Tonight, your comments on the death of an ethical public service and your ideas to repair the damage. I�ll start with a quote from Sir Robert Menzies in 1942, in one of his �Forgotten people� radio talks:

 

“Do not underrate the civil servant. He is for the most part anonymous and unadvertised, but he is responsible for by far the greater part of the achievements sometimes loudly claimed by others. He provides, as a witty friend of mine once said, ‘a level of competence below which no Government can fall’. He has done a marvellous job in this war. His importance will grow, not diminish, for Government activity is here to stay.”

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Peter Gellatly

Though I have no means to assess the merits of Colonel Collin’s concerns, I must allow that good people do not routinely risk their careers over implausibilities or trivialities. So I am prepared to put Collins on a pedestal with Wilkie and … Whatshisname?

You recall the fellow: the Federal Police Officer let go because he asserted the Federal Police was allowing itself to be politically manipulated regarding East Timor intelligence. At least, so my memory serves: the same memory which, a couple of years after the incident, can’t even recall the Officer’s name!

Which brings me to your solution in Few chances left to restore public service integrity:

“What scares me is that if the crazy brave whistle blowers who keep telling us what�s gone wrong don�t get the public�s attention soon, the destruction of our long tradition of a �frank and fearless� public service will be complete and there�ll be nothing left to save…

“In the end, the people have to insist. We need to honour our whistleblowers, for a start, and look after them when the government goes for their throats.”

All the evidence points to the public having a very short attention span, and, subsequent to a fast but fleeting bout of moral outrage, not really giving a damn. And one wonders at the public-sector whistleblowers’ consequent employment prospects in the private sector.

Industry, after all, cherishes “team players” above all, and could well be averse to hiring a perceived “loose cannon”.

I suggest that it is really this lack of public support, not term contracts and the like, which is responsible for a dearth of overt fearless principle in the public service. Not from the (preselected?) naturally timid, mind you – they wouldn’t speak out under any circumstances. But the putatively courageous might be forgiven for concluding that the public they serve does not value, and is therefore not entitled to expect, the whistleblower’s inevitable personal sacrifice – a sacrifice borne, not just by the individual, but by his/her family as well.

So, Webdiarists, what is the name of that former Federal Police Officer, and does anyone know how he’s making out?

Margo: His name in Wayne Sievers. He stood for the Democrats in Canberra after he left the AFP. I don�t know what he�s doing now. Wayne, can you check in? Here�s an interview he did on Lateline in May 2001 when Captain Andrew Plunkett blew the whistle on East Timor intelligence cover-ups: East Timor massacre cover-up discussed.

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Anon (name supplied)

I’ve just ‘resigned’ from the federal public service (I’ve taken a super option available to me) due to some family heath issues, so it�s not a happy event for me personally. However it does give me an opportunity to join others who are prepared to tell it as it is these days (see Expelling the good, for the good of the government).

I was not at the Senior Executive Service level in Canberra but at the Executive level and State based. I was responsible for a lot of State-Commonwealth implementation of policy and programmes stuff.

The last 2-3 years have been all about ‘scripting’ what we said and what we did. No one – but no one – is allowed to speak any more in meetings – only the person who is ultimately going to have to sign off. So while one was allowed – but also threatened sometimes with not being allowed – to attend meetings, one was expected to sit mute as the script unfolded, even where it was obvious that the Canberra blow-ins did not have all the detail nor necessarily all the facts.

This was due to the ‘position’ that the department had decided it would take, regardless, and of course we all had to toe the line or else.

I’m extremely proud of being a public administrator of 25 years standing, and I’m even prouder that I continued to try and give fearless and without favour advice and information, even if it did make my working life uncomfortable and at times cost me personally.

We need to acknowledge that there are many, many fine public servants who do want to be effective, worthwhile and fearless public administrators.

Maybe if the public stopped the nonsense of saying how meaningless public service work is then more would be proud to wear the badge and tell it as it is. For all Australians’ sake.

***

Dr Geoff Robinson, lecturer in Australian studies and politics, Deakin University

Peter Shergold, the current head of the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, gave an interesting insight into the contemporary public service in March 2002 as head of the Department of Education, Science and Technology. He declared in an address to staff (my emphasis): “The key question, and it is the one on which I have been reflecting at every meeting I�ve had in the last six weeks, is whether the Department is in a fit shape to contribute as we should to supporting the Government, particularly our Ministers, in pursuit of public policy….

“There were times in the past when public servants did not have to worry too much about such questions. They could look forward to having an effective monopoly on providing advice to the government of the day. As has been emphasised at previous all-staff meetings, this is no longer the case. We need to aspire to being the provider of choice. We need to think constantly of how we can add value to the directions of government.

“The need to stand in the shoes of others is nowhere more important than in the service that we provide to our Ministers. Let me be quite clear. They are our most important clients. We serve the government of the day through them. Of course they need to receive, and will almost certainly welcome, frank and fearless advice. But robust advice will only be fully effective if a relationship of trust has been established. To do that we have to get the day-to-day responsibilities right.

“And �right� means imagining that we stand in the shoes of a Minister who is participating in rigorous political and public debate, facing hostile Parliamentary questioning, contributing in an informed way to Cabinet deliberations or seeking to respond sympathetically to the interests of constituents and citizens.

“In relationship management there is one abiding truth: from little things big things grow. We need to ensure that the correspondence drafted for Ministers captures the personal concerns that they will want to express for those who write to them. We need to imagine, as we prepare PPQs (possible parliamentary questions) that we would want to use those words if we were on our feet in Parliament.

This seems to me a total misreading of the role of the public service. Only the minister stands in parliament, it is not the role of public servants to pretend they are politicians (although the Canberra press gallery dropped this inhibition a longtime ago, as demonstrated by Paul Kelly’s belief that he is the leader of the ALP).

Margo: Shergold certainly put his ideas into practice � see Nelson hides behind Sir Humphrey. And for more words of wisdom from Shergold shortly after becoming head of PM&C, see Nelson’s purge escalates as the education department burns.

***

Simon Jarman in Melbourne

Disclosure: I am a former A.C.T. Branch Secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union (1997) and a member of the Australian Labor Party.

Since Federation, our �third pillar� of government prided itself in providing frank advice to all governments without fear or favour. It could no longer be accused of doing so, and that is to the detriment of the good governance of this country and the health of our democracy. I believe that the politicisation of Australia�s federal public service over the past decade is one of the saddest things to have happened to our democracy.

A Labor government started us down this road by ending permanently tenured public service heads and moving them to fixed term, performance based contracts. Perhaps one of the rationales for this was that the government wanted the public service to be run more like the private sector. Perhaps the notion of permanency for agency heads was considered antiquated. Whatever the reasons, this change has created a dynamic where senior public servants are now entirely captive to their ministers.

While this may or may not have been the intent of Labor, it is without doubt the outcome under John Howard, who has accelerated the politicisation of the public service to the extent that public service heads are, generally speaking, now little more than political lap dogs.

Under John Howard, we have seen time and again that most advice from the public service is tailored to the prevailing policy, ideology or propaganda of his government. Doubt and dissent from senior public servants is punished rather than encouraged by his government, and those who toe the line get the favours.

John Howard�s record in this area is dismal. The children overboard scandal immediately springs to mind, where senior bureaucrats in the Department of Defence remained silent in the face of overwhelming evidence that this was a lie. The navy officer who spoke out had his career ruined, while Jane Halton, who ran the boat people policy in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, was given a pat on the head and appointed head of the Department of Health and Ageing.

The Mick Keelty affair is still fresh in people�s minds. After senior managers of our intelligence agencies were outed this week for tailoring their intelligence assessments to government policy, Paul Barratt, the ex-Secretary of the Department of Defence, said on ABC radio:

“I�m sure throughout government there are pressures on people to tell the government what it wants to hear. I would be very surprised if there was any strong counsel against the invasion of Iraq.”

Under Howard�s government senior federal bureaucrats operate in an atmosphere dominated by fear of reprisal for telling the truth (if it doesn�t fit the government�s agenda) and the expectation of favour for toeing the Liberal Party line. How is this a good thing for our democracy?

It is time the Labor Party acknowledged that the changes they set in train were detrimental to the good governance and democracy of this country. In short, what Labor broke it needs to fix.

The Labor Party needs to abandon the short-term contracts imposed on agency heads and other senior staff, and their performance bonuses. Public service values are not the values of Collins and Pitt Streets and nor should they ever be.

I don�t pretend to have all the answers, but one to go would be to tenure senior departmental and agency staff for six-year terms, the same as Senators. This would restore some level of independence to our heads of public service, and their ability to provide frank and fearless advice to ministers without fear or favour.

Australia needs men and women of integrity running our public institutions, people captive to good governance in the service of all Australians, not to their performance bonuses and the sound of their master�s voice on the hill. The Australian people deserve to have confidence in the integrity of their public service.

There can only be upside for Labor in addressing this issue before the election. It melds perfectly with the �values� agenda Mark Latham is establishing, and the message is a simple one:

“Only the Labor party will restore integrity to the public service � a public service so thoroughly corrupted by John Howard.”

Don�t you love Bush�s timing? What better time to tear up the road map for peace he promised Blair he�d deliver as part of the �war on terror�. What a suitable reward to Sharon for the assassination of Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Yassin. What a clear sign to the Iraqi people that the occupation is no crusade against Muslims. What a lovely welcome mat for Tony Blair�s latest summit with Bush. Ever get the feeling Bush, Sharon and their neo-con Dr Strangeloves can�t wait to bring on Armageddon?

 

For more on Bush�s unilateral blessing to Israel to take more territory for keeps, Scott Burchill recommends Move Could Help Bush Among Jewish Voters. “Note 2nd and 3rd paragraphs. Tweedledee follows tweedledum”:

President Bush’s embrace yesterday of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to unilaterally disengage from the Palestinians carries potential political benefits for Bush but also potential risk for his foreign policy.

In declaring that Israel should be able to keep some of the occupied territories and block Palestinian refugees from settling in Israel, Bush followed a familiar pattern of finding common cause with Jews and increasingly pro-Israel Christian conservatives. That Bush’s move was good politics was evidenced by Democratic rival John F. Kerry’s quick move not to let Bush outflank him among pro-Israel voters.

“I think that could be a positive step,” the Massachusetts senator said, approving of the Bush-Sharon action regarding both refugees and Israel’s borders. “What’s important obviously is the security of the state of Israel, and that’s what the prime minister and the president, I think, are trying to address.”

Scott also recommends How Sharon won US backing for Gaza strategy.

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Matthew Daley

I’d like to vent a little on the latest tragedy of the evolving middle east disaster, namely Bush’s public tearing up of the ‘road map’ that probably never even existed.

There was a time when it was suggested that the removal of Saddam and/or the destruction of his weapons of destruction was in fact the first step on the road to peace in Israel/Palestine. The duplicity of right wing politicians never ceases to amaze me, though I suppose by now it should have.

Looking back it seems that the only WMDs that had to be taken out were those that could be delivered on Tel Aviv/Jerusalem, and that their elimination was a prerequisite to the hard-line Sharon and Bush are now taking regarding the settlements – the REAL �road map’.

But what can the consequences be of Bush’s remarks on the necessity of taking into account ‘the facts on the ground’?

Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general can hardly see this as anything but a challenge to alter the ‘facts on the ground’.

And as I watch yet again Lehrer�s’ News hour listing the names of eighteen and nineteen year old Americans who were alive a day ago but are no longer, it seems to me America is now in the business of spending blood as well as treasure in defence of the Israeli settlements.

For how long will Idaho and Vermont – let alone Florida – find it acceptable for their teenagers to be sacrificed in defence of illegal settlements on the West Bank?

*

I’ve got so many emails on Iraq, Bush and the whole damn thing I’m suffering information overload. Sorry if I haven’t published your stuff. I’ve just got a brilliant essay from Christopher Selth, who long-time readers will remember for some wonderful essays just after Septmber 11. He’s pulled together some of the disatisfactions of Webdiarists on how public, and Webdiary, debate is working – or not – and explores what we’re really pining for. I’ll publish it overnight. Save it for when you’ve got some time to sit back and enjoy.

Tonight Lance Collins, George Bush, Iraq and more great links. My highlight is Doug Wilson�s 8 point plan to clean up Iraq.

 

IRAQ NOTICEBOARD

On the ground

Ted Pritchard: There are no journalists in Falluja, but Jo Wilding got in to take wounded civilians out. Her account is at Inside the fire. “Latham might be a loose canon but no sensible Australian citizen having read this article could deny the need to put more distance between Australia and current US foreign policy. I read a lot of current affairs material – usually dispassionately – but this one brought me close to tears.”

Antony Loewenstein: The Sick, the Old and the Young Ask: “Do We Look Like Fighters?” and Robert Fisk’s Deaths of scores of mercenaries not reported

James Ogilvie: If you want a first-hand account of the awful mess that Falluja has become, check out Empire Notes. Rahul Mahajan is working in Iraq and gives gripping commentary. Juan Cole is also great as others have mentioned, and The Agonist.

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George Bush press conference

The New York Times reaction.

Phil Smith: I have just watched President Bush at his press conference, live on TV. He places long pauses throughout and before his replies to questions. I have a theory that he may be wearing a radio ear-phone and someone outside the room is dictating his answers to him. If you watch carefully these pauses almost match the length of his reply and his eyes often glance down as though he is listening to something during these pauses. Who is actually answering the questions? I have no proof of this. If my theory is wrong he sure talks funny – even for a Texan.

Margo: If that’s the case, his answer master must have got caught short on the question of what mistakes Bush thought he’d made pre-S11 and what he would have done differently: “I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. (Laughter.) John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just — I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t yet.” What, no review, no thought given? This administration is mad. I reckon they think they’re in a movie, they’re the heroes who can do no wrong, and Bush’s job is to learn his lines.

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Blair�s war

John Massey: Support for Bush ‘has harmed UK’s reputation’:

Senior Labour MPs expressed concern at Mr Blair’s close relationship with George Bush as he prepared to fly to Washington tomorrow for talks that will be overshadowed by the crisis in Iraq. In a sign of Mr Blair’s nervousness, Downing Street confirmed that he would not receive the Congressional Medal of Honour he was awarded nearly a year ago, insisting it was not yet ready.

Antony Loewenstein: Terry Jones on Tony Blair at Tony really must try harder:

Dear Mr and Mrs Blair, I have just had to mark Tony’s essay, Why We Must Never Abandon This Historic Struggle in Iraq, and I am extremely worried. Your son has been in the sixth form now for several years, studying world politics, and yet his recent essay shows so little grasp of the subject that I can only conclude he has spent most of that time staring out of the window.

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LANCE COLLINS

Hugh Hodges

As a now long time ex public servant schooled in the John Stone �fearless advice” approach to the public service, I applaud your article Few chances left to restore public service integrity on the demise of public service ethics and its implications for democracy. I don�t always agree with what you print, but this one touched a raw nerve, as did the whole of the refugee and intelligence ‘debate’.

We need a few more people willing to write “TIFI” (tell im fuck im) on minutes to ministers and particularly to advisers – been there done that – as I saw John Stone do on the odd occasion. However, as has been pointed out for many years now, the introduction of contracts and the sacking of senior public servants for being servants to the public rather than political henchmen have steadily weeded out the people who really were pillars of our democracy.

I�m sad but not surprised at the latest revelations.

***

Allen Jay

Spot on piece that goes to the real heart of the matter. Clearly we need to restore permanency to heads of Department and either eliminate or make accountable the personal staff of the ministers.

We also seem to lack a critical media as well as critical citizens. Maybe that is changing – slightly. Keep pushing – we only have our freedom to lose.

It�s good to see there are still people of principle within the Public Service. They should be given public praise, as they will surely endure official abuse in one form or another.

Our government processes have become totalitarian, and this is though the so called Liberals not the Dreaded Socialists!

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Robert Lawton

Your piece has got me thinking. You say that another bulwark of our democracy, the disinterested and fearless public servant, has disappeared. I’d say you are right.

Of course this process has been under way for 30 years. In effect the Westminster system in federal Australia has been replaced by the Washington system; each administration (itself a US coining) has its own issues and emphases. These are reflected in senior appointments and internal departmental politics. There have been some periods over those three decades when the public servants were giants and the politicians pygmies, whichever their party (one thinks of John Stone or Richard Woolcott, men who seemed to fit the Sir Humphrey mould admirably) but the general trend has been towards an emphasis on “servant” rather than “public”.

Okay. Another Webdiary piece which concludes with awful warnings of impending doom, but what exactly can we do about it?

I’m really asking: can crusading journos and their willing accomplices (Webdiary readers and contributors) rewind history? To when the PS was a job for life? To when it carried some community status? To when it was properly remunerated? To when it was not performance benchmarked to within an inch of its life?

Will Labor be any different? I am saddened, but not surprised at the way in which Latham is being soaped up for general consumption. He is not a phenomenon, but a hardheaded son of the NSW Right without the fascinating psychological complexities of a Whitlam or a Keating. They WERE phenomena; Mark is a leader for the Big Brother mindset. (In a bland world, any personality is welcome for a bored audience.) But for a glimpse of Mark in power, look at the sons of the Right who’ve made it. Think Laurie Brereton, think Michael Costa. Think Beattie and Bracks and Rann. Great titans of an impartial PS? Give me a break.

Mark has pushed a few barbeque stopper buttons of his own recently. But to paraphrase Simon Castles in a recent opinion piece for the Herald, it’s the same bloody barbeque as Howard. Never forget that these people are not revolutionaries!!

They remind me of Sean Connery talking to Kevin Costner in the movie The Untouchables about how to fight Al Capone…”he pulls a knife, you pull a gun; he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue!”

What about the Greens? Now they ARE revolutionaries. Were they to gain power they would also require apparatchiks to carry out their policies in government. The Greens are the party of politicised public admin par excellence.

Margo, I suppose what I really mean is: where are your alternatives to the current position? Please don’t tell me that there are noble impartial civil servants ready to ride back into Dodge and save the townsfolk. Most of these noble white guys (and they were almost all male Anglo-Celts) are dead or doddery.

Let’s hear some positive plans. I’m not just a caustic correspondent; I would love to see independent public servants. But I’ve had years in the modern Australian PS, and I can’t believe that the system can self-correct any more.

Margo: Alistair Mant diagnoses the disease in Muddying the waters between guardians and traders. I suggest a few ideas in my book, but as you say, who would have a go at cleaning it up in government? In the end, the people have to insist. We need to honour our whistleblowers, for a start, and look after them when the government goes for their throats.

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John Boase

Mulling over the Toohey report, it occurred to me that Lt-Col Collins is Australia’s Dick Clarke: a hardened professional, bloody good at what he does, unwilling to compromise or play games with the national interest. We need people like this to keep us alert to what is out there. We need to make it clear to government that Andrew Wilkie and Lance Collins must be reinstated to do what they are patently good at.

How long does it take to train a top-flight intelligence person? You don’t do it overnight.

Cosgrove’s response to the question of why Collins was not considered for Honours is interesting, further diminishing the good general in the eyes of this observer – remember the nice little job he did on Keelty? Cosgrove, the chair of the services awards committee, ‘could not recall whether LTCOL Collins was cited for an award’. Having hand-picked Collins to do the intel job in East Timor and praised him for the quality of his work, he ‘could not recall’ if Collins’ name went forward? He should have made sure it did.

If Mark Latham gets in, the first thing he should do is reinstate both men and put their expertise back in the service of the nation.

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Peter Funnell in Canberra

We seem to be a long way from the bottom on the Iraq intelligence deceit. Where will it end and what will we find if we keep looking? In quick time, several new people and reports have made it to the public, and all point again to lack of trustworthiness of the Howard Government’s handling of intelligence information.

The Howard Government’s response to those who speak their mind is vicious. They must have a lot to be worried about, and they have a lot of bureaucratic fellow travelers.

Our intelligence agencies have been caught in the mangler because senior management appears to see “duty” and “responsibility” as the requirement to ensure the Government’s plans are substantiated by the available intelligence. Just as we saw in Children Overboard and Tampa, too many senior public officials go along to get along and are comfortable in doing so. Those who object are marginalised or vilified.

The public outing of this dangerous sickness in public accountability and responsibility, a hallmark of the Howard years, will continue until the truth is out. We are fortunate that there are some Australians still prepared to stand up and be counted for the sake of democracy, and not “cut and run”!

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Simon Neldner

Why do the media continue to portray the Coalition as “responsible” on security and defence matters?

After the revelations detailing a litany of intelligence failures revealed in a letter to the PM by Lt-Col Collins, isn’t it time the media started to question the PM more closely on his claim to be “tough” and “principled” on defence and security issues?

If this was the first time we’d heard such claims, the PM, Downer and Hill might be given the benefit of the doubt, but the track record of this Government is abysmal – and not just the intelligence failures listed by Lt-Col Collins.

Let’s see, procurement problems and cost over-runs in the order of $100s of millions, a chronic lack of accountability in respect to military justice matters (particularly the investigations into recent suicides), the ongoing explanatory fog concerning the arrival of refugee boats (particularly SEIV-X), the revelation that explosives have gone missing (with just a shrug of the shoulders from Minister Hill), and that old favourite, the politicisation of intelligence briefings from a moribund and emasculated public service.

All this wouldn’t matter so much if we�d retained some standards of accountability in the system, but having pulled the plug on ministerial sanctions after a series of embarrassments during the Coalition’s first term (remember the code of conduct?), anyone remotely connected to the governance of this country has been given a ‘get out of jail free card’. In the advent of a complete stuff-up, we hear a familiar refrain: “It was someone else’s responsibility”; “I had incomplete information”; “Who knew they’d be so much violence!”; “I can’t remember the exact details”; “I wasn’t briefed on the problem”. When all else fails, “I don’t comment on matters of national security”.

Here’s a brain teaser: When was the last time someone was sacked or demoted for gross incompetence? Accepting responsibility for a mistake (or oversight, misjudgment etc) seems impossibility these days. Instead, the spin merchants have complete control of the “message” and the method of its delivery.

As a consequence, the onus of accountability is placed on individuals willing to risk their careers and earning capacity by foregoing promotion or resigning to raise these issues directly with the Australian people. This might create a decent headline or two and maybe even prompt a parliamentary inquiry, but the reality is that the system has failed.

This is what Lt-Col Collins was getting at in his remark about ‘the putrefaction beneath’. Nothing will change until people are basically sacked, demoted and/or expelled from the responsibilities they currently hold. We won’t get better intelligence or the better outcomes it would foster until we demand higher standards from our elected officials and the people who advise them. At the moment, our democracy is rotting from the inside out.

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CLEANING UP IRAQ

Doug Wilson in Marsfield, NSW

Reading through articles today I figured that rather than sit here and complain about the situation in Iraq and mutter about how things have gone so wrong, I’d write up something on how I would go about cleaning things up.

Step 1: Fire Paul Bremer and find someone whom speaks Arabic and knows more about Iraq than how many barrels of oil it has under its sand. Perhaps we can find someone well respected from Jordan or Syria? Failing that, how about Jimmy Carter?

Step 2: Appoint regional councils for Iraq. Split Iraq into regions and assign 3-5 respected people to these councils, preferably one representative from shia and sunni (and Kurd in the north) in each region no matter what the population split is.

Step 3: Stop handing contract $ to non-Iraqi firms. Hand the billions of dollars earmarked for rebuilding to the regional councils and let them decide how it’s going to be spent. Appoint a well known and respected Arabic accounting firm to oversee things to make sure that money isn’t being used on bribes, fattening Swiss bank accounts, or promoting cronyism. If they want to hire Three Stooges Inc to repair their streets, let them.

Step 4: Immediately re-hire the Iraqi army/police. Assign them to work for say a month at a time in an area away from where their family is. If you are from Fallujah, you get to work say in Basra for several weeks and then have say a week off at home. This would immediately put 450,000 Iraqis back at work and ensure that they would be less likely to get involved in any local political situation (such as is happening in Fallujah).

Step 5: State that we stuffed up on Iraq on intelligence, in securing the peace and in keeping the peace following the invasion. Ask the UN and nations around the world to provide troops to work alongside the Iraqi army, we’ll pay the bill.

Step 6: Pay every single Iraqi family who has lost someone due to the invasion or in the chaotic aftermath say $5,000-10,000/family member lost along with an apology from someone who speaks Arabic. I know this probably isn’t enough but I’ve read reports that they currently have to fill out reams of paperwork and wait an exceptional amount of time for some pitiful amount of money (one fellow received $5000 total for losing his 3 kids and wife after waiting a year).

Step 7: Set a date to pull every single Coalition soldier (those countries who assisted in the invasion) out of Iraq once the army is in place and the UN is there.

Step 8: Let the Iraqi people set up how they are going to run their country, Parliamentary, collection of local councils, council of muftis, or whatever system they want. The only condition is that it’s a representative government.

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RESPONDING TO AMERICAN WEBDIARISTS

Terry Embling in Canberra

There are so many specious arguments in American Les Edward’s piece in Is it any wonder the Iraqis are resisting? that it’s difficult to know where to begin. I understand that he still feels deeply hurt and angered by the events in September 2001, as does most of the civilised world. However, to use this event as an excuse for the carnage past, present, and future in Iraq is simply wrong.

Absent evidence of WMDs and ties with al-Qaeda, where is the justification for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children and the continuing occupation of Iraq? He asks how we would feel if 3000 of our countrymen “get killed one morning going to work”. I ask how he would feel if the most powerful nation on earth took advantage of the fact that your country, weakened by three wars, twelve years of UN sanctions and a vile dictator had been ‘fitted up’ for a crime it had no responsibility for.

Even Bush has, somewhat reluctantly, been forced to admit that there were no Iraqis among the hijackers of 9/11 and that Saddam Hussein had no links with al-Qaeda.

“We will kill those first that want to kill us” Les states. It’s difficult to believe that the 10,000 or so civilians killed so far wanted to kill him or any of his countrymen. To suggest that it was “for simply being American” demonstrates just how much the Bush administration’s lies have corrupted the body politic of America.

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Paul Hage in Adelaide

I would like to echo the comments of John T. Alfonse in Everett, Massachusetts in Is it any wonder the Iraqis are resisting? I too was in favour of the Iraq invasion, but mainly because of the side benefits � getting rid of a dictator, getting stronger ties with the US. The fact that WMDs were there was a good enough trigger for me. However I always disliked the hypocrisy of it all. To name one, why weren’t we invading Israel for disobeying UN resolutions?

But now that trigger is not there and it appears that the Australian intelligence was alluding to this but Howard ignored it and went with his mate. Now I have been “suckered” just like Mr Alfonse. I work in IT and considered it to be the most disorganised activity known to man. Now the Americans running Iraq hold this title.

I may well for the first time in my 19 years of voting put a 1 next to my Labor candidate in the lower house at the federal election. I think the time is right for a change of Government. There are echoes of 1996 for me. In 1993 and 2001 people wanted to vote the governing party out but the leader just wasn’t up to scratch. I hear increasing disillusionment with this mean and tricky Government every day, and nothing but praise for the way Latham conducts himself. The troops home by Christmas was the biggest beat up I’ve heard for a long time and it will fade away soon.

On Lateline in February, ONA whistleblower Andrew Wilkie was asked for an example of intelligence chiefs second guessing what the government wanted to hear.

 

�During 2002 I was asked to prepare an assessment on the situation in Afghanistan. It was to feed directly into the Government’s decision making in the situation in that country at about the time they were looking to start returning Afghans involuntarily to Kabul. I wrote it as I saw it. It was quite a damning assessment. The prognosis I developed was that the situation was dire and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

�But, in fact, the senior management of the Office of National Assessments said that that assessment would not go out because it was just such a political hot potato to be saying that at the time the Government was saying publicly that it would start the return of asylum seekers.�

As far as I know, this allegation has not been denied, despite its horrific implications, that ONA bosses were prepared to allow the government to deport refugees to a country unsafe to return to on the basis of false intelligence assessments. The government wanted to send them back to suit its domestic political agenda. And it did NOT want to be told that this would endanger their lives.

Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins� allegations don�t tell us much we didn�t know about the government�s deceit of the Australian people and betrayal of the East Timorese before the independence vote.

At the time, the then Labor foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton got several leaks proving the government was well and truly warned of the disaster that would follow a successful independence vote. Howard and Downer brushed aside the leaks, and the government then tried to bug Brereton. ASIO said no back then, but you�d have to doubt whether they�d do so after five more years of no-holds-barred bullying of the public service by Howard and his henchmen.

The thenLabor leader Kim Beazley had Howard and Downer on the ropes in parliament for days until Paul Keating went on the 7.30 Report to say Suharto had been the best thing since sliced bread for Australia, killing Beazley�s attack stone dead.

Meanwhile, Australia�s senior Defence Intelligence Liaison Officer in Washington Merv Jenkins committed suicide in Washington after intolerable pressure from Canberra for sharing our intelligence on East Timor with the Americans in accordance with intelligence sharing arrangements. Like Collins, the Americans were also concerned that a bloodbath in East Timor was on the cards without an international peace keeping force on the ground for the vote.

Collins� correct intelligence assessments on the pending catastrophe in East Timor never made it to the government. They were blocked by senior �public servants� who knew the government did not want to hear them, and presumably feared what would happen to their careers if they told them the truth anyway.

Intelligence reports are supposed to reflect information gathered and honest assessments of likely consequences. The government then weighs up the facts and the expert analysis against its political and strategic imperatives. That�s honest government. That�s government in good faith. That�s government when politicians are prepared to take responsibility for their decisions, decisions which must sometimes be desperately difficult to make.

We do not have such a government. We no longer have a public service prepared to force the government to take decisions with the facts before them. We no longer have a government or a public service we can trust.

As I�ve written for a long time now, our nation is critically disadvantaged in conducting �the war on terror� because of a collapse of trust in government. Our intelligence agency�s dishonour is all the more frightening when we face constant attempts by the government to destroy our civil rights and greatly enhance state power to detain and question us on the basis of supposed independent and impartial intelligence agency and police advice.

A national leader acting in the best interests of our nation would do everything in his power to restore that trust; including calling a Royal Commission to investigate the systemic dysfunction of our intelligence agencies in the face of a government which wants to use supposedly impartial �advice� as cover for pre-made political decisions.

Of course John Howard would never act to restore our trust. His government is the problem, not the solution.

What scares me is that if the crazy brave whistle blowers who keep telling us what�s gone wrong don�t get the public�s attention soon, the destruction of our long tradition of a �frank and fearless� public service will be complete and there�ll be nothing left to save. Another bulwark of our democracy will be gone, and the corruption of what�s left of our once proud democracy will be so entrenched we�ll have run out of chances to save it.

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.

Professor Gabriel Kolko is a leading historian of modern warfare. He wrote ‘Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914’ and, in 2002, ‘Another Century of War?’

 

There are great cultural, political, and physical differences between Vietnam and Iraq which cannot be minimized, and the geopolitical situation is entirely different.

After all, the U.S. encouraged and materially supported Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran throughout the 1980s because it feared a militantly Shiite Iran would dominate the Gulf region. It still does. But the U.S. has ignored many of the lessons of the traumatic Vietnam experience and is today repeating many of the errors that produced defeat.

In both places successive American dministrations slighted the advice of its most knowledgeable intelligence experts. In Vietnam they told Washington’s decision-makers not to tread where France had failed and to endorse the 1955 Geneva Accords provisos on unification. They also warned against underestimating the Communists’ numbers, motivation, or their independent relationship to China and the Soviet Union.

But America’s leaders have time and again believed what they wanted, not what their intelligence told them.

The Pentagon in the 1960s had an uncritical faith in its overwhelming firepower, its modern equipment, mobility, and mastery of the skies. It still does, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld believes the military has the technology to “shock and awe” all adversaries.

But war in Vietnam, as in Iraq, was highly decentralized and the number of troops required only increased even as the firepower became greater. When they reached a half-million Americans in Vietnam the public turned against the President and defeated his party.

Wars are ultimately won politically or not at all. This is true of all wars and at all times. Leaders in Washington thought this interpretation of events in Vietnam was bizarre, and they ignored its experts whenever they frequently reminded them of the limits of military power.

The importance of Vietnamese politics was slighted, escalations followed, and the “credibility” of American military power – the willingness to use it and win no matter how long it took – became their primary concern.

In both Vietnam and Iraq the public was mobilized on the basis of cynical falsehoods which ultimately backfired, causing “credibility gap.” People eventually ceased to believe anything Washington told them.

The Tonkin Gulf crisis of August 1964 was manufactured, as the CIA’s leading analyst later admitted in his memoir, because “the administration was seeking a pretext for a major escalation.”

Countless lies were told during the Vietnam War but eventually many of the men who counted most were themselves unable separate truth from fiction. Many American leaders really believed that if the Communists won in Vietnam the “dominoes” would fall and all Southeast Asia would fall under Chinese and Soviet domination.

The Iraq War was justified because Hussein was alleged to have weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda, but no evidence for either allegation has been found.

There are 130,000 American troops in Iraq now -twice the number that Bush predicted would remain by this month – but, as in Vietnam, their morale is already low and sinking.

Bush’s ratings in the polls have fallen dramatically – especially as he has run up huge budget deficits and ignored domestic issues, such as health insurance, which may ultimately determine how people vote in the 2004 election.

He needs many more soldiers in Iraq desperately and foreign nations will not provide them.

In Vietnam, President Nixon tried to “Vietnamize” the land war and transfer the burdens of soldiering to Nguyen Van Thieu’s huge army. But it was demoralized and organized to maintain Thieu in power, not win the victory that had eluded American forces.

“Iraqization” of the military force required to put down dissidents will not accomplish what has eluded the Americans, and in both Vietnam and Iraq the U.S. underestimated the length of time it would have to remain and cultivated illusions about the strength of its friends.

The Iraqi army was disbanded but now is being partially reconstituted by utilizing Hussein’s officers and enlisted men. As in Vietnam, where the Buddhists opposed the Catholics who comprised the leaders America endorsed, Iraq is a divided nation regionally and religiously, and Washington has the unenviable choice between the risks of disorder which its own lack of troops make likely and civil war if it arms Iraqis.

Despite plenty of expert opinion to warn it, the Bush Administration has scant perception of the complexity of the political problems it confronts in Iraq. Afghanistan looms as a reminder of how military success depends ultimately on politics, and how things go wrong.

Rumsfeld’s admission in his confidential memo last October 16th that “we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror” was an indication that key members of the Bush Administration are far less confident of what they are doing than they were early in 2003.

But as in Vietnam, when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara ceased to believe that victory was inevitable, it is too late to reverse course and now the credibility of America’s military power is at stake.

Eventually, domestic politics takes precedence over everything else. It did in Vietnam War and it will in Iraq.

By 1968 the polls were turning against the Democrats and the Tet Offensive in February caught President Lyndon Johnson by surprise because he and his generals refused to believe the CIA’s estimates that there were really 600,000 rather than 300,000 people in the Communist forces.

Nixon won because he promised a war-weary public he would bring peace with honor. Bush declared last October 28 that “we’re not leaving” Iraq soon, but his party and political advisers are likely to have the last word as American casualties mount and his poll ratings continue to decline.

Vietnam proved that the American public has limited patience. That is still true.

The real lessons of Vietnam have yet to be learned.

This piece was first published in the Sun Herald today

 

Around the world the top experts on war, terrorism, foreign policy, diplomacy and politics warned against invading Iraq. Some resigned in protest from governments and their agencies in the US, Britain and Australia.

Ordinary people who rely on their leaders to exercise sound judgement in their interests warned against it too, most spectacularly on a weekend in February 2003 when they marched in unprecedented numbers on all continents to request an alternative to war.

Yet on the eve of war, John Howard said of his long-made decision to invade Iraq: “I have never thought of changing my position. Never.”

This Easter, on the first anniversary of the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad, I want to salute some of the many Web Diary readers who did what they could to avoid the disaster Bush, Blair and Howard were determined to inflict on us all.

October 1, 2002

David Makinson: “Many commentators have tried the ‘appeasement’ argument. It’s terribly short in the logic department, but it has a certain emotive appeal so I’m not above using it. If we continue to appease US self-interest and let Bush et al get away with this, our children will hold us to account one day.”

Kim Rybinski: “The Americans just don’t seem to learn from their history. They were defeated in Vietnam because they failed to understand their enemy or their enemy’s commitment to their cause. Sadly, I fear that this is another lesson that will have to be taught to them again.”

Gene Adam: “There is no critical evidence in hand that Saddam is an immediate threat to Oz, the UK or the US now, even without inspectors on the ground, and certainly not ever if inspectors are in place. This rush to war is obviously not a matter of self-defence, of disabling an imminent attack. Is this rush to war with Iraq, with Osama bin Laden uncaught and unaccounted for and his followers doubtless at work, simply a matter of it being the right moment to grab the oil?”

January 30, 2003

Mike Lyvers: “The US threatened war, forcing the UN to take action by resuming inspections. As long as those inspections are happening, Saddam is effectively bottled up. That’s why they should be continued – they keep Saddam under wraps without having to go to war to do so. That’s why I oppose invading Iraq.”

Grace Knight: “You bastards of war you took your turn, running our planet into the ground. Now you sanction a dying child’s last breath, won’t stop till you own the rest.”

February 12, 2003

Justin Bell: “The benefit of removing Hussein by unilateral action is not worth the cost of exhausting the Western world’s most precious resource – international goodwill towards the ideals of America and Western liberal democracy.”

February 14, 2003

Michael Chong: “In diplomacy nothing’s so diverse as the mechanics of truth, you can even engineer in reverse evidence from proof. So shall we lose or confuse the plot of morality’s slender charter, as we choose to undo the despot with the tyranny of another?”

February 18, 2003

Diann Rodgers-Healey:

“We fear the loss of blood, so young. We fear the swell of death, so near. The loss of peace, the strength of rage. A future of divide, inequality more alive.”

March 18, 2003, the day Howard formally committed to the war on Iraq

Meagan Phillipson: “With a handful of words, the future of the entire world has become critically uncertain on a multitude of fronts. The only thing that remains certain, for me at least, is the thought that when people make war, war makes monsters of people. Hardly a comforting certainty in this, the most uncertain of times.”

Carole Hancock: “War is not the way to solve this problem and I sincerely hope that John Howard is prepared for the likely consequences. Even if the war is fast and furious, I doubt it will be the end of the issue. It is very likely there will be significant repercussions that roll out continuously in guerilla-type tactics by those who will feel justified to retaliate.”

Hamish Tweedy: “I have to confess to being more nervous about war in Iraq than any other decision I can recall. I can’t think of a time I more wanted to be shown up as an idiot, and that John Howard and the Government are 100 per cent correct and our commitment to a war on Iraq without UN sanction is not only the right thing to do but won’t turn around and bite us on the bum. If things go awry this could seriously screw the world and Australia for generations.”

March 19, 2003

John Augustus: “The big eagle caught in the trap. Feathers of failed diplomacy drifting, bin Laden smiling, the hapless waiting. A swift, brutal war, a fractured globe. The terrorist wins after all.”

Easter in Iraq. A year since the Americans pulled down Saddam�s statue, and they�re losing control. Or lost it. It�s hard to keep up with, but Webdiary readers are trying. I�ll post their recommendations soon, but here�s a very big picture view of what�s going on from new Webdiarist Matt Southon. He thinks we�re watching the beginning of the fall of the American empire.

 

Matt Southon

I’ve tried to put together my opinion on this US policy of preemptive action and how I understand it to fit within the greater historical picture of the rise and fall of pre-eminent nation states.

The theoretical benchmark loosely employed in this analysis is the school of dependency theorists such as Gunder-Frank, Celso and the more refined theoretical position of Immanuel Wallerstein, author of World System Theory (vol 1-3). The situation in Iraq is a fine example of what Wallerstein may describe as a transition of power and an eventual shift in Core versus semi-peripheral states.

The first point is that since 1945, the US has been in the position to direct capital globally through world financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, all stemming from the GATT treaty. Therefore, any market that wished to engage in the capitalist process did so under rules controlled by the US.

The second point is that a nation state may have economic power but will not achieve pre-eminence unless that capital control is overlaid with an ideological hegemony. Simply, not only does this system dictate where the money flows, but the general population believe it to be right as a fundamental truth, and that Western values as prescribed by the Core power are true and desirable for all.

The US has purveyed this hegemony since 1945, however its power has been slowly reducing since the 1970s. Some may suggest this is in parallel with the rise in globalisation and the opening up of new information about non western values and traditions, however that is another debate.

So, since 1945 the US has had both economic and ideological hegemony which it has used to access markets and free up non capitalist markets (customers are the name of the game). The economic agenda is to engage more of the global population in the quest for jeans and soft drink (and oil, weaponry etc).

This is obviously an unpalatable argument for attempting to control a nation state, so the ideological warm and fuzzy of democracy, freedom et al is used as a blanket to hide the true agenda, both for the home front and the newly liberated territory. It is much easier to say `We are liberating the Iraqis from oppression’ than `We are liberating the Iraqis from their strategic position in the middle east and their oil’.

We are witnessing the death dance of a Core nation which has started to believe too firmly in the ideological nonsense of ‘freedom’ and the theological rightness of the US position (Bush is as fundamentalist as many Islamic practitioners).

We know the neo-cons and other hawks have always had their eye on Iraq, but it is the ideological fervour of the justifications that leave me unsettled. They seem to really believe their own press!

Why has US hegemonic power been slowly disintegrating since the 1970s? One answer, exhaustion of markets. The end of the cold war saw Russia and China deciding to play the game, opening their borders to jeans and burgers. But that is not enough for the engine of the world’s growth. The Middle East is an untapped resource of potential MTV converts and the US wants in.

It would also like to suppress dissenting religious choice and Islam is a hard religion to marry with consumption. It also wants in for the oil required to run the engine but that is a historical not ahistoric specific and doesn’t need discussion here (except to say that while some of the world’s great artifacts were being looted, the US had a defensive perimeter around the Oil Ministry).

What of other major powers that have fallen victim to their own narcissism – Rome, Great Britain and the Happsburg Empire? The key link is that they rose to control via modernisation of agricultural and manufacturing practices, developed armies and weaponry, and developed social frameworks. They all also exported their own brand of reality as the true way. Rome and Great Britain operated under a capitalist system of trade. So too, to a lesser degree, did the Happsburg Empire, but the point is there is a noticable trend in all of the above. They operated as unchallenged ideological and economic hegemons for a long time unscathed but were eventually felled by their own `foreign policies’.

It is the shift from Core power, whereby the pre-eminent nation state dictates or controls global direction via market forces that are at least at some level mutually beneficial to both vendor and vendee. A good example of this is Ahmed Chalabi – a man with close links to Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s baby. He is manipulating and being manipulated to serve each purpose and the greater good or nationalist sentiment is the first chip off the bargaining table. History is littered with similar examples of a more affluent class enriching themselves at the expense of a majority of poverty stricken individuals.

A Core power could potentially be benevolent, however its addiction to the growth of the economy, combined with a generational indoctrination of the nation’s `fundamental truths’, neccessarily causes the need to access new markets to increase expodentially – you are only as strong as your economy.

This is where the US should have heeded history. The pivotal decision taken by all these superpowers is the policy of preemptive action – utilising military force to suppress the true nature of the population until they are consumed by the ideology being rammed into them.

This is where Iraq is totally different from Vietnam. The US was there to protect its ideological hegemony, not its strategic position or economy. That is another reason why theorists suggest the peak was in the 70s, as the illegal action in Vietnam forced a generation to question the depth of the ideology it had so believed in and found it to be shallow and wanting.

So where is all this leading? Wallerstein would suggest that the shift from a Core state to a state in decline is the use of force. As with Rome, Great Britain and the Happsburg Empire of Germany, the powers became so narcissistic they felt invincible. Military power was spread far and wide across all known borders, weakening both the domestic security of the nation and, more importantly, the economic structure of the nation.

Global conquest is not cheap, nor does it allow distraction. We are witnessing a modern version of over extension of military capability to impose ideology, compounded by a worsening domestic scene which directly effects the greater population. Why spend in Iraq when I can’t get a job?

This exposes the mob at the top of the heap and allows less strong nations an opportunity to move in. We are seeing the slow formation of a combined Europe and the Euro, and the opening of markets in China which will, due to market share, be able to start calling bigger shots in relation to trade deals. India, also a nuclear power, is experiencing unprecedented growth and Indonesia is starting to get its act together. Japan is also getting back on track.

These nations have the economic potential to either join or replace the US over time, diffusing the USA’s sole directional forces, and the US needs to be careful not to cut off its nose to spite its face. The US has stretched itself financially thin through drawn out military exercises, severely jeopardised severely its ideological claims by clearly acting against its basic tenets – just like in Vietnam – and by dogmatically pursuing unilateralist policies despite global condemnation.

So here we are. The US has done untold damage to the validity of its freedom loving ways, hurting its ability to continue to assert it stands for these things when its actions show that it does not.

It is hurting itself economically through an expensive and protracted campaign of force allowing sneak attacks by other strong nations, (not by force but by diplomacy and policy shifts), ignoring growing domestic unrest at the risk of alienating the electorate, forcing other global players to position themselves away from the ideology of the US.

The US is being disgraced globally with its heavy handed tactics, which again forces consumers to seek solace in another ideology not so connected to the United States.

Like the other Core nations that attempted to become Empire builders it will fall heavily from grace, as its geo-political position is so severely weakened it will need to revert to multilateral co-operation in which it will be a bit player, not a star, and its domestic policies begin to reflect a more inward looking direction.

Wallerstein draws conclusions in part on what he calls long and short economic cycles, short ones or Kondratieff cycles lasting 50-60 years and longer ones of about 100-200 years.

The short cycles generally mark a fall from grace, the longer ones a fall into the dustbin of history. We therefore not be surprised to realise that 1945 was 54 years ago. Spooky.

Tonight, Webdiary�s information clearing house on the latest in Iraq and what it means, Webdiarist Tim Gillin’s guide to the best websites on the war and American foreign policy, and caustic comments from Steve Wallace, Tony Yegles, Peter Gellatly and Robert Lawton.

 

To begin, Margaret Curtain’s quote for the future:

“I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In Australia, Keysar Trad put out a press release today announcing that the Mufty of Australia, Sh. Taj Aldin Alahilali. would join a rally in Auburn, in Sydney�s West, calling for all Coalition troops to leave Iraq. �The Mufty has sent a letter to Mr. Bush calling for the cessation of all bombardment and killings and calling on Mr. Bush to find a peaceful way to pull coalition troops out of Iraq,� Trad said.

Juan Cole reports: �Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, legendary leader of the Iraqi Hizbullah, which organized the Shiite Marsh Arabs to fight Saddam, has suspended his membership in the Interim Governing Council (IGC) in order to protest American actions in attacking the Sadrist movement. Al-Muhammadawi met Friday with Muqtada al-Sadr, whom the Americans say they will arrest. Were Muhammadawi and the Marsh Arabs to turn against the Americans, they would be formidable foes. Rumors are flying that many IGC members have fled Iraq in fear of their lives, afraid of a backlash against them because they are cooperating with the Americans attacking Iraqi cities.�

For on the ground coverage from a female Iraqi blogger, see riverbend.

Maggie Churchward: “Check out raedinthemiddle, a very different viewpoint from many other bloggers. He makes sense rather than spouting platitudes which many others seem to do.”

***

WHAT�S GONE WRONG

Allen Jay: A complement to Matt Southon’s piece As seen on TV: the decline and fall of the American empire:

President Bush’s options appear extremely limited, and there is little doubt that the United States will continue to decline as a decisive force in world affairs over the next decade. The real question is not whether U.S. hegemony is waning but whether the United States can devise a way to descend gracefully, with minimum damage to the world, and to itself. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power, The New Press, New York, NY, 2003, page 27.

Scott Burchill: In Iraq, a ‘perfect storm’, US commander will not take blame for unrest and Phoenix, Assassination and Blowback in Iraq.

Brian McKinlay: A Superpower Defeated by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr:

The news from and about Iraq, chronicling a quickening spiral of disaster for the US, is spilling out faster than even the experienced surfer can follow. The news is of a country united in a common cause: driving out the foreign invader and occupying power; of a militarized, imperial, foreign government attempting to run an ancient civilization, about which it knows or cares nothing; and of the impassioned desire for self-government proving to be more powerful than history’s wealthiest and most powerful state.

In the thick of all this blood, gore, destruction, killing, and hate, not even the ridiculous posturing of the Bush administration, forever promising to stick out this test of will, can reasonably dispute what is beginning to be obvious to everyone: the Superpower has been defeated.

Marilyn Shepherd: Iraqis told them to go from day one, Resistance will continue to spread until the occupation ends:

What went so wrong that the US-led war to “liberate” the Iraqi people turned into the daily slaughter of the victims of Saddam’s tyranny? The answer is simple: nothing has gone wrong. Despite the mythology, most Iraqis were strongly against the invasion from the start, though it has taken 12 months for the world’s media to report that.

What has changed is that many Iraqis have decided that the peaceful road to evict the occupiers is not leading anywhere. They didn’t need Sadr to tell them this. They were told it loudly and brutally a few days ago by a US Abraham tank, one of many facing unarmed and peaceful demonstrators not far from the infamous Saddam statue that was toppled a year ago. The tank crushed to death two peaceful demonstrators protesting against the closure of a Sadr newspaper by Paul Bremer, the self-declared champion of free speech in Iraq. The tragic irony wasn’t lost on Iraqis.

For analysis of Condi Rice’s S11 evidence, David Spratt recommends Condi Gets A Reality Check for the truth behind her opening statement spin and Scott Burchill recommends Rice Testimony Before 9/11 Commission.

***

TIM GILLIN’S GUIDE TO WEBSITES ON THE WAR AND U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

1. Slate’s “War Stories” columnist Fred Kaplan

He provides an intelligent, moderate and informed critical view of US military policy. Some years ago he wrote a great book on the US nuclear weapons strategists and their sub-culture called The Wizards Of Armageddon.

2. spiked online

Hard to classify. Near impossible to predict. It usually takes a different point of view than anything elsewhere in mainstream media. Sometimes I think they are different just for the sake of it.

3. winds of change

Generally pro-war in content, this site provides a wide selection of quality articles from the world’s press on various issues impacting Iraq and the war on terror.

4. anti war

Anti-war news and commentary with a staunchly non-interventionist editorial point of view. The product of a trio of activists from San Francisco, the site was subject to hacking attacks when it opposed NATO intervention in Yugoslavia that just may have had it’s origin in government or military circles.

5. information clearing house

“News you won’t find on CNN”. Includes Dick Cheney’s Song of America, a classic must read article originally published in Harper’s magazine.

6. amconmag

Website of Pat Buchanan’s “The American Conservative” magazine. Buchanan in the 1990s campaigned against George Bush Senior’s first Gulf War. He has been smeared by and has debated with the “neocons” fora dozen years before that label hit the headlines. Every month TAC posts a couple of articles on line. Their archive has quality articles from American and British authors (often contributors from The Spectator). TAC’s mostly conservative critics of Bush policy make Mark Latham look like a conga line wannabe.

7. Noam Chomsky’s “official” blog.

Surprisingly patchy in quality. Maybe he should stick to books.

8. Counterpunch

Edited by Alexander Cockburn. Often features articles by Robert Fisk. “America’s best political newsletter”. Leftist progressive slant.

9. Soldiers for Truth and Hackworth

The voice of the grunts? Run by David Hackworth, one of the “most highly decorated” US military veterans. He won the United Nations Medal for Peace for anti-nuclear work in Australia . Neither pro-war or anti-war, but definitely pro-soldier. Or is Hack just a con man?

10. Without Reservation

Archive of Karen Kwiatkowski, USAF Lt.Col (retired). Kwiatkowski was assigned by the Pentagon to work in Rumsfeld’s “Office of Special Plans. Kwiatkowski didn’t like what she saw.

11. ipsnews

The archive of Jim Lobe, a journalist who specialises in reporting on the neocons. Often used as an expert commentator by ABC’s “Four Corners” and BBC�s “Panorama”.

12. War is a racket

Classic text, a damning critique of the business end of war. Makes Chomsky look like a piker. Written by double Congressional Medal of Honor winner and former US Marine Corps Major-General Smedley T Butler. Butler was the youngest man to hold that rank.

13. Harper’s Index

It makes you think! The March 2004 edition of the Index includes a link to a speech made by Donald Rumsfeld attacking war profiteering by US military contractor Brown & Root)

14. History News Network.

Where historians comment on the news.

15. The Onion.

Enough said!

***

YOUR COMMENTS

Steve Wallace

I have no recollection at all of �cut and run� being Australian vernacular. When did we import this ridiculous term? Was it from some septic sitcom? I won�t do �cut�, and I don�t do �run�. Well, I get a runny nose now and then in winter and I hate it.

Margo, why are we obsessed with such stupid terms, and fail so dismally to see what�s really going on? I thought we were supposed to be so much smarter than our parents, the �Vietnam� generation.

Let�s �cut and run�, just to prove a point. Australians always respond to marketing.

***

Tony Yegles

When Howard says that Iraq is nothing like Vietnam we must take him at his word. After all he is the Prime Minister and as such his every word carries a lot of weight. This is especially true when it comes to National Security.

In Howard’s World Iraq still possesses WMD but they have not been found yet. No WMD may have been found yet but instead unspeakable atrocities by Saddam Hussein were discovered by the Liberals for the first time in 30 years.

Anyone with any logic should know that the presence of 200 Australian troops is crucial to the success or failure of the Iraq operation and can make or break democracy, freedom and stability. So that means that roughly 1 Aussie Soldier is worth about 600 US soldiers. We really are punching above our weight, as Downer remarked last year.

Anyone supporting a pullout by Christmas is obviously playing into the hands of Al Qaeda. These must be the same (Un)Australians who were giving succour to Saddam with their anti-war stance. In any case setting arbitrary deadlines in Iraq is irresponsible unless it is done by George Bush.

The Iraq War has not increased the terrorist threat to this country. How could it? It has made the world a safer place. We have seen proof of that this week.

But then nobody really cares as people have moved on.

If Howard had his time over again, he would do the same thing again.

Oh what a wonderful world…

***

Peter Gellatly

An open email to Alan Ramsey

Well, you’re really on a tear over all this – and who could blame you? But I contend you are avoiding the real issue: namely the Australian public’s inattention to the true cost of “independence”, and likely unwillingness to pay it. It is this issue which has trapped Howard – and, frankly, would likely have trapped PM Latham, whatever his heady rhetoric from the opposition benches.

I concede at once that Howard (whom I in any case can’t wait to be rid of, for myriad other reasons) may not enjoy the luxury of Kirribilli House sans bearing personal responsibility for participation in egregious error – however forced he felt that participation to be. This balance of perks and responsibilities is merely part of the price of prime ministership.

But Latham’s pronouncements on the subject are drivel. Your closing quote of his January 29 remarks says it all:

“Our foreign policy has three pillars. Our membership of the United Nations, our alliance with the United States, and comprehensive engagement with Asia. Those three pillars rest on a rock. And the rock is an independent, self-reliant Australia. When I have to make a decision on Australia’s national security, I’ll only ask one question: what is in Australia’s national interest?”

Since the “rock” of “an independent, self-reliant Australia” is nothing more than fraudulent mythology, any true assessment of “Australia’s national interest” must recognise this fact. To publicly assert otherwise is to mislead the Australian people on a scale far in excess of l’affaire Iraq.

Latham continues:

“I believe in the American alliance, but with Australia as an equal partner, not as deputy. I believe in ANZUS, but not as a rubber stamp. I haven’t got it in me to bite my tongue and stay silent if Australia’s interests are on the line…”

Australia as “an equal partner” with the US? Wake up! Recapping the Vietnam War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara omits to even include Australia as one of the US’s “allies”! Why would he: allies, after all, are those nations truly capable of independent action. They are not to be confused with client states.

So my question Alan – addressed to you, and to Latham – is by what specific measures is a mooted independent Australian foreign policy to be underpinned, what shall such underpinning cost, and how is the Australian public to be persuaded to bear that cost?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of such action – indeed I have lobbied for it for years. I just get a little cross at the continual pretence that the Utopia is already in place.

***

Robert Lawton

I too have a Japanese friend in the middle east (see Japanese hostages: a plea for help). She is in Amman in Jordan at present and emailed me today. She is working for a Japanese NGO on Iraqi projects, but from Jordan.

All the Japanese NGOs working in Iraq of which she is aware have no Japanese staff inside Iraq. Although, as she observes, this is discriminatory – casualties working for Japanese NGOs aren’t news in Japan, while the death of a Japanese daughter or son is news indeed back home – the Japanese aid profession has been careful not to expose itself to risk.

She finds it amazing that the Japanese hostages, who are very young and without expert assistance from other internationals (code for non Muslim Westerners) thought that they could arrive in Iraq and stay safe. In her view they are at best naive, at worst stupid.

I think that the world really has gone mad when you tell us we should email Al Jazeera and explain that these people are peace activists and should be freed. (Margo: I did no such thing. I published an email from a reader requesting that action.)

Iraq is a dangerous place and there are many ways to die there. People who put themselves in situations like this, where they can be used to play to the emotions by thugs, should be left to their own bizarre devices. In any case, it’s possible the entire thing is a hoax.

The point is worth making though: we here in the West are still interested in the affairs of other countries (Bush, Latham, Kingston, Chomsky, everyone!). In Iraq, they want the foreigners out and they couldn’t care less about the intentions of such foreigners. Not a surprising attitude really.

At some point in the not too distant future the US and its various assistants will get out of Iraq. Maybe the bases that the Bush administration thought they’d get in Iraq will be working by then, or maybe they will have to stay in Saudi Arabia.

At that point we might all get back to the main issue, which is the very busy schedule of Islamic terror groups.

Is it not clear from all this that Islamic terror is intolerant, and that multiculturalism and the campaigning spirit of liberalism doesn’t have a place in its world view?

Also – when everyone on Webdiary has stopped slavering over the prospect of a government without John Howard at its head dealing with the Yanks, it might be worth considering this. Latham’s speech to the Lowy Institute was nothing new for a Labor leader. The intelligence and defence signals relationship with the USA (which is many times more significant than a few hundred service people in Iraq) will go on as it always has. We will remain part of the US war on terror, whether it’s run by neo-conservatives in the Pentagon or old fashioned liberals in the State Department. Kim Beazley might even become Ambassador to Washington, his dream job.

Our real issue in foreign affairs should be our relationship with China. But that’s harder to put into a 10 second grab, so we can keep reading the UK and US papers for information on that country and its fascinating stories.

It is possible that Jemaah Islamiya or similar might try to destroy the Opera House or the Harbour Bridge. But where is the local Muslim audience? September 11 apart, terror attacks seem to be directed at countries with majority Muslim populations or an irredentist history (Spain). The lack of terror activity in Latin America – which has several countries with significant Muslim populations, in particular Brazil, in similar proportion to ours – seems to indicate that Australia is an unattractive place for Islamic terror to do its work.

I consider London and Paris, the site of some recently foiled plots, to be world cities like New York or Washington and thus similarly vulnerable. The rest of the UK or France should be considered differently to the capitals.

Sydney, for all its self confidence, is not a world city of the same kind.

As for the gender balance on Web Diary, the woman who made the point about men sitting at desks having time to think and write…and thus dominate the conversation is spot on. I used to write from such a desk, while the world was maintained around me – in public sector employment!

Now I snatch a few moments at a laptop, at home, usually in the middle of the night, between part time work, part time study and fatherhood.

The best Web Diarist is the one who have not yet spoken… (Zen wisdom)

�In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.�

 

The Apostle John, who – like Harry Heidelberg, Homer, Socrates, Shakespeare and Professor Bunyip today – could simply have been some clever chick with an elegant creative quill, for all anybody really knows.

***

One of the greatest gifts the internet might yet prove to bequeath Humanity is a realistic shot at fisking into permanent oblivion the sacrilegious trinity of Yahweh, Allah and God, an anti-Artistic Celebrity Triple Act which has stunk up the concrete human world for several Millennia now, proving along the way to be the most hateful, destructive, divisive and sub-human fictional triptych ever written by the hand of some genius guy (or, like I said, chick).

Bathsheba was the original trouble-making J-writer, the way Harold Bloom sees it. But then men tend to blame women for everything.

�The West�, which is where I learned to read and write, claims to base its �values� on the Judeo-Christian tradition (which sanctifies firing rockets from helicopter gunships into mosques nowadays – very scripturally helpful of Yahweh and God, I must say, although since Allah equally approves of killing Jews and Christians in their places of worship, I guess we can call Monotheism Thus Far a three-way tie in the satanic self-absolution stakes).

Since we Westerners are all about to head off for some Easter spiritual contemplation, and since Webdiary has been on a pretty wild old Robert Bosler-inspired head trip this week, I thought I�d have a tentative go at the Mother of All Meeja Watches: grappling with The Written Word itself, the human medium which begets all others, including this one here.

For those of you who delight in taking the piss out of twee elitist rhetoric and girly artistic conceit, I guess you�d better sharpen your keyboards now. (By the way, Helen Darville – see Latham tunes us into Iraq � is the hand that signed your anti-intellectual missive itself graced by good honest workers� dirt, these days? If not, don�t patronise Australia�s plumbers and garbos, dear, it�s most unbecoming in an artist. Transparent and tedious, too, cringe, cringe. Artists are special, because they produce art. Hamlet or a flushing dunny? If you need more than a second to choose, you�re a monkey at a typewriter, and I mean no cheap disrespect.)

Bet I�m in trouble with the Webdiary chicks, now.

Margo, hang me some slack here – Helen�s no wimp and with luck she�ll wind up and go me in response. Don�t know quite why, but I�ve been a bit perplexed by the gender stuff this week, as well as being dismayed by the cyber-wide savaging Robert Bosler received, so I�m throwing all caution to the wind myself, too, just to see what this website can do.

In fact as we�d discussed, Margo, I was planning to write a more mundane overview of the media �State of Play�, in particular with a view to predicting how the conservative, fervently pro-invasion press would deal with the worsening situation in Iraq. But as I started plucking all the naughty hidden agendas from the latest columns of writers like Miranda Devine and Chris Pearson and Andrew Bolt, I was overwhelmed by a sense of futility and self-disgust.

Is anyone else at Webdiary – or in the blogosphere for that matter – as bored as I am with constantly trying to have the �last word� in these endless tit-for-tat cyber-battles? Trying to �out-ironise� each new level of knowing irony? I suppose I�ll find out soon enough.

I think that most of us who�ve been writing in cyberspace for a few years now would probably recognise what you could call �Fisking Fatigue�. Since September 11, it�s fair to say that The Written Word has become more of a destructive weapon than a creative tool than ever before.

The betrayed, outraged, scarified post-WW2 impulse to pull words and sentences themselves to bits, in a desperate attempt to find out how the lying bastards duped us into the bloodiest disaster in human history, has now become shackled to this lightning-fast publishing technology, and also been thoroughly democratised, to the disastrous point where any literate person with a modem and a nice line in reactive bitchery can chuck their two bobs� worth into what�s now become the collective paralysation of the creative progress of woMankind.

If Shakespeare was writing now, she wouldn�t even be writing soap opera scripts; she�d be too busy churning out pre-emptive, defensive, ironic �self-reviews� to write actual meaty human drama, with stuff like fresh characters and majestic dreams writ large.

Art can�t be art without the audience�s willing suspension of disbelief on the medium�s intrinsic terms, so if your medium happens to be writing, the internet now makes art impossible, evidently. One single cyber-heckler can prick the bubble for every potential reader on the planet. One cynic can destroy a million idealists.

Or, to burrow back down to those J-Word first principles and return to the Godly theme of this Webdiary suicide run, as Helen Darville could no doubt confirm all it takes is for one determined writer to taint a fellow writer convincingly as anti-Semitic, and they can�t possibly write with quite the same open, creative heart again. What is The Written Word if not the greatest useful legacy of Monotheistic Certitude we humans have at our disposal?

God writes, therefore He is. Here I stand, with the emphasis on the masculine �I�, except that the true amplifying trick of �The Written Word� as a creative tool, rather than a destructive weapon, is to keep in mind that for all Harry Heidelberg knows, that priapic �I� I just wrote might well in fact have been tapped into my keyboard by the tender hands of a fourteen year school-girl.

Anyone can post a fake picture on his Webdiary column. Margo�s met me, of course, but then how do you know I haven�t been employing an actor all along, M?

Anyway, the original point that somehow got lost in there was that a WOMAN artist composed the original Word of God, guys. That�s right, a chick. Probably. Maybe. Or – who knows? But someone did � someone sat down and wrote out the sentence �God commanded: Thou Shalt Not Kill� for the first time in human history, and it wasn�t God, it was just some Jewish hack. Great message in itself, but think about the fact that � just like every word Shakespeare ever wrote � that writer took huge care to ensure that, hundreds of years down the track, there�d be no way for readers ever to know for sure who (s)he was.

There-in lies the true ironic power of the Written Word � and it�s creative, not destructive. �In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God�. Well – no it wasn�t, that sentence was some writers� recorded sentient thought, and idea, a cunning, cunning plan. But the fact that (s)he kept themself deliberately anonymous is both an indication of a) why the Judaic �One God� riff took off (then spawned two competing franchises, bit like the way Dan Brown�s da Vinci Code has launched a thousand clones all deconstructing how religions work, including this one here), and also b) a fair hint that the J-writer who invented God probably was indeed a chick. (Men generally want to be SEEN to be changing world even if they�re not, while women prefer to stay off the Celebrity Radar, the better to Get Shit Done behind the scenes.)

One God as The Written Word � how brilliantly slick a marketing trick is that? And how fertile, how creative, how damned interesting it is, to think that 3, 000 odd years ago somebody took the trouble to set up that fictional lever as a new tool for the expression of our infinite capacity for Human grace and majesty and wit and sheer joi de vivre?

Conversely, what – over and above (yet fundamental to) the unprecedented industrial butchery of the passing epoch – was the Holocaust, if not the closest Humans have yet come to rendering that same grand Judaic legacy permanently sterile? The ironic sentence �Arbeicht Macht Frei� didn�t in the end destroy World Jewry, but if Third Millennium writers don�t get back their angry confidence in the power of expressed abstraction to provoke and inspire and determine our real world actions (just like written scripts tell actors what to do), and get it back soon – before Generation Y or Z forgets forever that destructive irony isn�t the only kind that words can carry – then it might as well have.

In the beginning was The Hand That Wrote The Words �The Hand That Signed The Paper�, and it was connected to an artistic sensibility that took the creative risk of trying to get inside the head of a real character in history who, if he�d had his way in that real world, might have destroyed forever the creative wellspring of precisely the curious human impulse that did, eventually, inspire Helen Demidenko to try to backtrack over time and fictionally humanise him.

It would have been just as artistically self-defeating for Helen Darville to contemplate embracing that fictional conceit as it would have been for the writer who wrote �This is the Word of God� to then sign it with her name. The difference is that Darville got sprung, and any hope of THTSTP remaining a live fiction was lost. The truth is � and it�s one we�ve lost sight of in this age of celebrity � that the more ambitious is the fictional theme you want to create believably, the more anonymous your own authorial presence must be.

I think it�s a great pity that Helen Darville was blown so ruthlessly out of the fictional game by her HTSTP experience, and only hope that she�s long since bodged up a new fictional shop front, and kept it off the public scope since. �J.K Rowling� is a very nice thought, and there�d be a lot of justice in that, too.

Then again, Helen could be Harry Heidelberg for all I know. And Robert Bosler, too.

***

I think it�s time the Written Word overcame the profound artistic caution that is the still-lingering legacy of the Destruction of the European Jews.

The long-term impact of the tenaciously fashionable anti-creativity inherent in Helen�s current day stamp of ironic mistrust – of ideas and art – is a kind of universal triumph of the mediocre.

It�s not dumbing-down, but the precise opposite: these days we�re all far too smart to be smart enough to be stupid enough to believe in our own fiercely hopeful fictions as we weave them � much less to believe them so long and so hard that they become true, like our stories of Yahweh and God and Allah have done over the centuries.

The problem with those established religious fictions is that they are now increasingly destructive ones, since the world�s artists and intellectuals copped out of believing in God�s stories long ago, leaving the zealots and power-players unchecked, free to twist them into real world horror stories.

What we need is for more smart people to start believing in God, and if like me you can�t stand any of the Big Three, then you ought to pitch in and help people like Bosler invent a new one, rather than knee-capping his tentative efforts.

The more people who help invent a new belief, the more chance there is that it�ll become believable, and thus useful in more than the abstract world.

Alas, the internet as it stands kills all hope of this gauche game � let�s call it trying to get idealism to fly – as massed cynicism has always eventually done, certainly, given enough time and the inevitable gravitational imperatives of harsh reality.

Only now the destruction of idealism happens almost instantaneously, and we can witness and record this, our own on-going creative-death-by-sophistication, in self-accelerating real time. �Self-accelerating�, in that even writing a sentence like that last one simply digs me deeper into the anti-creative abyss. And that one. And that one. Blah blah blah. Fisk fisk fisk. Yada-yada-yahweh.

God certainly knew what she was doing when she wrote the story about the Tower of Babel.

***

And yet.

We�ve now spent an awfully long time putting the Babel bricks back into place, and with Web-Google-English creeping its way towards some approximate facsimile of linguistic and informational universality, it�s probably time we started asking what the hell kind of hymn we intend singing next time we do get the monolingual chance. Will we use a six billion strong massed choir to fling a harmonious invitation across the galaxies, or just create even more sound and fury, signifying even more nothing?

Me, I vote for a formal cessation of Fisking Hostilities. We all know now that each of us cyber-Human Beings is smarter than the next guy and that each of us, provided we get the last word in, will be able to make a mockery of her next written post.

Let us thus pre-emptively propose a voluntary end to intellectual cyber-dispute and cyber-differentiation. Let�s agree that no writer in history has ever written an article or a story so good that it couldn�t be pulled to pieces by another writer sooner or later, usually a far less capable one.

Let�s agree that the internet revolution has stalled a bit; that as things stand, we�re all of us trapped in a mutual, cyclic purgatory-of-endless-deconstruction.

Maybe it�s the rotten intellectual fruits of the Boomers� premature storming of the artistic and intellectual heights, given that if you make your name, career and fortune by twenty years of age via the brattish act of tearing down every last concrete thing that strays within range of your iconoclastic word weapons, chances are you�ll never really learn either the value or the trick of creating something concrete from said-same words. (Their lifelong Celebrity has a lot to do with the deadness of the work of the top Boomer fiction writers, too.)

But whoever is to blame, what�s been missing from public debate � for decades – is the understanding that, if we all do insist upon a strictly adversarial, stand-off, tear-down approach to the interaction of our individual words, then the expressed totality of abstract Human majesty can only end up being less, not greater, than the sum of all our constituent contributions.

Mark Latham can fisk John Howard in Parliament. John Howard can fisk Mark Latham right back. But they changed the pollies Superannuation rules only by working as an interactive ensemble, making something bigger than the sum of their individual abstract contributions where it counts – in the concrete world (even if it was accidental, and even if I bet they�ll never do it again.)

Our pollies changed the world, and made it better, and for no other reason than that Mark Latham threw out a Bosler-esque crazy idea, John Howard felt moved to respond in kind � rather than sneer it down � and LO! Free. Human. Will. Controlled. Our. OWN. Human. Destiny. Not Yahweh. Not God. Not Allah.

So, Helen D, I thought what Rob wrote was terrific. I liked it. I loved it. I loved it so hard I�m writing in to help keep it believably alive. I want more, Rob. I want better. I want wackier. I want cleverer. I want big words, absurd ideas, pretentious rhetoric and unlimited, arrogant, Godly artistic vision. If we can�t attempt it in words, then we�ll never pull it off in real life.

I think that this Easter (or soon) we Humans need to crucify God and resurrect Art. We need to make ourselves dumb enough to be smart enough to seize the brilliant opportunity presented by the fertile temporary concatenation of global technology, Millennial angst, epistemological anarchy (a new cyber-cosmic soup, if you like), Luddite World power-political uncertainty (or vulnerability) and universal spiritual hunger, and finally figure out a way to transcend the triangulating neutralisation inherent in the Big Three religious narratives.

If we do insist on giving expression to our higher yearnings by way of a �One God� story, then let�s at least bodge one up in cyberspace that everyone can agree upon.

Norman Mailer once characterised the Big Three thus: Judaism�s defining strength is its rationality; Islam�s its egalitarianism; and Christianity�s its compassion. Sounds like a pretty hot Holy Cyber-Trinity for the Third Millennium to me, especially if you give it a pastel Green hue and deify nothing more apocalyptic than Good Mum Earth.

Call the Written Word�s new creative lever Konfucionism, say, and you�re giving a sly sequential nod both backwards to the J-writer and forwards to the inevitable, looming Project for the New Chinese Century.

Whatever.

In order to pull something like this off over the next fifty-odd years, we the six billion New New Gospellers, would have to start small, first of all by convincing ourselves � and our kids ad nauseum, since this religion thing always takes many generations to bed in � that we weren�t being supreme existential tossers by even imaging that a convincing and ever-lasting One God really can be bodged up out of nothing more miraculous than The Written Word.

It�s odd that writers would ever doubt this for a second, since �John-the-Apostle� actually makes it explicitly clear with that give-away quote what God really is � three little letters written by a single human hand � but human beings are nothing if not monumentally obtuse.

And, like Meeja Watch writers, we�d much rather believe in Grand & Inexplicable Human Mysteries – conspiracy, miracles, hidden agendas, the man on the grassy knoll � than the bleeding bloody obvious.

Which is:

In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with Allah, and Allah was Yahweh was God was The Word. Osama bin Laden is God. Adolph Hitler is God. Jack Robertson is God. All Muslims are terrorists. Microsoft, Nike, McDonald�s and Starbucks are solely to blame for every suicide-murder in Gaza. The West deserves to lose the �war on terror�, for we are greedy, arrogant and lacking true pious humility. They want to kill us because they hate our �values�. George Bush is the greatest President the United States has ever had. I admire John Howard for his strength, courage and political conviction.

Abcdefghij lmnopqrstuvwxyz.

The mundane Word on God is and always has been that Human hands can choose to arrange those 26 (or whatever) letters in all and any kombination we like, and as soon as someone clever enough writes the right computer program and cyber-links enough microprocessing power together, we will no doubt do just that.

And then what? When every single Written Word in all human history is down-loaded onto the internet, when ever single possible combination and permutation of letters has been electronically typed out in the ether by the Pentium monkeys, when all God�s possible Names have been printed, when you can Google up a strong, credible, authoritative set of �proofs� for every Human opinion or idea every argued thus far – The Holocaust did happen (208,000 sites and falling); The Holocaust Didn�t Happen (128,000 sites and climbing) � well, then what clever, cynical cyber-words will be left to throw at each other in tit-for-tat turn, my fellow cyber-motormouths? Blah blah blah? Counter-Blah? Counter-counter-blah? Counter-counter-counter-blah? He-said-she-said-he-said-she-said?

Me, I�d rather hear a dumb new creative story than a clever old destructive one any day.

So my advice is that we should all take the next few years� worth of cynical blog-debate �as read�; accept that every last writer in cyberspace is effectively already as clever, sharp, fast, wry, witty, educated, well-informed, eloquent and feisty as the total sum of all Human knowledge written down since the J-writer wrote; acknowledge that Judaism, Islam and Christianity are thus effectively exhausted as creative levers as a result; and set about collectively charging a single New Millennium �necessary fiction� with the kind of interesting creative power that the Torah, Bible and Koran have carried thus far.

We don�t even have to create the new fictional script(ure) ourselves. All we have to do is act it out in the real world, believe in it long and hard enough until it becomes just as true as the wholly-fictional �One God� in whom, in barely discernible but deadly ways, three different kinds of religious zealots all believe so absolutely, after several thousand years of practise, that they are prepared to kill each other in the concrete world to prove it.

Stuff �em. I say let the new Written Word of God go like this:

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS

to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.

HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.

Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

***

No reason why not, is there. They�re just Written Words, too. Probably once again bodged up by some clever chick with an elegant quill, quietly pretending she never existed.�Untold sorrow to MANkind�?

There�s your give-away right there, boys. Clever bitches.