The news from Iraq keeps getting worse. Anyone got a story of hope in their suburb or town or world? Tonight, more great links on Iraq and America, and comment from Chris Munson, Doug Wilson, Les Edwards, Shaun O’Brien, Jack Kherani and Chris Murphy.
To begin, an American Webdiarist reverses his support for the war and new Webdiarist Jamie Clark discusses ‘post-democracy’.
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John T. Alfonse in Everett, Massachusetts
About a year ago you printed a letter I wrote defending my goverment’s decision to invade Iraq. I based my opinion on my belief that what I was told about WMDs held by Iraq being an imminent threat was true. Since the invasion, and subsequent inability of coalition forces to find ANY WMD’s in Iraq I have come to the realization that, to use an American colloquialism, I was suckered.
The most disheartening thing of all is that since this debacle commenced, rather than find the parties responsible for this appalling failure of correct intelligence and fire their sorry asses, my government has told more stories than Walt Disney studios. It would seem in the current administration the buck stops nowhere.
Without accountability, there is chaos. I have come to the conclusion that the light at the end of the Iraq tunnel is an onrushing freight train.
John in Feelings on the eve of war:
I would like to say a couple of things to the Australian people.
First thank you for your continued friendship and support over a long, long period of time, including being able to forgive some things of which the U.S. government should rightly be ashamed of doing to a friend. My country is far from perfect.
Regarding the Iraq situation, to quote R.A. Heinlein; a brute kills for pleasure and a fool kills for hate. I truly believe my government is neither. We are taking this course of action because the consequences of not doing it will, in the long run, cost more lives in Iraq and the rest of the world than doing nothing.
There are no sure things in the world. History will judge whether this was a correct course of action or not. I am just a blue collar working stiff with a brother in the national guard, but I wanted to make my feelings known to a nation that I admire, and respect.
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Jamie Clark (Nom de plume, name supplied)
I really like the way some Webdiarists `take the long view’ in their postings (Matt Southon in As seen on TV: the decline and fall of the American empire and the wonderful Robert Bosler in Why is Latham alarming?I thought the following brief extract from the London Review of Books might of interest.
It is from a piece called `Post-Democracy’ by Richard Rorty, who is a Stanford University professor of philosophy. After reviewing the way that `the war on terror’ has eroded democratic institutions, Rorty says:
The progress humanity made in the 19th and 20th centuries was largely due to the increased role of public opinion in determining government policies. But the lack of public concern about government secrecy has, in the last sixty years, created a new political culture in each of the democracies. In the US and in many of the EU countries, an elite has come to believe that it cannot carry out its mission of providing national security if its preparations are carried out in public. The events of 11 September have greatly strengthened this conviction. Further attacks are likely to persuade those elites that they must destroy democracy in order to save it.
Then, in a paragraph that echoes some Webdiarists’ ponderings on why people don’t rise up to challenge the erosion of public institutions, Rorty says:
In a worst-case scenario, historians will someday have to explain why the golden age of Western democracy, like the age of the Antonines, lasted only about two hundred years. The saddest pages in their books are likely to be those in which they describe how the citizens of the democracies, by their craven acquiescence in governmental secrecy, helped bring the disaster on themselves.
This highlights the significance of the various current and former government officials who’ve taken a stand in recent months. Particularly when we read Rorty’s description of what kind of world we might expect `post-democracy’. For clues he points away from the more obvious dystopias – military dictatorship or Orwellian totalitarianism – and instead describes `a relatively benevolent despotism, imposed by what would gradually become a hereditary nomenklatura.’
Rorty suggests that `that sort of power structure survived the end of the Soviet Union and is now solidifying under Putin and his fellow KGB alumni’. The same structure seems to be taking shape in China and in South-East Asia.
In countries run in this way, public opinion does not greatly matter. Elections may still be held, but opposition parties are not allowed to pose any serious threat to the powers that be. Careers are less open to talent, and more dependent on connections with powerful persons…
It is dangerous for citizens to complain about corruption or about abuse of power by public officials. High culture is restricted to areas that are irrelevant to politics [echoes of recent right-wing rumblings about the art in Parliament House?]. No more uncensored media. No more student demonstrations. Not much in the way of civil society. In short, a return to something like the Ancien Regime, with the national security establishment of each country playing the role of the court at Versailles.
Rorty acknowledges that this a `dismal scenario’, but points out that life for much of the world would not be greatly changed if it were to occur, because `in the poor countries most of society has always been, and still is, organised along feudal lines’.
In north-east Brazil, as in the villages of equatorial Africa and Central Asia, nobody would notice that the world had changed, that a light had gone out… After a few generations, utopian fantasies of an open society might be cherished only by a few readers of old books.
And readers of blogger archives??
The London Review of Books often has good, if somewhat densely-argued, pieces on democracy, some of which are available online – such as one from the current issue on The Precautionary Principle: Tony Blair and the language of risk, where Cambridge academic David Runciman puts under the microscope the interface between advice from government agencies and judgement by politicians – the precise zone that Blair excluded from the terms of reference of the follow-up the Hutton enquiry (the Butler Inquiry).
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NOTICEBOARD
On the ground
Antony Loewenstein recommends two blogs in Baghdad, empirenotes and Iraq Dispatches.
The indispensable Juan Cole reports:
The Iranian newspaper Baztab is reporting that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has sent a strongly-worded message to the Coalition forces, in which he warned them against attacking the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala after the end of Arba’in. According to this report, in this letter Sistani warned the US that were the Occupation forces to wage a campaign against Karbala and Najaf, the religious leadership of the Shiites would fight to its last breath for the rights of the Shiites.
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What’s it all mean?
Laurie Cousins: Cult of Saddam lives on
David Spratt recommends Iraq’s enemy within: The US-appointed governing council cannot deliver democracy by Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi-born novelist and former political prisoner of Saddam:
In Iraq we say: “Choose the companion first, then the road.” We believe it very important to know who one is travelling with. On June 30 the US-led occupation forces will hand power to an Iraqi government. Iraqis would like to begin our journey towards a much-needed stability and democracy. But at the moment our “companions” are the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and their appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). We have not chosen them. The governing council is as responsible as the US-led occupation forces for Iraq’s rapid slide into chaos and bloodshed. They stood aside last Sunday when the Sadr City demonstration against the closure of a newspaper was machine-gunned from helicopters – 32 people were killed and hundreds injured. They stood aside when rockets were fired into the Shulla neighbourhood further north in Baghdad, with more casualties. They have been watching in silence while Iraqis have been killed in Basra, Nassiriya, Kirkuk, Amara, Baquba, Kut, Kerbala and Najaf. It was left to journalists and organisations like Amnesty International and Occupation Watch to document and condemn hundreds of occupation excesses and outright atrocities, starting from the shooting of 17 civilians at a demonstration in Falluja in April last year.
Lynette Dumble: War on Iraq is a Nuclear War:
In May, 2003, the United States dumped 2,200 tons of depleted uranium on Iraq, according to reliable sources, and it’s logical to assume that more depleted uranium is being employed in the current attacks on Faluja that began April 8 to put down Iraqi resistance to the American presence there.
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The bigger picture
Antony Loewenstein: What Are You Doing About Afghanistan.
Michael Lardelli recommends lifeaftertheoilcrash: “I recently read a book that I found scientifically watertight (as far as I could tell) and very convincing. It concerns a phenomenon known as the “Peak in Oil and Gas” (Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. New Society Publishers, ISBN 0-86571-482-7). The idea is simple – sometime between now and the year 2014 the world production of oil and gas will peak and then begin to decline. than you actually gain by then burning it. A decline in oil and gas production may sound great from an environmental point of view, but, as the book points out, oil is actually irreplaceable in our energy intensive civilisation. When oil and gas production peak, demand will exceed supply and the price will skyrocket. As explained in Heinberg’s book, it is only independent geologists outside of the big oil companies (plus some that used to work for those companies) who are drawing attention to this phenomenon. Still, a group of European scientists have formed the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, where a recent report from the ExxonMobil Exploration Company on “Energy Trends, Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Alternative Energy” shows that huge amounts of additional oil reserves need to be found in the near future to meet world demand. See APSO’s latest newsletter. (Margo: On the same matter, John Boase recommends The Thirty-Year Itch: ‘Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington’s hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf’s oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance.’
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The Australian connection
Ross Sharp: Bush’s Boy Blunder, where Toronto Sun writer Eric Margolis opines:
How the many intelligent people in U.S. President George Bush’s administration can continue to make so many enormous blunders both astounds and dismays… Australia is facing a tight electoral race between Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who eagerly sent troops to Iraq, and Labour party challenger Mark Latham, who, like Spain’s new PM, vows to bring his nation’s troops home from Iraq. A majority of Australians opposes the Iraq war. U.S. Ambassador Tom Schieffer, a Texas pal of Bush, warned Australians of “serious consequences” if they elect Latham. Australians love America, but any worldly person knows you do not threaten Aussies. They will come out swinging. Schieffer should be fired.
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Bush in trouble
See The Silent President, a New York Times editorial on Bush’s failure to do anything when warned bin Laden wanted to hijack planes, not even order tighter airport security:
President Bush was asked, during a very brief session with reporters yesterday, about the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo he received on domestic terrorism. He responded with the familiar White House complaint about lack of specificity in the C.I.A.’s warnings although the memo mentioned a plot, possibly involving hijacked planes and New York City. The most striking thing about the president’s comment, however, was his bottom line: that he did everything he could. Over the last few weeks we have heard lawmakers and officials from two administrations talk about their feelings of responsibility, about how they compulsively re-examine the events leading up to 9/ll, asking themselves whether they could have done anything to avert the terrible disaster that day. It is beginning to seem that the only person free of that kind of self-examination is the man who was chief executive when the attacks occurred.
John Boase has tracked down two smoking gun pre-S11 memos: phoenix and memo. “The smoking gun comes up with original documents of all kinds. This reference is the original FBI report in Phoenix, Arizona, alerting FBIHQ to activities in flight schools. The blackouts notwithstanding, it makes fascinating reading, especially at pages 1 and 2. The author should have Condi Rice’s job.”
Damien Hogan: Is Dr Rice criminally ignorant? Here is a thorough, cross-referenced, date ordered list of what was known prior to 9/11 as extracted from the public record (the internal intelligence must be truly damning).
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ONE LINERS
James Pillsbury in Derby WA: Condi Rice says there was no silver bullet that could have stopped September 11. She’s wrong. It’s called listening.
Phil Ewen in Woodlands WA: Is the hugely heavy-handed reprisal on Fallujah any different from those the SS were indicted for at Nuremburg? Perhaps more so, when you consider that the four “civilian contractors” would appear to be mercenaries in the pay of the occupation forces.
Peter Fimmel: Margo, it’s plain for all to see, Haliburton, backed by their subsidiaries and front companies, have not lost original resolve. They are in Iraq for the long haul and Iraqi opinion, emotion and revolt will not (yet) sway them. The US military could not give Haliburton enough troops so they have an additional 22,000 mercenaries (officially 15,000) being paid out of the $87 billion. Some of the mercenaries are paid $3K/day and they all have to buy from the company store. We all wonder who gets the 10% placement fee. My advice to the Iraqis is to get into reality TV in the US and tell it the way it really is.
Reg Barlow in Ashmont, Sydney: I guess you’ve got heaps of comments on the state of play in Iraq but here’s my two bob’s worth. It’s my understanding that the newspaper the American’s closed was not too widely read. It was the firebrand cleric’s way of rousing the masses. Since the US closed it down the rest, as they say in the classics, is history! The US has lived up to its reputation of going in hard an then asking the questions. It’s time they ate a good slice of humble pie and let the Iraqis get on with their lives.
John Boase: In recent times we have heard news, without fanfare, of the theft of a large number of computers from Defence and of the theft of weaponry and of a large amount of ammonium nitrate. Is anyone following up on these stories? If any of these events had happened on Labor’s watch, we would not have heard the end of it. Robert Hill has escaped scrutiny on the thefts from Defence. Lucky man.
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Chris Munson
Have a look at LAW OF ADMINISTRATION FOR THE STATE OF IRAQ FOR THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD, 8 March 2004, especially the first paragraph:
PREAMBLE: The people of Iraq, striving to reclaim their freedom, which was usurped by the previous tyrannical regime, rejecting violence and coercion in all their forms, and particularly when used as instruments of governance, have determined that they shall hereafter remain a free people governed under the rule of law.
If violence as an instrument of governance is rejected, then what is the USA doing? Killing 450 Iraqis because 4 Americans were killed? Surely this whole episode is a charade, a simple US election side show. Bush, on holidays at his ranch, says he will hunt down these anti-democratic insurgents We will be victorious he says. My God, what does this have to do with him? Is it personal? Surely if there is truly a Coalition of the willing then the coalition was consulted. We should be able to simply ask Howard and Blair: Did he (Bush) get your consent as equal occupation forces? If there is no YES then there is no coalition. Simple as that.
If Bush is killing Iraqis (at all) or against the wishes of the Interim Council, or the members of the coalition, then it is the US’s war, no-one elses.
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Doug Wilson in Marsfield, NSW
Is it any wonder that the people of Iraq are taking up arms in frustration?
The US has appointed a fellow American in charge of Iraq (Bremer), who speaks no Arabic and has no background of Iraq. I would imagine that this would be a bit of an insult to the Iraqi people.
The US has spent over $140 Billion on the war ($150 billion projected) and only $18 Billion on reconstruction ($50-100 billion projected), with an additional $40 billion spent on extra security.
The US disbanded the Iraqi army, instantly putting 450,000 Iraqis out of work and needing to locate other jobs.
All the reconstruction contracts have gone to US and other allied companies (I’d be interested to know how much money actually has filtered down to Iraqi companies).
All reconstruction contracts are awarded by the US administration in Iraq (are the Iraqi governing council allowed any input).
The US administration has passed resolutions which the new Iraqi interim government will be unable to repeal (specifically privitisation of Iraq).
The US is building 14 bases in Iraq which it calls “enduring bases”, were they approved by the “governing council”?
Still no involvement of the UN.
All of this compared to what Bush said on April 8, 2003:
“I hear a lot of talk here about how we’re going to impose this leader or that leader. Forget it. Iraqis are plenty capable of running Iraq and that is precisely what is going to happen.”
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Les Edwards in the USA
Didn’t President Bush say in the beginning that this would be a long war that would not be resolved easily or quickly? It seems as though this has been forgotten, and a panicked media, intent on causing uproar and controversy, is reporting nothing but negative aspects of this war. Alas, we are used to that. (Margo: He said that about the `war on terror’. On Iraq, it was supposed to be a cakewalk, hence the complete lack of planning for the peace.)
The newspapers and television reports seem to always get the liberal minority point of view, and somehow always dismiss the 10s of millions of us who think it’s time to finally do something about the last 40 or 50 years of terrorism spawn from the Middle East instead of sitting back and letting it happen time and time again.
I realise that the 9-11 excuse is wearing thin for other countries, but it has not worn thin here, and never will, so you may as well get used to that. That day caused a terror in our hearts that will never leave us, and has made our train of thought this: We will kill those first, that want to kill us. It is a simple doctrine that other countries may not understand, but when people want you dead for simply being American it sort of gets to you and desensitizes you to the plights of these peoples.
These religious heretics have stated that they want me dead, my family dead, my friends dead and everyone in my country dead. How are we are supposed to deal with these people diplomatically and peacefully? I understand there are reasonable, logical and good people in these regions and I hope that one day all of us can live in peace with one another. As a human being and American, I cannot deal with people who want me dead in any other way except to kill them first. This is how most Americans think, and if it causes the downfall of the ideologues’ so called “American Empire”, then so be it. I do not recall ever wanting to be an empire – all we ever wanted was to have a world economy in which all countries could participate and prosper.
Maybe that is ideological, but when 3,000 of your countrymen get killed one morning going to work and your capital and largest city are under fire by terrorists, please let me know how you feel then.
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Shaun O’Brien
Some people – especially Latham – need a serious history lesson about the Australian and US relationship. Whilst I believe Curtin was the best PM Australia could ever have had during WW11, let’s not forget how we were treated by the US allies.
Curtin certainly stood up to Churchill to get the troops home instead of the diversion to Burma, but when it became apparent that the US would be the driving force in removing the Japanese Army from the Pacific he did not quibble about `equal partnership’. (Latham’s foreign policy speech is at Labor and the world.) He knew when pragmatism was appropriate, and that Australia could not have handle the Japanese on our own. We may have stopped them at the Kokoda Trail but we were never going to move them back.
Speak to any Australian war historians about the “equal” treatment received from the US about Australia’s war effort and they will say Australia was poorly treated and that our impact was pathetically underplayed by the Americans. So much for portraying the ALP as the guardian of the US-Australian alliance. There was a conga line of ALP suck holes to Douglas Macarthur during WW2.
Latham needs to look at the Alliance in a manner in which it was framed and how Curtin knew it would be operate. The US is our security blanket in times of trouble and for that to be guaranteed we have to be `flexible’ in dealing with the US and its foreign policies. It is a pity that the Curtin legacy has been used by the ALP to rewrite history.
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Jack Kherani
Can anyone remember a time when there’s been more interference in Australian politics by the United States? Check out this response from the US State Department to our Opposition leader daring to suggest that our `alliance’ is unequal:
“The alliance between Australia and the United States is a partnership of equals in principle and in reality. Characterisations to the contrary are neither well informed nor well based. American governments have always respected Australia’s right to its own decisions with regard to its national, regional and international interests.”
That first paragraph might as well explicitly read `Any deviation in your country’s discussion from the standard thought requirement WILL NOT BE TOLERATED’, whilst the second paragraph manages to completely contradict itself by reason of its very existence!
Does anyone else find this frighteningly surreal – that our elected leaders can’t have a remotely critical discussion about foreign policy without either the US Embassy or State Department sticking the boot in? Or worse, the way `our’ media instantly spins these stories towards the US line?
The Sky news report featured captions and commentary that Latham has received a `rebuke’ for his `attack’ on the alliance, conveniently omitting *any* detail of what Latham had said, and flashed up footage during the report of Dubya speaking as if he had personally made the comments.
As for our papers – I’m just waiting, now that News Ltd has made it official by incorporating in the US, for The Australian to rename itself The American.
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Chris Murphy in Southport, Queensland
The following two stories from The Sydney Morning Herald show just how similar the Liberal and Labor parties now are in this country. Things seem positively frightening in New South Wales (home of both Howard and Latham).
`Of 42 Young Liberal branches only 18 are now held by the so-called moderates. The other 24, with their power base in Sydney’s western suburbs, are considered hard right.’ Religious right crams into Lib branches
`The Greens look set to be shut out of the mayoralty in two inner-city councils despite having won the most seats, under deals Labor struck with Liberals or independents.’ ALP deals topple Greens from power.
At a federal level, Labor voters are kidding themselves if they think that Mark Latham is some kind of progressive saviour. The reality is that he is at least as conservative as Howard. It’s a sad fact that voting for either Liberal or Labor will not deliver this country into the 21st century.
More than ever before, the voters of Australia are faced with a choice similar to that in the United States – Conservative vs Conservative. For those who wish for social progress and a better Australia, the situation is a tragedy.