G’Day. Here’s a piece on the Labor leadership I never thought I’d write. I’m off for a couple of weeks to recharge, and have a think about where Webdiary might go to from here. As usual, your ideas would be greatly appreciated.

***

Political documents come and go, but there’s one set I’ve kept on my bookshelf at work for more than ten years, called Fightback!

Remember November 1991? The Coalition had dithered it’s way through seven years of opposition until John Hewson took it by the scruff of the neck and set it to work finding out what it believed in and why, and how it proposed to realise the vision.

Vision statements are meant to be passe these days, and Hewson’s tome is conventionally seen as the way NOT to do politics. But step back and take the long view, and that muscular, honest, rigorous document is the blueprint for just about everything the Coalition government has done since.

When the Coalition lost in 1983, it thought it would soon return to government. It sat back and waited for Labor to fail, and found, to its great discomfort, that it agreed with many things Labor did economically. It pulled together a bit of this and a bit of that election after election, a sweetener here, a rhetorical flourish there, and shunted the leadership between Peacock and Howard for years looking for a way back to office without effort. It failed. Fightback! ignited the Party and the 1993 loss – based on the lie by Paul Keating that could have tax cuts without a GST – galvanised many grassroots Liberals into committing energy into turning it round next time. It’s the energy born of a common vision, and it matters.

I thought Kim Beazley did a good job as opposition leader in the first term. He did the healing and kept the party unified. I wrote at the time that the second term was the one for a new vision. Labor needed to work out its mistakes in office, reenvision the Party’s alternative to the Coalition, in particular the role of government, and set the agenda in areas like water, education, health, the environment, Aboriginal affairs and accountability. It needed to find, through research, community consultation and vigorous debate, its core values and principles, its abiding beliefs, and adapt them for a changing world, as John Hewson did after 1990 and as Tony Blair did with his Third Way.

But it did not. It thought it would zoom back into office by opposing the GST Howard took to the 1998 election. It failed. Then it thought it would get back by opposing the GST and making itself a “small target”.

That lazy, arrogant stance saw Labor take decisions which destroyed principles many thought were at its core. It supported the private health insurance rebate despite saying, correctly, that it would destroy Medicare, the most popular policy for a generation.

And Simon Crean did something so dreadful I can hardly credit that Labor ever made him leader. Howard sold the GST as an integrated package, giving with one hand, taking with the other, to promote fairness between sectors. In return for the GST business got tax breaks, in particular the halving of the capital gains tax. But it also had to suffer a clampdown on the most widespread tax avoidance mechanism around, family trusts.

But after the Democrats did a deal to pass the GST shadow treasurer Crean, in a panic of relevance deprivation syndrome, rushed into Peter Costello’s office to do a deal on the business tax package. He agreed to support the business tax sweeteners in return for a mere promise by Costello to bring in legislation at a later date to fix the trust problem. As was obvious then, that legislation was later dumped due to political pressure from the Coalition’s core constituency. Crean and Beazley share the disgrace.

The ever smaller target also saw Labor rail against the redistribution of funds to wealthy private schools, then pass the legislation. By the time Howard had picked the vibe and spent his way back into contention for the 2001 poll, Labor was wide open to a Tampa type sting. When it came, it capitulated, and yet another core Labor principle – an insistence on the universality of human rights – was also gone.

Back in 1998, after Beazley’s first lost election, Mark Latham, incensed that his visionary education policy had been reduced to a couple of lines by Beazley’s office, retired to the backbench. He’s been doing the hard yards on policy and vision ever since. His latest book, ‘From the Suburbs: Building a nation from our neighbourhoods’ (Pluto Press) is a collection of his essays trying to reenvision Labor as the outsiders party, giving power to the powerless, and promoting bottom up democracy.

I’ve been a Latham fan for a while now, believing that his combination of mongrel, thick skin, and intellectual powerhouse was what Labor needed to regenerate, as Hewson regenerated the Liberals.

But now, I find myself believing something I never thought I would – that Kim Beazley should be given another go.

We live in dark, insecure times when international affairs dominate our lives and our fears. I believe the Australian people will not accept an untried player at this time. They like Kim Beazley, and respect his judgement on matters of defence and foreign policy. They would therefore be prepared to consider him next time around, but would not take the risk with Latham. Of the other contenders, Stephen Smith and Wayne Swan are small target machine men, and that’s bad news for Labor. Very bad news.

I hope Kim Beazley has learnt the lesson of his failures. He was badly advised, and he wrongly accepted that advice. He was on the right track with Knowledge Nation, but got freaked out by the supposed necessity of a balanced budget, an ideology being trashed as we speak by George Bush in the nation which founded that orthodoxy. Investment in our future can’t be reduced to short term numbers, as the Coalition proved when its decision to increase HECS for science and maths students saw many fewer students get educated in these vital fields for our future.

If we get Kim Beazley back, and he sets to work forcing his party to really look at itself, and produce a Fightback!, Labor will finally stop reacting to the Coalition agenda and produce an agenda of its own to argue for. Fightback! put Labor on the backfoot for more than a year, and destroyed the Prime Ministership of Bob Hawke. Keating was reduced to deceit and scaremongering to win the 1993 election, and was duly punished at the next one.

Labor’s performance since it lost office has been deeply damaging to Australia. It has failed to hold John Howard accountable for his failures, or his lies. It has left a vacuum where engaged, constructive policy debate should occur, leaving the field to polemicists who have reduced the national debate to vicious pointscoring and the politics of prejudice.

Kim Beazley may get the chance to prove that he really is a conviction politician. Australia needs that, desperately. The dominant neo-liberal ideology is dated, and has created terrible unintended consequences. are looking for a credible alternative that’s not about manipulation of their feelings, but based on Labor’s deeply held conviction that it can truly serve the public interest better than the Coalition.

John Hewson is a martyr to the Liberal Party, doing what had to be done while failing to reap the personal success from it. Kim Beazley too, might not reap the personal success of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work on a fresh new vision for Labor, but the service he would give to his party and the nation would be priceless.

 

Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies.daviesart

G’Day. Lots to think about this Easter.

Here is the speech I gave to the Sydney Institute on Wednesday night. The topic was “Where the left’s at”, but I’m still trying to process the war and its terrible aftermath, so it’s more about how the experience might change the discourse. Imre Salusinszky also gave a speech on the topic, which was about his view that the war debate proved that the intellectual left is defined by anti-Americanism.

I hope you can be with people you love this Easter.

***

Where the left’s at…

I guess some of you assume I’m here as a representative of the beleaguered left, taking up defensive position number 123 to ward off a rampaging member of the triumphalist right about to stick the boot in one more time.

Could we start again please?

The world, the allied and Iraqi troops, the Iraqi people, and all of us who watched it and read about this war have just been through a traumatic experience which will continue for a long time, perhaps for my lifetime.

That experience sounded, please God, the death knell for the traditional left-right dichotomy, which lost its utility a long time ago and now survives, it seems to me, as a convenient means by which commentators accuse each other of being disgusting, idiotic ideologues to the cheers of fans who stopped thinking because it got too hard. The labels are an excuse not to engage, to reassure adherents there is a certain truth, an instinctive escape from genuine conversation in an era of profound uncertainty.

I know a few people for whom expressing dissent by way of rallies and protest marches is a part of their lives. Without exception, their experience of the big weekend of protests before the war was one of awe – to a man and woman they said, in wonder, “I didn’t see anyone I know!” Humanity – all shapes, sizes, addresses, incomes, world view – cared enough to come together, in peace, to ask our leaders most sincerely if they could please find an alternative to war. Even if you supported the war, surely there was joy in seeing so many Australians, so many people around the world, having a say, trying to make a difference?

The war debate saw the traditional left split. The traditional conservatives split. The nationalists split. The realists, in general, were against a unilateral US war. No, that’s too simplistic. Australians, like peoples around the world were in many camps. No war in any circumstances. War only if the UN agreed that the weapons inspections could not disarm Iraq. Support for a US led war, but not Australia’s participation. In my case, opposition to a US war without prior disclosure of a just and democratic transition to peace by an genuine act of self determination by the Iraqi people and, ideally, a unanimous resolution of the Security Council to establish an independent state of Palestine as a top priority. BUT, if by whatever means and even if under no constraints the UN gave the green light, yes to Australia’s participation due to our reliance on the American alliance for our national security.

So the people who marched had many reasons, and represented many strands of political belief. Remember this letter to the Sydney Morning Herald way back in September last year?

“We put this conviction directly and unequivocally: it would constitute a failure of the duty of government to protect the integrity and ensure the security of this nation to commit any Australian forces in support of the US military offensive against Iraq without the backing of a specific United Nations Resolution.”

That letter was signed by former Labor Prime Ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, former Liberal opposition leader John Hewson, two former chiefs of the Australian Defence Force General Peter Gration and Admiral Alan Beaumont, former navy staff chief Admiral Michael Hudson and the head of the RSL Major-General Peter Phillips.

Let’s be honest here. In my view, the fundamental split was between those who thought a US invasion would make the world a safer place, and those who thought it would make it more dangerous. For each nation, the question of its national security within a changed world was paramount. And hovering over the debate was the desperately difficult fact that the world’s only superpower had decided that, on the basis of its national interest, it would decide which nation to invade, the circumstances in which to invade it, and how the invaded country would be shaped after regime change. It was that issue, more than any other, which saw a strange new alliance formed between France, Germany, Russia and China, and which saw “right wing” leader Jacques Chirac oppose the invasion and Labour leader, Tony Blair, give it his backing.

We do not know who is right and who is wrong. We will not know for many years. Most importantly, the question is not predetermined, merely requiring revelation in time. It will depend on how the world’s nations and the world’s peoples act and react from now on.

What we’ve just been through, for the first time in my lifetime, is the peoples and the nations of the world engaged in a tumultuous, deeply unsatisfactory debate about the world’s future through the prism of one nation.

Every sensible person knew as they watched those two planes crash into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 that the world changed irrevocably at that moment. Since then, we’ve watched the world unite, then divide bitterly and destructively as America launched a preemptive war without disclosure of its blueprint for peace and proved to the world, starkly, that might is right.

Now, the rules of the old security order have fallen over and with them, in my view, the supposed “inevitability” of world economic globalisation, which the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers also symbolised. So also, the globalisation of environment protection and human rights – which struggle to keep up with economic globalisation – are at grave risk.

As the UN as we know it – and thus the power of the forces of internationalisation of world governance – collapsed, what the world began debating so imperfectly were the greatest, deepest and most confronting questions of all. In many types of discourses, we began discussing the values and beliefs to which we – as individuals, nations, and collective custodians of this world, our home – subscribe, and the costs we are prepared to pay to meet the demands of those values and beliefs.

For me, a piece by novelist Walter Kirn in The New York Times, summed up my experience watching the war:

“Lately what the polls seem to be demonstrating is their own pathetic inadequacy in the face of events that cut deeper than the cranium – events that can be processed only in the soul. What’s your opinion of a soldier with a head wound staggering through a sandstorm at 3 a.m.? What’s your opinion of a missile blast that collapses eight stories of reinforced concrete on top of an unknown number of civilians who were either inside the building by accident or because they’d been herded into it at gunpoint? What’s your opinion of mass panic brought on by the noise of unrelenting artillery fire and a chronic shortage of clean water? What’s your opinion of nerve gas?

… Sorry, not playing. I’m turning in my card. What’s more, I’m turning off the polls. To keep tabs on what ‘we’ think before I know what I think, and perhaps to risk shaping my own thoughts in the process, whether out of some secret longing to fit in or an unconscious desire to stand out, strikes me as a form of spiritual cheating, of shirking my obligation before the cosmos to pass through this fire naked and alone, without checking to see who’s with me and who’s not and by what magnitude and over how many days.”

Hard choices, each one having a terrible cost. No referee. No consistency. No level playing field. Shifting arguments. Fake evidence. And the certainty of all thinking people, surely, that the stated rationales for the war were untrue, that there were deeper, more fundamental reasons in play, reasons which those who rule us believed could not be openly discussed because they were ashamed of them, or because they were too confronting for us to face, or because we might interrogate them and they might discover (or do they already know?) that the peoples of the world just don’t support them.

Then war. Scenes of horror, dismemberment, liberation, anarchy, joy, hope, unimaginable pain and loss, fear, hatred, hubris… Name your adjective – list them all through the prism of the experience of the people of Iraq, blessed and cursed with its abundance of oil, torn asunder by wars of empire over thousands of years. We stared at the human condition, blinkers removed.

And then – too quickly – many of us put the blinkers back on. The debates resumed as before, only more bitter, angrier, even more divisive.

But it can’t be, can it? It doesn’t matter what your walk of life, your wealth, your philosophical or political bent – an unsafe world where bombs or other mechanisms of random death can hit anyone, anywhere, anytime means we’re all in the same boat in a world rent with terror, aren’t we? We were all able to emphasise with the tragedy of the war and the fragility of hope for the Iraqi people, weren’t we? There MUST be common ground, mustn’t there?

What is the value of a human life? What is the responsibility of those who decide they will sacrifice some innocent lives for a larger purpose? What place does Australia have in the world and what place can it realistically aspire too? What values does Australia stand for? What compromises must Australia accept to those values to keep us as safe as possible?

Left and right. Black and white. Good and evil. All or nothing. These binaries are methods of escapism from the need to examine who we are and where our society is failing us with clear, honest eyes. The left-right debate in Australia reinforces prejudice on both sides, and is both an avoidance mechanism and a dangerous tool of fanatical political tribalism. It destroys. It is hopeless. It does not reflect the diversity and nuances of the views we hold, or the extent of our common ground. It does not facilitate constructive conversation. It is an admission of the failure of public debate to achieve anything of value for society.

I suggest those of us lucky enough to be paid to think about our nation and its values, and those interested in reading and participating in that discourse take a deep breath at this momentous moment in Australian and world history, and make the assumption that each of us is in good faith and has the best interests of Australians and Australia at heart.

Let’s then explore where we differ, and why. Let’s first focus on what our core beliefs are about the individual, our society and the role of government. Then let’s see what common ground we’ve got, both in our core beliefs and principles and in our assessment of the weaknesses in the way our society and our democracy are working. You know, it’s just possible that most of us will share more core beliefs and principles than not. Most of our disagreements may well be about the best means to fulfil our common principles, and on whether we are inherently pessimistic or optimistic about the human condition.

But pessimistic or optimistic, we must find the hope in this, and nurture it for all it’s worth.

So let’s do what we always promise we’ll do next time but never do when the time comes, and look at the history of this war from September 11, when fanatics invaded America and a group of Americans called neo-cons had the clear-eyed, bright-light, absolutist, fundamentalist vision ready to put in place in response.

And let’s look back on the wreckage of the rules now gone, and consider in hindsight what could have been done differently, and how, by all the players, to achieve a more satisfactory, less brutal, less uncertain result for all of us. If we all had our time again, what would we do differently, and what would we have liked our leaders to have done differently?

And when we’ve done that, let’s dream about what a new world order might look like, that we think gives the world a better chance to survive and to maximise human freedom, happiness and dignity.

I don’t know about you, but I feel humbled by this war. It brings into sharp relief the urgent work to be done in finding a useful mechanism by which the world tackles the world’s problems, the ones no country can tackle alone. Amid destruction of the rules must come renewal, and I’m trying to think, as many of us are, about what my role could be in that, in my little world, in my little country, as a citizen of the world committed to doing my best to leaving it in the best shape I can to the children of my relatives and friends.

I’ve got lots of thoughts – too many – jumbling around my head, competing with each other for attention. Maybe some people in the audience need what I do – a process – a means by which I can converse with other people of good faith, who care about our land, our people, our country, and our world, to settle on a few basic values, to be honest about the constraints individuals are under, in their individual circumstances, in giving them full rein, and to work across old political divides to find, encourage and support leaders who will help us all nurture our hope, and put the energy that gives to good purpose.

No-one has “the truth” any more. We all know it, in our hearts, though so many of us pretend not to, for fear of what that means, and the consequences that might follow for our careers if we dropped our pretence. And partly because of these left-right barriers, we can’t seem to get together and talk things through any more. And agree, politely, to disagree on some matters, and have the courage to agree, with relief, on others, and put our heads together to push those common ideals along.

When an old order falls, there is the chance to rebuild a better one. This is a time of vulnerability and fear. Thinkers can exacerbate those feelings, or facilitate honest conversation with each other to do our bit to rebuild community spirit and regenerate a shared value system.

The people in this country and this world need to trust, and need to hope. The left-right debate doesn’t engender either. Could we start again, please?

 

War cartoon by Courier Mail cartoonist Sean Leahy. Sean spoke at the Just Peace seminar in Brisbane. Republished with permission.

This war was – is – an incredibly challenging experience for media practitioners and and media consumers alike. For the first time, we and they had ready access to both sets of propaganda and the full spectrum of opinion on the war, its meaning, and its possible consequences from multiple sources with multiple angles of vision.

G’Day. This is a speech I gave on Tuesday night in Brisbane at a seminar on media coverage of the war organised by a group called Just Peace. To comment on my piece, media war coverage, your experience watching the war, or how you’d like the Sydney Morning Herald to adapt or change in the internet era, click on Repartee. I will moderate the feedback.

Newspaper and reader: the post-war relationship

This war was – is – an incredibly challenging experience for media practitioners and and media consumers alike. For the first time, we and they had ready access to both sets of propaganda and the full spectrum of opinion on the war, its meaning, and its possible consequences from multiple sources with multiple angles of vision. And this at a time when the old world order is tumbling and the world’s superpower begins to stamp a new one on us, with the threat that nations which dissent join its enemies, and those which agree are rewarded. And at a time when the tired old classification of political thought into left and right became utterly meaningless as highly unusual alliances took shape across politics and between nations.

As the rules and norms by which we have lived for a long time crash down around us, the world’s nations and peoples began debating the values and principles by which we wished to live and the costs we will accept to live by them. For Australians, the debate was complicated by the fact that our leader avoided it and our opposition has no idea what it believes in.

For the first time in my lifetime people in just about every country in the world began debating one topic – the world’s future, through the prism of one country – Iraq. We learnt much about history and its consequences, and the perspective of other cultures. We participated directly in decisions usually made by grey men behind closed doors, and saw that they lied as a matter of routine. And we influenced events profoundly. I do not believe that the UN Security Council would have dared turn America down without those massive protests all over the world from people who said categorically that wars of aggression meant failure, not solution, and promoted danger, not safety.

Many people, pro and anti war, didn’t watch the war or read about it. Of those who did, many regretted the experience, for it confronted them to their core, while others pondered whether engagement was, in the end, meaningless. Said Webdiarist Hugh Driver:

“I just wonder whether scouring the net, posting rants, sending e-mails, etc etc isn’t just an intellectual exercise that, at the end of the day, counts for very little outside the very, very small circles of consequence that we operate in. Is it just another form of entertainment for modern media junkies?”

Susan Metcalfe, similarly overwhelmed, replied:

“I can’t turn away but I’m not sure where to look or how to process the massive amounts of information being produced on the subject … in truth what is happening is so painfully human, in the worst possible way.”

“Howard will only do what plays well for him, he will do what wedges us from our own feelings and offer us a paternalism that has worked so well for him in the past. Our decisions are again made for us by a parental figure and we are again powerless. He does it well. Most of us fall into line without too much fuss, and who’s got time to fight all the hard battles anyway?”

Yet there was blinding clarity, too. Ned Roche wrote:

“I am not a Lefty or Right-winger. I completed a major in Politics at UNSW and qualified for Honours, but couldn’t bear the thought of another year at University. I am a 26 year old single gay male, I live in a small country town running a pub, and I realise that community is important. I have a view on the war, but that is far less important than realising that my (Iraqi) brothers and sisters with whom I share the same human experience need my help, and it is as easy as donating money.”

I cling to the belief that the more information we can access, and that our readers can access, the greater the chance of the world’s peoples making informed wise choices, and that from the ruins of the rules of the old world order, a worldwide discussion of the values and principles upon which we wish to base our construction of new rules on can deliver a better future for the world.

The media is no longer the gatekeeper of information. As we, the media, judge what is news and which views to publish, our readers are in a position to judge us. The internet has levelled the playing field between newspaper and reader. Our readers, if they so chose, can get the information they want when they want it and link to like-minded people around the world. Some of those who don’t wish to, or can’t, do this, will expect us to exercise judgement on their behalf, and they will want to know by what values and principles we do that. Some – and this is the competing demand which will arise in a fractured, uncertain world – will want us to stroke their prejudices and rebuild their certainties with dishonest, black and white news and views and escapism.

I don’t know how the media will develop from here. We face not only new and confusing circumstances and a transformation of our traditional role, but the emerging world-wide hegemony of Rupert Murdoch, who runs an empire which, as the war coverage showed, is willing and able to use its media as a deliberate instrument of his business interests. It is also willing to abandon a core belief of the industry in democracies – the right to free speech – to threaten and attempt to silence those who disagree with the line his empire takes on world and domestic issues.

I believe media practitioners who believe that the media has a vital role in protecting and enhancing our democracy must now dig deep to reexamine the core values and beliefs of our media outlet which we will strive to serve. We must state those core values and beliefs publicly, make ourselves accountable to our readers for fulfilling them, and be very open to their participation and critique.

Since there are now no certainties, I’d like to see us wind back the mutual provocation which passes for much comment these days, and move towards a genuine exploration of what core values and principles most of us can agree on and genuine engagement on how best to put those values and principles into practice. This could mean experimenting with form. For example, the Sydney Morning Herald could ask two experts with differing views on an issue to collaborate on a piece which debates the matter internally and draws out the common ground and the points of disagreement.

I’d also like to see us interrogate our conception of “news judgement” and admit that the dominant conflict-driven, top-down view requires a radical overhaul. At a time of transition, it becomes important to report process as well as final decisions and to give public figures the freedom to change their mind without catastrophe, and to float new ideas without insisting on detailed costings or making the loose ends the story before debate can begin. I’m looking for openness, not closure; facilitation of debate, not instant judgement upon each contribution. I’m looking for a media which will reach out, not circle the wagons, a media which will search for common ground, not escalate political tribalism.

I believe that at this momentous moment in our history, what each of us stands for in each of our our spaces on each of our stages will influence the shape of the future. The temptation is enormous to escape into fantasy, or close our eyes and pretend nothing has changed. That too, of course, is doing something.

Webdiary columnist Harry Heidelberg, an Australian who lives in Europe, works for a US multinational corporation, and supported the war, spelt out the challenges for the active reader in the new, internet era, a challenge which also confronts our media:

“The information in this war is breathtaking in its openness. We have the American view, the Iraqi view, the Al Jazeera view and several things in between which verge on independence. As usual, people will pick and choose but it is a rich smorgasbord of information.

“That’s the joy of a free society. You see it all. It also makes it hard. We are challenged to figure it out for ourselves…If there is anything to celebrate in all this crap and misery, it’s that we have full access to the smorgasbord and have every bit of the spectrum analysed. That makes us fortunate indeed.

“When you see all the spectrum at once……what do you see…….yes……that’s bloody right……you see white light. The prisms create rainbows and they are actually beautiful. Looked at as a whole as white light or split through the prisms into rainbows, the light of information enriches us all.

Get mad, get passionate, but never, ever try to shut off light or extinguish candles. We need every aspect of this debate fully lit.”

This is a day when you dare to hope, and fear hope will be dashed. Although the war is not over, it is a day when healing could begin and hearts could open. Yet energy is drained at a time when the important, patient, constructive, long term work must begin.

I’ve received emails of hope, triumphalism, abuse, threats, bitterness, argument, advice – you name it. The war on Iraq is bloody for the combatants and the innocents, bruising for those who watch, worry, wonder, can’t sleep, weep, despair, and dig to the core of what they believe in, and why. Millions of people around the world in almost every country in the world have experienced an intensity of feeling, energy and debate on one subject – our common future – through the prism of one nation, Iraq.

I hope that the world’s scrutiny will bring out the very best in America. Only America at its most noble can achieve the result the world needs out of this nightmare. Peace with dignity.

Webdiarist John Nicolay said to me today that the scenes in Baghdad yesterday were “a marvellous affirmation of liberal values – and of the belief that, ultimately, it’s not possible to crush the human spirit entirely.” I think that test is about to begin. It will be a long, long road, with no certainty of victory. So let all of us who believe in liberal values – pro-war, anti-war, ambivalent, keep Australia out of it, only with the UN – shake hands and do our best to make John’s wish come true.

David Jones writes: Just maybe? I have been sickened and saddened by the war in Iraq. The pictures today of Iraqis rejoicing in the streets cheering their US liberators gives me cause to question my stand on the high moral ground. Who am I to pass judgement on any of this? To walk a mile in the shoes of the war victims or the victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime is not one I would want to undertake, nor one I will likely ever understand.

I’m off tomorrow. Back Monday.

(For a wild read on an alleged underground battle in Baghdad, see Israeli military site debka)

At 12.35 this morning, a marine place the United States flag over the head of Saddam’s statue in central Baghdad. An Iraqi man climbed onto a US tank and waved the old Iraqi flag. People threw flowers at him. An American marine climbed up the statue and replaced the US flag with an old Iraqi flag, not over Saddam’s head, but hung from his neck.

After removing it, an American tank pulled Saddam down by chain. He didn’t topple, he bent, hanging down from the pedestal. Finally, he split apart, his head and torso on the ground, his feet still firmly planted on the pedestal.

Memories of Umm Qasr, when the American thought, wrongly, they had taken the port town very early in this war, and a marine planted the American flag aloft before being told to take it down.

The world knew the war would be won. The world is split asunder on whether the American came to conquer, or to liberate, on whether the war on Iraq will enhance or worsen world peace, on whether a war of civilisations has begun, or is closer to ending, on whether the West will reunite or has split for the long term.

The American and Iraqi people stand face to face, soaked in blood, after decades of bloody proxy plays, uniting in a moment of joy at Saddam’s defeat.

The world will now learn, perhaps over years, not months, how the American and the Iraqi people deal with each other after this moment passes. How the two nations and their peoples negotiate the peace. How the Iraqis, now certain that Saddam is gone, will react to an American occupation. Whether America will replace a man it once called “our bastard” with someone chosen by the people, or by it. Whether it will allow the Iraqi people to decide whether to allow a permanent American base on its soil, or demand a settlement on its terms and pretend that’s the will of the people. Whether it will insist that its companies profit from the peace or allow the Iraqi people to decide where and how its oil wealth will be spent. Whether Iraq is ungovernable and will tear itself apart, or will survive intact.

Hold your breath. Pray food and water are delivered quickly and efficiently. Hope against hope the violent deaths end soon.

 

Monday’s front page of the Daily Telegraph.

People who remain to be convinced that cross-media laws are important to maintaining the fabric of our democracy need look no further than today’s page one ofThe Daily Telegraph.

KILLING ROOM – Coalition forces reveal Saddam’s torture terror” it screamed. The first lines: “The depraved brutality of Saddam’s regime was revealed to the world yesterday in a series of horrific discoveries. As US forces intensified the battle for Baghdad last night, British allies uncovered an enormous charnel house containing the remains of hundreds of Saddam’s torture victims.” ( See Killing Room and Coffin rows expose an unspeakable evil).

I saw the vision of the find on TV last night, and noted the British officers remark that it was unclear what the building and its rows of simple coffins was all about. However, the remains were old, he said, and he showed documents and photographs also found on site, which did not scream out torture chamber but rather respect for the dead.

So where did The Daily Telegraph get its scoop information, and why was it so confident of the truth of its story? Who knows, but CNN reported today:

U.S. military: Remains from Iran-Iraq war

Sunday, April 6, 2003 Posted: 11:41 AM EDT (1541 GMT)

SOUTHERN IRAQ (CNN) — More than 400 sets of human remains discovered in a barracks outside of Basra are of soldiers killed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the leader of a U.S. military team that examined them said Sunday.

Forensics experts sent to southern Iraq to analyze the makeshift coffins and plastic bags in which the human body parts were found said all the injuries appeared consistent with combat, contrary to initial reports from an Iranian news agency some showed signs of torture.

CWO Dan Walters with the U.S Army told reporters the bodies were mostly those of Iraqi fighters, and appeared to be a staging point for the exchange of such remains between Iraq and Iran. British soldiers with the Third Regiment of the Royal Artillery made the gruesome discovery in an abandoned warehouse.

“Some had tatters of uniforms hidden amongst the human remains,” said U.S. Central Command Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks during a briefing Sunday. Some of the soldiers said the makeshift wooden, open-face coffins were stacked deep in the warehouse and belonged to the 51st Division headquarters of the Iraqi regular army.

The bodies were located over the recent months in joint recovery operations along the Iran-Iraq border, Iranian Army Gen. Mirfeisal Baqerzadeh, head of the search and recovery committee for those missing in action, told the Iranian newspaper Jomhouri-E Eslami.

The newspaper quoted Baqerzadeh saying Iran and Iraq scrapped the search and recovery operations for the missing in action on the Iraqi territory 15 days before the war started.

The remains were found in plastic bags and makeshift coffins

“We eagerly ask the International Committee of the Red Cross to carry out its obligations and immediately take delivery of the bodies from the U.S.-British troops, and return them to Iran in Shalamcheh border point with Iraq,” the Iranian newspaper quoted Baqerzadeh.

British soldiers at the scene said a neighboring building contained photographs of the dead, most of whom had died from gunshot wounds to the head.

 

Webdiarist Peter Fulham sent me this report from the New York Times, which begins:

ZUBAYR, Iraq — A poignant bit of unfinished history caught up with the current campaign against Saddam Hussein yesterday, as U.S. and British officials combed through a makeshift morgue for Iraqi and Iranian soldiers killed in the 1980s in a war most Iraqis are too young to remember.

The 664 thin wooden coffins at the morgue, containing the remains of 408 men, were stacked in neat rows, some five coffins high in a warehouse in what the officials called a former Iraqi artillery complex. Plastic bags in the coffins contained all that remained of each young soldier — an identity tag, a wallet, a piece of uniform, pictures of loved ones and occasionally some money.

Investigators from the U.S. 75th Exploitation Task Force arrived here yesterday from northern Kuwait. The task force, charged with documenting war crimes, had come to investigate what initial descriptions of the site suggested was a center for torture and execution.

But in just a few hours, Chief Warrant Officer Dan Walters, the leader of the task force’s Criminal Investigation Division unit, said a preliminary examination of the remains and some of the thousands of pages of documents that were abandoned in a building next to the warehouse suggested that atrocities had probably not occurred here. Rather, he said, Iraqis had apparently been processing the remains and preparing to exchange them with Iran.

“Their wounds were consistent with combat deaths, not executions,” said Walters. “So far,” he added, “there are no indications that war crimes were committed here.” …

I can hardly wait for the correction tomorrow. It’s not as if standard journalism wouldn’t have discovered a lack of certainty. The Herald reported today:

“MASS GRAVE DISPUTE: Iran said the remains of as many as 200 people found near Basra were Iranian soldiers killed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and demanded their immediate repatriation, a newspaper reported yesterday. But Iraq has said the bodies, discovered on Saturday by British soldiers in a military complex, were Iraqis killed in the conflict and recently returned by Iran. But the head of Iran’s Committee for Searching for the Missing in Action, Brigadier-General Mireysal Baqerzadeh, was quoted in Jomhuri-ye Eslami saying the corpses were unearthed in recent months by joint Iran-Iraq search teams.”

Rupert Murdoch’s vast newspaper empire has waged a relentless pro-war propaganda war before and since the war began without even the pretence, in many cases, that even the facade of journalism – a genuine attempt to get the facts in the time available and to present what is known at the time of going to press, appropriately attributed – is being preserved. It just so happens that Murdoch wants US government approval to take over DirecTV and further extend his grip on pay TV.

Just last week Mr Murdoch, who said before the war that it would be good for the economy (Murdoch: Cheap oil the prize and Murdoch’s war: 175 generals on song) urged America to get it over with quickly. Note that he aligns himself explicitly with American interests, as an American citizen. This could explain why editorially the Murdoch papers here have made little or no mention of what Australia’s distinct interests might be in this war.

Murdoch: Iraqis Will Welcome U.S. Troops

By GARY GENTILE

The Associated Press

Thursday, April 3, 2003; 12:07 AM

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch said Wednesday Americans have an inferiority complex about the world’s opinion and that Iraqis eventually will welcome U.S. troops as liberators.

“We worry about what people think about us too much in this country. We have an inferiority complex, it seems,” Murdoch said at the Milken Institute Global Conference. “I think what’s important is that the world respects us, much more important than they love us.”

The head of News Corp. said a long war could heavily influence the U.S. and global economies while creating political instability in the Middle East and elsewhere. And he suggested a decisive U.S. effort for a quick end to the war would be better than a protracted battle.

“There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better we get it done now than spread it over months,” he said.

Murdoch also warned that the world should be prepared for more terrorist attacks. “It’s very possible to see freelance suicide attempts both here and in London, and that would psychologically shake this country up,” he said.

Many Murdoch outlets’ commitment to free speech is non-existent. I quote from crikey.com.au’s sealed section of April 4: “Speaking of Fox, their most feral presenter Bill O’Reilly this morning had two legal experts on to discuss whether Peter Arnett should be charged with treason. They all agreed he could and should be. There goes Rupert again, profitably spewing out some of the most disgraceful journalism the world has seen and then trashing free speech when it suits him.”

Now that Australia’s identity under John Howard seems to be dissolving into a subset of America’s identity, it would be nice to maintain some semblance of a diverse Australian oriented, Australian owned, media in this country.

But don’t expect the government to care about silly little issues like that. It’s already negotiating a ‘free trade’ agreement with the USA, which demands an end to foreign ownership restrictions on media, Qantas, Telstra and Woodside, as well as an end to laws trying to preserve our cultural identity. Australian nationalism? Not for much longer, if John Howard gets his way.

Poor old Australia – the USA doesn’t need to invade us to take us over. We’re inviting them in. Oh, and crossing our fingers that as a defacto state of America (minus the right to vote) the Americans will sympathetically consider helping us out if our security is threatened.

 

Hate of an omen. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

G’Day. My motto from now on in covering the war in Webdiary is inspired by Harry Heidelberg. He wrote in Protecting the joys of a free society:

“At either end of the spectrum, by definition, you have extremes. At one end you have the “this is liberation” camp, at the other end you have the “demon, imperial America” camp. The truth lies somewhere in between.”

What that truth is is yet to be revealed. And all the world’s peoples can help determine what it is.

To end another long week of war, pieces from readers responding to Bring home the troops and the resulting debate in Reaction to ‘Bring our troops home’ and ‘Protecting the joys of a free society’. Contributors areNed Roche, John Berg, Peter Air, Ernie Graham and Shawn Kopel – all on debut, Brian Bahnisch, David Makinson, Clem Colman, Peter Funnell, Luke Callaghan, Susan Metcalfe, John Wojdylo andJustin Bell.

In this week’s Time magazine essay, Joe Klein wrote: “War is a force of primal disorder; we are a society afflicted by the illusion of orderliness”. This war confronts all of us, and the contributors I’ve chosen are people I feel are genuinely engaging with the disorder. Thank you to all the readers who wrote privately to support my work in the wake of this week’s attacks, especially the bloke from Maryborough, my home town. Your kind words were much appreciated.

The volume of emails to Webdiary is now such that the current Webdiary format can’t cope, given that Webdiary is a one woman operation. We’re looking at ways to update the processing. In the meantime, my apologies to all those who haven’t got a run.

To begin, the ten most read Webdiaries in March:

1. A think tank war: Why old Europe says no, March 7

2. Australia: The war within, March 18

3. Do you believe John Howard? March 16

4. Russian war report, March 26

5. Howard: repeat the line, answer no questions, March 13

6. Frontline report: What’s gone wrong, and who’s to blame, March 31

7. Russia’s war state of play, March 25

8. In Howard we trust, but why? March 26

9. This war is illegal: Howard’s last top law man, March 21

10. Denial virus alert: It’s alarming, March 28

The top five referring websites, apart from news.google, were whatreallyhappened, rense, dailyrotten, buzzflash and timblairblogspot.

***

Recommendations

Han Yang in Turramurra, Sydney: I recommend Arundhati Roy’s piece Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates, one of the best I’ve ever read.” Many other readers also recommend this piece.

For the strategy to take Baghdad, Scott Burchill recommends Baghdad: Surround and squeeze? on the BBC site.

John Bennett recommends Robert Fisk’s The monster of Baghdad is now the hero of Arabia.

Anuradha Moulee recommends The message coming from our families in Baghdad: You have failed to learn the lessons of your last occupation of Iraq by Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi-born novelist and painter who is a former political prisoner of the Ba’ath regime

Tim Gillin: Ronald Reagan’s former ambassador to Iraq calls the war a ‘terrible, bloody miscalculation’: orangecountyregister

Amiel Rosario: Here’s some elegant and superb writing on the war in Iraq by Anthony Shadid for The Washington Post: washingtonpost

David Makinson: I think this one, from Hong Kong’s Asia Times, deserves publication in Webdiary. I know you’re wanting to “reach out”, but really – read it and weep. Cluster bombs liberate Iraqi children in the Asia Times.

John de Lange recommends Coalition faked it, says UN, on the discredited US claims that Iraq had revived its nuclear program.

***

Ned Roche

I have started reading your Webdiary over the last few days. I am not a Lefty or Right-winger. I completed a major in Politics at UNSW and qualified for Honours, but couldn’t bear the thought of another year at University. I am a 26 year old single gay male, I live in a small country town running a pub, and I realise that community is important.

The Bali bombing changed my life. Instead of just thinking about what had happened I called the Red Cross on the Monday morning and donated money, more than I would ever thought that I would donate to charity.

A lot of people are saying that they care about the people of Iraq. If you care about people, and watch the television, and realise how much the Iraqi people have suffered over a long time, then it’s not much of a leap to call the Red Cross, ask how you can donate money towards the aid effort for the Iraqi people and send a cheque.

I have a view on the war, but that is far less important than realising that my brothers and sisters with whom I share the same human experience need my help, and it is as easy as donating money.

I hope that you believe that this is an important enough message to publish.

***

After ‘Bring the troops’ home, John Berg protested in an email I didn’t publish at the time. Here is his email, and our exchange. More hope for all of us!

***

John Berg in the USA

So – what would you call a terrorist? Someone who holds a gun to the back of a mother or child and forces them to act as a shield? Someone who shoots their own people in the back? Someone who voluntarily cuts off the water supply to an entire city? Someone who hangs or cuts the throats of anyone who voices dissent over their ruler?

Of course admitting to any of the above would seriously damage the logic of the rest of your argument – actually, it probably wouldn’t since there is so little logic. At least so little informed logic. Send back your degree, honey – it’s seriously failing you.

I replied:

I’m finding the war almost impossible to process – the choices are so awful and the circumstances our troops are in so nightmarish. The Webdiary is a conversation really – it seeks to acknowledge that opinions aren’t final and immediate, and need to be teased out through debate.

I won’t say I enjoyed your email – I didn’t – but I did find it rigorous and very challenging. Hope you contribute again one day.

John replied:

Thank you for taking the time to post my reply to you – and for your tempered response. My apologies for my personal comments to you in my previous e-mail. If I may – a quick reaction to your latest to me –

“I’m finding the war almost impossible to process – the choices are so awful and the circumstances our troops are in so nightmarish.”

I can understand your emotions and appreciate your expressing them. It seems that these are the times we are in – over that we have no choice. But what is in our control is what we do with these times. I can respect and understand (though not necessarily agree with) those who argued for a delay in this war, those who wanted to give the UN one more chance, those who felt that peaceful methods were worth one more try. But since the war was joined by the coalition, here’s what we have learned:

– Saddam ruled created a terrifying, devastating police state

– He ruled his people through fear

– He has proven willing to place innocent people in harm’s way, even use them as shields

– He has shown no compunction to starving, neglecting, punishing and killing his people and each day he continues his rule, more innocent people die

– He would use tactics such as holding families hostage in order to recruit men into his armies

– He has made a mockery of the Islam religion by using mosques as armed camps

– He was harbouring al Qaeda and other terrorists

– He was not willing under any circumstance to disarm, even when faced with his ultimate demise

While the USA has a great many problems which are open for excellent and engaged debate, this country does not come close to comparing to the atrocities committed by Saddam’s Iraq. And the ideals we fight for – freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness stand in contrast to what Saddam stands for.

The justifications for this war become stronger with each passing day and the differences become starker and starker. Perhaps this might help you process this nightmarish situation.

***

Peter Air

I hope you weathered the blasts that ‘Bring our troops home’ generated. I did not see any new arguments in any of the responses that you printed.

When we started this thing we believed that the Iraqi regime was repressive and hated by the majority of the Iraqi people. As such, we expected that the Iraqi’s would welcome the Coalition troops, and support coalition efforts to oust Saddam.

That has not happened. Maybe it is too soon to expect the Iraqi’s to have re-oriented their thinking, maybe the Ba’ath party is still sufficiently dominant to repress such reactions. But there is also a possibility that we were mistaken about the wishes of the Iraqi people. If so, then this is a strong point towards pulling out.

The major issue, though, is the potential outcome. I wish some omnipotence would provide us with a guarantee that it would work out one way or the other – then it would be easy to know what to do. If we “win” this war, only to find that we can hold the territory only through constant repression, then we erred in getting involved in the first place.

The reality is that the outcome will depend a great deal on how things are managed, both by field commanders and by the actual troops on the ground. We are close to creating an unending hatred for the West, in Iraq and related Arab and Islamic peoples.

Terrorism springs out of hatred, demoralisation and polarisation. And this is the key point that many of your respondents missed. If we can only prosecute the war in a manner which creates hatred and demoralization in the majority of the Iraqi (and Arab/Islamic) people, then we must stop, and stop right now. For that could create a much larger evil than Saddam ever was.

This does not mean that we support Saddam, or his regime. It should be possible to find another way to deal with him.

***

Ernie Graham

Firstly let me say as an Australian returned serviceman of 72 years of age I find your personal attitude to the invasion of Iraq both intelligent and truthful. Your Webdiary has relieved me from the frustration of blatant television deception and the worst kind of confusing propaganda.

The people who defend this war reply to you with bitter sarcasm and duplicity. Me thinks they protesteth too much. These are after all, the people who happily absorb the lies, damn lies and Howardisms, euphemistically calling the latter good politics. One could continue by referring to the multitude of childish mistakes these misled people argue but I shall leave that to the more articulate of the decent Australians who also support your Diary. Remain forthright and even-handed Margo in the sure knowledge that right is on your side.

I respect and salute those special few telling words of Robert Byrd, the wise man of the U.S. Senate about this war of choice (Today, I Weep for my Country…). Because Margo, I too weep for my country.

***

Shawn Kopel

Regarding Harry Heidelberg’s piece, of course one is seduced by the Playstation 2 appeal of television coverage of the war, but that does not mean that all of one’s concerns are reduced to the impotence of voyeurism. It’s as simplistic to argue that the nett result of the activities of the anti-war groups amounted to a failure, as it is to allege that the American war is a success. Call me naive, but I’m confident that the public and demonstrable concerns of people like me, all over the world, have had an effect on not just the way the war is publicised, but also on the way that the war is prosecuted. Along the way, some lives have been saved, some morality has been applied, some suffering reduced, some of the reins of the politicians have been scrutinised and some motives have been questioned.

All that is very worthwhile.

What is disturbing, however, is the self doubt that contributors like Harry are expressing. The fact that one’s views do not prevail in preventing an outcome designed by mad politicians, does not mean that they are worthless, or of diminished value. Far from it. The efforts that result in suffering being avoided, or in a single life being saved, are of such magnitude that they are immeasurable. “He who saves a single life, saves the world.” Never forget that, Harry.

***

Brian Bahnisch in Brisbane

It is easy to feel humble when you have contributors who write with the facility of Harry Heidelberg (Protecting the Joys of a Free Society). Nevertheless one statement particularly troubled me: “I also add that I do not view every aspect of every problem through the Vietnam prism. The baby boomers always do this.”

The first sentence is fair enough. The second sentence is surely an outrageous generalisation. Are you really saying, Harry, that every single baby boomer, on every occasion on every aspect of every problem sees it through the Vietnam prism? I’m older than the baby boomers and I have never met or heard of one who saw things remotely like that, nor do I think I ever would.

I think you may be saying that if we have had a traumatic experience we tend to be residually obsessed with it and it colours our view of reality. Fair enough, but I know lots of baby boomers who weren’t traumatised to that extent by Vietnam, and in fact know none that were.

I hope you are not saying that previous generations are excessively obsessed with Vietnam and it is time to rule a line and move on. Now I am putting words into your mouth, which is presumptuous, but what did you mean?

I wouldn’t bother about this except that I believe a great wrong was perpetrated in Vietnam, as well as in Laos and Cambodia. I’m not comfortable with the notion that we can walk away from those events as part of the receding past. We should find out first what the countries concerned, and the rest of the colonised world think about it.

In 1999 Chomsky said: “We’re not talking about ancient history. The Lao government estimate about 20,000 casualties a year, of whom more than half die. Whether that number is right or wrong, nobody knows.”(Propaganda and the Public Mind, p63) That of course was from the saturation bombing of the Plain of Jars. I hope some-one has since shown some interest and has is doing something about it, but I would not bet on it.

There is no doubt in my mind that the events of Indo China all those decades ago still affect our moral authority to mount military expeditions whereever we think the world needs setting to rights.

***

David Makinson

Much as I understand and support nearly all of your motivations in ‘Bring our troops home’, I just don’t see how we could possibly bring the troops home at this point. We have been painted into an appalling corner, and now that we are in this thing, I think we are stuck in it for the duration. A withdrawal now would only bring even further damage to Australia. Having already made unnecessary enemies of the Muslim world, a withdrawal would probably destroy our alliance with the US, and the Iraqi regime would trumpet its triumph to the heavens.

Tragically, the troops have to stay, and the coalition has to win. We have got to the point where the alternatives are even more tragic. In any event, John Howard abrogated any choice in this matter long ago. The only way we we can withdraw is if the US withdraws. I can’t envisage that this would ever happen. (But wouldn’t it be good to see the last crumbs of John Howard’s credibility shot to even smaller pieces? The awful and simple truth that we are in or out if the US is in or out – and for no other reason – would come into stark relief. All the lying “justifications” would just fall apart!)

What we must do for our troops is keep protesting. Any way we can. That way we’ll maybe get them home sooner, and hopefully avoid them being sent off on Washington’s next act of piracy. We also need to maintain the detailed scrutiny and public assessment of the political and military actions of the coalition of the k/willing. This won’t stop the war, but it will help to save innocent lives. Were it not for the fact that they know we are watching, God alone knows what the Bush-Rumsfeld Gang would have sanctioned by now.

Because of this, I believe you are doing fantastic and important work with Webdiary, and you are entitled to ignore the jibes of those who seized so gleefully on what was very obviously a simple mistake of expression. These people are clearly desperate. Lacking a real argument, they invent red herrings. Too many of these people still seem to think this whole sorry mess is an excuse to score cheap debating points.

Have they seen the pictures of the boy with the shredded head? Let them debate that.

***

Clem Colman

It seems many people had a “spit” over your article. Frankly, I think when an issue runs this high on people’s emotions everyone gets the right to have a spit every now and then.

The issue of the use of nukes in Vietnam (which the US didn’t), or whether Agent Orange is a WMD aside, there is still some important points that you made (more important than either of these) and most people missed them.

Many of us who disagree with this war don’t disagree because we are worried about the difficulty of the task (militarily), or even the potential civilian casualties in Iraq (as tragic as they are). We even hope that a free Iraq may one day grow back into the modern first world nation it was before 1991, with hope for secular benevolent government and moderate Islam.

We disagree with the war because of the precedent it sets. We worry because we think this “conflict” may be the tip of the iceberg. Already the US has begun the rhetoric against Iran and Syria. We worry because we wonder how the grizzly pictures of civilian deaths on al Jazeera are going to draw out moderate Islam and marginalise Fundamentalism. We worry because we think it will actually have the opposite affect.

We worry because after our victory we (the Coalition) will need to occupy a nation that will not be grateful for their “liberation”. We worry that our force of occupation, although always more humane, will probably come to be regarded as badly as Saddam by the people of Iraq. We worry because this will lead to terrorism against our troops, and us in our home countries.

We worry because we have been lead to war by a group of men who are responsible for the strategy that Ariel Sharon is currently using to affect “peace” in the occupied territories. It can scarcely be said that that peace plan is working out well.

We worry that 20 years of painstaking engagement with our asian neighbours, which whilst often robust and difficult, was normally progressive and resulted in genuine goodwill, was undone in an instant as our PM jumped up and said ‘me too’ to the doctrine of preemptive attacks.

We wonder what this war in Iraq has to do with the Bali bombings when the Indonesian authorities hold those responsible in jail. When the next Terrorist attack strikes us from Indonesia we worry that the Indonesian Police will not be so fussed about tracking down the offenders.

We know it wouldn’t be easy to bring the troops home at this stage. As much as it is now irrelevant, we still wonder what the hell they are doing there in the first place.

We worry that those advocating this peace through superior force have drastically overestimated its effectiveness (as evidenced in Iraq where the intelligence failure has been spectacular) and also drastically underestimated the resentment that the use of such force builds in those we use it on (also evidenced in Iraq).

But mostly, we worry that we are putting our trust in a group of frightened control freaks who actually believe that they can control everything and that this will somehow keep us safe as well as advancing their other interests (whatever they may be). We worry about that one a lot.

***

Peter Funnell in Farrer, ACT

I read ‘Bring our troops home’ and I’m damned if I can see what the fuss is about. I didn’t think you meant the US used nuclear weapons in Vietnam, but they did use chemical (agent orange and napalm). Just a little imprecise by your standards. I just thought you were pretty distressed by what was happening. I happened to agree. Stop flailing yourself over this one, there are more important things to be saying in Webdiary and about this war.

One thing I must say is this – this war is generally going to plan and at great speed. If you leave every other human consideration aside, this is a remarkably successful military campaign. The US is getting better at this business.

But our country (and the US and UK) have no appetite for pain and sacrifice – for any kind of cause. For those we now wage war against, it is part of everyday life. We are weak and self obsessed. They are scornful of our selfishness, self indulgence and lack of human understanding.

Our expectations of how long a war should last are more akin to the number of episodes in a television drama. It’s as though we are in some crazy, technology-inspired time warp when we speak of this war. War and soldiering is basic, earthy, unattractive, costly (in every sense of the word) and totally unpredictable. That it generates acts of great personal courage and self sacrifice is one of the great mysteries of life to me. It also brings out the absolute worst in everything. It is so vulnerable to itself, as the protagonists abandon every vestige of civility and concern for other human beings, particularly the enemy, and often their own citizens.

The net has bridged the cultural divides and short circuited the media and spin. It is a hot medium and everyone has a voice. I have never met you, nor you me and we have no other knowledge of each other to cloud our judgement or prejudice of feelings. When we speak on the www, we are removed from observation and peer pressure or social restrictions. Everyone has a view and they don’t hold back. That’s my experience. Like any medium it can be exploited, but it can’t be censored or stopped – well, not yet.

The real “war” is about what will follow the current conventional campaign. There is no “plan” for that mate, and it’s looking more dangerous by the day. But there is greed and opportunity.

This war will certainly polarise the Christian and Muslim peoples everywhere. You could see the frustration on the faces and in the behaviour of the young men and women on the Sydney march that got a bit nasty. It must be awful for them. I have spoken to six Australian Muslim citizens in the last few weeks and listened as they vented their disbelief and frustration over our participation in the Iraqi war. They see no reason to be there and believe it to be aimed at Muslims as much as Saddam.

None defended Saddam. Their sense for where this could end up (in Australia and internationally) is very acute. I found it very distressing to listen to and could offer little except to agree. You could feel the gap opening between us, Noone wanting it to be so, but the hint that sides would be chosen, lines drawn in society. Just awful.

Banning the protests by Carr was insane. We will come unstuck if that continues, because then we will get our own home grown bombers. No doubt about it!

The lid is completely off the pot over Iraq and the Iraqi government’s strategy has been quite obvious and predictable in their pleas to all Muslims. It is a call that resonates through history to this day. Some corner of each of us responds to it. We don’t all accept it is pre-ordained, which is easier to do when you are not being bombed, starved or suffering interminable indignities at the hands of nations such as our own. We are beyond “forgiveness” – the very core common element of Islam and Christian beliefs.

To call the Iraqis who turned themselves into human bombs terrorists is obscene, and a gross misrepresentation. They are another part of an enemy’s arsenal, nothing more. Who are we to say that our way of killing is right and theirs is wrong. To coin a phrase from Apocalypse Now – “.. it’s like giving out speeding tickets at the Indy 500”.

You are right to be fearful of the future. We all should be. The US is not able to control anything beyond the immediate battlefield in Iraq, because that responds directly and decisively to raw, brutal and deadly power.

In my view the current battle will be won. After that is darkness and dishonour.

What we have done is awful and depresses me. I’m buggered if I will give up on it though. Keep going forward. Faith – you can’t do much with it, but you can do nothing without it.

***

Luke Callaghan

From “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam” by George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft, Time (2 March 1998):

While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately.

We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish.

Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.

***

Susan Metcalfe in Ocean Shores, NSW

I don’t know if this is coherent or makes sense or is of any value. I’ve found it so difficult to know what to write lately, or if silence is perhaps a better option. This morning I just sat down and wrote what came out and this is it.

I just read Paul McGeough’s report today (In the ruins, all that’s left is death and fear) and words just seem inadequate, emotions seem inadequate. Chaos is being created, lives are being destroyed forever and it’s all happening in my name and your name – this is all for our future safety, and I know I didn’t ask for it, I actively opposed it. But I still have to take responsibility for it because I am an Australian and I’m not sure yet what that means, for now, for the future, or how I am to process that in the context of my own life. I guess in part it’s a waiting game.

It’s all going extremely well, they keep telling us – what does that mean? Going well for who? For Basan Hoiq, in Paul’s report?

In the next bed was Basan Hoiq, 38, who was one of 34 passengers on a bus bound for Najaf – his left arm, gone from above his elbow, is bandaged, but gaping wounds on his legs are in need of urgent treatment.

He had fled his home in strife-torn Najaf, but decided to return after being away for only a day. He said: “I could see the American flag on the tank 500 metres down the road from us. There was no warning. There was a noise and a lot of shouting on the bus – then people’s heads seemed to snap away from their bodies and many of them were dead.”

His wife, Samia, sat blank-faced at the end of his bed, clutching a two-month-old baby to her chest. His brother-in-law, Hiderj Abid Hamza, said that Basan Hoiq’s mother, Najia Hussain, was among the 18 civilians who died.

Back here safe at home I was at first confounded by the lack of war talk in shops and on the streets and from the people who live in my neighbourhood. Then I got angry that people were simply turning away, I got angry because when the going gets tough (unless it is something that they are directly effected by) people often refuse to engage. The great Australian apathy overcomes us and we go about our lives because there is nothing we can do, or so we think. We protect our children and ourselves from the traumatic images and people complain to the Herald about its front page photo. But if the Iraqi people have to go through this in our name surely we should have to bear to watch.

But I know people’s lives already overwhelm them and to risk the surfacing of their own unresolved traumas triggered by watching other people’s, is not, I understand, in anyone’s best interests. So now I just feel numb and talk to the people who can bear to stay with it for as long as it takes.

But then what is there to say about it now anyway? I can’t turn away but I’m not sure where to look or how to process the massive amounts of information being produced on the subject. What do we really need to know? What is just superfluous add-in designed to keep the massive media machine going? Much of the coverage is concerned with military analysis trying to predict the war strategies and their outcomes. Is Saddam dead or alive? It’s like a macabre form of the game ‘Where’s Wally’ designed for war enthusiasts.

The effect of this is mind and emotion numbing – it all becomes so inhuman and removed from the realities of people’s lives. But in truth what is happening is so painfully human, in the worst possible way, and personally I usually find facing pain to be a healthier option than numbness.

But we are presented with very few options for experiencing this conflict. We are effectively wedged from the realities of war, in anything other than a fragmented and disconnected context, by the fog of analysis, the manipulation of the media, and by the commentary and rhetoric of denial from our politicians. Perhaps they themselves are in denial – how hard would it be for Howard to ever face himself if he had to face the horrific consequences of his actions.

As a nation of sports lovers Howard plays us well. He knows we will fall in line behind the home side, he knows this as he spends his time effectively hiding behind his players, consoling their wives and families. It would take real courage for him to also visit the Iraqi families who sit and suffer while their homeland is reduced to rubble and they worry night and day about their relatives and friends back home. To see him sit down and explain the facts of life, as he sees them, to these people, to face them and us with something other than rhetoric would at least give us something to engage with.

But Howard will only do what plays well for him, he will do what wedges us from our own feelings and offer us a paternalism that has worked so well for him in the past. Somehow he taps into that part of us which wants to be led, the part that denies we know how to act for ourselves or make our own decisions. Our decisions are again made for us by a parental figure and we are again powerless. He does it well. Most of us fall into line without too much fuss, and who’s got time to fight all the hard battles anyway?

And for all those who think they know how this will all turn out or what is right or wrong, and I can be guilty of that as well, I would say that none of us have any idea of what lies ahead. We can know that Iraq will, most probably, fairly soon be run by the US, but other than that it’s all a guessing game with very few reliable facts to work with, particularly at the moment, positioned as we are in the cross fire of an enormous war of propaganda from every possible side. It will be some time before we get a look at some real stories and are able to separate them from all the rubbish we are now being fed.

So Margo, I think your original advice to stay calm is right on the mark. But that doesn’t mean we have to be paralysed – to pressure our government on humanitarian issues and self determination in Iraq has never been more important.

The people were already struggling before we created this chaos and now their situation is desperate. They are truly stuck between their old life and a very uncertain future, and at the moment they need us to fight for them and their rights more than ever. We have to take responsibility for our actions.

***

John Wojdylo

Here’s a press release from Human Rights Watch that explains the point about why Iraqis who blow themselves up etc. while posing as civilians are committing war crimes and are rightfully called terrorists. It’s to do with the consequences of the climate they sow on civilians. They drag civilians into the conflict. It’s at hrw

Iraq: Feigning Civilian Status Violates the Laws of War

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Justin Bell

As I have noted in previous submissions, I am an Australian graduate student who left Sydney in June 2002 to come to Seattle. Prior to the advent of Webdiary, I thought you were decidedly left leaning in your perspective. However, I glean from your usually considered commentary on the war and the balance of views reflected in Webdiary that you have made a deliberate effort to consider the war from all perspectives. It is my first choice for a quick review of thoughtful opinions about the war and you usually pick up the best in American writing.

I thought you sacrificed some of that considered perspective for an emotional response in ‘Bring our troops home’, but I understood why you did that. My emotional response to some of the footage of war has been similar, and as an Australian my first, emotional response to George W. and the Neo-cons is :”What the …!”.

After reviewing the treatises of the “brains trust” of Rummy, Wolfey & co, my considered response is to take up religion (I’ll wait and see which one).

The Bush administration’s response to 9/11 has lacked coherence, been immature and short-sighted in its reliance upon unilateral force and bluster. However we could hardly expect a magnanimous internationalist approach from a President and administration that prided itself on withdrawing the US from oversight or restriction by global authorities – and managed to get elected by a “red” states constituency that similarly couldn’t give a rat’s about life outside the US of A.

However, nothing in the lead up to this war shook me from the view that American political culture has much more in common with Australia than the anti-war Aussie majority might care to admit. Australia’s political culture also cleaves along city/rural/regional lines, and as others have noted on Web diary, there is a consistent isolationist theme that accounts for the seeming disconnect between the popularity of a hardline approach to refugees and the unpopularity of a war that might confront the root cause of many refugees.

If Australia had the first past the post voting system of the US, and non-compulsory voting, I reckon we would have had a Prime Minister Bjelke-Petersen or Hanson by now.

My reading of Seattleites is that they are more reflexively against Bush, and by extension against the war, than even Australians. I ask Australians to be more aware of the common city/regional divide we share with the US and to consider the relative popularity of parochial and insular politics in our own backyard before tarring all Americans with the egregious error of the Bush administration. This is a war precipitated by American parochialism, for parochial ends. Parochialism is a disease from which Australians are not immune.

Since the war started, however, two events have occurred to make me think that the US may have more latent parochialism entrenched in its institutions and societal framework than does Australia. The first was the footage of the US admiral raising his hands to rock music, then making the adolescent pronouncement of the onset of war, death and destruction with the words “When the President says go, it’s hammer time”. I could not imagine an Australian military leader being so unaware or inconsiderate of the awful burden of exercising military power.

The second was the sacking of Peter Arnett and the near unanimous commentary, even on PBS, purportedly concurring in the sacking because he made his comments to Iraqi TV. I say purportedly because I do not understand the relevance of this Iraqi TV objection. It seems to me that the real objection was to the commentator and the comments themselves, not to the venue. Arnett did not say anything that different to a myriad of opinions expressed elsewhere, that were also capable of being presented on Iraqi TV for propaganda purposes. It was not until the conservative media in the US started the leftist propaganda flagellation tornado machine and aimed it at its old favourite target of Arnett that NBC, under ratings pressure from Fox, caved to what NBC management perceived as the parochial public sentiment that would favour its rival. It seems that everyone else in the mainstream American media has fallen into line.

 

Madness. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

OK, I’m convinced. Despite the fact that our troops are fighting this mad, bad war, Australians must protest for all they’re worth to bring our troops home and extricate Australia from this American imperial crusade before it’s too late.

Adele Horin’s article in Saturday’s Herald made a compelling case for continuing, intensive protests to keep the Coalition honest in their conduct of this war.

But there’s a broader issue. Australia is at grave risk. This should never have been our war. We would have been obliged to participate if the UN sanctioned this war for the sake of our alliance with the US, but without that we should have done a Canada and stayed out of it. Australia is an innocent abroad in the Middle East. Unlike Britain, we have never been a colonial power. Unlike the US, we have never propped up evil regimes like Saddam’s. We must get out, as soon as possible.

It’s clear we’ve been lied to by Bush and by Howard, both about this war’s purpose, and its risks. The blind arrogance of Bush and his mates is beyond belief. Bush is in the process of uniting Arab peoples around the world by turning Saddam, of all people, into a martyr for Islam. And the war on terrorism? What chance help from Indonesia, Pakistan and the rest now that their peoples are on the march.

I realised Bush was mad when his army chiefs starting calling suicide bombers and guerilla fighters “terrorists”. For God sake, it’s their country, and they’re facing overwhelming force! The US is INVADING Iraq, to take it over – their bodies are in some cases the only effective weapon they’ve got.

It’s so obvious that what Bush is doing will case an arms race, not reduce it. No country can hope to beat the Yanks off with conventional weapons – they’ve got air, sea and land completely covered. The only recourse is chemical, biological and nuclear weapons (the Yanks used them in Vietnam, and have not ruled out using them in this war). It’s all there is that can deter a rampaging rogue superpower which has trashed international law and international institutions to get its own way.

(Margo, April 1: Several readers have pointed out that my turn of phrase is loose here, to say the least. I did not mean to allege that the Americans used nuclear weapons in Vietnam. My apologies. They used chemical weapons in Vietnam – Agent Orange. The Americans have denied reports from embedded journalists that they are using napalm in this war. The Americans have consistently refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Iraq – the latest example was at the press conference of Bush and Blair post war summit. The Americans used depleted uranium in the first Gulf War, and have not ruled out using it in this one. The Americans are also investigating developing small nuclear weapons for use in war.)

And as I’ve said before, if Australia is attacked, it’s no longer terrorism. We have invaded Iraq. Iraq, or its new allies, have every right to attack back. Again, they haven’t got the weapons and systems to launch a conventional attack, so why wouldn’t they use unconventional methods? Because they would kill civilians? We’re doing that right now in Iraq.

There is no comfort at all in knowing that Bush, Blair and Howard knew exactly what risks they were taking and have no excuses. The top level intelligence leaks, the warnings from former top defence brass, the foreign affairs warnings, all were to no avail. What role did Australia play in this misconceived plan of attack? Why did Howard ignore his intelligence advice that this war would increase, not reduce, the risk of terrorism? Why did he deny that the threat to world stability posed by this conflict was far worse than Saddam – head of a third world, internationally isolated, obsessively monitored regime?

In Tony Blair: The whole world’s in his hands I published a Jane’s Defence Weekly analysis of March 5 of the disquiet in the British and American intelligence community about what was going on. An extract:

While Bush administration officials deride opposition to a war against Iraq as the usual “peacenik” reflex, Jane Defence Weekly sources say that dissenting views are now also coming from those who have traditionally supported military action.

…The fundamental questions of why now, and why Iraq, have not been adequately answered, intelligence, military and legislative sources in Washington told JDW. Sources said that the Bush administration’s changing arguments for military action appear to confirm that none of them is sufficient to justify the use of military force.

One congressional source said that the arguments in favour of a war increasingly seem to be a “smokescreen” to hide the real reasons the administration is set on war.

Indeed, both the US and UK intelligence information supposedly justifying a war with Iraq raise serious questions. “[Chief of the UN weapons inspectors Hans] Blix’s criticism pokes holes in [US Secretary of State Colin] Powell’s intelligence,” said Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “And the UK’s intelligence dossier was shown to be a complete fraud.”

A US military source said that Bush and his inner circle seem to be suffering from what is known in the Department of Defence as incestuous amplification. This is a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation. An illustration of this was Bush’s address to the American Enterprise Institute – a right-wing think tank in Washington – last Wednesday on why military action was required.

Today John Bennett sent me “Once more into the swap” by The Toronto Sun’s contributing foreign editor Eric Margolis, which includes this chilling summary of the bloindness of the madmen in America:

The immediate uprisings against Great Satan Saddam, the quick, almost effortless “liberation” of Iraq, and the joyous reception by grateful Iraqis promised by the neo-conservatives who misled America into this increasingly ugly war have been exposed as a farrago of lies or distortions.

…The CIA and many American generals warned for months that: a) there might be no mass uprisings against Saddam’s regime; b) over-extended U.S. communications would be vulnerable; c) the invasion force lacked sufficient ground troops to conquer Iraq; d) Turkey’s refusal to admit the U.S. 4th Mechanized Division would wrong-foot the campaign.

In his eagerness for war, President George Bush ignored these warnings. So did the civilian neo-con war hawks running his administration, few of whom, save Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had ever served in their nation’s armed forces.

We’ve been lied to. Howard has lied to us – witness his dismissal of ONA defector Andrew Wilke, who warned that this war had nothing whatsoever to do with WMDs and would increase the risk of terrorism, not reduce it.

Howard has already proved himself a failure as a war time leader. Instead of trying to pull the country together, he has played his standard wedge politics game – thus further enraging the opponents of war. WebdiaristChris Munson sums up his latest disgusting trick:

“I notice that John Howard is using his saddening tactic of drawing a false conclusion, and then presenting lots of awesome facts to defend it. Last week it was something like: “I would like to say to those pacifists who declare that the war should have been over by now ….. should take a reality check and be aware that …”

Well, just like the other great lies of John Howard, I know of no-one who has ever said that. This is the same tactic as “if you are against the war you are against our troops” and “If you believe in giving Saddam and the weapons inspectors more time, then you are participating in the destruction of ANZUS, NATO, the UN and bringing forward the end of the universe”.

This tactic is sickening, but it was seemingly successful in the kids overboard and Tampa. So much so that in Canberra only one solitary liberal voice uttered words of concern about our participating in the US/UK/Aust “Axis of 3” That solitary politician said simply that he had concerns about it.

This does not bode well for Australia, for our future Prime Minister was silent, as were the other 40 or more liberal politicians who must also have had concerns. In the face of deputy sheriff John, they all were silent!

Where is Paul Keating now – we need him!

The reality is the opposite, of course. As a Webdiarist wrote recently, it is the pacifists in this debate who were the realists, not the warmongers. It is the American madmen who promised a quick war. Former Webdiarist Tim Dunlop is tracking the lies, and the new spin, on his wonderful weblog The road to surfdom. He writes:

There is a big conservative campaign going at the moment to rewrite history and pretend that they, the officials who launched this war, have told us from the beginning that it would take a long time. The fact is, it is the antiwar types who have warned that this might drag on, not hawks like Howard. The notion of sacrifice and difficulty has been notably absent from most of the President’s public script-reading.

The fact is the pro-war commentary, from the blogs through to the Whitehouse, was filled with endless reassurances that this would be a quick, clean war, in and out like a flash, with the Iraqi people falling at our feet. To pretend now that this is something they warned us about all along is patent nonsense; or if you prefer, par-for-the-course lying. Where they have dealt with the scenario that it mightn’t be that quick and easy, they have played it down, mentioned it as an afterthought, and always preceded it with the rosier, “most likely” option.

Listen to Dick Cheney a mere few weeks ago:

MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq. And like Kanan Makiya who’s a professor at Brandeis, but an Iraqi, he’s written great books about the subject, knows the country intimately, and is a part of the democratic opposition and resistance. The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

Now, if we get into a significant battle in Baghdad, I think it would be under circumstances in which the security forces around Saddam Hussein, the special Republican Guard, and the special security organization, several thousand strong, that in effect are the close-in defenders of the regime, they might, in fact, try to put up such a struggle. I think the regular army will not. My guess is even significant elements of the Republican Guard are likely as well to want to avoid conflict with the U.S. forces, and are likely to step aside.

Now, I can’t say with certainty that there will be no battle for Baghdad. We have to be prepared for that possibility. But, again, I don’t want to convey to the American people the idea that this is a cost-free operation. Nobody can say that. I do think there’s no doubt about the outcome. There’s no question about who is going to prevail if there is military action. And there’s no question but what it is going to be cheaper and less costly to do it now than it will be to wait a year or two years or three years until he’s developed even more deadly weapons, perhaps nuclear weapons. And the consequences then of having to deal with him would be far more costly than will be the circumstances today. Delay does not help.

Even at the launch of the war, there was not much attention payed to length and difficulty and again, it was played down. Bush said:

“Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory.”

The tone and emphasis now has shifted considerably, as Howard’s “reality check” comment shows. In fact, Howard’s comments directly contradict the President’s as Howard is claiming the moral highground by pointing out the fact that they are using “half-measures” to lessen civilian casualties.

The really stupid thing is that, by almost any standards, this war is going quite quickly and is relatively casualty free. It is still appalling, and the humanitarian disaster is probably in the not-too-distant future, but so far things could certainly have been worse.

As with everything else about this war, the official hawks and their spruikers in the public sphere have oversold and misled creating false expectations. And if you want to to prepare yourself for the next build-up and backdown, you need look no further than the promise that the US will get out of Iraq very quickly. Cheney again, same interview:

MR. RUSSERT: The army’s top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.

VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree. We need, obviously, a large force and weve deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don’t think is accurate. I think that’s an overstatement.

How long before “we” are asked to take another “reality check”?

Labor has betrayed Australia by failing to force Howard to account for his proposed actions before he went to war. It is still betraying Australia by not holding him to account for what he’s done. Crean has failed, utterly. A decent ALP would get rid of him and agree on a successor to take over immediately. The ALP has been cowed by Howard’s political ascendancy. This must stop now.

With the world at “tipping point”, some strands have begun to develop in your emails. There’s the state of the war on the ground, the global strategic earthquake, the propaganda war, the politics of the war in Australia, and the protest movement. From now on I’ll publish Webdiaries on each of these strands, like I did after the Tampa.

Tonight, lots of recommendations, and contributions from Esselle Nattom, Peter Ryan, Paul Walter, Oscar J and David Palmer.

Recommendations

Tim Gillin in Sydney: Your recent discussion on globalisation and the war (America’s war a threat to globalisation) may have its parallel in the “family feud” between two brothers, none other than the pro-war left winger Christopher Hitchens and anti-war right winger Peter Hitchens. Peter outlines his feelings about the Iraq war at spectator and femail. Chris outlines his views at opendemocracy and slate. Peter of course had his last public dust up with Chris over the Abolition of Britain. What’s the core of their disagreement? Peter believes in good institutions. Chris believes in good ideas. Peter has the best ideas.

Earl Mardle in Sydney: Go here for a closer look at the company we keep in GWII: A Coalition of Weakness. It begins:

As U.S. officials look for political cover after losing the drive for a second UN Security Council resolution, the recently renamed “Coalition to Disarm Iraq” is the Bush administration’s only opportunity to salvage a semblance of international legitimacy for war. A closer look at the countries involved reveals that claims to multilateral action in the name of democracy are grossly exaggerated. In reality, the U.S. is isolated internationally, and a few of the countries signing on to “liberate” Iraq have human rights records that rival Saddam Hussein’s.

For what when wrong in getting Turkey onside, Scott Burchill recommends Diplomatic Missteps With Turkey Prove Costly in the Washington Post.

Clem Colman: “The amount of information out there to absorb is simply staggering. One very interesting one (like you need another URL right?) is whatreallyhappened which is mainly a list of links to mainstream media stories where the editors read something between the lines.

Aslam Javed: Please visit aljazeerah for a perspective on the suicide bomber who killed four American soldiers.

Tony Kevin recommends former UK Cabinet Minister Robin Cook’s piece in the Sunday Mirror demanding Britain bring its troops home. “It is 100% relevant to the present situation of our Australian servicemen and women in Iraq – except that we have not yet taken service casualties as the UK forces have. Things are soon going to get very much much worse in Iraq. The seige of Baghdad is set within days to become a major humanitarian disaster. Australia – regardless of our own rules of engagement – will share complicity for the coming great crimes against humanity that will undoubtedly be carried out by the invasion coalition of which we are a part. How are we going to get our Australian Defence Forces (and our nation) out of this tragic and shameful mess that John Howard has unnecessarily embroiled us all in? Is there any way the opposition majority in the Senate could trigger an election on this issue, as a national emergency? The time for creative political thinking is now.” See Bring our lads home: Let’s send Rumsfeld and his hawks to war instead. It begins:

This was meant to be a quick, easy war. Shortly before I resigned a Cabinet colleague told me not to worry about the political fall-out. The war would be finished long before polling day for the May local elections.

I just hope those who expected a quick victory are proved right. I have already had my fill of this bloody and unnecessary war. I want our troops home and I want them home before more of them are killed.

…We were told Saddam’s troops would surrender. A few days before the war Vice-President Dick Cheney predicted that the Republican Guard would lay down their weapons. We were told that the local population would welcome their invaders as liberators. Paul Wolfowitz, No.2 at the Pentagon, promised that our tanks would be greeted “with an explosion of joy and relief”.

… Having marched us up this cul-de-sac, Donald Rumsfeld has now come up with a new tactic. Instead of going into Baghdad we should sit down outside it until Saddam surrenders. There is no more brutal form of warfare than a siege. People go hungry. The water and power to provide the sinews of a city snap. Children die.

… Washington got it wrong over the ease with which the war could be won. Washington could be just as wrong about the difficulty of running Iraq when the fighting stops. Already there are real differences between Britain and America over how to run post-war Iraq.

The dispute over the management of the port of Umm Qasr is a good example. British officers sensibly took the view that the best and the most popular solution would be to find local Iraqis who knew how to do it. Instead the US have appointed an American company to take over the Iraqi asset. And guess what? Stevedore Services of America who got the contract have a chairman known for his donations to the Republican Party.

The argument between Blair and Bush over whether the UN will be in charge of the reconstruction of Iraq is about more than international legitimacy. It is about whether the Iraqi people can have confidence that their country is being run for the benefit of themselves or for the benefit of the US.

Ron Stodden in Melbourne reckons it’s about time Webdiary mentioned the Euro-$US theory on the reason for the war. See Ailing dollar strikes at euro in Iraq war, by Geoffrey Heard. An extract:

There are many things driving President Bush and his administration to invade Iraq, unseat Saddam Hussein and take over the country. But the biggest one is hidden and very, very simple. It is about the currency used to trade oil and consequently, who will dominate the world economically, in the foreseeable future – the USA or the European Union.

Iraq is a European Union beachhead in that confrontation. America had a monopoly on the oil trade, with the US dollar being the fiat currency, but Iraq broke ranks in 1999, started to trade oil in the EU’s euros, and profited. If America invades Iraq and takes over, it will hurl the EU and its euro back into the sea and make America’s position as the dominant economic power in the world all but impregnable.

It is the biggest grab for world power in modern times.

America’s allies in the invasion, Britain and Australia, are betting America will win and that they will get some trickle-down benefits for jumping on to the US bandwagon.

France and Germany are the spearhead of the European force — Russia would like to go European but possibly can still be bought off.

Presumably, China would like to see the Europeans build a share of international trade currency ownership at this point while it continues to grow its international trading presence to the point where it, too, can share the leadership rewards.

Peter Nusa: “Hi Margo. I follow your web diary every day.Thought you or your other readers might be interested in this BBC report, Up close with Naji Sabri, where “Mark Doyle describes his hotel lobby encounters with Iraq’s foreign minister and hopes he is not killed”.

Amiel Rosario: “Hey there! Remember me? I was a regular back in the Tampa days. Anyway, I’m pro this War – for many reasons – but I write to share with you some links. Are you into International Affairs, check out crisisweb. Keep an eye on some freebie articles/news stories from some of the best schools in the world like the Kennedy School of Government; the Woodrow Wilson School and the Fletcher School. And if you haven’t already subscribed, do so now with Australia’s wonderful new publication The Diplomat. Also see foreignpolicy. The current issue has some interesting articles like ‘An Unnecessary War’, “Think Again: Attacking Iraq’ as well as a debate between Richard Perle and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Also see The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Iraq War site, and in particular “Contested Case: Do the Facts Justify the Case for War in Iraq? which suggests that there is a lack of evidence and thus that the entire war is suspect. See also ‘Impact of War on Iraq’ from Eldis. Whatever you do, don’t read CNN!!

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Esselle Hattom (Australian Representative) Iraqi Prospect Organisation, (an organisation that seeks the implementaion of a secular and proportional democracy in Iraq.

To begin, I was born in Baghdad in 1972. I have many vivid memories of the childhood I spent in Iraq: my grandmother making bread for us in her backyard Tannur on Friday mornings whilst my uncles go to the markets and bring us Kahee, puff pastry inundated in liquid caramel and thick cream; the bombing of Baghdad in 1981 by over 100 Iranian jets and how that, at the age of 8, made me understand how deep fear can run in the human soul; the constant chatter about world politics while I lay my head on my mother’s lap. Most of all, however, I remember the smell of Iraqs mud. It is the only smell I have experienced that I can describe as history running its voluminous pages into the olfactory sense.

I try very hard to imagine the smell every now and then but it is seeping away. I often wonder about the fusion of events in Iraqs history, the most ancient history, the sine qua non of civilisations, that must have bled into that single scent. Was it the smell of a decomposed timber from one of Sergon the Akkadian’s chariot wheels which he used to conquer Sumeria? Was it Gilgamesh’s lion skin melted into dust by time and brought grain by grain by the feet of Sinbad’s sailors as they came to Baghdad with riches and tall stories from the east? Was it the remnants of a tablet from Ashurbanipal’s library that explained how time is measured or how a certain illness is cured or how the deities fought to protect man from Namtar’s bag of diseases unleashed against Ishtar or the birth of mathematics, accounting, astronomy, irrigation, literature, laws, government, writing, or education?

Recollecting the aroma makes me think about the 6,000 years of wars and I wonder how much blood must be in the mud given the incalculable armies that have hemorrhaged their way into obscurity upon it. I am quite certain that the soldiers throughout Iraqs history fought for mere land and prosperity and I am sure that their leaders often invented outrageous reasons for why the enemy was bad and why the enemy must die. The richness of the mud’s fragrance dissuades me from believing that their lies broke anything of substance in the Iraqi spirit.

The Arabs are big on history. I have often felt that they emphasised their own past glories far too much and at the expense of the present, which is dismal, and the future, which may still be so. But having immersed my intellectual nose into my own colossal past, as an Iraqi, it seems to me that the very strength of Iraq’s incomparable history is what runs like fire ants through the veins of its people. There is a strength, a will, a resilience, that emanates from the depths of the Iraqi soul where it confronts fear and subdues it.

The people of Iraq shall prevail and the scent of mud that shall greet me once again when I am back in Baghdad once the tyrant is torn to pieces with the teeth of those he oppressed for decades, shall smell all the richer, from the years we have been apart and with the tears with which I will wet it.

***

Peter Ryan

Maybe this war is the beginning of a people’s world government (Denial virus alert: It’s alarming) or, as one guest on Philip Adam’s Late Night Live suggested, a world government without people. The later would, initially, seem more likely. Governments so far have heeded only the not so distant voices of of the corporate world rather than the ‘economic units’, the potential consumer. The consumer as an opportunity for wealth production will more or less maintain itself given the right conditions. The opportunity for being strategically placed to capture (invade) and expand that consumer base happens infrequently.

The conditions for such expansion are a world stage upon which leading actors (spin doctors, politicians etc) employ the instrument of language as an opportunity to represent and construct a particular type of reality. Iraq is such a stage and is constituted replete with an ‘evil other’, a mass of ‘undifferentiated ignorant others’ and those fearful of those ‘others’. The economy of the language to date proves meaningful. I feel I am ‘Waiting For Godot’.

***

Paul Walter in Adelaide

Good to see you are last allowing the big secret re “denial’ out of the bag ( Denial virus alert: It’s alarming)

As some one who had to live through all this sort of denial nonsense during the Vietnam effort, as a young bloke growing up, I can’t express how disappointed I am to be watching this particular replay. What else can you expect? These people (the Yanks, Howard and the like, read about “War between Civilisations” rather than, say, Edward Said and his calls for an attempt to understand the position of “The Other”. Vietnam all over again.

It might not prove as expensive these time around, but it sure reveals how well the hardy underlying pathology is despite all the events of the last several decades.And given the damage Vietnam did, that ought to be REALLY worrying.

***

Oscar J.

Thanks for the Webdairy – lots of interesting reading and views about the war. I’ll state up front that I’m opposed to it, but I just wanted to raise a couple of things from Webdiary contributions in Australia’s war.

1) From Bill O’Mara: “I do not consider myself a racist but suggest part of our problem is that we have allowed people from the Middle East to live in Australia. Multiculturalism is okay when we all have similar values…but we don’t.”

Ahh Bill, you may not consider yourself a racist but your words betray your real beliefs. Sorry mate, I just can’t see any other way that “I’m not a racist but we shouldnt let people from the middle east live in Australia” can be construed. You may also be off the mark on your understanding of Multiculturalism too. I think the idea is to have a blend of cultures/values… so that we aren’t all the same. I think that’s the Multi part of it. Loved the use of the “Un – Australian” term though. Many of us would have thought that becoming an aggressor in a war

of questionable (at best!) motives was Un Australian too. (NB – UnAustralian is one of John Howards favourite tag lines, along with “Mateship” and “Fair Dinkum”.. I love them too… fantastic stuff!)

2) from K Pham: “My stance on the war is of support. What must be done should be done now. If some people believe so strongly in it, most notably Tony Blair, then there must be enough reason for it… There will always be militants, fundamentalists and terrorists who believe strongly enough that our way of life is wrong and are willing to tear it down through violence and anarchy.”

So basically, what you are saying is that you are support the war because if some people, especially Tony Blair, believe strongly in it, there must be enough reason for it to happen (oh yes, lets use violence!) and then go on to say that militants, fundamentalists and terrorists also believe strongly in their cause (ie our demise, using violence). So using your logic, I guess there is reason enough for their activities as well, simply on the premise that they believe strongly in it. Sorry, I think that you’ll have to do better than someone believing strongly in something to justify it being “right”. I do agree that we would all like a swift end to the hostilities and as few casualties as possible though.

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David Palmer in Adelaide

Do you recall the email I sent you about 2 weeks ago re the intelligence view of the length of the war? Why is everyone so surprised that it isn’t “two weeks” – once the Turks stopped the northern front it should have been obvious to anyone that there was no chance of this happening. Furthermore, anyone who knows the history of bombing campaigns in the 20th century knows that bombing urban areas only strengthens resolve – Vietnam being perhaps the best example. The one exception is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – where everything and everyone within the epicentre were destroyed – plus Japan had wanted to surrender a few weeks before anyway.

As for Ehud Barak’s prediction of “9 weeks” – yes in terms of the immediate war against Saddam, but no in terms of occupation. This war will basically continue until the US is forced to leave. I have no doubt that a new leadership will emerge advocating independence – probably anti-Saddam, but definitely anti-US and anti-British.

Why is it that commentators forget that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and controlled all cities initially – only to be defeated within a decade? And we have British soldiers already saying that the situation reminds them of Northern Ireland. It is amazing that the US military does not comprehend this – as if they haven’t read any history. Comments from these people are virtual quotes from US propaganda during the Vietnam War – “progress”, “light at the end of the tunnel”, and so on.

One prediction that I really hope never happens. If the US decides to bomb the North Korean nuclear weapons facility, it is most likely that the North Koreans will launch a massive attack into the south in retaliation with their army of one million men. The US military believed that had such an attack occurred in 1993 that within a month some 200,000 people would be killed including thousands of US servicemen. This time I think there is no question that the Chinese will immediately attack Taiwan and occupy it – and there will be nothing the US can do short of launching a nuclear war against China. We can expect Northeast Asia’s economy to collapse – and the US to be unable to cope with the situation militarily. Ironically, there will be no threat to Australia (except from nuclear fallout), given that we are in the Southern hemisphere – and really not perceived as “the enemy” by North Korea (despite the rhetoric). Don’t forget – Australia and North Korea have diplomatic relations – unlike either the US or Japan.

Those who support the current invasion of Iraq by the US should consider that North Korea is next on the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld agenda. The consequences are not even worth considering. John Howard has no idea of the possible outcome of his current position, nor has he really thought about the possibility of this eternal “war on terrorism” reaching this level, which it may.

Our one hope is that Bush will be soundly defeated in 2002, given that the US economy will soon go into deep recession, and the Howard too will be gone (along with his government).

We really have no choice – we must become completely independent of the United States militarily – including an end to the ANZUS Treaty, an end to US bases in Australia, and return of Australian troops, ships, and planes to this region. I will be advocating this policy change in forums this weekend: Saturday at Adelaide University (teaching sponsored by Student Association and Resistance); and Sunday at a forum including other academics sponsored by the Democrats.

 

The Fox v The Fox. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

G’day. The whole world is watching this war. For the first time, we get propaganda from both sides, and we become the judge of what is true or false. This is an extraordinary development in warfare, and one creating tremendous accountability pressure, particularly on the Americans. Is this the beginning of world government by the people?

The people’s opinion has already had an enormous impact, by empowering France and Germany to say no and forcing Turkey, Mexico, Chile and others not to say yes. Now the US is being watched by a skeptical world holding it accountable to its rhetoric of liberation.

In my view, the embedding policy is proving a disaster for the Allies. We see the realities of war – the sheer hell of it – stripped of the language of war designed to turn it into an abstract, heroic game. The Herald’s page one photo today says it all. In orange hell, an allied soldier tends to an injured Iraqi. Both are tragic figures. Both are symbols of the failure of their leaders.

Not only that, the field commanders are telling the journos the truth, and the journos can see the truth, in part, for themselves. How can the bosses say the war is going to plan when the soldiers on the ground say they were profoundly misled about the resistance to expect, when American soldiers talk of Vietnam, and the Brits of Northern Ireland.

And how could it not be so? The US and Saddam have been dancing with each other for decades now, first as parties in crime, now in a dance of death. They are joint oppressors of the Iraqi people. It used to be the Brits, first the colonial rulers, then the knowing suppliers of WMDs for money, eyes tight closed to what Saddam was doing with them to massacre his own people. The Iraqi people may be about to take their revenge on all three of their oppressors. And John Howard has put poor little innocent Australia in the middle of the apocalypse.

This 24 hour war, where the public knows both sides are without moral integrity, puts the focus squarely on journalistic ethics. How do they adjust to war? You can feel the tension just watching the Qatar briefings by the US military, as US journos focus on news of casualties, French, German, Chinese and Canadian on the problems with and ethics of the war. Each has the perspective of their country in mind, and the world is split on this war. al-Jazeera journos are under pressure for showing images which humiliate allied soldiers, and are now banned from the New York stock exchange.

This war is a watershed for the role of the journalist, as well as the role of the public. Traditionally, the public is hostage to their country’s propaganda machine, backed by a home media getting behind the war effort. But when public opinion is so split even in allied countries, so the media splits. And when the allies are fighting a war most of the world believes is illegal with overwhelming firepower the Iraqis can’t hope to match, scrutiny becomes almost intolerable, and the allies’ moral case and railing against the tactics of an enemy impossible to credit, almost pathetic.

My feeling at the moment is that all this is greatly improving the truthfulness of both the Iraqi and American war machines. Each wants to get the credibility edge over the other. And don’t think the media has become all powerful here either. The availability of alternative news and views means mainstream media is under unprecedented scrutiny from the people too. The media groups which keep their credibility intact or nearly intact during this war will be big winners with the public after it.

On Wednesday night on Lateline I saw a compelling interview with the former leader of Israel Ehud Barak, an experienced general. He said the unprecedented 24 hours coverage of the war from all sides of the conflict, particularly the reports from embedded troops, was actually affecting how the war was being fought:

“It’s quite normal when you move a quarter of a million of soldiers that you lose several helicopters in crashes and some soldiers are taken prisoners and some lose their lives as well as enemy with soldiers and equipment is lost. It’s part of any war. The only new thing is that this war is covered continuously, like the Truman Show, kind of, appearance and the whole world is watching and every platoon that surrenders becomes a global headline.”

“I know from my experience as a prime minister how complicated it is to keep the expectation of a public in regard to something that is going to happen within a zone of proper expectation. It’s not easy and your need in the media to produce new headlines every two hours makes it even more complicated.”

Today, Jack Robertson’s first Meeja Watch on the war. For relief from the madness, sort of, Polly Bush’s column is how the war is affecting AFL etiquette: No no war in footie, please.

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Meeja Watch war

by Jack Robertson

Two views of the war from the Sydney Morning Herald, 28 March 2003

1. War is going ‘extremely well’, says Howard

The war against Iraq was going extremely well, Prime Minister John Howard said today. Mr Howard, in his first press conference on the war in several days, said people who believed the war would have been won in a few days misunderstood the nature of armed conflict. “I believe in all the circumstances (it is) going extremely well,” he told reporters. “To those who are suggesting that because it hasn’t in effect resulted in complete victory in the space of a week, I suggest they take a reality check and understand a number of things.”

Mr Howard said one of the reasons the war had gone a little slower than anticipated was because of the way the coalition of the willing was trying to minimise civilian deaths. “The ethical way in which the coalition is conducting this campaign is in stark contrast with the absolute disregard for human life which has been a hallmark of the Iraqi regime,” he said.

2. Nightmare of telling friend from foe

Sergeant Tony Menendez spent the past three days in the Iraqi desert fighting a hit-and-run battle that left hundreds of Iraqis dead and resulted in no US casualties. Menendez, back in camp for his first shower in days, wasn’t boastful. He was sad. “Their technology is sad, so outdated,” said Menendez, of Miami, an Abrams tank gunner. “I saw their faces, and I felt so bad for them.”

Menendez and others of the 3rd Infantry Division who have been struggling for control of An Najaf, about 130 km south of Baghdad, have battled against Iraqi fighters with AK-47s, grenade launchers, anti-tank rockets and mortars as well as 30-year-old Russian built tanks. The Americans lost four tanks in the three day battle, two apparently to laser-guided Russian made, anti-tank missiles. Two others ran off bridges into canals during sandstorms.

But what strikes the US soldiers most is that Iraqis come to battle often in civilian clothes packed in pickup trucks, cargo trucks, taxis and buses with velvet curtains. “The Iraqis took it bad. It was suicide,” said Private 1st Class Jonathan Simatos of Los Angeles, who drives a Bradley fighting vehicle. Similar scenes are unfolding throughout southern and central Iraq with poorly equipped Iraqis, most lacking uniforms, being militarily routed by superior American forces. The Iraqis are not members of the regular army but are Fedayeen, irregular militia members loyal to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. Because so many Iraqi fighters lack uniforms and arms and, in some cases, even shoes, American soldiers are having difficulty telling civilians from combatants – and friend from foe. Fear of civilians and concerns about where their loyalties lie was palpable throughout the field yesterday.

The rules of engagement were clear: Don’t shoot anyone who isn’t armed; if they are armed, shoot them. “We’re looking for black flags, black uniforms and people with weapons,” one commander told his troops.

160 km away along Highway seven busloads of civilian-garbed, poorly armed, and sometimes shoeless Iraqis have driven directly at American convoys. The outcome is always the same: US forces pour rounds from Humvee-mounted .50-caliber machine guns into the buses. Most onboard die. The rest are taken prisoner. Southeast of Najaf, soldiers guarding an ammunition and fuel depot were wary of Iraqi civilians as well. Seemingly civilian vehicles – white vans – have actually been armed with rocket-propelled grenades.

But [such tactics have] sown some confusion among American soldiers about who to trust – and made it difficult to win the hearts and minds of Iraqi civilians. At one point yesterday in the sweep outside Najaf, soldiers rounded up 48 civilian villagers, forcing the men to lie face down in the sand and, in a violation of Islamic custom, patting down the women. No weapons were found on those civilians. “This is about the oddest situation I’ve ever been through in my life,” said Private 1st Class Matthew Pedone, 19, of Springdale, Arkansas, as he cradled a light machine gun across one knee. “Just look at the primitive living conditions. Some of them don’t have shoes.” When asked if he believed the villagers were Iraqi militia who had fired mortars, Pedone said he was unsure. “I don’t know,” he said. “Intel said it was a training camp or something. I’m just doing what I’m told to do. If the leadership tells me to check them for weapons, I do it.”

******

MASS DENIAL VIRUS TRACED TO DR STUPID

AAP, Friday: THE UNITED NATIONS SANITY COUNCIL HAS CONFIRMED that the virulent Denial Virus which swept the Anglosphere this week, leaving millions in the Coalition Of The Willing dangerously deluded and deteriorating into terminal adolescent insanity, was almost certainly the work of the fictional global terrorist ‘Dr Stupid’, brother of the slightly-more-notorious-but-equally-contrived ‘Dr Evil’.

Officials said the virus, which can attack the scepticism and irony systems in powerful or influential opinion leaders of both pro and anti-war sentiment, bore all the hallmarks of the most self-destructive of the many ‘Axis of Evil’ masterminds which had been self-created from thin, hot air by the West since September 11.

Speaking only-barely-on-the-record at the Oscars ceremony, Sanity Council spokesman Michael Moore said that the Denial Virus, which to date has infected only human beings but has never-the-less prompted several Gods to issue pre-emptive statements denying complicity in the fighting in Iraq, represents a serious escalation in the ‘War on Terror’, one that the UNSC has long feared.

“Every Anglospherian with a public platform, including many of us who are against this war, is living in an infected fictitional bubble right now, a McCluhanite Mass Meeja fantasyland which is now apparently resistant to any inoculating dose of raw, ugly truth at all. We’ve hit this sucker with reports from embedded war correspondents, we’ve tried live feeds from Bagdad under bombardment, we’ve lifted gruesome al-Jazeera footage and we’ve even tinkered with on-air ‘ethical dilemma assaults’ from temporarily-doubtful anchors who should have learned about the high cost of a self-deluding, self-excusing media way back in Vietnam. And yet all these high-profile Boomer cretins still haven’t grasped the ugly fact that launching an aggressive war of choice automatically puts an invading army on the wrong side of the ‘moral clarity’ equation when things start to turn messy in the field,” wailed a desperate Moore. He elicited what he later denied was anything other than unanimous applause from the gathering of Selfless Hollywood Geniuses, among them Best Actress winner Nicole Kidman, who in her acceptance speech also underscored how important it was for contemporary ‘Artists’ to deny the existence of the real world completely.

Quoting himself at admirable length, Moore went on:

“Not even my brilliantly iconoclastic books and documentaries seem to be smashing home the reality of the terrible mess the Anglosphere has now blundered into in Iraq. This Denial Virus is causing the most tenacious outbreak of wilful self-deception the world has seen since 1930s Germany. Such a weapon of mass delusion in the non-existent hands of a stateless rogue like Dr Stupid could ultimately lead to catastrophe for the gentle, democratic West.”

As the global denial crisis gathered momentum, Kofi Annan called for an immediate suspension of hostilities in Iraq, announcing that France, Germany and Russia would push next week for a new Sanity Council resolution incorporating a plan to disarm the world peacefully of the virus, although a spokesman for French President Jacques Chirac flatly denied that the resolution would need to include an automatic trigger for a resumption of military action in the event that Stupid himself failed to comply.

The spokesman said that the proposed new resolution as drafted was already “as unavoidable as the Maginot Line, as uncompromising as the Vichy Treaty, and as undeniable as the prosecution case against Dreyfuss.’ In a breaking development, however, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun denying rumours that a rift with France has already opened up, reportedly over joint Russo-German moves to add the phrase “and as ultimately successful as Napoleon Bonaparte” to the new resolution’s preamble.

US-Coalition leaders and neo-conservative commentators remained resolutely unmoved by both the new disarmament proposal and the Sanity Council warnings, denying that the Denial Virus had led to any change of Coalition military strategies in either the Liberation Of Terror or the War On Iraq. “We don’t deny that some isolated cases of serious denial of reality have occurred in the past – perhaps,” said Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer, arguing that while the pending legal action of key invasion strategist Richard Perle against journalist Seymour Hersch might be seen by some as a particularly illuminating case of denial, Perle’s shock resignation from the influential Defence Advisory Board today “clearly demonstrates that at least some harsh reality is finally dawning on this Administration”.

Fleischer continued, however, to deny other specific reports of denial among key Bush officials, including claims by White House reporters that Secretary of State Colin Powell had recently denied that he was considering resignation over his ‘diplomatic failure on Iraq’ – itself a charge Powell vigorously denies – and reports coming from Kuwait that General Tommy Franks was now denying any split with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over coalition force strength and disposition.

“It’s a war, and in any war situation, obviously you’re going to get rumours of delusion and denial being tossed all about,” said Fleischer, stressing that President Bush had always sought to embrace a frank and open policy on “the whole denial-of-worldly-reality issue”, and in fact “prayed every morning with John Ashcroft and Paul Wolfowitz for Divine Guidance” on the matter.

Fleischer also denied that the Bush Administration had ever argued that the Iraqi people would welcome the Coalition forces as ‘liberators’, repeatedly accusing White House journalists of “getting the titles of the two distinct security campaigns we’ve been running since S11 mixed up”.

He also vigorously denied that resentment, hostility, hatred and sustained violence directed by Iraqis at US, British and Australian forces operating in the Persian Gulf was at all representative of the “average Iraqi’s true feelings”.

“All these critics who are so eager to claim that angry mobs chanting anti-American slogans and shooting at GIs distributing food are somehow being anti-American are, quite frankly, simply knee-jerk anti-Americans in total denial of the reality of this situation,” he said.

“You have to keep these things in perspective. It’s a war. Of course you’re going to see some denial of America’s benevolence, from what I would call pro-regime elements of the Iraqi population, such as the grieving fathers of newly-dead kids, bombed-out market stall owners, and the southern Shi’ites Saddam tortured, raped and murdered during the 91 uprising. But it’s important to deny Saddam a propaganda victory by not blowing these isolated denials of reality out of perspective. What’s absolutely undeniable is that most Iraqis love us, and are deeply grateful for this invasion of their homeland. They love us to bits, and they understand that part of learning to love America to bits – a sad part, sure, an undeniably difficult part – is accepting that America may need to blow some of them to bits, first. OK, so some stubborn Iraqis may deny that subtle reality, but we strongly deny that individual denials of that nature constitute anything like a denial epidemic.”

The US Administration’s denial denials were echoed in London London even as Tony Blair emerged with Bush at Camp David from their first denial council since the invasion of Iraq was launched, to jointly deny that they both remained in self-denial about the magnitude of what they had started.

In the lead-up to the critical weekend, Blair’s Press Secretary Alistair Campbell had already moved behind the scenes to deny rumours that differences in British and American attitudes on post-Saddam reconstruction were already weakening the Coalition’s wartime unity. Leaking off-the-record denials via the Hustler letters page, Campbell made it undeniably clear to Westminster lobby hacks that however much the British Prime Minister’s denials of the harsh reality of in-theatre developments in Iraq might differ “in nuance, tone and focus” from those emerging from the White House, there remained a “fundamental, Trans-Atlantic denial accord”, and that “Britain and America would together persist, endure, persevere and prevail” in what was still “our broadly bipartisan bout of geo-political self-delusion, poised as we are together at this portentous turning point in the history of global democracy”.

International Development Minister Clare Short, in a Downing Street doorstop interview clearly authorised by Blair, was typically more blunt: “My ideas for the post-Saddam Iraq received a brilliant hearing from Richard Armitage in Washington earlier this week,” she said. “I am confident that Mr Bush’s Administration will not deny Britain or the UN a full and controlling involvement. You only have to consider the contractual processes to date; who can deny the transparency and fairness of the Halliburton oil-fire deals, for example?”

Short said that after her meeting with Armitage, her conscience remained “as clear as ever”, but played a dead bat to questions regarding speculation among Labour rebel backbenchers that if post-Saddam events proved her wrong, she would immediately not resign from the Cabinet again in protest. “I’m neither confirming nor denying that,” she said. “One must keep one’s powder dry.”

In Baghdad, which many proponents of the Iraq invasion have argued has links with Dr Stupid and other global terrorists, six Saddam Husseins again appeared on State Television denying any connection with the Denial Virus, or any other weapons of mass delusion. Reading from written statements, the Saddams declared that Iraq “has no need to make joint cause with Dr Stupid and his weapons of mass denial, for even though we would be proud to know this great anti-Western warrior, we Iraqis are capable of such tactics all on our own, praise Allah”.

Appearing relaxed and untroubled by the gun barrels behind their ears, the Saddams denied that they were dead or injured, claiming that they remained in full control despite “this illegal invasion and occupation by Imperialist Crusaders of Iraq’s rightful sovereign territory, such as Kuwait City”.

Several of the Saddams appealed to the international anti-war community to “take to the streets in protest again to stop this unlawful killing of innocent Iraqis, which is surely for us alone to do”. They repeatedly denied anew that the regime possessed any weapons of mass delusion, calling upon the UNSC to halt hostilities immediately so that the new French-draft resolution would give them “the opportunity to continue our denials of weapons of mass delusion peacefully”. If the UNSC failed to do this and allowed the Crusaders to enter Baghdad, the Saddams warned, they would unleash every weapon of mass delusion they had, in what they menacingly described as “the Mother of All Mass Denials”.

In Canberra, Prime Minister John Howard continued to deny that Australian had already irrevocably committed forces to the invasion of Iraq, but praised the “bravery, commitment, courage and skill of our soldiers, sailors and airmen” who, he told Parliament, had been singled out many times by Pentagon officials for their effectiveness in the fighting.

In a final fiery question time before Parliament rose, Howard also passionately denied that Australia would ever commit troops “in any way, shape or form” to what he dismissed as the “purely hypothetical” matter of any post-Saddam “Liberation Stabilisation Force” the US might establish, but told the House that his government would certainly commit troops to such a force once it ceased to be hypothetical, since it would then become his “passionate belief” that helping with the “heavy denying” would be in the national interest.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer denied that Australia’s non-involvement in the Coalition Of The Willing in Iraq would increase the terrorist threat faced by Australia, before advising Australian journalists in the north of Iraq that following the commencement of Coalition operations they were now being specifically targeted by Ansar al-Islam terrorists operating there, and that while as Australians they should always remain relaxed and comfortable, they should also now endeavour to become alert but not alarmed.

In other mass denial news, anti-war protesters in Sydney who threw rocks, marbles, chairs and themselves at police have heatedly denied that they are dangerous hypocrites, while NSW Police Minister Michael Costa has denied that police threats to take legal action denying a similar protest next week represents any denial of civil liberties.

Opponents of the invasion of Iraq who argued that “it is all about oil and US economic hegemony” are denying that America’s spiralling war costs are making them look pretty dumb in retrospect, broadsheet Op Ed commentators who took the doctrine of pre-emption or the Washington neo-cons seriously for a minute are rushing to deny they ever did, and the Federal ALP continues to deny that it is unelectable.

In etymological developments, ‘Peace’ once again denied that it was ‘War’ and ‘Liberation’ sought to distance itself from ‘Invasion’, while everyone in the gentle, democratic West desperately, desperately, desperately tried to deny the dawning truth: that this is a disaster for America, Britain, Australia, Iraq and the world, an act of unnecessary, tragic aggression, and a bitter betrayal of our soldiers by our politicians. God help us all in the months and years ahead.

Finally, pre-empting predictable outrage from various closet-Trekky warbloggers, Meeja Watch writer Jack Robertson coldly denied that writing stuff like this while American, British and Australians were killing and dying in Iraq was treachery, and recommended that each of them not waste any time calling him un-Australian or anti-American again, but instead try turning off their computer, heading down to the local recruitment centre, and translating their tiresome cyber-warmongering into a little real world action for a change.

Maybe one fine day in the long, bloody years ahead – if any of them make it through basic training, that is – they might finally, finally, finally grasp what it actually means to go to war in the real world. As are all the poor bastards they helped send off to Iraq right now.

What is the link between globalisation and the war on Iraq? It’s central, and helps explain Tony Blair’s enigmatic position in a war that will reshape not only the world’s security framework but its economic order, writes former head of international equities at Bankers Trust, Christopher Selth.

Christopher Selth first contributed to Webdiary after September 11, when he argued that the catastrophe marked the end of “naive global capitalism” His essay today develops that theme in the light of the war on Iraq, and is compelling and deeply thought-provoking reading. It attempts to answer, in part, the intriguing question of where Tony Blair is in the crisis enveloping the world, and why. After reading Christopher, it’s worthwhile re-reading Blair’s first major speech after September 11, at Blair vision. I’ve republished two previous Webdiary pieces by Christopher after his essay.

If, as Christopher argues, globalisation forces are at odds with US unilateralism, where does that leave the anti-globalisation/peace movement? It leaves it with some hard thinking to do. As Blair said in his vision speech post September 11: “This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us. Today, humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can’t make that choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community, can.”

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America’s war on globalisation

by Christopher Selth

I appreciate the quality of so much that has appeared here in the Webdiary with regard to the Iraq disaster. In trying to understand the causes and the possible consequences of the current disaster, as Kim Beazley rightly describes it, I would like to consider an additional element which does not seem to have been much touched upon, the economics of globalisation. I find it amazing that this issue which so dominated debate prior to 9/11, and is still in many ways central to understanding the politics of the current situation, seems now so invisible. I think that it is with reference to these forces that the position of the most enigmatic figure in this crisis, Tony Blair, can be understood.

The objections of so many of us around the world to the war in Iraq have centred on two primary arguments.

Firstly, there is the question as to whether the disarmament of Saddam Hussein could be achieved without recourse to war. Increasing pressure through the auspices of the United Nations and the weapons inspection process might have achieved this outcome without risking the horrific loss of life implicit to war.

Secondly, there is the deep anger and suspicion inspired by the US and the coalition of the willing acting unilaterally, ignoring the protocols that form the basis of what we consider to be international law. These actions could fundamentally weaken structures that have been developed since the Second World War. Rising from this are a number of profound concerns:

1. It represents the effective declaration of an American Empire. We have lost sovereignty. This suggestion is not just some paranoid fantasy by critics from the left, inside and outside of the US. It is equally argued with a positive spin by neo-conservatives within the US.

2. There is a fundamental inconsistency between the breaking of international law to initiate a war and the western values that George W. argues he is claiming to defend. This suggests these values are in fact under attack within the West, not just be the terrorist threat, but by the neo conservative elements within the US administration and its allies. That attack can be seen not just within the war itself, but in the overturning of civil liberties and the manipulation of the media. Doubts grow as to whether the attack on those values is an unintended consequence, a necessary evil, or an explicit objective to control opposition.

3. These actions, rather than promoting global security, are likely to stimulate a global arms race, and promote terrorist activity. In a world where the US administration is suggesting the only real basis of security is might, other governments are going to have to get some muscle. The marginalised people of the earth are going to have to resort to terrorism to be heard, as they lose faith in institutions not backed by force.

Forgive me for repeating these arguments, but there is one question I find intriguing in them, intriguing by way of its absence. Whatever happened to globalisation?

I believe that alongside the moral outrage, part of the energy that has driven the peace movement derives from the same source as the anti-globalisation protest movement. There is a strong sense around the world, by the man on the street, that the structure of our daily lives has been shaped by forces outside of the control of our communities. And then we got September 11.

To a cynic it would seem hardly surprising that “the terrorist threat”, a “law and order” issue, has been used by politicians of any persuasion to sidetrack the globalisation debate and the electoral damage of a weakening economy. I in no way want to downplay the significance of the tragic loss of life in New York, Washington, Bali, or in Palestine and Israel for that matter, but there is little doubt that times like these are ripe for political exploitation.

With the war on Iraq, US unilateralism, and the much publicised manifesto of the “Project for a New American Century”, however, the fears that were latent in the anti-globalisation protests appear to have crystallised.

Yet they have crystallised in an extraordinary and perverse way. What has transpired in the diplomatic lead up to the Iraqi War has run significantly counter to what was the suggested by proponents of the globalisation juggernaut.

I quote from last weeks edition of US business magazine Business Week:

Chief executives are beginning to worry that globalization may not be compatible with a foreign policy of unilateral pre-emption. Can capital trade, and labour flow when the world’s only superpower maintains such a confusing and threatening stance.

What is exposed are divisions in what previously had been categorised as a singular elite, widely perceived as dominated by the business community driving global development.

What we have is not just a growing rift between France, and potentially much of Europe with the US, but also Russia, and even more concerning from a US perspective, China. One of the core elements of globalisation was consensus amongst governments weakening the significance of the nation state as anything other than a geographic expression of a potential market. Furthermore, the business community is profoundly sensitive to any breakdown in the rule of law. It sits at the heart of contractual relations.

Will the current situation threaten the multilateral basis of international law? The risk of this is not as fanciful as might first be thought. The US, through its non-ratification of several international agreements, has powerfully intimated that it is only interested in agreements that meet its specific national interests. This position is also made explicit in many of the neo-conservative manifestos that have without any doubt been read with horror in the capitals of Americas trading partners.

What is now made clear is that there is no single global elite co-ordinating world affairs.

Now it becomes obvious that in order to understand how we got here, and where we might end up, we need to understand the positions of heterogeneous collection of powerful interests across the planet. Nor should we fall into the trap of thinking that we can simplify revert to an old fashioned model built around nationalism to explain the situation. This cannot be understood simply as France versus the US, or the UK and Spain versus France and Germany within Europe. I believe this analysis suggests the clearest explanation of Tony Blair’s position, which has mystified so many.

Whilst recognising the risks in using any broad generalisations, in considering the drivers of change through history I find it very enlightening to consider the tension between old money and new money.

Old money tends to reside in mature industries. It uses its clout to get government to either give it monopolistic rights, or to protect it from potential external threats. It argues a politics of nationalism, traditional values, and fear of change to win public support. The Packers are a classic example of this in Australia.

New money will seek to win support by promising opportunity in growth and innovation. It tends to be identified with a rising middle class, with liberal social and cultural values.

Old money has been suspicious if not scared of globalisation. New money has tended to embrace it.

It is interesting that many of the positions held by neo-conservative elements dominating the White House were formulated prior to the ascendancy of neo-liberal politics over the 80s and 90s, and the move to an increasingly trans-national economic order.

But it is also telling that if one were to politically deconstruct the Bush White House, its key agenda had always been domestically focused. Its key backers were “old money”; the oil industry, the defence industry, the auto industry. Its positions have consistently played to those constituencies. Furthermore, the “new money” identified with globalisation and the economic boom of the 90s has been in retreat; primarily the technology and telecom sector, but also the financial community.

As the Business Week quote suggests, it is hard to believe that these groups are comfortable with the current US government position. Do transnational US companies appreciate the risks to the multilateral trading environment? Alan Greenspan, head of the US federal reserve, and some time guru to the “new world order” has been widely criticised by the neo conservative establishment for not being supportive of the Bush economic stimulus package. There was already significant concern about the blowout in the US budget deficit. This is no script that the “globalisation” camp ever called for.

I have built a scorecard looking across countries and industries to try to explain the national position with reference to the stances of these various nations to the current situation. It is extraordinarily accurate.

I only want to refer to the two obvious swing players – Britain and France. This analysis can be fruitfully applied however to everyone.

In France there is a fascinating synergy. There are significant “old money” groups who have tight relationships with the government, and have a nationalist view of the world. They are commonly labelled by critics of the French as “Gaullist”. The French farmers that generate so much ire in Australia are the tip of the iceberg. Yet, French companies targeting pan European or global markets could also be seen as having a stance powerfully opposed to that of the Bush administration. They want a world governed by global agreements, not US ones, and/or want to be seen as neutral and independent of US unilateralism.

In the UK, on the other hand, economic interests face the inverse dilemma. British companies are heavily exposed to the US. Many have been trying to explicitly position themselves as domestic players in both the UK and the US market. That means the UK must tread very carefully as to not burn bridges in America. Furthermore, the greatest wealth generated in the UK over the past 20 years has been in the booming financial hub that is the City of London. The City is increasingly dominated by US investment banks, that have used it as a platform to penetrate both the British and the continental markets. In fact it would not be much of an exaggeration to describe London as the capital of the “globalised world”. The interests of the financiers are not strictly aligned to the Bush camp, but they are desperate to protect the fabric of the global order. It is the bedrock of their business.

Oh what an excruciating bind for Tony Blair! He was so clearly trying to manoeuvre what he must have seen as the perilously unilateralist Bush administration into adopting a position that might protect the global institutions that British commerce has been built on in the 90s, whilst protecting English economic interests in the US, in the face of a hostile Labour Party! And maybe have an impact on fighting the threat of terrorism. If Blair had pulled it off, he might have been the saviour of the globalisation new order.

The business interests that drove globalisation in the 90s find themselves equally in a bind. Clearly their preferred outcome is the reconstitution of a consensus which permits a return to the old status quo. Sadly, I think issues of morality will be secondary in these negotiations. But the question remains, can it be done? Is it consistent with the way the neo conservative agenda is playing out now in the United States? Are there old money nationalist business constituencies on either side of the Atlantic that will resist such compromises?

“Global” business might think that it is better to protect the increasingly integrated global economic structure, even if it is at the expense of surrendering political sovereignty to the neo conservative Bush administration. Conversely, it might see that the Bush position as ultimately inconsistent with that economic order, and business would either be better served by an attempt to rebuild it led by the Europeans, with China as their key ally. Or they may see the reemergence of distinct regional trading blocks as the new reality that they will have to learn to live with. Publicly they will say nothing. They do not want to be identified with the losing side.

John Howard’s behaviour demonstrates the centrality of these calculations in even Australia’s strategic thinking. He hasn’t signed up just as part of the coalition of the willing. He is aggressively negotiation a bilateral free trade agreement with the United States. This is pretty clear evidence of a fundamental shift away from the 90s multilateral globalisation paradigm. The end result, however, is unlikely to be one that anti-globalisation protesters were seeking.

I apologise if this reads as callous. The “financial markets” tend to be as callous as the bureaucrats who have initiated this ugly war. Of course, one must also remember that Saddam Hussein is nothing if not callous.

So what about we, the people? Well the good news is that its not all over for us, yet.

Elections are far enough away not to be caught up excessively in wartime jingoism, but close enough to make a difference. Is that what the French were actually playing for? Chirac has popular support across Europe. France looks like it has miscalculated, and divided Europe. But what happens if Blair or Aznar succumb at the polls? Or more significantly if Bush fails? He would not be the first one term Bush.

Maybe that is the most bizarre irony. For the sake of our moral convictions the global peace movement must fight on. But what are we fighting for? Is it the multilateral world that was the foundation of the globalisation the public was so afraid of? Or are we, hopefully, fighting for a new form of globalisation? One that has a popular mandate, for the people, by the people, of the people.

***

Christopher Selth, 20 September 2001, published in What happens next?

I have been travelling in Europe during this time of crisis. It has been illuminating and disturbing to witness the varied responses to the horror of the attacks on New York and Washington. It is with this experience I read with interest the piece you included by John Wojdylo in Terror unlike movies. I agree with much he has reported and many of his views, particularly with respect the CNN coverage. On other fronts, however, there are deep issues which I feel are avoided in his analysis.

I do not think it is adequate to analyse the dynamics of Islamic fundamentalist extremism in isolation, no matter how sophisticated that analysis is. I agree that these acts cannot be tolerated, but to characterise them solely as the product of sophisticated extremists misses the key point. Why is the audience these extremists play to so fertile?

There is a deep centered anger about the inconsistencies and injustices of global capitalism that are more than just the ravings of extremists. I was in Covent Garden during the 3 minute silence. Behind me, a man of Indian or Pakistani extraction held a series of conversations on his cell phone. It was hard not to feel that this was not an act of terrorism, at the most personal, small level, flouting our moral expectations. I was angered. But I also understood that the problem was deep, and broad.

Some of your readers made reference to Marx. Marx is very relevant here, and I do not come from a background that would seen as traditionally marxist. I was a senior fund manager, a primary witness to global capitalism. Speaking with some of my associates here in London there is a perception, which I strongly share, that this terrorism reflects the end of imperialism, of naive global capitalism. That is what financial markets are trying to digest, Tony Blair refers to the end of an era. Paul Keating is now talking about this.

The West’s involvement in the region is reasonably well documented, even though its moral implications do not seem to be widely understood by the man on the street. The West supported the Shah of Iran and other totalitarian regimes in order to fight the ogre of communism and guarantee the supply of oil, even when these regimes flouted the democratic rights the West so grandly espouses as the basis of its moral superiority.

The support of the creation of the Israeli state was in part to assuage Western guilt at complicity in the holocaust, and the strength of the Jewish electorate in the United States. The fate of Palestine was a side issue which the West saw for a long time as not of its concern.

The endless, morally ambiguous partnerings driven by the Kissinger-driven philosophy of my enemy’s enemy is my friend as evidenced by the support of Sadam Hussein by the US, to fight Iran, and US support of the Taliban to fight Russia, has seen the West create its current foes.

The rule of law has been applied selectively. UN Security Council motions have justified the bombing of Iraq, but have not produced an effective censure of Israel. The basis of these inconsistencies is the tendency, throughout history, of the establishment to reinterpret history, and morality, to justify its own actions.

On a personal level, I firmly agree that the action in New York cannot be tolerated but it is not enough to dismiss the actions of the terrorists as nihilistic or insane or immoral. These people are the disenfranchised. Why should they confront the West on the West’s terms?

The rules of contract and law, which are the basis of western capitalism, look like locking 75% of the world population in poverty for the foreseeable future. Why are the acts in New York any more morally reprehensible than what happened in Rwanda? In Kampuchea? In Sri Lanka? The only reason why the west is involved in the Muslim world at all is the presence of the oil that drives our economies.

What we are witnessing must be interpreted on one level as the end of acceptance of the rules of the game by the 75%. That is why there was dancing in the streets in many parts of the world inhabited by the have nots. A friend of mine was in Cairo last week. It was clear that the anti western sentiment was not just held by extremists.

Yes, we must track down the perpetrators of these acts, but if we do not face up to the new reality, that the desperate of the globe will play by their rules, not ours, to change the global playing field, this struggle will go on indefinitely. The planet could resemble a giant Beirut or Northern Ireland.

We must finally face up to the legitimate concerns of the underprivileged, and not dismiss them as just the way things are, whilst we continue to enjoy our consumerist society and our superficial support of liberal humanist ideals when they suit us. It is time to be positive, and fight to make the world a better place.

***

Christopher Selth, September 27, 2001, Left, right … how politics will march forwards

In response to Greg Weilo’s view of left and right (Retrospective Hansonism), I am not sure whether or not Greg is confused about the appropriate labels to apply to his position. He is either naive or disingenuous with respect to the label appropriate to his positioning on the political spectrum. More significantly, the underlying politics of his position reflects the deep fissures in our society that the tragedy in New York is opening up.

I would like to respond to the underlying philosophical points Greg raises before coming back to labels. The two issues are, however, very linked.

Firstly, one must distinguish between underlying belief systems, and the strategies adopted by political parties. This distinction can be seen either as reflecting the notorious disconnect between politicians and voters, due to the cynical pursuit of power, or alternatively as the disconnect between high principle, or abstract theory, and its application to the practicalities of government.

A further problem appears from the difficulties, if not bankruptcy, of left and right wing economic theories in generating convincing practical outcomes. Marxism and Socialism, and Economic Rationalism no longer offer the political machines of left and right easily saleable policy stances. Note, so-called Economic Rationalism is in f act the pure application of a brand of capitalist, neo-classical economic theory. It has become clouded with the realiti es of practical, rational, economic policy.

Political parties need to be understood in terms of the electoral base to which they appeal, and the strategies they need to adopt in order to get over the line, to win elections. So-called left wing parties have two traditional constituencies; the working class, which tends to be economically left wing, but culturally conservative; and the liberal humanist intelligentsia, which is more economically rational in orientation, but culturally very liberal.

The right wing parties have a parallel fault line. One constituency is old money and small business. There are a number of sub groups here, including owners of businesses that are often local monopolists, but tend to be averse or incapable of taking on global challenges, farmers, and small businesses. These groups tend to favour state intervention to protect their positions from globalisation and the stresses of change. Their politics can ironically parallel the socialism of the working class, but for powerfully different reasons. Their cultural politics tend to conservatism.

The other group comprises global capitalists and technocrats. This group is not defending its position, it is seeking to expand its wealth. It is confident and pro-globalisation and economic rationalism. It is culturally liberal humanist.

You can see in this matrix the divides that have been evident within the Australian political landscape for some time. It is why the Labor Party has resisted homosexual law reform, and why the Coalition has locked in the positions of Kerry Packer, Qantas, and parts of the agricultural lobby, rather than promoting free trade. Left and right wing parties pursue policies in stark divergence from some simplistic understanding of their supposed underlying support base.

This is why right wing parties tend to push socially conservative and populist policies that appeal to the working classes. It will transfer votes from the traditional left to the populist right. It is key to winning a parliamentary majority. In America these were the so called Reagan democrats.

Pauline Hanson undermined the Australian right wing’s ability to claim this ground. That’s why she was so dangerous. This was why the Tampa was such a crucial turning point for John Howard. Behind this rhetoric, however, the right has little interest in the broad agenda of the working class, other than protecting jobs when it simultaneously protects the economic interests of its support base.

The globalist faction in the right, witness Peter Costello, is invariably outraged by this positioning.

The old left was interested in pushing its liberal humanist agenda to win middle class champagne socialist support, whilst being careful of not alienating its working class base. This was the Gough Whitlam strategy. You can see how long Labour stayed out of power in Australia and the UK as a result.

The new left added to its arsenal by embracing elements of economic rationalism. This was particularly the case as Marxism and Socialism were seen as failing to deliver under the pressure of global capital and change. It owed few favours to old money. The more sophisticated members of the new left, such as Paul Keating, saw that the only way to improve job prospects in the nation longer term was by making the economy more efficient. This would also win middle class votes.

The problem was that the short term pain would always leave it at risk with its traditional voting base. That is what ultimately brought Labor down. It is why Kim Beazley is so scared of declaring his hand. He is castrated by these internal tensions.

Both sides are constantly doing deals that alienate part of their traditional support base. This is reality. It is a clear outcome of the structure of our electoral process and parliamentary system.

An interesting insight on these issues can be found in the work of the now dead US sociologist, Christopher Lasch. His last book before he died, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy is particularly thought provoking. The core thesis in this book is that the global technocracy, visible in all our major cities, working for globally focused organisations, have more in common with each other than the culture of their particular national hinterland.

I think there is a great deal of truth in this proposition. People like me, educated affluent technocratic elitist bastards, have more in common with our class compatriots in London, Paris or New York, than we do with the average man of our particular economic hinterland. In Sydney this can be metaphorically conceptualised as the difference of culture and beliefs between inner city and coastal dwellers, and the suburbs.

Lasch comments that this global class tends to be socially liberal humanist. He notes the irony that the elite might support gay rights, but at the same time feel it is for the best that inefficient industries be shut down, even at the expense of jobs and communities This is what Greg would refer to as left wing, social ideology. At the same time it is economically rationalist, which Greg identifies as right wing economic philosophy.

The important question that arises is what is the motivation behind the elite’s espousal of these values? Is it legitimate compassion, or a self-serving identification with the fashionable causes of the day, a champagne socialism that can go hand in hand with the process of personal enrichment? It is the new religion of the upper class, which John Howard often, to his chagrin, runs up against. The have nots of our society often feel these values are hypocritical. Despite all of this, many of these values are of great merit. The irony is that it is this great Western tradition that George W. Bush keeps saying we are fighting for.

Lasch’s work is filled with dark irony. It transcends the distinction of left and right. It hits the fault line on which Greg sits. Whilst Lasch unquestionably has captured a key thread, he does not reach any conclusions. It is a provocative piece.

The attack on liberal humanism, and economic rationalism and globalisation, reflect a common factor, fear of change, fear of the unknown. Human history has seen at these moments objective analysis give way to extremism and hysteria. Legitimate criticisms from both sides are lost. We are at risk of being swept away by this tide. Extremist politics are on the rise.

The question confronting us is: Can we integrate liberal humanism with a new paradigm in economic management? Economic policy needs to balance the dynamic drive of capitalism, with appropriate measures to reduce the shock waves and to humanise the process. Regrettably most such strategies in recent times have been hijacked by traditional interest groups: old money, old unions, and old farmers. The power of governments to act in the face of global forces is itself suspect.

A new economic philosophy and social philosophy is required. We must move forward, not backward. The conservative chest beating post the World Trade Center attack risks the worst outcome.

Greg’s thinly veiled piece emphasises this point. It is not hard to decipher. Greg groups all elements of the community that are not part of his pure national core as dangerous; homosexuals [of which I am proudly one!!!], feminists, pro-abortion groups, multi-cultu ralists. On this front he calls himself a Nationalist. On the economic front, he calls himself a Socialist. A national socialist?

Is it by accident that Greg says that left wing extremists have been running things for the last 50 years, ie the post war period? Fifty years ago there was another National Socialist who was arguing the same thing. His name was Adolf Hitler.

I am afraid that the fight is just beginning against this conservative backlash. I agree with Margo that a new opposition movement is needed. It needs to do more than just say bigotry is wrong. It must address the philosophical and political roots of this problem. It must be a broad movement. It must be self critical to avoid the accusation of elitism. This must be more than just the liberal humanist intelligentsia saying how awful everyone else is.