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.
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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.