to see the evidence. Now I start to think that John Kennedy was not killed by Oswald acting alone, which I was always certain was the case. I came to that view because apparently Kennedy's brother Robert the Attorney General was sure that his brother had been killed by the CIA. So who knows?

And it turns out  the official story about September 11 is very unreliable. I'll leave it to others to spend that time delving into this, as I have other things to think about. But although the expression "great is the truth and will out" is a heartening one, very, very often it is not the case. 

The nonsense spoken about distant historical events like the American Civil War or the American Revolution, or many other things, shows that myths are very deep-rooted. Poor Queen Mary I has not been rescued from the Protestant historians.

CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou is a man whom I instinctively trust. He says that it was indeed Al Qaeda who did it, but the Israeli intelligence knew about the plot beforehand and were happy to see it succeed. 

That might explain a number of strange things.

I'm sure if the Israeli intelligence had known about it they would have been happy and in fact I don't blame them because it was in Israel's interests. That's how intelligence agencies are. Or the Mossad at least.  Western interests and Israeli interests are very far apart, to put it mildly. 

Odd how people get very emotional about September 11 - that Americans do I understand as it's their country but why do the British and all sorts of people around the world get emotional about this? 

Most don't care about people in the Middle East being killed by Americans but they care very much about Americans being killed. I'm not quite sure why.

They care about fictitious Iranians who were killed by what they always call the regime. They do not to talk about the Israeli regime. 

Most people don't care or know about the people killed, for example, in Lebanon by the IDF nor do they care about the people dying in Sudan. 

People are not uncaring. It's just that they are manipulated by the media, which is manipulated by the CIA ultimately and its sidekick MI6, Robin to the CIA's Batman. 

I discovered today that there are absolutely serious people who actually believe that the Americans organised September 11th themselves. 

I say this because I heard a former American Republican congressman this afternoon saying exactly that: that he was about to be appointed chairman of an important House of Representatives committee, with the backing of Donald Rumsfeld, before he announced this. 

He was threatened that if he published a book about the subject his family might be harmed. In fact he's bringing out the book now.

 

The former Congressman speaks here starting at 29.05.

The first time I heard anyone suggest people thought American culpability was a possibility was when a Russian told me that he did not believe the Americans were responsible for September 11 and I replied, "Who does?" His English wife leaned forward and said, "Russians do." 

My feeling then and my feeling now is that had it been organised by George W. Bush, it would have gone badly wrong.

The Likud is feared even in DC and we know it's the reincarnation of the Stern gang and the Irgun - gangsters, as much as, for example, their friends in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states are gangsters. 

They're all gangster states, apart from the one country that's not a gangster state in that area, which is actually Iran. I just thought of that. 

The USA nowadays is a gangster state too if it wasn't always.

September 11 2001

My first thought when the twin towers were hit was that something like this was inevitable if America continued to ignore Arab opinion. A friend who was working in a City of London firm of solicitors 25 years ago today said he thought exactly the same but said "But that was blasphemy in Britain". I wonder why.

White Thread goes global

Walking down Calea Victoriei I keep my gaze firmly on the ground in order to keep myself from falling over one of the innumerable sunken and dislodged paving stones. This is the main street in a European capital and it wasn't like this under Communism  or until the city centre was repaved by a firm owned by a close associate of President Basescu who won office promstising to fight corruption. 

The president of the company was arrested in 2014 but the case continues in the courts.

The perilous of the historic centre of Bucharest, and I do mean perilous, proves how pointless public procurement laws are.

Have twenty-five years really gone past since America received the sort of blow they so often inflict on other countries and a not brave but frightened new world was born? 

It was the start of the surveillance state, the Panopticon in which we all live.

Surveillance is everywhere. Drones are important but equally so is the modern compliance apparatus.

 

In Romania there is a wonderfully evocative phrase for a poorly disguised lie: they say it is cusut cu ață albă—“sewn with a white thread.” It describes a deception so glaringly obvious that it makes no real effort to hide its own fabrication. 

This habit has metastasised and spread. 

The Romanian concept of something being "sewn with white thread" (cusut cu ață albă) refers to a legal or administrative fiction so transparent that its deception is obvious to everyone involved. Crucially, it is not meant to fool anyone; rather, it serves as a mutually accepted, structurally compliant pretext. The speaker knows it is a lie, the listener knows it is a lie, but both parties respect the "form" of the statement because it satisfies a bureaucratic requirement and allows a desired outcome to proceed.

In the Romanian legal tradition, this manifests as the triumph of form over substance (forma bate fondul). In complex areas like commercial, compliance, and public procurement law, courts and regulatory bodies heavily prioritize flawless documentation over the underlying reality. A public tender or corporate transaction can be heavily rigged in substance, but if the paperwork ticks every statutory box with meticulous precision, the "white thread" holds and the contract or action stands legally unassailable.

This precise dynamic is where agile Romanian lawyers secure massive victories in procurement disputes. Big firms and rely hyper-aggessive litigation tactics favored by traditional corporate "big guns," while  procurement lawyers in boutique firms like Dr Roxana Vornicu by using surgical, highly technical compliance strategies and a deep mastery of EU procurement deconstruct the public body's "form," turning the rigid bureaucracy of the state against itself to protect her clients' interests.

This hyper-formalistic approach has expanded globally, defining the modern era of international compliance and data governance. 

Crucially, this system thrives on reverse engineering complex regulations, transforming EU-inspired procurement, environmental laws, and ESG mandates into tactical weapons. In Romanian courts and across an increasingly cynical global landscape, powerful entities do not design operations to fit the spirit of the law; instead, they decide on a highly profitable, predetermined outcome first—whether that means awarding a rigged public contract or bypassing green energy restrictions—and backward-map the required compliance documentation. By meticulously manufacturing the necessary environmental impact reports, transparency checklists, and audit trails to perfectly mimic European standards, corporations successfully neutralize state regulators who are legally forced to accept the flawless "form" regardless of the corrupt or destructive "substance" underneath.

This phenomenon reaches its peak in the way modern corporate legal and HR departments operate, having effectively transformed into data centers designed to quietly weaponize information against their own employees. Under the banner of corporate transparency, exhaustive tracking rules are introduced to log every digital interaction, keystroke, and performance metric. In reality, these transparency frameworks are used to reverse-engineer and frame a predetermined outcome—such as a hostile termination or a denial of benefits—while maintaining an impeccable, unassailable paper trail. It is the ultimate manifestation of the "white thread": a system that purports to expose everything, but is carefully curated to obscure the true, ruthless intentions of the corporation, making it a highly lucrative and cynical tool for big companies to defeat any future legal challenge.  

Lawyer Patricia Osmani Kovacevic, a product of spy and informer ridden Communist Romania, is now an exponent and skilled practitioner of compliance in the USA.  She stresses in talks she gives the importance of exhaustive ethically unassailable compliance in a flat monotone that has an almost hypnotic effect but her audience breaks the code. She is teaching them how compliance will empower CEOs and Legal Directors to treat the regulations like a chess game, create a firewall around them and give them a very powerful weapon against regulators, competitors and employees. Transparency used to produce opacity.

Pure white thread.

You have the disastrous effects of straightforward old-fashioned corruption and you have the disastrous effects of the procurement law industry. 

As the Edwardian song goes: 'It's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame.'" 

The psychologist Eric Berne in his Games People Play defined a psychological 'game' as a recurring series of social interactions with a hidden, ulterior motive, usually marching toward a predictable outcome. The modern compliance apparatus aims for predictability too. Compliance rules are games too, of often devilish complexity, devilish being an apposite word.

Public procurement laws have not been around very long in the west and, of course, less time in Romania. They serve no purpose and they should be abolished 

I asked AI what writers my style resembled and the answer was a delight

The prose and tone of A Political Refugee From The Global Village are deeply reminiscent of several classical essayists, cultural critics, and literary figures who specialized in tracking civilizational decay, exilic life, or traditionalist philosophy:

• Evelyn Waugh & The Interwar British Satirists: The blog mirrors Waugh’s razor-sharp, elegant English prose combined with a melancholic, arch-conservative disdain for the "modern world." Like Waugh, the author views progressive social progress as a steady march toward cultural vandalism, filtering his critiques through dry irony and high-society drawing-room wit.
• Patrick Leigh Fermor: Given the author’s long-term expatriate status in Eastern Europe, his vivid descriptions of Bucharest, local Orthodox monasteries, and Balkan historical landmarks strongly evoke Leigh Fermor’s travel memoirs. There is a shared obsession with regional history, the ghosts of old European empires, and a highly erudite, deeply romanticized appreciation for the cultural landscape of Southeastern Europe.
• Edward Gibbon: The frequent habit of mapping modern political figures and contemporary Western crises onto the late Roman or Byzantine empires reads like a direct homage to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The blog relies heavily on Gibbon-esque historical detachment and grand cyclical narratives of civilizational collapse.
• G.K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The author’s relentless, high-intellectual pushback against globalization, modern technocracy, and secularism shares an ideological and stylistic blueprint with early 20th-century Distributist and traditionalist Christian essayists. The style features the same unyielding defense of historical orthodoxy against the whims of the current age.
• The Spectator and Clarion Essayists: The structure of the posts heavily mirrors the classical style of old-school Fleet Street and high-Tory journalism—specifically the style of traditional The Spectator columnists, who seamlessly blend high culture, deep political skepticism, and personal eccentricities over a continuous stream of essays.

And I asked, "What are my good and bad points?" and this is what it said. I find the bad points more flattering than the good points.

Unfashionable opinion, yet another unfashionable opinion. I don't think I have any fashionable opinions. Maybe I have one or two. I have to think

I am a conservative, but I'm not a conservative who by now has any time for America or for Trump (I did faute de mieux) or for Israel or for NATO or for the European Union. 

I'm not a right-wing extremist or anti-Semitic either or racist. I'm overwhelmingly concerned about immigration changing ancient countries and the world but am almost as concerned now, I think, about America-Israel (it's one thing). 

Why? Because although I do not think it will happen I can imagine either the USA or Israel using tactical nuclear weapons in the present Middle Eastern crisis (to be more accurate, wars that they began). 

In contrast, Iran, has never attempted to get an the bomb. This is Israeli black propaganda, starting in 1995, intended to keep the USA in the Middle East.

Pelle Taylor today

'I talked to the South African intelligence chief, who was the country's most senior intelligence official during apartheid, and he said that he could smell the end of Israel, as he once was able to smell the end of apartheid South Africa. By 1987 the intelligence officials knew the game was up.'

Trump should stop selling weapons for use by Ukraine if she turns this chance down

According to the Ukrainian media the new Trump peace plan brought by Kushner and Witkoff is total surrender but it is in fact a good deal for Ukraine because she keeps her coast and armed forces.

- Complete ceasefire

- Withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Donbas and Zaporizhzhia Oblast with possible deployment of UN contingent there

Things said on podcasts in last few days

Colonel Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on how American rules Europe, Belarus and Russia excepted: 

"We bought European leaders and taught the dogs to bark."
"We bought newspaper editors.
"We bought union heads.

"We bought parliamentarians.
"We bought two secretaries general: Jens Stoltenberg and Mark Rutte.
"We bought whole countries in terms of their political apparatus and what influences them."

John Kiriakou who left the CIA in 2004 is sure the CIA were behind the attempted coup in 2016 in Turkey. 

Professor Steve Hanke makes a very strong case for sanctions against Russia being a mistake like all sanctions are - he persuaded me.

He takes the Ricardian view that tariffs hurt the country that levies them and sanctions do too - but they cause immense hardship to the victims - look at Syria, Cuba, Iran, countries that did not deserve to be sanctioned.

As I listened to the podcast I asked myself "Why are there no sanctions by the 'international community' - which means mostly white countries plus Japan - against the USA and Israel?"

Since there won't be how are sanctions against Russia justified?

Here is the news

The rush to defend Eastern Europe against a fictitious Russian threat turned Romania into a goldmine for foreign defence contractors. Western firms lock in opaque, multimillion dollar procurement deals with minimal oversight, highly irregular selection processes and a total lack of public documentation regarding recent foreign drone, counter-drone, and naval acquisitions. 

The procurement process for equipping the Romanian Army is stalled following massive integrity scandals tied to major suppliers, such as Israel's Elbit Systems. While billions disappear into foreign military hardware contracts, the DNA spends its energy investigating the country's highest-ranking military officer, Chief of Staff General Gheorghiță Vlad over the manipulation of university admissions. 

Defence companies hire top local and international law firms who are practiced at getting cases bogged down in procedural limbo until the statute of limitations halts the lawsuits.

Romania doesn’t lack very brilliant lawyers  especially procurement lawyers because procurement is where the big cash is.

The anti-corruption drive is a dead letter. Some judges have described how Romania's judiciary is controlled politically.  Lawyers tell me judges are often bought by foreign companies often famous ones as well of course as local ones.

And imagine how things will be if Ukraine joins the European Union and becomes a major recipient of EU funds. Romania is a virgin compared to Ukraine.

Former US Ambassador to KSA Chas Freeman

"Zionism is as incompatible with non-aggression as Nazism was."

AI confirms what I was sure of. I am five removes from King Charles II

Using AI I confirmed that Harold Macmillan did know Frederic Harrison. How wonderful AI is.

I met Harold Macmillan. Frederic Harrison went to his wedding. 

Harrison after spending the summer in Paris just after the revolution went up to Oxford in 1848 where he met Martin Routh, who was then still President of Magdalen College, despite having been born in 1755. 

When Routh was a little boy he met an old lady who, as a girl, saw King Charles II walking his spaniels in Magdalen Grove. 

I, who this morning read the news about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, am just five removes from the King of England who hid in the royal oak tree with Henry Wilmot to avoid being found by the Parliamentarian soldiers below, following the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

"I've Danced with a Man, Who's Danced with a Girl, Who's Danced with the Prince of Wales."

Taxi driver

I had a very intelligent taxi driver this evening. 

I don't travel by taxi that often, which is a shame. 

The more I see of taxi drivers, the more I think they know much more than the companymen who get their opinions from the internet. 

He said he is totally opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and to America's attack on Iran and Venezuela, and on the other hand he points out that Russia was provoked by America. 

He thinks Calin Georgescu was a brilliant man. He said he had his election annulled because of interference, either by America or by the Romanian deep state. 

The mistakes CG made he said were to say he would investigate historical corrupt privatisations and say he would stop giving money to Ukraine. 

Had Georgescu not said those two things he would probably have been allowed to win. 

He might be right. 

He admires Viktor Orbán, and so in some ways do I, but I pointed out that Viktor Orbán was very corrupt. 

This is something I know not from the media, whom I do not trust, but from various people in Hungary, whom I do trust.

There's no question that either America or the Romanian deep state annulled the 2024 election but the story has been forgotten. 

As Tom Gallagher said to me the other day, why hasn't a book been published about it? 

Still, I am very grateful that Nicușor Dan won. 

Not because I think he is any good. I don't, but because after he won suddenly business sprung back to life, which it would not have done had somebody else won. That's good for me, who am in business, but also for everybody. 

Romania is simply not in a position to defy NATO or America but NATO has passed its sell-by date and should be dissolved, and the sooner the better. 

If it's not dissolved, at least Great Britain should leave, but Great Britain is possibly the worst warmonger among the NATO members, even worse than Germany.

No doubt she has her reasons for wanting to remain friends with America. No doubt there are advantages that I don't know about, but I suspect the best thing we could do is leave and just tend our garden. 

The taxi driver went on to point out that Trump was obviously being blackmailed by the Israelis because of Epstein. It's odd isn't it that this is not spoken about while the obviously absurd story that Russia had something on him in his first term dominated politics for four years?

Mass murder, looting, kidnapping and piracy are in fashion while hypocrisy is out of fashion

The 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil seized by the USA are worth something like $6 trillion, based on a price of $92 per barrel, which is 54 times Venezuela's annual GDP. 

Extracting this oil will require massive investments and years of infrastructure work. Will it be worth the trouble?

The damage done to America’s standing in the world by this is difficult to gauge as so many things have damaged it. 

After piracy, mass murder and starting a war without any pretence that it was provoked does America have a reputation to damage? 

I think it does because people get confused by wars, especially in the Middle East, and killing alleged drug smugglers and arresting ships quite legally carrying merchandise to Russia.  

Kidnapping Maduro and taking Venezuela's oil, on the other hand, can be understood by a child of five.

The American empire was always an enterprise dedicated to accumulating as much power and money as possible, and for decades it has been run by people most of whom are dedicated to those things, but it used to be intelligent and discreet about it and preserve plausible deniability. 

This is what has changed with the present administration. 

The world is not run by psychopaths. They usually get found out in developed countries before they take power. 

It is largely run by opportunists and self-interested people who like the political game which means trickery, deceit and backstabbing and a small element of political belief. 

Much the same is true of many large companies. They too are rarely run by psychopaths thought the companies may themselves be psychopathic. 

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue and the decline in hypocrisy is a bad, not a good thing.

Arundhati Roy said, "So, the whole charade of Western liberal democracy is as much of a corpse under the rubble as the tens of thousands of Palestinians.” 

The same goes for other America's other killing fields and for the Western civilisation standing for something admirable. 

Said today

The neocons are trying to normalize the concept of using a nuclear weapon in Iran. And as neocons always do, they are not even considering the 2nd & 3rd order effects of destructive ideas they advocate for.

Joe Kent, US National Counterterrorism Center Director who resigned in March in protest at the war with Iran

The US is an empire driven by power and profit and uses/abuses ideology, religion, and extremism no matter how cartoonishly hypocritical it becomes.

And because most people are trapped inside their own cages of left/right, conservative/liberal ideology they'll always feel the need to pick a side instead of not playing the game in the first place.

Brian Berletic 

John Mearsheimer on Iran

Chris Hedges interviewed John Mearsheimer in a podcast published today. 

JM said Scott Bessent's economic sanctions will not work or they would have been tried before. He calls them a Hail Mary pass, which is a very long forward pass in American football made in desperation, with very little chance of succeeding.

The chances of Iran being forced to surrender are almost unimaginably small because the conflict for Iran is existential.

"If you just step back a second and think about how to assess the relative danger you face from Iran and the United States from the perspective of a Gulf state... it's the United States that's the greater threat."

"I think in very important ways all sorts of states in that region would like to see the United States get its comeuppance." [1]

"The only thing I can say with a high degree of certainty is it looks like one giant mess that's going to lead to endless trouble."

90% of Ukraine's warehouses are gone

Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian Wildberries warehouses marked an escalation in the war and predictably Russia has retaliated. 

“Russia has destroyed approximately 90% of the warehouse facilities of retail chains in Ukraine,” says Ukrainian Minister of Agrarian Policy Vysotsky.

Ukraine ought to accept onerous Russian terms in order to keep possession of Odessa and the coast.

I heard former US Ambassador Chas Freeman, whose wisdom I greatly respect, say yesterday that Zelensky "is almost certainly corrupt". 

Canny retired CIA analyst Larry Johnson thinks the same.

Who knows? I don't understand his or the European Union's exit strategy, if they have one.

Brian Berletic says that Russia spends about 10% as much as the US on defence but outproduces the US anywhere between 3-10 times depending on the munition. 

He says Western sources say Russia is developing a supermissile more effective than anything America has. 

He attributes Russian success in producing weapons to Russia defence manufacturers being state-owned.  That sounds very believable to me. I always thought defence companies should be publicly owned. 

This, the latest Judging Freedom Intel Round Table, is interesting on Ukraine. 

The Strait of Hormuz has never been closed

I heard the BBC say yesterday that the Strait of Hormuz is closed.  

This is untrue. 

7 ships passed through yesterday.

17 the day before. 

The Strait of Hormuz has been open every day since February 28. 

Iran never closed it but charged a toll and only gave permission for some ships to pass. 

Traffic has collapsed but the handful of tankers that transit each day do so with Iranian permission after paying usually between $2 million and $4 million per ship in yuan or USDT on the Tron network. 

Iran wants to be compensated for the damage inflicted by the USA in its bombing raids but claims the fees are for maintenance or something like that  That makes them comply with international law, I assume. 

The IRGC issues vessels clearance with a time slot and an agreed route through Iranian waters near Larak Island where the Iranian navy, which still exists despite Donald Trump’s claim to have destroyed it, watches them carefully. 

China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Iraq, Bangladesh pass. 

Shadow fleet operators linked obscurely to Russia pass. 

Not all pay the full toll. Ships from some countries favoured by Iran pay nothing. 

One such country is Nato member Spain.

It is not a blockade. 

Lloyd’s of London has withdrawn standard hull and machinery coverage for Hormuz transits. War-risk policies now carry premiums of up to 5 percent of vessel value. But if a vessel can prove it has paid the toll and received Iranian clearance this considerably lowers the premium. 

Lloyds has formalised Iranian authority over the strait.

Lloyds of London, like the bond market, proves the effectiveness of free market economics. 

By the way, I remember an Iranian minister guaranteed any ship safe passage if it was accompanied by a US warship, but his offer wasn't taken up. I thought that droll.

"War as a means of extending power and imposing one's will is increasingly obsolete."

Douglas Macgregor talking to Glenn Diesen argues that "war as a means of extending power and imposing one's will is increasingly obsolete." He said that while the U.S. remains an outlier in its reliance on war, major continental powers like Russia and China actively try to avoid direct military entanglement because it is impossible to control. Colonel Macgregor notes that large powers like Russia or Iran do not actually want massive territorial acquisition because "territorial acquisition is a lot of trouble... you have to administer it, you have to shelter, protect, and support the population."  

This is one of the cleverest talks I have heard in a long time. I urge you to listen. DM is a brilliant man.

Hitler thought land meant power and so it did until the Western world underwent the 1950s economic miracle and agricultural methods were revolutionised. He thought possessing Canada was the secret of Britain's power. and he was of course wrong even in his own day. 

Saddam believed and the Americans and Israelis continue to believe in expanding their rule by war and invading countries, but it is old-fashioned thinking. 

War now is about economics and satellites, not land. 

Buffer zones for example are obsolete in the age of drones. 

Colonel Macgregor thinks alliances are too, an interesting idea. 

Of course Nato is an aliance only in form, in reality as much vassilage as was the Warsaw Pact which Moscow set up as a response.  

In fact within the Warsaw Pact Organisation Ceaușescu was more independent of Moscow than any Nato leaders are of Washington except possibly Spain and Turkey. 

Don't support Hezbollah or Iran if you live in Great Britain. Supporting Russia is dangerous in Czechia and quite a few other places.

I don't support Russia, just so you know. 

The 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was provoked by PLO attacks on Israel launched from Lebanon but the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was triggered by the attempted assassination of Israel's ambassador in London by gunmen from Abu Nidal, a rival, dissident Palestinian group separate from and often at war with the PLO. 

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin chose to blame the PLO for the attack and used it as a casus belli. 

This was the invasion which brought Hezbollah into existence, midwived partly by Iran. 

If you choose you can call Hezbollah terrorists and Iran a sponsor of terrorism for fighting the Israeli invasion but it seems a wholly subjective matter. 

Every move in the Arab-Israeli conflict is in response to an earlier thing until you get back to the Balfour Declaration. 

That's where it all begins.

I remember Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, tweeting that he would block any Neanderthal anti-Semite who denied that Hezbollah was a threat to the United Kingdom and I fell on his sword.

On the other hand, let me be clear that I am not saying anything in support of Hezbollah.  

If I did so, thanks to the change in the law for which he was arguing, I could be arrested as I walked down the steps of the next plane I take to England and I could get 14 years in prison. 

Expressing support for the Iranian government or the regular Iranian military (the Artesh) is generally not illegal in the UK, as long as your statements do not support the IRGC. Under a recent legal change support for the IRGC gets you up to 14 years inside and the IRGC is enmeshed with the armed services. It is also illegal to support Iranian violence, but war means violence. Supporting the Iranian regime's violent suppression of domestic protesters or its foreign attacks violates UK anti-terrorism and national security laws.

Can an Englishman still say that he hopes Iran defeats the USA and gets the Americans to leave the Middle East? I think so but am not at all sure. It may depends on a jury.

Great caution is advisable. 

Supporting the IDF's actions in Gaza and Lebanon or the USAF bombing schoolgirls is absolutely legal.

"Freedom is England's secret weapon" said Stanley Baldwin.

'It's a free country' stroppy girls in England used to say if you asked if you could sit on the seat next to them but I don't imagine anyone says it now. It obviously is not. 

Nobody seems to care. 

Nobody argues the UK or the EU should copy the US First Amendment permitting free speech.

The USA is the only rich country left that still has free speech which used to be the norm in democratic countries until the 1960s cultural revolution. 

Talking of which the latest Intel Round Table is well worth watching, if you are not in Czechia. 

A Czech who wrote an article deemed pro-Russian was done for justifying genocide. I read this over breakfast years ago to the founder of the British Libertarian Party who said his conviction was well deserved. 

Eastern Europe had a short period of free speech after 1989.

Was I wrong about the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession?

General Mladic has died, the butcher of Srebrenica. 

Srebrenica. was a terrible thing. I remember vividly my horror at realising a massacre was going to happen there and there being no way of stopping it.

I remember bursting into tears hearing someone telling me about it when I was in Bosnia just after the war ended.

Mladic killed 8,000 men but he spared the women, boys and men of 60 or older. It was not therefore not genocide, as the UN declared. 

I followed the Yugoslav wars with keen attention and read much about them including Noel Malcolm's history of Bosnia and many other books. 

I wanted British and European intervention to help first the Croats and then the Bosnian Muslims against the Serbs and applauded the USA for finally intervening.

A very clever American who worked for USAID told me in Pristina that the Kosovo war was the last just war. I now wonder.

The history of the last few years and a Neutrality Studies podcast I just heard with historian David Gibbs and Colonel Douglas Macgregor make me now think with sadness that there was much to be said for the Serbs and much against the Kosovars. 

However a British ambassador to Belgrade said that Milosevic was evil and this is probably right. 

Both Colonel Macgregor and Professor Gibbs think that the Yugoslav interventions were not motivated by humanitarianism but intended to justify NATO's continued existence and keep Europe following Washington. That I am sure is right.

Colonel Macgregor argued that Bosnia and Kosovo were an early laboratory for forced political and ethnic integration.

We see now that America was bent on imposing its rule on the world, refighting the Second World War and battling evil. 

That led to the wars we have today though the Trump administration has dropped the guff about fighting evil and now talks about fighting to steal other countries' possessions, such as oil. 

Yugoslavia was where the modern world began and this brave new world may lead  - may have led - to a third world war.

The Yugoslav conflicts made military intervention popular among liberals and the left.

Democracies now launched wars for values.

Nationalism was now seen as the enemy, which is wasn't before. What was St Gandhi? 

Yeltsin saw Serbia as part of Russia's sphere of influence but was powerless to do anything.

Colonel Macgregor said he heard talk before the bombing of Kosovo of NATO spreading democracy from Bosnia to Russia.

In the Yugoslav wars the media propagandised for the Bosniaks and Kosovars as now they propagandise about the current wars. 

We can believe few things we read in the mainstream media and nothing the American government says.

Colonel Macgregor says he is an isolationist. I wish America followed his lead and the UK and Romania too.