John Howard’s decision to incorporate our troops into the United States invasion force means Australia has consented to its invasion plan. If yesterday’s reports about those plans are true, he has agreed to a scorched earth invasion which would indiscriminately kill a huge number of civilians. If the Yanks go to war without UN authorisation, just about every country in the region, Muslim nations around the world and many Australians would see this as mass murder. What are we doing? Why?
Henk Verhoeven in Sydney writes: “The US intends to shatter Iraq physically, emotionally and psychologically by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days. The deadly-accurate 880 km/h missiles can be launched from destroyers to deliver 450 kg bombs that cannot be detected by radar systems. The price of those 800 infernal killing machines? As much as 1,000,000 US dollars each, meaning the total cost could be the equivalent of around 1 billion 350 million Aussie dollars. No figures are available about the cost of the infra-structure needed to launch such a mass of lethal consignments. Who would give a child a stone when it asks for bread? Who would rain down bombs on fellow human beings when they ask for food and medicines?”
It looks like the United States is manipulating the world into a position where the Yanks will allow another few weeks for inspections on condition that war starts soon thereafter, when its invasion force has completed its build-up in the Gulf. In the time left I’d like your thoughts on some key issues.
Harry Heidelberg is interested in what Webdiary readers think is the main real reason for the war. I think intention and motivation is everything. What is the main reason for invading Iraq?
1. Weapons of mass destruction (apparently not – Scott Burchill and Jack Robertson have deconstructed this one out of the debate)
2. Oil (Europeans most strongly believe this one)
3. George Bush Jnr completing dad’s unfinished business
4. The start of a new order in the Middle East
5. A human rights improvement project
6. The US showing that it will implement a new security policy for global dictatorship
“Of course the reality could be a combination of all of the above but since the vast majority of people question the number one motive regarding the weapons, they are then under an obligation to identify an alternative number one motive. In Germany this is easy. They feel it is OIL. I’m curious because I think you can’t deconstruct anything until you put up an alternative. I mean to say, if this is not about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism……then WHAT EXACTLY is it mainly about? As said, the Germans are reasonably clear. I do not get this sense from the Australian debate.”
James Woodcock reckons he’s worked it out.
Regarding the up and coming war, I have been wondering “What the Hell (actually I said the word starting with F) are the Yanks thinking about?? I think I found the answer in Laurie Anderson’s “Oh Superman” written in 1981, a prophetic verbally sparse, almost childlike mantra:
“Here come the planes.
They’re American planes. Made in America
Smoking or Non-smoking?
And the voice said ‘Neither snow nor rain nor gloom
of night shall stay these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.’
‘Cause when love is gone, there is always justice
And when justice is gone, there is always force
And when the force is gone, there is always Mom. Hi Mom!
So hold me Mom, in your long arms. So hold me.
Mom, in your long arms.
In your automatic arms. Your electronic arms.
So hold me Mom, in your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms. Your Military arms.
In your electronic arms”.
There’s a great interview with Anderson in last week’s Bulletin magazine where she spoke of its refrain, “here come the planes”, taking on an eerie new meaning post-September 11. “I wrote O Superman during the Iran/Contra scandal,” she said. “Americans have short memories. They don’t realise that this is the same war that’s been going on for 20 years.”
Anderson, who’s touring Australia next month, performed in New York a week after September 11, and referred to the horror as an ‘opportunity’.
“I thought about that word a lot. I really believe that when something big happens, whether it seems good or seems bad, it’s a chance to jump out of your preconceptions. I was very disappointed that there was no dialogue in the year since then. I suppose instead of opportunity the word would be security because we’re now just too afraid – or too lazy. These pools of freedom and fear are really interesting ones. It’s a brand new question, what is it to be free and also afraid?”
I’ve got a related question to Harry’s. Why doesn’t the world trust George Bush and his regime? There’s lots of talk about this in Britain, where people wonder why Tony Blair, an acknowledged master political salesman, can’t convince his people about the need for war. The fashionable theory is that he’s drowned out by the British people’s aversion to George Bush. So why can’t George Bush convince the world he’s doing the right thing? Is it his style, his substance, or both? Why doesn’t the world trust America? And another question: What is your main fear about the possible consequences for Australia of joining a US invasion? If you want to answer any of these questions, how about sending in your answer in less than 200 words so we get a feel for how readers are thinking.
Harry’s column today, In Europe, don’t mention the Yanks, includes a piece by Bill Clinton late last year, ‘The United States should lead, not dominate’, which tries to answer the question: ‘What is America’s responsibility at this moment of our dominance?
The best article on the Yank’s attitude that I read last weekend was by billionaire financier George Soros in the Australian Financial Review, a piece first published in the New Statesman. Unfortunately you have to pay to read it on either website. He wrote that the Nazis and the Russian communists had one thing in common ‘- ‘a belief that they were in the possession of the ultimate truth” – and that America too now shared this fatal flaw.
“Since September 11, the threat (to open society) comes not only from terrorism itself, but from the war against terrorism. Amazingly, the government of one of the most open societies, the US, has embarked on policies that violate the principles of open society. The Bush administration contains a number of ideologues who believe that international relations are relations of power, and the US, being the most powerful state, has the right to impose its will on the rest of the world. They held this belief before September 11 and, to the extent they could, they acted upon it. They renounced international treaties and sought to make American military power absolute by militarising space.
“But they were constrained by the lack of a clear mandate. The events of September 11 changed that. The Bush administration could claim to be acting in self-defence and carry the nation behind it.
“The Bush administration arrogates for itself the right to decide how and where to fight the invisible enemy. It fails to acknowledge the possibility that (philosopher Karl Popper always emphasised – that we may be wrong. Military power is of limited use in dealing with asymmetric threats such as terrorism. The US needs to earn the support and sympathy of the world, and following the precept that might is right is not the way to go about it. Fortunately, the US is a democracy, and if its citizens of the US, believe in the principles of open society, they can prove the Bush administration wrong.”
David Grant was disturbed by the contributions of the two American contributors in George Bush, Australia’s war leader.
“I read the Webdiary correspondence on Saturday from contributors in the US and closer to home and two things struck me. Firstly, I was shocked by the severe degree to which critical analysis of the US (and current Australian) policy on Iraq have been taken to represent some strident anti-Americanism. Secondly I was struck by the failure of some of the writers to comprehend or acknowledge the implications of unilateral action against Iraq (even if that is a gang of ‘likeminded nations’) to the whole culture, history and mission of modern international diplomacy. Things are very dire indeed if we are encouraged to accept that we are doing something wrong when we question our involvement in an American war for oil, while at the same time we are encouraged to accept that there are ‘unseen enemies’ trying to impose upon us ‘a way of life’. If we are not allowed to speak and must run after shadows what hope is there for us?”
Karen Jackson, a member of the Democrats, was so cheesed off by the contribution of American Hal Wilson that she penned a piece she called ‘Ten reasons to be anti-American’.
Karen Jackson
Hal Wilson sent you several paragraphs of the usual simplistic slogans that we have come to expect from today’s war mongers. He also used that tired term “anti-American” so favoured by the “with-us-or-agin-us” brigade. It’s a useful label when trying to bully your way through a reasoned debate. I decided I’d beef out this “insult”, so we know exactly what it means to be “anti-American”.
10 Reasons to be Anti-American
1. They claim to be the greatest democracy in the world, yet only a small percentage of their population even bothers to vote. This means US governments gain power via pathetically small margins about 49,000 votes in the last congressional election. And this is labelled government by the people! Whats more, getting elected in the US now requires vast amounts money, and corporate sponsorship. Naturally this results in big business gaining more than their fair share of government help. Is that democracy? And does that give them the right to invade other nations in the name of their democracy?
2. Americans love trumpeting on about their love of freedom. However, they are currently dismantling a great many civil rights laws in their attempts to rid themselves of terrorism. At the same time, hundreds of prisoners of war remain in Cuba without legal representation, and with no hope of a trial. More murders occur in the US than any other Western country because of their freedom to own guns. The Bush government is keen to crack down on freedom of speech when it comes to sexually explicit material, something the vast majority of Americans indulge in. And sodomy is still illegal in dozens of US states. Is that freedom?
Whats more, the propaganda that says the terrorists hate our freedom is just so much bullshit. Its not freedom that these people hate; it’s America’s hypocrisy.
3. The Americans are supposed to be the good guys. Yet they have, over the last 50 years, engaged in numerous dodgy interventions in other countries, including Vietnam. On many occasions, this has involved supporting despots, and being accessories to mass murder. We have no proof that will allow us to believe they have learned from their mistakes.
4. The US champions free trade for everyone else. When it comes to steel, or their farm products, or any other US product with a vested interest, the rules don’t apply.
5. They have consistently undermined the UN for the last 10 years at least, and then have the gall to say it is a spent force and impotent. Their unswerving support of Israel is part of this, to the point of defending Israel when it defies UN resolutions.
6. When other countries defy or ignore international treaties, they should be bombed. When the US ignores or abandons international treaties, they are asserting their rights as a sovereign nation.
7. The US public has an incredible ignorance of the outside world, thanks to their media, and an accompanying arrogance. When Bali was bombed, we didnt hear a peep out of them. Australia was mentioned in passing as being south of Indonesia. Chances are that most Americans won’t know that Australia is about to be one of their few allies in the coming war. The less you know about the rest of the world, the more mistakes you can make.
8. The general neglect of the US’s own people when it comes to education and healthcare is atrocious. Their system of funding sees terrible inequity in these areas, and reinforces cycles of poverty. The US should be looking to clean up its own backyard, perhaps using some of its defence money to educate its children.
9. The US consumes vast amounts of the world’s resources, and its people are some of the most
affluent in the world. Yet they ignore their responsibility toward the environment (eg Kyoto) and see oil as a birthright. If the US had developed sustainable energy technology and industries, this war with Iraq would not be inevitable.
10. Jerry Springer.
Interestingly, Australia is also guilty of many of these transgressions (for Jerry, read “Stan Zemanek”). Perhaps the difference is that were not as proud of it as the US. Nonetheless, we too should be working to overcome our own hypocrisy and improve our own “democracy” and “freedoms”.
Reasons to like the US
1. The Simpsons and Seinfeld.
2. Star Wars (except for Jar Jar Binks)
3. Squirrels
4. The ideals behind their bill of rights.
5. The Grand Canyon
6. The friendliness of everyday Americans
***
I’ve republished below two weekend pieces. Peter Hartcher’s piece in the Australian Financial Review let’s you in on the chaos and unintended consequences behind George Bush’s last State of the Union address, and Lisa Wilkinson’s Sun Herald column is the best example of many columns asking the Prime Minister just why we’re off to war.
By the way, I’ve started using ‘Yanks’ again, after being dissuaded from doing so last year by many readers who claimed it was derogatory. The US Defence Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Richard Myers thinks otherwise, and who am I to disagree? He said last week: “Our military relationship goes back to every conflict we have ever been in. Australians have always been side-by-side with the yanks, and we appreciate that very much.”
***
Bush’s dilemma: bite his tongue or bite the bullet
by Peter Hartcher, 24/01/2003, Publication: Australian Financial Review
When George Bush delivers the President’s annual State of the Union address on Tuesday (Wednesday Australian time), it will be 364 days since his infamous speech declaring the “axis of evil”.
That speech electrified capitals around the world because it seemed to promise the confrontation of the three points of evil on the axis: Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Note that this is not supposed to be the way of State of the Union addresses. They are traditionally dull laundry lists that the President presents to the Congress for it to work on in the year ahead.
They do not typically set out an aggressive global agenda in strident moralistic terms.
And in one sense last year’s speech looks soundly prophetic, signalling the US intention to remove Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Indeed, this has been a fixed goal of Bush’s from the moment he claimed the presidency.
If it has seemed in the intervening year that Bush has wavered from time to time, this is only because of the vagaries and oscillations of the media. Bush himself has been, and remains, singlemindedly determined to prove the dispensability of the man in Baghdad who calls himself the Indispensable Leader.
As 159,000 US troops and four US aircraft carrier moved into position around Iraq, the leaders of Germany and France postured on Thursday as if they were in a position to do something about it.
More likely, France and the other major powers “will make a lot of noise but in the end go along with the US”, predicts a foreign policy expert at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, Walter Russell Mead.
This year’s speech by Bush will be keenly read for what it tells us about the year to come.
And while the White House spokesman says that it will not contain a declaration of war against Iraq or an ultimatum, Bush is preparing to use the speech, carried live on every TV network, to persuade the American public and the world community of the need for the forcible disarmament of Saddam.
But in another sense the “axis of evil” speech looks like a very bad idea. By seeming to signal confrontation with North Korea and Iran as well as Iraq, it was a dangerous piece of rhetorical over-reach. And in the case of North Korea, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The US can bluster, but it can’t do anything to stop North Korea. Pyongyang is too well armed and too dangerously positioned.
So while Washington is ready to spurn the UN to get its way in Iraq, it is now turning to the UN to help it manage North Korea.
The “axis of evil” speech, perversely, seems to have spurred one of the evil ones to move from a state of somnolent sinfulness into a condition of demonic dynamism.
Signalling resolve to confront evil, Bush accidentally provoked it. This was not how it was supposed to be. The presidential speechwriter credited with coining the phrase “axis of evil”, David Frum, says that in drafting the speech “my strong language had concerned only Iraq”.
“Now, Condoleeza Rice and Steve Hadley at the National Security Council wanted to go further. They wanted to take on Iran as well,” Frum says in a new book, The Right Man. Rice is Bush’s national security adviser, and Hadley her deputy. Frum doesn’t tell us who added North Korea to the axis, but he does tell us this: “Bush read the speech closely. He edited it in his own bold hand. He understood all its implications. He backed them with all the power of his presidency.”
That’s what his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was afraid of. Fearing the provocative power of those words, according to US officials, Powell’s staff asked the White House to remove the “axis of evil” phrase from a draft of the speech, but failed.
So Powell tried to recover afterwards instead. He told the Weekend AFR that the speech “should not be seen as a change in US policy or thinking”.
Said Powell: “We reserve all of our options to do something different, especially with respect to Iraq, but all of our previous policies remain.”
But it was too late. So, while the US wants to marshall all its energies to depose Saddam, it is desperately trying to manage North Korea’s threat of dangerous nuclear escalation at the same time.
So perhaps this year Bush will take greater care with the crises he wants to deal with, and the ones he cannot, and learn to tell the difference.
***
Can someone explain why we’re off to war?
by Lisa Wilkinson, editor-at-large of The Women’s Weekly, 26/01/2003, Sun Herald
OUT OF the mouths of babes … stopped in traffic the other day listening to the news, my nine-year-old son suddenly asked me a question. “Mum, why are we going to war against Saddam Hussein? What has he got to do with Osama bin Laden?”
We were two more traffic lights gone before I came up with the only answer I could muster: “Well … I just don’t know.”
The one consolation to my ignorance on this subject is that at least I am not alone. All over the world people are asking just what this looming war against Iraq is all about and how precisely it connects to the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the whole war on terror.
Noted author John le Carre struck a chord with many last week when he was widely quoted asserting that “how Bush … succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks in history”.
Personally, I pretend to no expertise in matters of geopolitics and am still at a loss to understand why, on the one hand, we are falling over ourselves to sell Iraqis hundreds of millions of dollars worth of wheat and, on the other, wanting desperately to be part of a war on them.
But it is precisely for that reason that I’d like some answers to a few questions of my own …
* First, what is our specific beef with the Iraqi people? What have they done to us that we will send thousands of our soldiers there and put our resources towards visiting death and destruction upon them?
As a country, we have recently suffered the agony of seeing more than 80 of our families lose loved ones in the Bali bombings at the hands of a dozen or so deranged and evil terrorists. Are we, a good and decent country, to be a party to causing equally innocent families in Iraq to lose their loved ones?
Surely one of the lessons of September 11 is that a person with enough hate in them can become a weapon of mass destruction all on their own, and I can’t help but feel that dropping bombs on Baghdad will have the opposite effect to the one intended.
* All other world leaders bar Britain’s Tony Blair and our own John Howard have kept a careful distance from the George W. war rhetoric and, more pertinently, war preparations. Instead of backing America to the hilt, they have backed the United Nations.
So I ask: what can our Prime Minister see that the likes of France’s Jacques Chirac, Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and New Zealand’s Helen Clark can’t? I know there must be something other than the fact that Howard was in Washington on September 11 and so probably feels it all more personally it’s just that I can’t see it.
* Precisely what has the whole UN inspection exercise been about if the US intended to ignore their findings all along? Did we Australians really sign up to a proclamation which said “if we find something we’ll blow you Iraqis away, and if we can’t find anything we’ll still blow you away!”?
* I’m afraid I also don’t understand the whole military mindset. Time magazine reported this week that US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had assigned the key sections of the attacking force their tasks and that ‘the commandos’ primary mission will be to disable Saddam’s biological, chemical and nuclear-weapons capabilities.” How does that work?
All the UN inspectors have scoured Iraq for two months and haven’t been able to turn up the famed smoking guns, yet US commandos are magically going to go in and knock them out?
I wouldn’t be surprised if my words here become a target for the hardliners who maintain that my sentiments are typical of the latte-drinking, weak-kneed among us.
But I repeat: I am not alone.
This week, Time Europe has been running an internet poll with a simple question: “Which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003?”, asking readers to tick off one of three possibilities: Iraq, North Korea or … the US.
Already I know you’re way ahead of me, but after 250,000 people had responded, Iraq was only viewed as the most dangerous by 8 per cent, while North Korea got 9 per cent and lock it in, Eddie fully 83percent voted for the US.
Of course, through all this, our thoughts are with the Australian servicemen and women now on their way to the Middle East. It’s just that many of us wish your cause was more clear.