(Brian Allardice) wrote in message .ca...
To go off topic when we are already off topic might seem silly, but if you have
been following the US/Vietnam "Catfish War" one of the reasons advanced by US
producers for banning Vietnamese catfish is that they are probably unfit for
human consumption due to contamination by residues from Agent Orange.
Hmmm.....

Well, the main argument about that is that the Vietnamese are dumping
the catfish on the US market; pollution is really only a minor element
in the argument, which mostly boils down to "they are undercutting us
because their labor and sunk costs are so much lower". Marion Berry
(D-Ark) mentioned it in his speech on the house floor, but almost no
one else has, as they mostly focus on the price issues and want it
labelled as "product of Vietnam" or "pangas Catfish" or similar, to
differentiate it from good honest wholesome American catfish.

Yes, you do seem to be right here. Just to make things more
complicated, the US never recognized the Taliban government as the
government of Afghanistan, and the wording 4.A.1 is "Party to the
conflict"- I'm not sure whether they mean High Contracting Party in
the conflict or simply a group involved with the conflict. The use of
the capital P suggests it might be HCP, which could complicate matters
even more.

I'm glad someone finally said that... sometimes, judging by the discourse
here, I think I must be hallucinating. But to return the the point, I don't
think mutual recognition of the Parties is a problem..

I agree completely that it doesn't matter whether you recongize the
government that you are facing, I think that the Taliban being a High
Contracting Party to the treaty might not be true, since they aren't
really a successor government to the Afghanistan Constitutional
Monarchy government that signed the treaty all those years ago. This
is a fairly weak argument but I can't see what other reason to have
that capital P there; it might be a typo in the ICRC website, but the
Avalon project has the same letter choice, so if it is typographical
error it was introduced in a common source document between the two.

Well, at least that has the merit of grappling with the realities of
"asymmetrical warfare", from American colonists sniping at the Redcoats to
almost everything going on today and for the forseeable future.

You are just saying that to deliberately incite Americans; forming
skirmish lines and using bad country to break up enemy formations is
much much much older then the Revolution (where it was only done on a
few occasions anyway, the vast majority of American troops fought in
lines just like the British and Hessians did; among the regulars,
really only Morgan's Riflemen would fight out of skirmish lines, and
even then only when the terrain made it useful, like at Freeman's Farm
and Bemis Heights but not at Charleston or Yorktown), and is not
really asymmetrical warfare in the modern sense at all[1].

And incidentally, "grappling with the realities" is a long way from
"improving". In my opinion, granting such protections to people who do
such odious things is a mistake, steps should be taken to discourage
using civillians as human shields, rather then encouraging it by
offering people who do so protections under international law.

[1] "Barnett defines asymmetrical warfare as not simply a case of
pitting one's strength against another's weakness but rather of taking
the calculated risk to exploit an adversary's inability or
unwillingness to prevent, or defend against, certain actions." - a
review of Roger Barnett's book _Asymmetrical Warfare_.

Chris Manteuffel