Why is the government being so nice to Andrew Wilkie? One theory floated in the weekend papers is that it’s trying to avoid a damaging leak. That makes sense – a few days before Wilkie’s resignation, I published an article from ‘Jane’s Defence Weekly’ which discussed widespread unease in intelligence circles about the rationale for war (Tony Blair: The whole world’s in his hands), and a steady stream of leaks from intelligence and foreign affairs sources in Britain and the US attests to the unease.

But the obvious reason for the kid gloves is that murmuring sweet nothings about Wilkie’s right to speak hides the fact that the Government is not actually engaging with what he’s saying, let alone confronting his key claim – that the Office of National Assessments (ONA) does NOT assess that without war Saddam is likely to give WMDs to terrorists, and assesses that AN INVASION is likely to have that effect. That claim leads to Wilkie’s conclusion – that our decision to go to war has nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam’s WMDs, ie that the government is lying to the Australian people.

I analysed Howard’s answers to questions after his Thursday address to the nation in Deconstructing JW Howard. Fran Kelly asked:

You said today that this judgement, Australia’s judgement, reflects the intelligence community’s professional assessment. Well, in recent days we’ve had an ONA officer quit his post, saying that ONA had given the Government advice that the more Saddam Hussein is pushed, the greater the chance of him using his weapons of mass destruction or linking up with terrorists. Will you release the ONA reports on Iraq, just as you released the ONA report on the children overboard, here in the National Press Club address 16 months ago?

Howard replied:

Well that particular ONA report, as you know Fran, in relation that I mentioned 16 months ago, merely repeated press reports. I’m not going to release ONA assessments which, almost of all of which remain classified. What I said to you today represented their general view. As far as Mr Wilkie is concerned, I respect his right to have another view. It’s not surprising in a large public service and a reasonably large intelligence community, that you’re going to have a range of views. In the end, all of these things involve questions of judgement…

Get it? Wilkie has a right to another view, end of story. But Wilkie did not say it was HIS view, he said it was ONA’s ASSESSMENT. Howard oh-so-gently gently asserts the opposite but runs a mile from proving it.

There’s something else Howard won’t release either – the government’s legal advice to back his claim that a non UN sanctioned invasion of Iraq would not breach international law. Thus Howard refuses to prove the two claims which are essential to making the case for war to the Australian people.

Trust him? Howard has form. On Thursday, he admitted to misleading the Australian people just before the 2001 election by claiming an independent ONA assessment – which he read out – backed his claims that children were thrown overboard. The admission served to bat away Fran’s request that he release the ONA assessment backing his claim that ONA believed Saddam was likely to give his WMDs to terrorists unless we invaded Iraq. ONA assessments were not made public, he said – the children overboard ONA assessment was OK to releasesbecause it merely summarised media reports.

There is another recent example of Howard misleading the Australian people to serve his political interests. Just after we heard of the sinking of SIEV-X and the deaths by drowning of hundreds of asylum seekers, Howard closed down debate on Australia’s responsibility by stating categorically and repeatedly that SIEV-X sank in Indonesian waters. Despite documents gradually forced out of the bureaucracy which all said the opposite – that SIEV-X likely sank in international waters – he refused point blank to produce the advice he said he relied on. The actual advice that went to him at the time recently surfaced – it too confirmed the documentary trail of advice contradicting Howard’s claim.

To me, Howard’s address to the nation made it crystal clear that his stated reasons for joining the war are false. I believe he has made the judgement that because the United States is on the rampage, and will continue to be so, the world will become a more dangerous, unstable place, and that the best spot for Australia amid the turmoil is under America’s skirts. It’s that simple. He really is a puppet, by choice.

Tomorrow negotiations will begin in Australia on a free trade agreement between Australia and the United States, the one the Yanks got excited about last year after Howard said yes to its plans to invade Iraq, and the one Howard made a point of pressing when he met Bush recently.

Howard wants us so tied to the United States militarily and economically that the US would feel compelled to defend us if our security was threatened. Backing the US in its adventure, of course, adds to the risks we face. He must have judged that the balance of risks favours us going with the United States anyway.

The Australian’s Paul Kelly said this of Howard’s position on Saturday:

First, Australia is going to war because of the US alliance, not because Iraq represents a direct threat to Australia. Second, the Australian public, like much of the world, does not accept his argument that the risks of doing nothing outweigh the risks of war.

… Most of the global community disagrees with Howard about the risk. Howard argues, in effect, it is so great that Australia must play a high profile role with the US, if necessary outside the Security Council, to attack Iraq pre-emptively at the possible cost of breaching the Western alliance, marginalising the UN, risking Hussein’s use of his weapons and fanning the hostility of the Islamic world.

… He has failed to mount a persuasive argument that a war to disarm Iraq is an imperative now when the risks are so vast and the national interest could be prejudiced.

I’d add only that Howard hasn’t even bothered to admit the risks Paul mentioned to the public, let alone assess their weight. He’s treated the Australian people like fools. No wonder so many of us are so anxious. He’s left Australians to try to make sense of what’s happening without his guidance.

Oh well. War it is. And what a war it could be. Scott Burchill sent me a couple of recent articles on the mess Northern Iraq could quickly become once the invasion begins, on the new “pre-emptive strike principle” America would just have created the precedent for.

In Kurd-Turk rivalry threatens US plans for Iraq, The Christian Science Monitor’s Ilene R. Prusher writes:

If war begins in Iraq, it could look like this: Turkey’s troops move into autonomous Kurdish areas in northern Iraq; Kurds view it as an act of war and open fire.

It could also look like this: Kurds move on the oil-rich Iraqi cities of Kirkuk and Mosul; Turkey views the advance as a casus belli and launches an attack to prevent the cities from falling into Kurdish hands.

In either scenario, two of Washington’s key allies could wind up fighting each other instead of the forces of Saddam Hussein – not exactly what the US had in mind when it drew up plans for regime change in Iraq.

She says the US envoy has warned Turkey that if the deal to let Turkish troops follow the Yanks did not proceed because Turkey didn’t allow the US to use its territory as a base for attack, the Turks should stay out. His warning prompted this rejoinder:

“He said the Turkish military cannot enter Iraq, as if he can dictate to Turkey what Turkey can do,” says Egemen Bagis, Mr. Erdogan’s foreign policy adviser. “If the US feels they need to come 10,000 miles away to Iraq to protect their citizens from another Sept. 11,” he asks, “isn’t it right that Turkey, which is right on Iraq’s border and a longstanding ally hosting US forces, should be concerned? If Saddam is armed [with] weapons of mass destruction, Turkey has a right to be in Iraq.”

Pre-emptive strike time for Turkey, too, although not under US auspices. Oh dear. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the US had given up on Turkey and was re-routing its ships accordingly:

As a result, the U.S. diplomatic effort in Ankara has shifted to ensuring that Turkey keeps its troops out of Iraq…

Over the vocal objections of Iraqi Kurds, the administration had agreed to let Turkish troops follow U.S. forces into northern Iraq and take up positions about 121/2 miles past the border to help prevent a flow of refugees and maintain security and stability. But Khalilzad told the Turkish government that the agreement was void because Turkey had not approved the U.S. deployment.

“The situation now is that it’s all off,” the official said. “We don’t have an agreement, and we don’t want them to go in unilaterally. The mission now is to discourage and deter them from going in, and to reach an understanding with them on legitimate issues of concern.”

The paper also reported yesterday:

Kurdish militia leaders in northern Iraq have begun intense preparations for participating in a war against President Saddam Hussein’s government despite repeated pledges to heed U.S. appeals to stay out of the way…

Turkey fears that a prominent Kurdish role would lead to a permanently autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq, possibly reawakening similar aspirations among Turkey’s own Kurdish minority. To avoid that, Turkish officials in Ankara have said Turkish troops will occupy part of Iraq’s Kurdish zone, ostensibly to prevent a flow of refugees into Turkey.

Turkey has also threatened to march on Kirkuk and the rich oil fields that surround it if the Kurds try to take it for themselves. Against that background, the Bush administration has put Kirkuk off limits to a direct assault by Kurdish militiamen, called the pesh merga, meaning “those who face death.”

But a senior Kurdish official said the civilian Kurdish underground, composed mainly of residents with hidden arms, is preparing to seize control of some Kirkuk neighborhoods and attack the city’s defensive perimeter from the rear when U.S. troops draw near. “It’s not just us,” he said, predicting that Iraqi Arabs and members of Iraq’s Turkmen minority also will rise up against Hussein’s government. “Be sure, there will be Arabs helping us, Turkmen who are helping us. All the people inside will take the city.” The plan is rarely talked about, he explained, because “we don’t want to embarrass the Americans.”

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Today, some final thoughts by you before the war. I’ve just published John Wojdylo’s latest piece on the people’s instinct, Loving the farthest, and Polly Bush’s first piece on the war, There’s daggers in men’s smiles. I’ve also published the Press Council judgement upholding the complaint against The Daily Telegraph’s coverage of last year’s civil disobedience forum in NSW Parliament at the bottom of Press Council to reader: We’ll choose your friends then close the door.

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Recommendations

I got a shock last night while watching the news when George Bush put out his roadmap for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You’ll remember I floated the idea of a UN sanction for war in return for a binding commitment from the US to get peace in the really big war in the Middle East on February 28, in Incompatible values. This was in response to Bush’s big speech on democracy in the Middle-East and his personal commitment to a Palestinian state. In the last few days I’ve been sent quite a few US articles focusing on the fact that many leading neo-cons are Jewish, a ticklish topic, to say the least. Yesterday John Bennettsent me a piece by Republican Christian fundamentalist Pat Buchanan in the latest issue of The American Conservative magazine, Whose War?. Buchanan makes the incendiary claim that certain Jewish powerbrokers in the neo-con club are more loyal to Israel than America. The puff reads: “A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest.” Amid the mess the world’s in, the last thing anyone needs is an upsurge in anti-Semitism, especially, from Bush’s perspective, from the Republican fundamentalist moral majority so supportive of his presidency. I wonder if that’s part of the reason for Bush’s move yesterday, to dispel the perception in parts of his core constituency that he’s captive to a Zionist cabal.

Unlrich Adami: “If you want to see the real agenda of this war, read George Monbiot’s A wilful blindness. An extract:

Last year, the Sunday Herald obtained a copy of a confidential report produced by the (New American Century) Project in September 2000, which suggested that blatting Saddam was the beginning, not the end of its strategy. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” (Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century)

The wider strategic aim, it insisted, was “maintaining global US pre-eminence”. Another document obtained by the Herald, written by Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, called upon the United States to “discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”.

On taking power, the Bush administration was careful not to alarm its allies. The new president spoke only of the need “to project our strength with purpose and with humility” and “to find new ways to keep the peace”. From his first week in office, however, he began to engage not so much in nation-building as in planet-building.

The ostensible purpose of Bush’s missile defence programme is to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. The real purpose is to provide a justification for the extraordinarily ambitious plans – contained in a Pentagon document entitled Vision for 2020 – to turn space into a new theatre of war, developing orbiting weapons systems which can instantly destroy any target anywhere on earth11. By creating the impression that his programme is merely defensive, Bush could justify a terrifying new means of acquiring what he calls “full spectrum dominance” over planetary security.

Immediately after the attack on New York, the US government began establishing “forward bases” in Asia. As the assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Jones noted, “when the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long-term plans and interests in this region”12. The US now has bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Georgia. Their presence has, in effect, destroyed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation which Russia and China had established in an attempt to develop a regional alternative to US power.

In January, the US moved into Djibouti, ostensibly to widen its war against terror, while accidentally gaining strategic control over the Bab Al Mandab – one of the world’s two most important oil shipping lanes. It already controls the other one, the Strait of Hormuz. Two weeks ago, under the same pretext, it sent 3000 men to the Philippines. Last year it began negotiations to establish a military base in Sao Tome and Principe, from which it can, if it chooses, dominate West Africa’s principal oilfields. By pure good fortune, the US government now exercises strategic control over almost all the world’s major oil producing regions and oil transport corridors.

It has also used its national tragedy as an excuse for developing new nuclear and biological weapons13, while ripping up the global treaties designed to contain them. All this is just as the Project prescribed. Among other enlightened policies, it has called for the development of a new generation of biological agents, which will attack people with particular genetic characteristics14.

Why do the supporters of this war find it so hard to see what is happening? Why do the conservatives who go beserk when the European Union tries to change the content of our chocolate bars look the other way when the US seeks to reduce us to a vassal state? Why do the liberal interventionists who fear that Saddam Hussein might one day deploy a weapon of mass destruction refuse to see that George Bush is threatening to do just this against an ever-growing number of states? Is it because they cannot face the scale of the threat, and the scale of the resistance necessary to confront it? Is it because these brave troopers cannot look the real terror in the eye?

Lloyd Mcdonald: “This piece, by musician Brian Eno, is in the European edition of Time but apparently not fit for its intended audience so it’s missing from the US edition. The US needs to open up to the world

Damian Joyce recommends Lunch with the chairman in The New Yorker, a piece on how prominent neo-con Richard Perle is not only on a government advisory panel telling the government to wage war on Iraq, but has a stake in a company seeking to profit from homeland security contracts. Apparently it’s the done thing in America.

A reader advises of a new campaign to stop the war, from the culture jammers network Abusters:

Dear Jammers,

In spite of opposition from the world – proven in poll after poll – > Bush’s oil-thirsty war machine marches on. Feeling frustrated? It’s time to take a new stand and hit Rogue Nation USA exactly where it counts – right in the economy. It’s time to Boycott Brand America. Are you ready? The Boycott Brand America pledge is already up at adbusters – check in to sign it, find out more, and help circulate the pledge. Let’s build this boycott into an international mass action on par with the peace marches!

Ever since the Tampa transformed Australian politics, someone has sent me the “Marine Digital maritime newsletter’. In the latest issue:

“Shipping Industry Anxious About War Premiums: South Korean shipping companies and exporters are locked in a growing concern over the issue of war premiums charged for vessels operating along the Middle East routes. According to the Korea Shipowners Association, the war premiums are expected to increase by at least 200 percent from the usual rate of 0.01 percent, if a war between the U.S. and Iraq breaks out in the region.”

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Jonathan Toze in Canberra (this is Jonathan’s debut on Webdiary)

Death of the Liberal Party

A bit of an extreme declaration perhaps, but one that I have been watching develop with increasing dismay over the last few years. Not a sign of dissent has appeared as the rules of standard political party behaviour in a Westminster system have been torn up and discarded.

This War is the most important and divisive issue to have hit the political and social landscape since, I would argue, 1975. While Tampa split the body politic, it fell in Howard’s favour. But with Howards current behaviour, this is not the case, and it confirms what I have been suspecting for quite some time. Australia now is run by an Autocracy: There is no divergence of opinion from within the leading political party, where it seems only those who think and feel like John Howard are given the leading roles.

It is impossible to believe that there is only one faction within the Liberal Party, that there is on such an important issue no divergent belief or value on the issues of violation of International Law, or the subjugation of Australian Democracy to blind personal allegiance to the American Neo -Conservative Agenda,

The state the parliamentary Liberal Party finds itself in is one of grave concern, and displays tremendous weakness. With Shane Stone in place it is not likely to be seen to or even recognised, but the corruption of the party from within could well spell a long term problem for not only the Liberal Party, but Australia as a whole as long as the Libs are in power.

One can only hope for Australia’s sake that those within who are opposed to Howard are capable of showing some spine?

Margo: I know of two Coalition politicians who have broken ranks, both because of the core demands of their constituencies. Federal Liberal MP Peter Lindsay, who holds the marginal north Queensland seat of Herbert, has spoken against the war more than once in the party room. His electorate includes defence barracks and many defence force families, and he would kiss his seat goodbye if he did not publicly oppose the war. This sort of thing is tolerated in both parties – on the Labor side in Government, MPs in seats where voters are affected by aircraft noise were given the nod to speak out publicly against the third runway. Don Page, the National Party member for the NSW state seat of Ballina on the north coast, told his voters recently – at a meeting and then through the local paper – that he opposed a war without UN sanction. Page is a seat where anti-war feeling runs high, and Page is in danger of losing his seat. Can anyone add to this tiny list of dissenters?

Gina Bowry

I am beyond hearing any more arguments pro or anti war. It has all been said. If you are pro war, let’s go in there and get the job done. If you are anti war, there are still options.

This is a war of brinkmanship. Will there actually even be a war? The USA has stationed troops around Iraq as a means of pressuring them into some form of disarmament or compliance. This has to some degree worked, even though each step “forward” is still derided by the US administration.

It has come time for GW Bush to step up to his line in the sand. He, however, has just seemed to move it again. Will there or will there not be war on Tuesday?

Saddam Hussein will not remove himself from power. The US has put itself in the invidious position of either being seen to start a war, for no clear reason, or of putting its military might and world power at risk and then stepping back without following through, after only minor resistance.

The big question for me is, will the US actually risk war with world opinion against it? Do they really want it in the first place, or were they only hoping for quick compliance (and to what end?)

That Iraq is obviously destroying some weapons is interesting. To me, it indicates that there is some anticipation that compliance will reduce or remove the chance of war. Yet each step they take is followed by an announcement from Mr Rumsfeld that says they are doing too little too late.

Iraq is actively destroying weapons which are it’s most obvious means of attack (or defence), in an attempt to be seen as complying to the UN resolution, at least in part. This is different to the Russians agreeing to destroy hundreds of obsolete nuclear warheads. This is a nation which is destroying what I can only see as part of it’s national defence assets only weeks before what could be a war for regime change in Iraq. Why would any ruler of such a country agree to destroy a weapon which could be used defensively if it truly thought it would be invaded, with or without those weapons’ capability?

Saddam seems to assume that there will be a limit to the aggressive rhetoric of the US, and they will at some point, not too far removed, come to the table and let Saddam continue to rule.

Are the American’s waiting for a pre-emptive strike on their own forces to justify an attack? How else can they force world opinion to swing enough their way to endorse their latest resolution?

If this war is just and necessary, can Bush and his allies keep letting the tide of public and world opinion wash back his line in the sand? They cannot keep letting this rogue state dictate its own terms for survival. They must invade unless there is total compliance, and soon, and accept the cost of adverse world opinion for the benefit of the world. Otherwise, it’s just a bluff.

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Chris Andrews

Disclosure: My partner is currently one of those pre deployed to the gulf in OP Bastille.

I am writing in reference to some of the dribble I have been reading in the comment pages and Webdiaries. Honestly people, we are talking about a man (Saddam) who has no regard or respect for the value of human life. He is a vicious killer, someone who under Australian laws would never see the light of day again.

Yet you defend him so that he may go and kill yet another human being in cold blooded murder. He still uses torture, yet you defend him. Since he came to power he has declared war with 2 countries, yet you defend him. He is willing to use his own people to protect his palaces and military installations, yet you defend him.

For Christ sake, he ordered the so called human shields from all around the world to guard his palaces, not his hospitals. This is a man who will put a Surface to Air missile Launcher on the roof of a hospital so when the coalition blow it up protecting themselves he instantly jumps up and down saying we’re murdering innocent civilians.

Why should we have to prove that this man no longer has weapons of mass destruction, should he not be the one trying to prove it instead? He has defied the world for 12 long years – can someone honestly say when enough is enough. Saddam is a lying, deceitful, evil man.

Making speeches may not be the PM’s strong point, but at least someone in this damn country has some back bone to stand up for human rights. Let’s end this now. Saddam could end this now, but he chooses not to. In the couple of months the UN weapons inspectors have been back in the country how many times they have caught him out lying already, and yet you defend him and what’s worse, you damn believe him.

Open your eyes people, the PM can not just come out and tell you all the intelligence they have. If he did he would signing the death certificate of our own men and women, What is the first thing everyone did when September 11 and the Bali bombing occurred? They immediately asked why did we not know about it and if we did then why did we not do anything to prevent it.

Well ladies and gentlemen, we know Saddam has WMD and we know he has links to extremist groups. Do you really want someone to drop a biochemical bomb on someone before we do anything?

I sure as hell don’t. Instead of fighting amongst ourselves and providing Sadam with encouragement let’s stand united and when he sees he has no choice only then will diplomacy have a chance.

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Shawn in Arkansas( The home of Bill)

Let’s have a little bit of a fact finding mission here. I live in America, my father fought the second world war, I married an Australian, we met in London. To the best of my judgement, these were the freedoms my father fought for. I could travel, I could meet someone, they could meet me. The world wasn’t a bad place, was it? Look at it from an American point of view, as much as you hate to!

What are you angry about? What do you dislike? I’ll tell you what you dislike. You dislike that we’re right. And we’re right about many things. Do you remember Chamberlain? Do you remember appeasement? Do you remember Hitler? Do you remember Mussolini? Do you remember Stalin?

Do you remember YOUR GRANDFATHER? Did you think he was a fool? Did you think he was ignorant? Do you remember WW1/ WW2?

THEN, If you remember these things, and you have a knowledge of history, you know that bad men, do bad things, and it takes a greater power, a greater sense of self, to stand, to unite and to fight for what is right.

If you’re not with us, you’re against us. This isn’t a Bush “redneckism”, this a “truthism”.

Finally find the courage within your self to not feel inferior, to stand up against tyranny in the face of evil. And see it as it is – a threat to the Western World, Capitalism, Australia, America , Great Britain.

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‘Poindexter’

I am staggered by the superficial reportage of John Howard’s latest address. To state the blinding obvious, the PM fully expected to be delivering a Churchillian/Menzies speech with the war already underway. Hence the switch to the ” Great Hall ” – forget the red herring of security – this was about gravitas. He could hardly announce we were in a shooting war from the rooms of the Telstra Press Club.

Unfortunately for JWH, things were delayed – those nasty ” spoilers ” held up the invasion schedule – HENCE, Mango, the PM delivered a re-hash, re-gurgitation word for word of the speech every Liberal MP has been forced to give in the recent Parliaments ” debates “. Check the Hansard – nothing new, nothing that had not already been chanted/shrieked across the Lower and Upper Chambers by the sheep already ( talk about a rubber-stamp Parliament!)

This was patently a substitute speech for the war leader address he planned to be delivering until those nasty French ” spoiled ” his game.

Still, only a few more days before his historic address to the nation telling us what I for one have known since last September, that we are in the largest Anglo-American invasion since D-Day 1944 and the ADF is going in boots and all.

It amazes me that journos still, at this late hour, will not wake up and smell the cordite. JWH, who brooks no dissent, made a firm irrevocable decision committing the ADF to war in September 2002.

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Jackson Manning (nom de plume)

John Howard is such a coward he has refused to answer essential questions about this war by pretending he didn’t commit to war on Iraq months ago. Even at three minutes to midnight on the war clock he refuses to fess up and give the Australian people the answers they deserve. He has offered no proof, no justification, just month-after-month of rehashed Bushisms.

Such serious breaches of democratic trust should surely prove electorally unforgivable – though one must never underestimate the ALP’s capacity to let its timidity and short-sightedness ensure it snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

Soon the clock will strike twelve, the war will begin, and in all likelihood it will be over in weeks, days, possibly even hours if Saddam’s people rebel. That much of the Bush administration’s gamble is probably correct.

Immediately afterward, the Government’s formidable Op-Ed and talkback cheer-squad – the Joneses, Ackermans, Bolts, Sheridans and Devines – will surely gloat about the spectacular success of the stars and stripes and urge us all to forget the ‘discredited’ UN and put our faith in the brand new reich – the one financed by corporate crooks and run by unelected zealots like Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle.

But at that stage – just weeks away – it will pay for us to remember that the long-term consequences of this adventure are yet to unfold. In the longer run the blowback from this folly could well claim the lives of many more Australian kids than Iraqi – though none should be considered more important than the other.

Presuming it would even work – and the jury’s still out – even a Missile Defence Shield won’t protect the schoolkids of, say, Sydney from a smallpox attack or an atomic transit van.

At the very least our world’s only system of almost-democratic global law, the UN, looks likely to fall victim to the might-is-right mindset that brought us two world wars in the first half of the Twentieth Century and millennia of bastardry before it. Don’t believe the line that the UN will have failed its test; if the UN croaks it will be because the sole superpower and its whitebread colonialist cronies pushed it so hard against a wall it splattered.

It’s hard not to worry about this. The total destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have already taught us the old ways must be overcome if the human race is to have any hope of continuing. It should be obvious that war must be a last resort and that global domination is now a redundant wetdream for psychopathic control freaks.

The sixties were no accident of history as the hardcore conservative rump likes to pretend. The ‘revolutions’ of that decade – pacifism, environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism and respect for human diversity – did not emerge from nowhere. Rather, they are essential evolutionary tools for human survival in a post-nuclear age.

As the global mass demonstrations against this war should indicate ‘the people’ themselves are moving on.

But alas, our prime minister is stuck following the patterns of the past – suck-holing up to the dominant power in the hope he can trade not only international law, the UN and the lives of our soldiers but also Medicare, the PBS and our quarantine laws for an anti-free trade agreement (let’s be honest, it’s ‘special’ trade not free trade we’re seeking) with the biggest bastards on the block — the corporate-owned, televangelist-run US Republican Party.

Time is tick, tock, tick, tock, ticking away, Johnny. It’s too late to turn back the clock.

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Hannah Newman (nom de plume)

I usually make a point of reading Webdiary everyday but haven’t had the chance to get my daily fix of late. And then bam! I hop on today, after a two week absence, and read John Wojdylo’s attack on Jack Robertson (Against Human Rights in Iraq). Before I know it I feel my blood pressure rising – as it usually does after reading one of John’s hysterical, self-righteous columns. While I applaud your commitment to giving all sides of the war argument a fair go, I have decided that despite being usually tempted by John’s provocative and needling articles, I am boycotting the chunks of (cyber) space you give him in Webdiary for my own sanity and health.

Don’t get me wrong, I do want to read alternative viewpoints. I actually want to be convinced that somehow as we edge closer and closer to war, that there are compelling reasons to do so. I want to be convinced that a blanket bombing of Iraq and its aftermath will deliver liberation to its people. I want to be assured that all alternative avenues have been determined and tried. To this end however, John does the pro-war lobby a great disservice since all he does is try to shame those against war by calling them anti-human rights.

It’s a sick and troubled world we live in when a call for no war is seen as anti-human rights. Although, it just goes to show the perverted means the pro-war right will go to, to drum up support for their war. Yes, call those who want peace evil and against Iraqi democracy so you can all sleep better at night as the bombs fall half a world away.

I guess the truly good thing to come from all this debate so far is that despite having to ride on the back of oil and WMD, the plight of the Iraqi people is finally getting the international attention it deserves and countries like Australia will think twice before sending out our navy vessels to turn back desperate Iraqi refugees.

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Peter Woodforde in Melba, ACT

Today, Sunday 16 March 2003, was the 35th anniversary of Operation Muscatine, north-east of Quang Ngai City, which, according to a hearty message of congratulation from William C Westmoreland, Commander US Forces: “Dealt enemy heavy blow. Congratulations to officers and men of C-1-20 [Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry] for outstanding action.”

We should remember the families of Song My (My Lai), from babies to great-grandmas, butchered like sheep in a supposedly successful and praiseworthy military action.

But this is not a time for recrimination against the United States, a country of great institutions and great people, set, like our own, amidst great flaws.

We should also remember the courage and sacrifice of a small group of young American servicemen who put their lives on the line that day to save a small number of the massacre survivors, and who met years of danger, harm and ridicule during the despotic and bloodthirsty Nixon-Kissinger era to expose the evil.

And we should try to remember all the words of Matthew 5:3-12, surely never heard at Dubya and Condoleeza’s bloody awful prayer breakfasts:

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

***

Edna Ross forwards this report from the frontline.

Letter from Iraq -an American photojournalist’s letter home

Some of you have written to me with concerns for my safety in Iraq, but this was easily one of the safest assignments I have taken. In all my time in Iraq, in spite of an intense awareness of the threat of an impending attack by the United States, I haven’t met a single Iraqi who had a harsh word for me. Iraqis are very good at distinguishing between the U.S. government and a U.S. citizen.

It seems to me that as a photojournalist, Iraq is where I might best play a role in making a small difference. I’ve done some work in Iraq for Newsweek and Time magazines but that kind of work has really become secondary for me. I do what I can to influence (in admittedly small ways) what kinds of stories those big magazines do, but ultimately their stories are nearly worthless at confronting the inhumanity of American foreign policy in the Middle East. I will continue to work with Time and Newsweek (and with other corporate media) on stories that I don’t find offensive, but the bulk of my efforts are now going into reaching alternative media and in supporting anti-war groups in the states. I hope I can find some time soon to come to the states for a speaking tour of sorts.

There’s a lot of talk about whether or not the U.S. will go to war with Iraq. What many people don’t realize is that the U.S. is already at war in Iraq. I made two trips last month into the “no-fly zone” created by the U.S. with Britain and France in southern Iraq. Actually it would be better named the “only we fly” zone or the “we bomb” zone. “We” refers to the United States who does almost all of the flying and bombing (France pulled out years ago, and Britain is largely a nominal participant). There is another no-fly zone in the north, which the U.S. says it maintains to protect the Kurds, but while the U.S. prevents Iraqi aircraft from entering the region, it does nothing to prevent or even to criticize Turkey (a U.S. ally) from flying into northern Iraq on numerous occasions to bomb Kurdish communities there.

Turkey’s bombing in Iraq is dwarfed by that of the U.S. The U.S. has been bombing Iraq on a weekly and sometimes daily basis for the past 12 years. There were seven civilians killed in these bombings about two weeks ago, and I’m told more civilians last week, but I’m sure that didn’t get much or perhaps any press in the U.S. It is estimated that U.S. bombing has killed 500 Iraqis just since 1999.

Actually I believe that number to be higher if you take into account the effects of the massive use of depleted uranium (DU) in the bombing. The U.S. has dropped well in excess of 300 tons of this radioactive material in Iraq (30 times the amount dropped in Kosovo) since 1991. Some of the DU is further contaminated with other radioactive particles including Neptunium and Plutonium 239, perhaps the most carcinogenic of all radioactive materials, and these particles are now beginning to show up in ground water samples.

I spent a lot of time in overcrowded cancer wards in Iraqi hospitals. Since U.S. bombing began in Iraq, cancer rates have increased nearly six fold in the south, where U.S. bombing and consequent levels of DU are most severe.

The most pronounced increases are in leukaemia and lung, kidney, and thyroid cancers associated with poisoning by heavy metals (such as DU).

But the most lethal weapon in Iraq is the intense sanctions regime. The toll of the sanctions is one of the most under-reported stories of the past decade in the U.S. press. I have seen a few references to the sanctions recently in the U.S. press, but invariably they will subtly discredit humanitarian concerns by relying on Iraqi government statements rather than on the statistics of international agencies.

My careless colleague at Time magazine, for example, recently reported that “the Iraqi government blames the sanctions for the deaths of thousands of children under the age of five”. That’s simply not true. The Iraqi government, in fact, blames the sanctions for the deaths of *more than a million* children under the age of five.

But let’s put that figure aside, for there’s no need to rely solely on the Iraqi government, and let’s refer instead to UNICEF and WHO reports which blame the sanctions directly for the excess deaths of approximately 500,000 children under the age of five, and nearly a million Iraqis of all ages.

We all have an idea of the grief borne by the United States after the September 11 attacks. Employing the crude mathematics of casualty figures, multiply that grief by 300 and place it on the hearts of a country with one tenth the population of the United States and perhaps we can get a crude idea of what kind of suffering has already been inflicted on the Iraqi people in the past decade.

The greatest killer of young children in Iraq is dehydration from diarrhea caused by water-borne illnesses which are amplified by the intentional destruction of water treatment and sanitation facilities by the United States. The U.S. plan for destroying water treatment facilities and suppressing their rehabilitation was outlined just before the American entry into the 1991 Gulf War. The January, 1991, Dept. of Defense document, “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities,” goes into great detail about how the destruction of water treatment facilities and their subsequent impairment by the sanctions regime will lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.” I can report from my time in Iraq that all is going to plan.

Cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid (previously almost unheard of in Iraq) are now quite common. Malaria and, of course, dysentery are rampant, and immunities to all types of disease are extremely low. Even those lucky children who manage to get a sufficient daily caloric intake risk losing it all to diarrhoea. Around 4,000 children die every month from starvation and preventable disease in Iraq – a six-fold increase since pre-sanctions measurements.

Treatment of illnesses in Iraq is complicated by the inability of hospitals to get the drugs they need through the wall of sanctions. In a hospital in Baghdad I encountered a mother with a very sick one-year-old child. After the boy’s circumcision ceremony, the child was found to have a congenital disease which inhibits his blood’s ability to clot, which results in excessive bleeding. The child encountered further complications when he took a fall and sustained a head injury which was slowly drowning his brain in his own blood. In any other country the boy would simply take regular doses of a drug called Factor 8, and he could then lead a relatively normal life. But an order for Factor 8 was put on hold by the United States (prohibited for import), so the doctor, the mother, and I could only watch the child die.

Much is made of Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, but it is the sanctions, the use of depleted uranium, and the destruction of Iraq’s health and sanitation infrastructure that are the weapons of greatest mass destruction in Iraq.

The situation is so bad that Dennis Halliday, the former Humanitarian Coordinator for the UN in Iraq, took the dramatic step of resigning his position in protest at the sanctions. “We are in the process of destroying an entire society”, Halliday wrote. “It is as simple and terrifying as that.” “It is illegal and immoral.” And Halliday isn’t alone. His successor, Hans Von Sponeck, also resigned in protest and went so far as to describe the sanctions as genocide. These are not left-wing radicals. These are career bureaucrats who chose to throw away their careers at the UN rather than give tacit support to unethical policies driven by the United States.

Being in Iraq showed me the utter devastation U.S. policy (war and sanctions) has wrought there and has given me a vision of what horror a new war would bring. And, of course, an attack on Iraq would be just the beginning of a terrifying chain of reactions throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world. Having worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Palestine in the past year, I am intensely aware of how the fragile politics and powers outside Iraq can be dramatically unsettled by a U.S. Invasion within Iraq.

It’s easy to imagine an impending tragedy of enormous proportion before us, and I ask myself who must step up and take responsibility for stopping it. Clearly the U.S. government is the most powerful actor, but it is equally clear that we cannot turn aside and realistically expect the U.S. government to suddenly reverse the momentum it has created for war. So I feel the weight of responsibility on me, on U.S. citizens, to do whatever we can with our individually small but collectively powerful means to change the course of our government’s policy. I try to picture myself 10 or 20 years in the future, and I don’t want to be in the position where I reflect on the enormous tragedies of the beginning of the 21st century and admit that I did nothing at all to recognize or prevent them.

I don’t know how this letter will sound to my friends and family who are living in the U.S., in a media environment which does very little to effectively question U.S. policy and almost nothing to encourage ordinary people to participate in making a change. I imagine this letter may sound like the political rant of some kind of extremist or anti-American dissident. But that’s not how it feels to me. This doesn’t feel like a political issue to me so much as it feels like a personal issue. I am appalled on a very human level at the suffering which U.S. policy is already inflicting and I am terrified by the prospects for an even more chaotic and violent future.

And let’s be honest about U.S. policy aims. Those in the U.S. government pushing for war say they are doing so to promote democracy, to protect the rights of minorities, and to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction.

But is the U.S. threatening to attack Saudi Arabia or a host of other U.S. allies which have similarly un-democratic regimes? How many of us would advocate going to war with Turkey over the brutal repression of its Kurdish minority and of the Kurds in Iraq? And do we expect the U.S. to bomb Israel or Pakistan which each have hundreds of nuclear weapons? Let’s remember that leaders in the previous weapons inspection team in Iraq had declared that 95% of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities were destroyed. And let’s not forget that in the 1980s, when Iraq was actually using chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranian army, the U.S. had nothing to say about it. On the contrary, at that time President Reagan sent a U.S. envoy to Iraq to normalize diplomatic relations, to support its war with Iran, and to offer subsidies for preferential trade with Iraq. That envoy arrived in Baghdad on the very day that the UN confirmed Iraq’s use of chemical weapons, and he said absolutely nothing about it. That envoy, by the way, was Donald Rumsfeld.

While Iraq probably has very little weaponry to actually threaten the United States, they do have oil. According to a recent survey of the West Qurna and Majnoon oil fields in southern Iraq, they may even have the world’s largest oil reserves, surpassing those of Saudi Arabia. Let’s be honest about U.S. policy aims and ask ourselves if we can, in good conscience, support continued destruction of Iraq in order to control its oil.

I believe that most Americans – Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Purples or whatever – would be similarly horrified by the effects of sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq if they could simply see the place, as I have, up close in its human dimensions; if they could see Iraq as a nation of 22 million mothers, sons, daughters, teachers, doctors, mechanics, and window washers, and not simply as a single cartoonish villain.

I genuinely believe that my view of Iraq is a view that would sit comfortably in mainstream America if most Americans could see Iraq with their own eyes and not simply through the eyes of a media establishment which has simply gotten used to ignoring the death and destruction which perpetuates American foreign policy aims. While the American media fixates on the evils of the “repressive regime” of Saddam Hussein, both real and wildly exaggerated, how often are we reminded of the horrors of the last Gulf War, when more than 150,000 were killed (former U.S. Navy Secretary, John Lehman, estimated 200,000). I simply don’t believe that most Americans could come face-to-face with the Iraqi people and say from their hearts that they deserve another war.

I believe in the fundamental values of democracy – the protection of the most powerless among us from the whims of the most powerful. I believe in the ideals of the United Nations as a forum for solving international conflicts non-violently. These are mainstream values, and they are exactly the values that are most imperilled by present U.S. policy. That’s why, as a citizen of the United States and as a member of humanity, I can’t rest easily so long as I think there is something, anything, that I can do to make a difference.

(The family asked for the author’s name to be suppressed.)

Getting to know another person’s point of view does not mean you agree with them or that you support them. This sounds simple enough. But in minds possessed by the virus of ideology, simple observations about another person become monsters attacking the foundation of one’s existence. There are undoubtedly times when ideology has to be fought with the intellect, with arguments; but there are also times when observations are simply no more than the stuff of reality.

The main point of my Against Human Rights in Iraq was to draw attention to the lack of the Iraqi viewpoint in all of Jack Robertson’s Iraq pieces, which nevertheless express an opinion on what ought to happen in Iraq. He has not “consulted” the Iraqis while presuming to tell them (and all of us) what’s best for them.

As I’ve argued before, this holds, too, for “the people” – those antiwar protesters described in Margo Kingston’s The People’s Instinct on the War. Nothing about seeing the viewpoint of the Iraqi in Iraq necessitates being for the war; but if you’re against the war, and you’re not a scum of a human being, you owe the Iraqis an apology for your choice that this time you cannot support their liberation. “The people” should have apologised to the Iraqis, then been ashamed of themselves.

The elementary fact that getting yourself informed about the Iraqi position does not necessarily mean agreeing with it is what underlies all my recent articles; namely, Why the people’s instinct can be wrong, I felt liberated when I saw the bombs falling and That obscure thing called reality. These pieces are therefore neither pro war nor antiwar.

These works are for seeing another person’s reality – this time, that of the Iraqi under Saddam – and for smashing the mental barriers that prevent human beings from seeing other human beings. With these barriers in place – be they rooted in fear or ideology or both – no just future is possible in Australia or anywhere.

In these pieces I’m simply for clarity and truth, and against the obliterating virus of ideology.

I’ve made my case many times over – and Jack proved my point once again in Two letters to the future. His politicised soul insists that ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’ betrays a political leaning; but in fact he’s hallucinating monsters and goblins, like some medieval religious knave obsessed with grasping onto power no matter what.

In the 21st century so far, two devastating bushfires have swept across the Australian societal landscape, each in turn reinforcing the great Australian inability to imagine in any depth the lot of a stranger, each dividing the world into us and outsiders, whereby what in each case is accepted as “us and ours” is elevated to a special status through heightened familiarity, to the exclusion of the other.

The outsiders are thought of in myth-like ways, images of them are somewhat unreal, because the image of “the other” is a projection of what is necessary for “us” to uphold “our” image of “ourselves”: it has no basis in reality, and its effect is ultimately to falsify and oppress human beings.

In the Tampa and SIEV-X cases, this was called “racism”. It is no different now with the anti-war protests, in the way they shun the Iraqi viewpoint.

I’m saying that when antiwar protesters claim their prejudice is unintentional, they’re not being completely honest: True, they’re not directly intending this consequence, but a destructive intention certainly exists. The viewpoint of the Iraqi seeking liberty – who is supposed to be our kindred spirit, is he not? – is obliterated in the minds of “the people”; for example, by promoting myths such as he or she hates the Americans so much that he or she will fight for Saddam Hussein and not against him.

“The people” naturally believe that Iraqis will willingly fight to save Saddam’s totalitarianism – because if they had it in their mind that Iraqis want to fight with the Americans against Saddam, then they would be confronted with the unsavoury truth that their antiwar protest is denying individual liberty.

Jack Robertson, too, sees Iraqis as an abstraction. He has written so much on Iraq, yet not one word about the Iraqi viewpoint. Not one word of his piece Controil – ostensibly about American Big Oil but it ends up being an antiwar rant on the prophecy that American self-interest is the sole motivation for invading Iraq and that democracy is not worth the risk – sees the situation from the point of view of the Iraqi desiring liberty (as opposed to the apparatchik, and the expatriate conservative Muslim and expatriate socialist/communist, which almost entirely account for Iraqi opposition to the war).

In his letter to me in Two Letters to the Future, Jack admits that he doesn’t have any idea what the Iraqis think. He writes:

I simply don’t know what ‘most’ Iraqis want …. We just don’t know what all the twenty-three million individual Iraqis want, John… there are many Iraqis, here in Australia, around the world, and in Iraq, too, who don’t share your views that we in the West should ‘liberate’ Iraq…

But he’s nevertheless certain that “this debate is dividing Iraqis, just as much as it is dividing the rest of us”.

He projects his image of ourselves onto the Iraqis, as if Saddam’s brutal totalitarian dictatorship makes no difference.

Most striking is that Jack sees no problem with his insinuation that “many Iraqis inside Iraq choose Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship over American liberation”. It’s striking for two reasons:

a) It’s not correct (in any meaningful sense of the word “many”). See ‘I felt liberated…’, ‘Why the people’s instinct…’ and especially ‘That obscure thing called reality’ for the opinion of probably the majority of Iraqis. Also have a look at the open letter from Barham Salih, Prime Minister of Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, in The Age, March 10 (A Plea from the People of Iraq):

No one wants a war in Iraq less than the Iraqi people. But we don’t have the luxury of being anti-war. For the past 35 years, the Baathist regime has been waging war against Iraqis. We know there can be no peace without the military liberation of Iraq. The brutality of Saddam Hussein’s regime leaves Iraqis and the civilised world with no other option.

b) Being capable of taking that insinuation seriously can only mean that despite Jack’s years of doing a lot of good in the Australian community, and years of activism – against Saddam in 1983, as he tells us, too – Saddam’s totalitarian dictatorship is enough of an abstraction in his mind for him to imagine it to be a viable alternative for the Iraqi individual. There’s something making him keep a distance between himself and the reality of totalitarianism. Could it be his ideology?

In ‘I felt liberated when I saw the bombs falling’, I wrote:

Despite knowing tons of information, people don’t have a feel for what a totalitarian dictatorship is – what it actually feels like inside your body, how it makes your body sick (“Hussein is like a cancer eating away at me every moment of the day.”). Often it’s because of preoccupations (eg the obsession with America) – or maybe preoccupations are projections of the mind as it tries to fill the disjointed gaps: a search for meaning.

In summary, Jack has clearly allowed my basic point in ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’:

Most importantly, and I stress that this is the main point of this Webdiary note, you have failed to consider the viewpoint of the Iraqi people.

Yet he still has the gall to claim:

You’re quite wrong about (Amnesty International), by the way – concentrating on individuals is exactly what our little group does.

But evidently it’s not what he does in the case of Iraq, because he hasn’t bothered to inform himself of what Iraqis think.

I only disclosed my involvement with AI – while making it clear that my views were personal…

So while working for Amnesty in his contact group, Jack suddenly becomes enlightened on the viewpoint of the Iraqi individual? I don’t think so. Ignorance of the meaning of totalitarianism represents a fundamental conflict of interest for Amnesty International workers. Anti-American jaundice is likewise.

This was the point of ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’. One cannot seriously act for human rights in Iraq if one is ignorant of the Iraqi viewpoint. Moreover, in opposing the war, one is culpable for keeping a dictator in place. One ought to acknowledge that, just as Australians ought to acknowledge that modern Australia is partly founded on the suffering of the Aborigines.

Now, as I wrote above, you do not need to be for or against the war to inform yourself of the Iraqi viewpoint. Getting to know another person’s point of view does not mean you agree with them or that you support them. My recent pieces are neither pro-war nor antiwar.

Despite this, Jack has hallucinated some “monster” of pro-war sentiment in ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’ – without bothering to read the other three pieces I mentioned above at the start. His phantasms are purely a product of his politicised soul, the cause and symptom of his inability to see what is simply human. He writes:

You’re not the first pro-war ‘Born-Again Human Rights Believer’… pro-invasionists like you get bored by plodding, case-by-case grass-roots work … For all your pompous bluster, none of you war-hawks have a clue what your invasion aim really is … your knee-jerk lefty stereotyping… You warhawks keep wanting to use force to bring stability to the unstable world … I don’t agree with your plans for carpet-bombing Baghdad into freedom; ergo, I must be ‘against Human Rights in Iraq’. … It’s you, I think, who are the real Utopian – vague, assertive, short-sighted, unpractical, seeming to believe that an invasion will magically ‘cure everything’,… You’re blindly hoping for the best, John, and not remotely preparing for the worst. … Do you remotely care…? And my kind of plan is also far, far more likely to achieve a good HR and democracy outcome in Iraq in the long run than yours… You’re the one about to summarily take over the joint, and tell everyone who lives there what ‘free’ and ‘just’ is going to mean to them all, from now on…. What we can’t be so sure of is the ‘big picture’, the ‘sweeping solution’ that people like you – the real Utopians – love so much. … Did you bother to… before you decided to declare me a self-obsessed, Utopian, pro-Saddam ignoramus…? I’m sorry, I’m now all confused again. This is your problem, John.

Oh, is it? I think you still have some growing up to do, Jack. That is your motto, isn’t it? “Leftists must grow up or die.”

It’s extraordinary that Jack has written so many words while completely missing my point. He therefore doesn’t say anything that I need to respond to.

There are, nonetheless, some sentences I will respond to, for various reasons.

Jack writes:

It’s you, I think, who are the real Utopian – vague, assertive, short-sighted, unpractical, seeming to believe that an invasion will magically ‘cure everything’, even if it’s run by, and/or for the partial benefit of, oil ‘parasites’, to use your term.

In fact, I’m reporting the views of Iraqis both inside and outside Iraq. I have taken the time to understand their point of view. Jack’s disdain towards their existence, while making pronouncements about what’s best for their country, is disgraceful.

I think he should now explain to the Iraqis – because I know we have a small audience in northern Iraq – why their desire to be liberated from the most brutal regime on earth is “vague, assertive, short-sighted, unpractical”, despite the effort they’ve put into plans for democracy, and the enormous price the Kurds have paid in creating the freest region in the Middle East.

On a similar note, Jack mentions protesting against Saddam Hussein in 1983. I wonder to what extent Jack was against Saddam Hussein, and to what extent he was raging against Ronald Reagan, and whether obsession with the latter stunted his education about Iraq. (Although Reagan had decided that the US should entice Iraq away from the Soviet Union, it did not come across like this to Reagan haters.)

Jack writes that he lived in Dresden not all that long after the war. I wonder whether – while comprehending in full intensity Allied war crimes in Dresden – he took the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, or Babi Yar (near Kiev), to name just a few, all of which aren’t that far away from Dresden. It would have been possible, even under the communists.

In any case, let’s get back to Iraq, as these days we’re talking about Saddam’s brand of fascism.

Must I – to prove my (human rights) credentials to your satisfaction – climb heartily aboard your Iraq invasion bandwagon?

Nothing about seeing the viewpoint of the Iraqi in Iraq requires climbing onto any “invasion bandwagon”. This is why I did not mention it. Jack’s claim is just a phantasm inside his head.

But to prove his HR credentials to his own satisfaction, may I suggest he apologise to the Iraqis – thereby acknowledging their existence – for being unable to support their desire for liberation and for taking action whose success would keep Saddam in power, thereby making him partly culpable for the murder of countless Iraqis by Saddam’s henchmen in the years until the fall of his regime.

I don’t agree with your plans for carpet-bombing Baghdad into freedom.

“My” plans? Jack’s hallucinations.

But there’s a worrying slovenliness with the truth in Jack’s sentence, indicative of a wider trend. Stealing certitude they’re not entitled to is completely typical of “the people”. Here is an example of a point I mentioned in ‘Why the people’s instinct can be wrong’.

Even Paul McGeough knows that the Americans are not going to carpet bomb Baghdad. That’s why he’s staying put. See Margo Kingston’s interview with him, Behind the story.

“Carpet bombing” is propaganda. Jack has swallowed it hook line and sinker. Jack uses his army experience – and his family’s involvement in the imminent war – to claim authority on military matters, yet he’s gullible for the most blatant propaganda concerning tactics of war. This particular image of the American invasion seems to dominate his thinking on the issue. Propaganda has obliterated his better sense, and has stopped him from informing himself about the most basic aspects of American tactics.

If there’s any threat of mass destruction, it comes from Saddam Hussein and a possible “Nero” order, a la Hitler, March 1945. (I shall write about this for Webdiary soon).

Saddam Hussein – not the Americans – would be to blame. Jack’s perverse inversion of values would blame the Americans for Saddam’s murder suicide.

Paul McGeough might have got his information on how the Americans intend to minimise civilian casualties from defenselink.

Jack writes:

The first Principle of War is ‘selection and maintenance of the aim’.

Depends on who you read. According to Sun Tsu, it’s something like this:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Jack writes:

I spent a good deal of my time in uniform finding practical solutions to real-world problems – floods, bushfires, aerial search-and-rescues, the odd delicate ‘crowd situation’, h/c medical evacuations, and so on.

Good for Jack! Evidently, however, Jack ought to spend less time in the great outdoors and more time reading about what the Iraqis think before presuming to advise them on what’s best for their country.

Did you actually bother to read my alternative plan for the use of the West’s power? (Looking for John Curtin)

Actually, I did. I immediately saw that Jack’s idea is a product of naive wishful thinking. As Iraqi vice president Tarek Aziz stated late in February, Iraq would consider a UN force (or “protection” force as Jack puts it) to oversee weapons inspections as a violation of its sovereignty.

Jack’s plan amounts to an invasion of a sovereign country. You’re back to square one.

The bottom line has always been getting Saddam Hussein to cooperate. Without his cooperation, nothing but war is possible – if you’re serious about imposing United Nations “law”. This is the basic reality Jack’s plan misses.

You can’t democratise a country by imposed force, mate, any more than you can smack a child into adulthood.

This folklore “history” suits Jack’s purpose but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Afghanistan. Kosovo. Serbia. Bosnia. Germany and forced de-Nazification. Japan and forced de-imperialisation. The Marshall Plan. The Vietnamese liberation of the Khmer Republic.

Imposed force was essential in the democratisation of all of these places. Although in some of them the job is still going on, in all of them life is better now than it was.

Echoing de-Nazification in postwar Germany, one prominent Iraqi this week called for “de-Baathification” of Iraq following liberation. I’m not lying, Jack. And this fact has nothing to do with being for or against the war. It’s got everything to do with finding out what Iraqis think before presuming to tell them what’s best for them.

Nobody necessarily has to agree with the Iraqis just because he or she has the courtesy to find out what they think. That Jack has continually accused me of acting otherwise is an indication of the politicisation of his soul. If he’s too far gone then there’s no hope for him – he’ll continue to have a lot of trouble sorting out the spin from the truth.

There’s an undercurrent in Jack’s writing:

You’re supposed to inspire, demonstrate, show, lead by brilliant example.

The Iraqis are not stupid, Jack. Why are you presuming that the Iraqis are incapable of organizing a democracy for themselves? Any reasons? Do you know anything at all about northern Iraq?

Why are the Iraqis a monolithic, unknown entity in your mind?

The fact is that the Iraqi situation is not as familiar to you in your mind as, say, American oil interests. That’s a shame.

In all of your pieces, you haven’t shown any understanding of what the Iraqis are planning in their own country, or acknowledged that they have made serious plans for Iraq’s future. These plans may or may not be realized, there is always risk – but why do you deny in advance that democracy is possible in Iraq?

You’re manifesting complete ignorance of the Iraqi viewpoint – that they are willing to take that risk.

Jack writes further:

Do I whine back at you about much time I spend as Balmain AI co-convener writing letters, articles and appeals, helping run market stalls, collecting furniture, collecting money, collecting members, collecting signatures and advocating on behalf of Iraqi refugees and Iraqi HR-abuse victims…

The question is not how much good you have done in the past, nor whether you once advocated on behalf of Iraqi refugees in Australia. The question is why is the Iraqi viewpoint missing in your present writings – while an obsession with the Americans is manifested clearly.

It’s about time you faced the fact that the same refugees you helped are looking on in horror at your present actions:

On Sunday I watched the peace activists rallying for peace without mentioning my butcher, Hussein.

They marched alongside Hussein’s activists, I saw them very clearly. I watched the Greens seeking votes. I watched Labor seeking leadership. I watched the Democrats trying to save their sinking party. I did not see John Howard marching, but he too is serving his own interests.

I don’t care if this war is for oil or not. I didn’t get any advantage from oil under Hussein and if it goes to the US, who cares?

My only wish is for the sinking ship of Iraq to be saved. We tried very hard to save ourselves but we couldn’t. All the nation rebelled in 1991, but was put down brutally, right before America’s eyes. Hussein has survived more than 20 assassination attempts.

“I looked to the Iraqi opposition groups to unite so they could form a government after an invasion. There is not much hope of that either.

“I don’t care who rules my country after an invasion as long as there are less jails, less killing. (Account of “Adnan Hussan”, Feb 20, The Australian)

Jack writes:

But I simply have to protest that it’s asking a bit much to expect me to cop it sweet when someone like you tries to blame us anti-invasionists for Saddam.

This is populist obfuscation. A cop-out, anti-intellectual laziness. I never made the argument that you claim here. Shame on you. If you succeed in your cause, then you will be helping keep the status quo in Iraq. This may not be your intention, but it is the effect. Doesn’t it bother you that your actions would lead to this if they’re successful?

Now, you’re intelligent enough to know the difference between “culpability” and “blame”. Why are you playing the fool?

If you’re not playing the fool, and you truly don’t care much for the distinction between “culpability” and “blame”, then next time Australian right-wing conservatives bemoan the “black armband view of history”, and refuse to say “sorry” because “it’s asking a bit much to expect me to cop it sweet when someone like you tries to blame us” for the stolen children and the cultural genocide of the 1930s, then I expect you not only to respect their right to express their monstrous inhumanity, but also to support their washing their hands, because that’s what you have done in every piece of yours on Iraq.

Yeah, you’re not the first pro-war ‘Born-Again Human Rights Believer’ who’s berated me over my refusal to support the act of bombing Baghdad into HR submission, John. Nor, no doubt, will you be the last. ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’. Jesus.

Nothing about seeing the viewpoint of the Iraqi in Iraq necessitates being for the war; but if you’re against the war, and you’re not a scum of a human being, you owe the Iraqis an apology for your choice that this time you cannot support their liberation.

Moreover, your term of abuse betrays your ideology.

Read that again. “In Iraq”. Not “In Australia”. As the Amnesty website says, human rights are indivisible, universal. But it is impossible to claim to be upholding human rights in a country of which you have none of the essential knowledge.

You’re blindly hoping for the best, John, and not remotely preparing for the worst.

On the contrary, in ‘Why the people’s instinct can be wrong’, I wrote:

…these last two years have been an extraordinarily difficult time to be an Australian. Twice already, the 21st century has exposed deep flaws in the Australian character. Of course, Australia is not uniquely afflicted with these problems; but historical, geographical, demographic and other factors conspire to make them particularly pronounced here.

In this period, two devastating bushfires have swept across the Australian societal landscape, each in turn reinforcing the great Australian inability to imagine in any depth the lot of a stranger, each dividing the world into us and outsiders, whereby what in each case is accepted as “us and ours” is elevated to a special status through heightened familiarity, to the exclusion of the other.

The outsiders are thought of in myth-like ways, images of them are somewhat unreal, because the image of “the other” is a projection of what is necessary for “us” to uphold “our” image of “ourselves”: It has no basis in reality, and its effect is ultimately to falsify and oppress human beings.

The first Australian catastrophe was the assertion of State power – feeding and fed by nationalist paranoia – over human decency; the second, as we have now seen, is the assertion of a pose of international solidarity, in a movement of vilification of a figurehead – feeding and fed by self-seeking neurosis ostensibly in the name of justice.

Both are ultimately inward-looking. Both, as George Orwell wrote, are forms of nationalist isolationism, despite the latter’s internationalist pose.

… Like Tampa and SIEV-X, the antiwar marches expose gaps in Australians’ ability to function as moral people, which means as people who can imagine the lot of another and do the right thing of their own free will. There’s room for improvement. Australia’s only hope for the future is if enough people find the will to improve. Otherwise Tampas and concentration camps for asylum seekers will keep recurring.

Preparing for the worst means that in this strange, sick country of ours, seeming so free yet giving only lip service to loving liberty, the overwhelming impression one gets will continue to be the same as that of the Iraqis who watched the antiwar protesters and despaired – those who call Australia “home” and now wonder what sort of society can so passionately ignore the victims of totalitarianism.

Just as Jack Robertson has done once again in his letter to me.

The overwhelming impression one gets of Australia, particularly following the two recent disasters, is a country where reality is obliterated from the mind and replaced with inhuman phantasms generated by the virus of ideology.

Prepare to feel a foreigner in your own country. That is preparing for the worst, for the day when you fall within the sphere of influence of an ideologue, a person in whom distance between human beings is permanently and irredeemably embedded.

I fear that in Australia it’s already the case that this kind of ideologue constitutes the vast majority, and that only a small number of foreigners in their own country are wandering shattered and shell-shocked through the wreckage.

I’ll end by citing a portion of ‘Why the people’s instinct can be wrong’:

It must be emphasised that apart from the neo-nazis, none of the protesters would have wanted Saddam Hussein to win. They do, after all, have a feeling for peace that they were promoting, even if it was expressed as vilification of Bush. Moreover, consideration of the potential victims of the imminent war was certainly a part of their protest, even if their conception ignored the view of the Iraqi seeking liberation.

But it is easy to be appalled at violence, especially when it hasn’t happened yet and everybody fears the worst, … It is much harder for “the people” to come to terms with the dilemma faced by Iraqis who dream of freedom.

Furthermore, the protesters would have been appalled if it were explained to them that their action was subsequently used by the dictator and his henchmen to prop up the totalitarian regime oppressing the Iraqi people – by buying time and waiting for public support in the USA and Britain to collapse, a tactic Saddam announced in an Egyptian newspaper interview back in November. Saddam’s plan has been falling into place ever since.

Saddam’s tactic seems to be working, with extreme pressure recently having been placed by their electorates on the prime ministers of Britain and Spain, Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar, following the French and German-led revival of the worldwide antiwar movement.

Nevertheless, protesters that wash their hands of responsibility for handing Saddam the initiative would be acting dishonestly. They would be denying their culpability (ie unintentional causation) in the same way that many Australians, having supported the unscrupulous opportunists on the Tampa and SIEV-X issues, deny responsibility for the self-mutilation of asylum seekers in Australian concentration camps. These denialists think every man is an island. We’re far away from Iraq, why should our actions have any influence there? (Similarly: we’re far from Iraq, why should it be Australia’s problem?) But the distance we imagine between us and Iraq is mirrored in the distance between fellow Australians.

Perhaps Australia’s landscape is a strong influence, embedding distance between human beings. Or perhaps it’s our relatively comfortable existence influences our worldview. The protesters – or, at least, “the people”, because their view is what I have on paper before me – are without doubt morally blameworthy.

The reason lies not in the fact that Saddam Hussein was able to use their protest towards his own goals, but in their wilful promotion of – and wilful neglect in permitting – the long gradual process of forgetting – the “Chinese whispers process” – of the point of view of the Iraqi who thirsts for liberty. “The people” have driven this Iraqi from their mind, so their naive and dreadfully misconceived protest became thinkable. In the end, if Hans Blix does his job well, then it probably won’t matter to Saddam Hussein. But it will always matter to the Iraqis who watched the protesters and despaired – those who call Australia “home”, and now wonder what sort of society can so passionately ignore the victims of totalitarianism who long for freedom.

“The people” have rendered themselves incapable of acting (eg holding a demonstration) in full knowledge of that other human being’s viewpoint.

Worse, that human being’s viewpoint – who is supposed to be our kindred spirit, is he not? – is obliterated in the minds of “the people”; for example, by promoting myths such as he or she hates the Americans so much that he or she will fight for Saddam Hussein and not against him. “The people” naturally believe that Iraqis will willingly fight to save Saddam’s totalitarianism – if they had it in their mind that Iraqis want to fight with the Americans against Saddam, then they would be confronted with the unsavoury truth that their antiwar protest is denying individual liberty.

They would be confronted with the logical consequence of their negative choice: they are the ones responsible for keeping Saddam in power, for the murder of countless Iraqis by his henchmen in the years until the fall of his regime. Whether you agree with the war or not, this is the consequence of the success of the protests’ aims. From being obliterated in the minds of “the people”, the viewpoint of the Iraqi desiring liberty is obliterated in reality.

The antiwar movement in its current form is perpetrating a moral disaster for the world and for Australia. The symptom is that “the people” have not come to terms with the fact that Iraqis can desire liberation; that Iraqis face a horrific dilemma; and that Iraqis can choose war, on the side of the Americans, in full knowledge of the consequences.

The committed leftist and the committed pacifist reel away from the human desires expressed by Iraqis desiring liberty, because here is an implicit blessing for war. But this is what the Iraqi wants – because he knows that alone, the opposition groups are no match for the totalitarian regime.

The diagnosis is that the Iraqi reality is obliterated from the protester’s mind and replaced with phantasms generated by the virus of inhuman ideology.

The prognosis is not good for a just society in Australia, or anywhere.

To save themselves from this plague – and give Australia some hope for her own future – the antiwar protesters ought to apologise to Iraqis and offer their condolences that this time they cannot support liberty in Iraq; that they have chosen to block action that would free Iraqis. Then they should be ashamed of themselves.

Hi. John Howard’s question and answer session after yesterday’s speech to the nation was devastating for the Prime Minister. – and the Australian people. Australians need reassurance – they were treated instead to obfuscation, confiusion, contradiction and lawyer’s games of hide and seek. I agree with our Meeja Watch man Jack Robertson that the press gallery performed well in impossible circumstances:

“After my wild spray at the media’s performance a few days ago (Two letters to the future), I just wanted to say that I thought the Australian Press was pretty impressive today at the National Press Club speech, especially Oakes, Seccombe, Tingle, McGrath, Grant and all those who tried to get specifics from the PM about our ‘reconstruction’ role and the longer-term strategic implications. I recognise what the Press is up against with this man. Thanks for a good attempt. Keep at him.”

The questions were not as tough or broad, overall, as those from the Washington press gallery at Bush’s press conference last week, but there’s good reason for that. Bush was upfront about his intentions, opening up the discussion. John Howard stonewalled on his intentions, despite the fact that it’s obvious from everything he said that we’ll go in with the Yanks no matter what happens at the UN, and cut off further discussion. This meant several questions were taken up with pressing him for an answer, and because he refused to answer most questions anyway, with asking the same question in a different way.

His performance did nothing to alter the impression that he is a lap dog to Bush – a man dancing on the spot until Bush teaches him the next move. It appears that Australia’s interests are simply not being separately addressed.

Bear in mid that this was probably Howard’s last speech to his people before announcing war, his last chance to convert a skeptical public. Maybe he’s diabolically clever – that it’s correct strategically to keep your people in the dark and hope they rush to support you when our troops are in action, because from his performance yesterday he either thinks Australians are stupid, or he doesn’t give a damn what they think.

Here are the key questions and answers, with my comments. For the full transcript, go to pm.

***

Laura Tingle, Australia Financial Review: Prime Minister, your speech today has been a fairly clear enunciation of the principle of pre-emptive strike, and I was just wondering, given how events are unfolding in Iraq, or over Iraq, what is that doctrine likely to imply for the future of the broad western alliance and the UN security system, and where does it suggest Australia goes after Iraq on other rogue states?

John Howard: Well Laura, you’ve chosen to put a particular description on it. I’m not going to adopt your description. I’ve given, I believe, a clear enunciation of why we’re adopting the policy we have. I’ve put it in context. We are living in a different world. The old view of aggression was that an army rolled across a border. The new menace and different menace arrived on the 11th of September. America has a different view, very understandably, and I think the implications of that for other liberal democracies is very real. But I’m not going to adopt yours or anybody else’s language. I choose my own. I’ve explained the reasons. I hope they are clear and compelling.

Comment: Both Mr Howard and Robert Hill have themselves used the description “preemptive strike” to describe the American’s new policy, and have argued that the doctrine constitutes self-defence in the post-September 11 world. Mr Howard has even said he’s prepared to invoke the doctrine to attack a nation in our region if he feared an imminent terrorist attack from its soil. His ‘answer’ to Laura is his way of not answering her question, by focusing on what she thought was an uncontroversial summary of his position as a lead-in to the substantive issue. By doing this, he sought to cover the fact that he would not answer a question on the minds of very many Australians. Both sides of politics have traditionally set great store in the UN as a body helping necessary to guarantee our security as a middle- ranking power. His non-answer is an insult to the Australian people, most of whom do not support an invasion of Iraq without UN sanction.

***

Mark Riley, Sydney Morning Herald: It’s clear from what you have said today that you no longer consider the prospect of this new resolution failing to be hypothetical. You’ve shared with us your view of what France and Germany’s attitudes may be in that circumstance as it relates to the military deployment. I’m wondering if you’ll now be as equally candid as George Bush has been with his people, and Tony Blair with his, and tell the Australian people whether you will send our troops into war without UN approval, or the backing of the Security Council.

John Howard: Mark, I’ll just repeat what I have said before, and the Australian people understand this – a final decision will be taken on that when all the processes at the Security Council are known. I’ve said before, and I’ll repeat it today, we seek the 18th resolution of the Security Council – it’s not the 2nd, it’s the 18th resolution of the Security Council – not because we believe as a matter of international law that it is needed. We believe it would be better politically, strategically and in terms of the united voice of the international community, if you could get another resolution. I take you back to what I said in my speech. I really do believe that if everybody got behind the sort of resolution of which I have spoken, and I acknowledge that the prospects of that now are not great, you would perhaps have a real prospect because if you had 15 nations saying you disarm or were coming after you, and you had the neighbouring Arab states saying look, the game is up, you might just get some change in Baghdad. Now if that doesn’t occur, I think the prospects for a peaceful resolution don’t appear very bright. We are positioned to participate in military action. That is self-evident. But as you will have observed from the remarks made by our men in the field, they clearly have not received any instruction as yet, and that will not be given until the Cabinet has considered the matter in the wake of the issue being resolved one way or the other, or no way, at the United Nations. That has been my position all along. I think it is the only responsible position. You never in the situation in which I am placed, you never pass up by taking a decision before you need to, the capacity to consider last-minute circumstances that may affect the type of decision you take. You never do that.

Comment: Howard, again refusing to admit that he is prepared to go in without UN sanction, is reduced to implying that Blair and Bush have been irresponsible by discussing the possibility of unilateral action with their people.

He refuses to enlighten the Australian people about why it would be “better politically, strategically and in terms of the united voice of the international community if you could get another resolution”. This refusal, of course, also allows him to avoid discussing the political and strategic downsides for Australia of going in without UN sanction. Again, he deliberately keeps the Australia people in the dark on his considered assessment of the issue of most concern to them.

***

Fran Kelly, The 7.30 Report: You said today that this judgement, Australia’s judgement, reflects the intelligence community’s professional assessment. Well, in recent days we’ve had an ONA officer quit his post, saying that ONA had given the Government advice that the more Saddam Hussein is pushed, the greater the chance of him using his weapons of mass destruction or linking up with terrorists. Will you release the ONA reports on Iraq, just as you released the ONA report on the children overboard, here in the National Press Club address 16 months ago?

Howard: Well that particular ONA report, as you know Fran, in relation that I mentioned 16 months ago, merely repeated press reports. I’m not going to release ONA assessments which, almost of all of which remain classified. What I said to you today represented their general view. As far as Mr Wilkie is concerned, I respect his right to have another view. It’s not surprising in a large public service and a reasonably large intelligence community, that you’re going to have a range of views. In the end, all of these things involve questions of judgement.

We’re not talking about proving to the, beyond reasonable doubt, to the satisfaction of a jury at the Central Criminal Court in Darlinghurst, if you’ll excuse my Sydney origins, I mean if you wait for that kind of proof, you know, its virtually Pearl Harbour. You’ve got to make judgements, and judgements are made and I have given you the judgement of the [ONA] and I’ve given you our judgement. I mean, people are saying well, you know, where is the further proof? I mean, what I am saying is you have Iraq with weapons of mass destruction, Iraq’s terrible track record, refusing to disarm, the world in effect buckles at the knees and doesnt disarm Iraq, other rogue states say, well we can do that, North Korea says knew they would give in, North Korea becomes more uncontrollable. The likelihood, as a matter of sheer logic in those circumstances, of terrorist groups getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction has got to be greater. And these are judgement calls. And I can respect the fact that somebody else has a different view. Im not going to denigrate the man because of that. I respect that.

Comment: This is a killer question. If ONA defector Andrew Wilkie is telling the truth, then Howard’s case – that we need to declare war on Iraq to avoid the nightmare of Saddam giving WMDs to terrorists – is back to front. War would produce the very nightmare Howard says he’s trying to avoid.

ONA assessments are not released to the public, but Howard made an exception to that rule under enormous pressure over the truth of his election campaign claim that asylum seekers threw their children overboard. Roll back to the last Thursday of the 2001 election campaign, when Howard was at the Press Club the day after The Australian published a page one report that it never happened. His staff then trawled for documents to back his claim, and his foreign affairs adviser came up with an ONA report, which Howard read.

I published the transcript of the pre-election Q and A in Red light questions:

Fran Kelly: Defence sources are saying today that the photos released by the Defence Minister’s office some weeks ago of the people in the water from that sinking boat were captioned when they were handed to the Government and that those captions clearly showed that the people were in the water because the boat was sinking, not because people had been thrown overboard, children had been thrown overboard. Will you now ask the Minister of Defence to release those photos with captions as originally provided by the Navy?

Howard: Well, Fran, I don’t know what defence sources you’re referring to but let me just take you through the sequence on this very quickly. The claims that were made by Mr Ruddock and Mr Reith on the Sunday, I think it would have been Sunday the 7th of October, it was just after the election was called, they were based on advice from defence sources. My own comments were based on my discussions with Mr Ruddock and Mr Reith. On the 9th of October I received an ONA report that read in part as follows: Asylum seekers wearing life-jackets jumped into the sea and children were thrown in with them. Such tactics have previously been used elsewhere, for example, by people smugglers and Iraqi asylum seekers on boats intercepted by the Italian Navy.

By referring back to Howard’s previous use of ONA to help his cause, Fran illustrated the priceless asset of corporate memory in journalism. Howard was cornered. Back in 2001, Howard represented that the ONA document was an independent assessment of the children overboard claim. That was its very purpose in his defence. In fact – as the inquiry revealed – ONA told his adviser in writing that its report was based ONLY on press reports of what the Government had claimed happened.

Either Howard knew that and misrepresented the report, or he didn’t, in which case he decided to release what he thought was a genuine ONA assessment.

To justify not releasing the ONA assessment of risk of WMD distribution to terrorists by Saddam, he was forced to admit that he had misused the ONA document on children overboard. Surely on such a vital matter – crucial to his case for war – he would release it if it contradicted Wilkie and backed him. If not, why not? Do you believe John Howard or Andrew Wilkie?

When I was railing at the calumny of the government on children overboard last year, several readers opined that there would be damage to the government in the medium term because it would corrode the governments credibility. Several other readers wrote that most people didn’t care whether Howard and co had deceived the people because they agreed with his boat people policy. For example, in For those who give two hoots, Graham Bousen wrote:

Margo, the punter does not give two hoots about this children overboard inquiry. They have been told that on other occasions children were used as pawns, so if the Government was wrong on this one, they were right on the rest. Hence the apparent forgiveness for the fibs. It really is old news that the media keeps perpetuating with its holier than thou indignant approach – have they never fudged the facts themselves? Sad is it may be, the punter does not give a damn.

People who thought this way were admitting to themselves that the government had lied to them. That’s a crack in credibility which could widen significantly now that there’s a very important issue Howard is trying to sell to a public which isn’t enthusiastic about the product. The Australian people know the government is capable of deception. As Fran’s question showed, the children overboard is still capable of haunting the Prime Minister.

***

Mike Seccombe, Sydney Morning Herald: The United States has backed its humanitarian concerns over Iraq with a promise that it will stay around after the war and will spend as much money on restoring the infrastructure of Iraq as it spends on flattening it. I was just wondering if you would give us a commitment that we will do something similar. Will we spend something equivalent to the half a billion to a billion dollars that were going to spend attacking on Iraq, on repairing the damage afterwards? Or will we leave the heavy lifting to someone else?

Howard: Well what we will do is well play a role in the reconstruction if that is necessary as a result of a military conflict. Of course, no reconstruction would be necessary if you could peacefully disarm Iraq, but we’ll make a contribution. We’ve already indicated that well contribute some money, I think $10 million to a fund set up by Kofi Annan. That won’t be the end of that. Well make a further contribution. We would actually want to play a significant and constructive role in the reconstruction process. The one thing that I have said were not going to do is were not going to provide a large peacekeeping force. We dont have the military or defence capability of doing that. But if anybody imagines that we won’t play a strong humanitarian, positive role in the process of reconstruction, theyre completely wrong.

Comment: I’ve never seen Howard visibly gag at a question before. After this one, his mouth fell open and there was a pause of at least two seconds before he answered. Secco’s question was a creative way of asking Howard about the peace, and the responsibility we would accept for rebuilding a country shattered by an invasion in which we participated. His use of the words “heavy hitting” repeated a phrase Howard had just used to in describing Australia’s duty not to sit on the sidelines:

There is a temptation, as some have argued, Australia should do is to sit on the sidelines, to be a spectator, to do very little either diplomatically or militarily, to leave the heavy lifting to others, to assume that we’ll somehow or other be okay in the equation and that in many respects would be quite an appealing approach. And I can understand why some of my fellow Australians have asked why does John Howard think this is important to Australia, why is he taking this stance? I’ve tried to explain some of those reasons. I don’t think this is an issue that Australia can simply be a spectator on. I don’t believe sitting on the sidelines is either good for Australia nor do I believe it has ever really been the Australian way.

His answer made it clear that Australia would repeat its behaviour after the 1991 Gulf War. It was our duty to repel Saddam the monster, the evil one, and we signed up to the moral imperative hook line and sinker. Yet when the war was won and Iraqi refugees fled to Iran, Australia and the rest of the world did little or nothing to look after them. Overwhelmed and financially unsupported by the West, Iran told the Iraqis to leave. They couldn’t go home and there was no queue to seek asylum, so many fled in boats. In early 2001, Phillip Ruddock began issuing temporary entry visas instead of permanent visas to boat people, for the explicit reason that most were now Iraqis and virtually all of them were genuine refugees. Post Tampa, he and Howard did much worse. It looks like we’ll again wash our hands of the casualties of war.

***

Michelle Grattan, The Age: Mr Howard, if as you advocate, countries in the Security Council got behind the resolution and a miracle happened and Iraq said yes it would say the game was up and disarmed, but Saddam Hussein was still there, would this be enough for peace given the strong case you have made today for regime change in the name of the Iraqi people?

John Howard: Well I would have to accept that if Iraq had genuinely disarmed, I couldn’t justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I’ve never advocated that. Much in all as I despise the regime. But what I was really trying to say today and perhaps it has had some effect is that I get a bit tired of the humanitarian argument all being on the one side. Its about time that the humanitarian argument was put into a better balance and people understand what a monstrous regime we are dealing with.

Comment: Howard devoted a significant hunk of his speech to the humanitarian case for war, signifying a victory for anti-war campaigners focused on the human costs of the war. The humanitarian argument was absent from the pro-war case until the anti-war humanitarian case gained traction. Howard said (after Bush showed him the way):

We’re talking about a regime that will gouge out the eyes of a child to force a confession from the child’s parents. This is a regime that will burn a persons limbs in order to force a confession or compliance. This is a regime that in 2000 decreed the crime of criticising it would be punished by the amputation of tongues. Since Saddam Hussein’s regime came to power in 1979 he has attacked his neighbours and he’s ruthlessly oppressed ethnic and religious groups in Iraq more than one million people have died in internal conflicts and wars. Some four million Iraqis have chosen exile. Two hundred thousand have disappeared from his jails never to be seen again. He has cruelly and cynically manipulated the United Nations oil-for-food programme. He’s rorted it to buy weapons to support his designs at the expense of the wellbeing of his people. Since the Gulf War the people of Iraq have not only endured a cruel and despotic regime but they’ve had to suffer economic deprivation, hunger and sickness.

And we should never forget that economic sanctions imposed have had a humanitarian cost. That cost has been made worse by Saddam Hussein’s rorting of the sanctions regime. Those sanctions could have been lifted years ago if Iraq had complied with the requirements of Security Council resolutions about disarmament.

It is too easy to limit, it’s too easy for some people to limit the humanitarian considerations to the consequences of military conflict. In truth there’s nothing easy or reassuring or comfortable about the problem of Iraq. Surely it is undeniable that if all the humanitarian considerations are put into the balance there is a very powerful case to the effect that the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime would produce a better life and less suffering for the people of Iraq than its continuation.

If Howard had used those compelling examples of a brutal and brutalising regime when the Iraqi boat people asked for sanctuary, instead of calling them queue jumpers, child throwers and terrorists, the Australian people would have empathised with the necessity for Iraqi refugees to go to any lengths to rescue their families from the horror. We would have welcomed them, not turned them away. Howard’s use of graphic examples of the truth of Saddam’s regime to justify the war on moral grounds after demonising refugees from it just a short time ago was despicable.

He’s in an uncomfortable position, and Michelle – a notoriously cautious columnist who this week in The Age was prepared to call his claim that he hadn’t yet decided to wage war without a UN sanction as ‘The big lie’, skewered Howard’s answer to the humanitarian anti-war. He is forced to admit that rescuing the Iraqi’s is not the reason for war, or even a reason. If he did make the claim, of course, he would be confronted with the terrible fact that the US backed Saddam for many years in full knowledge of his barbarism.

No, saving the Iraqi people would be a happy byproduct of war, that’s all. Not only that, we see from his answer to Secco’s question that he would do virtually nothing to help the Iraqi people rebuild a shattered nation after he’s helped bomb it to smithereens. Goodbye just war.

***

Dennis Grant, SBS television

In your speech today my attention was drawn to this line where you’re talking about “people who are ready to mount the moral parapets” of this debate. Can I draw your attention to some of them? Could I draw your attention to General Peter Gration – he was CDF at the time of the last Gulf War; Major General Peter Phillips, fighting soldier in Vietnam, the National President of the RSL. On the diplomatic side, Dick Woolcott – former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs. All of them are opposed to your policy. Can you point me to a credible, non-political figure who does support your policy?

John Howard: Well, in the nature of political debate Dennis, people don’t declare and come out in favour of something that is being done, they tend to come out against something that they disagree with. And in talking about those gentlemen, particularly Peter Gration and Peter Phillips, I don’t regard everybody as everybody’s who’s been a little bit critical as having mounted the moral parapets, I don’t. I, in fact, I followed carefully what both Peter Gration and Peter Phillips have said and I don’t, you know, I don’t put them in the category of people who have branded what we’re doing as immoral and war mongering and so forth, they have reservations, they have different views about different aspects of it. As far as Dick Woolcott is concerned, well I respect his views. He, of course, was somebody who was very critical of our intervention in East Timor, now that’s his right. But in a debate like this you get a whole range of views and I’ve read what Peter and the two Peter’s have said and whilst they raise a number of questions and express some concerns, I don’t regard them as having mounted the moral parapets in the way that some others have done.

Well the question of who supports me or who doesn’t support me in the end is a judgement for the people of Australia. I regard the views of individual Australians on this as just as valuable as the views of people you’ve quoted or any people I might invoke. I mean this is something for the people to think about and the purpose of a gathering like this is for me, through this forum, to talk directly to the people of Australia. I’m interested in their views, some of them don’t agree with me, some of them do. A lot of them haven’t made up their minds and I can understand that because, as I said right at the beginning, this is the first major difficult international issue of great complexity, the world has had to grapple since the arrival of what I might call the new dispensation of which I spoke in my address.

Comment: Howard has completely fallen apart now. By saying that in politics “people don’t declare and come out in favour of something that is being done, they tend to come out against something that they disagree with”, he’s implying that he’s decided to go to war, something he’s denied. If you take him at his word, the matter is unresolved, in which case you’d expect vigorous debate from credible people on both sides of the debate.

In any event, his claim is inaccurate. It’s a standard feature of political debate that before a decision is announced, a government lines up credible non-political figures to praise it on release. And when a government is not winning an important political debate, it’s standard practice to press supporters of its cause to go public. Howard, it seems, has been spectacularly unsuccessful in this endeavour.

The fact that he can think of not one credible non-political figure who supports his position is proof that he’s in deep trouble on the merits. To then outsource the question to the people of Australia to rack there brains over – and on a question of fact, not opinion – is breathtaking. And the fact that he gives the people this responsibility while making it clear he’s perfectly prepared to go to war in the face of contrary public opinion, shows he’s been snookered. For mine, Grant asked the question of the day.

***

Catherine McGrath, AM, PM and World Today: You opened your speech today by talking about terrorism, terrorist groups and you identified Osama bin Laden, you talked about his appalling track record. You then spoke about Iraq and said that if Iraq is not stopped that’s the green light for weapons to pass from terrorists to Iraq. Can I ask you, you’ve made a link between the terrorists’ requests, the terrorists’ desire but you haven’t made a strong link between Iraq or provided any proof that Iraq is seeking to deliver its weapons to terrorists. Can I ask you a two part question – do you have any evidence that you can provide now? Secondly, what about other countries that hold nuclear weapons that may provide opportunities for terrorists, for example, Pakistan which some could argue would have more chance of passing them on?

Howard: Well, can I start with the other countries that have them. I mean, we regret very much that Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, we made that very clear. I mean, I do have some warm regard for the courage and the stance of General Musharraf in the war against terror. I have great admiration for the risks that he’s taken and the strength he’s displayed. India and Pakistan, to my knowledge, didn’t sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and they don’t, to my knowledge, have the same track record as Iraq.

I mean, to compare a country like India which is the probably the – I mean, it’s the largest functioning democracy in the world – with Iraq is very very unfair. And equally, although Pakistan has not had the same familiarity with parliamentary democracy as India, it is nonetheless in many other ways a very very good international citizen. So, I don’t think you can and I think it’s very unfair on both India and Pakistan to draw that analogy.

Catherine, with respect I think you leapt over one of the things I said. I mean, my argument is this in relation to Iraq. Iraq is demonstrably, to use my language, a rogue state. If we don’t make sure that Iraq is disarmed, that of itself will encourage other rogue states to acquire and develop weapons of mass destruction and the more of those states that acquire, the greater inevitably is the likelihood that those weapons are going to get into the hands of terrorists. And when you have on top of that clear evidence, that I mentioned today, that Al Qaeda – the most lethal of the international terrorist organisations – wants to get its hands on, and in fact is doing its own work in relation to those weapons, you know, that to me is pretty compelling.

Now, you say proof, I mean as I say, I can’t prove before an Old Bailey or a Central Criminal Court jury but can I say to you again, I mean if the world waits for that, it’s too late. I mean, that is I said a Pearl Harbour situation.

Comment: He’s on the run. He raises India out of the blue as covering waffle, then finds that his justifications for not seeing India as a threat ruptures his pr-Pakistan case, as Pakistan is a military dictatorship still suspended from the Commonwealth due to the overthrow of the democratic government. To allege that Pakistan – a known financial and military supporter of the Taliban before September 11 – is “a very very good international citizen” is beyond belief.

To the big question. Was there ANY evidence that Iraq is seeking to deliver WMDs to terrorists. The sting in the tale in this question is Andrew Wilkie’s claim that ONA assesses that Saddam could deliver WMDs to terrorists AS A RESPONSE to an invasion. Howard ignores this crucial claim in his speech and in every answer.

Instead, he replies by restating that Iraq is a rogue state, and that there is good evidence that al-Qaeda wants WMDs. From this non-answer he jumps to the admission that he can’t, and shouldn’t have to, provide proof to the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. Sure, but how about some EVIDENCE – even a little bit. He covers over this gap by citing Pearl Harbour. There was no warning of that attack – is Howard saying we have the right to invade another country with no proof at all?

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Laurie Oakes, Nine Network: I don’t think you answered Catherine’s question, so before I ask mine I’ll ask hers in a slightly different way. We read in the morning papers that you were going to present today evidence from our intelligence agencies of a link between Iraq and terrorists. What happened to that evidence? Why isn’t it in your speech? And since you’ve made no attempt at all to demonstrate a link, are we to assume there is none?

And then my question after you’ve answered that – the speculation that the US and its allies will stop seeking a fresh UN resolution against Iraq before launching military action, Spain one of the co-sponsors has indicated there’s not much point if it’s not going to get through. Is that your information and how do you feel about that?

John Howard: Well, Laurie, in answer to the second question – I’ve had a number of discussions about what’s happening in the UN, the latest information I have is that there is still a very concerted effort being made to get a resolution through. Now, its a fluid situation, things can often change but they’re still trying very hard.

As for the first question, well I read what was in the paper this morning and I’m not entirely responsible for what’s in the newspapers, although I’m sometimes responsible for some of it. I’m perfectly happy to plead guilty to that. What I endeavoured to do today was to do two things – to establish clear evidence that terrorist groups wanted weapons of mass destruction and I think I did that and I think I did that quite convincingly. I’ve never represented to anybody that we could produce what I called Darlinghurst or Old Bailey proof.

Comment: Mike Seccombe details the misrepresentation from John Howard’s office which got him live coverage from Nine and Seven as well as the ABC in All the propaganda that’s fit to hear. Besides getting the free hit on TV, Howard achieved page one headlines and news stories the morning of his speech containing the claim that Howard would detail new evidence of terrorist attempts to seek WMDs (see, for example, the page one lead of the Herald, PM’s final case for war). Howard awkwardly fudges – he doesn’t deny he leaked false info, he doesn’t deny his office leaked false info (he can’t – his audience KNOWS the truth). So he denies something Laurie hadn’t alleged – that the leak was that he’d provide evidence satisfying the criminal onus of proof. He and his office have been caught out in blatant media manipulation. He seems to be learning his media tricks from Bush too – the incident reminds me of senasational, and false, White House leaks to the press before big speeches, for example the security council statement of evidence by Colin Powell. Fake info, dishonest spin. Find the suckers to convince. Get the cheap scores. Sickening. Blowback – full-on cynicism from journalists, who’ll stop taking big deal people at their word.

Colin Powell announced today that the US might renege on Bush’s cast iron guarantee to his people last week that he would force a security council vote – that all members would have to put their cards on the table (US wavers on seeking UN approval for the development). See Cards on the table for Bush’s promise: “Yes, we’ll call for the vote: No matter what the whip count is, we’ll call for a vote. It’s time for people to show their cards.”

Yet Howard yesterday, true to form, avoided the question, which meant he didn’t have to discuss the ramifications of a refusal to seek a vote, as distinct from a defeat on a vote. George Bush, Asutralia’s wartime leader.

***

Tony Wright, The Bulletin: If, as Donald Rumsfeld suggested a couple of days ago, Britain decided not to go ahead in the Gulf. How comfortable would you have been for Australia to be the single deputy to the US in any strike on Iraq? And when you deployed Australian troops in the first place, did you imagine at that time that Australia could still be in the position of being the only other nation that troops in the Gulf, other than the US and Britain, at this time?

Howard: Well, I think it’s – I didn’t see a lot of other countries at that time coming in, although we made our decision based on our own assessment. I mean, as to what the British do is a matter for Britain. What we do is a matter for us. Clearly, the presence of the British there is seen by many Australians as an important supplement to the presence of the Americans. I want to say that the leadership that’s been displayed by Tony Blair on this issue in his own party has been extraordinary and I salute him for that. He’s a very strong Labor leader and I think he deserves a great deal of respect for the very strong attitude that he’s taken. He believes very strongly in what he’s doing – I know that, as I do.

Comment: Why won’t John Howard level with the Australian people? Its stating the bleeding obvious that what Britain does is what Britain does. What would it mean for us? We get an admission that many Australians think it’s important that the Brits fight beside us if there’s a non-UN sanctioned attack, but doesn’t say what he thinks.

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Karen Middleton, The West Australian: The Chief of the Defence Force, General Cosgrove, gave an undertaking today that he would never lie about the activity of our forces in the Gulf, but he also acknowledged the Defence forces have been generally reluctant to discuss publicly particularly the activity about special forces. I’d like to ask you, can you envisage any circumstances in which you would deem it in the national interest not to tell the truth to the Australian people about our forces activities in the Gulf?

John Howard: Well I haven’t come across them yet. It’s a hard question. I don’t want to mislead the Australian people. Sometimes you have to be careful if the lives of people are at risk and I hope the Australian people would always understand that. But as to whether I would set out deliberately to deceive them, no I hope I never do that.

Comment: Are you comforted by Mr Howard’s ‘hope” that he won’t deliberately deceive the Australian people? Maybe it gets easier with practice.

***

Lincoln Wright, The Canberra Times:

Prime Minister, your speech today strikes me as a clear case for regime change in a sense that youve raised the humanitarian argument about the regime. I think youve backed off a bit from that before. But is it really an addition to your foreign policy armoury now? And my second question is the Americans talk a lot about reshaping the Middle East in terms of geopolitics in Iran, Saudi Arabia. Youve rarely mentioned that, that were buying into that position. Can you comment on that please as well?

John Howard: Well you’re the commentator about what Ive said. But our position on regime change has not changed. But I do think that its necessary in these public presentation of this whole thing for the Australian public to be reminded of the balance of the humanitarian argument because inevitably when the possibility of war looms people talk about the costs of it, and that is naturally human. I mean we all hate it. Anybody who thinks I’m enjoying having to argue this position in the sense that, you know, I like the idea that at some stage this country might be involved in a military conflict, I mean nothing could be further from the truth. I’d much rather be talking to you today even about things like the – the GST’s come and gone, but other things like that, much rather. You know, health policy, having a debate about good water policy with the States, things like that. But I cant do that. But I do want the Australian people to understand that the humanitarian argument is not all on the side of those who are attacking the stance being taken by the Americans and by implication ourselves and the British. And if it does come to military action I believe there is a very powerful case that the humanitarian balance will point to a better life for the Iraqi people without Saddam Hussein because although regime change is not the primary goal of Australian policies, if it is necessary to forcibly disarm Iraq it is axiomatic that the regime will go. I think most people understand that.

But as far as reshaping the Middle East is concerned, well the American Administration can say what it chooses to on that. We’re not necessarily saying exactly the same thing on reshaping the Middle East. I am well known as somebody who is a strong supporter of the State of Israel but Im not an uncritical friend and nobody should be. But I would like to see the re-elected government of Israel, it doesn’t seem to be quite as possible now because of the structure of the coalition, I would like to see as much responsiveness as possible. I do believe in the establishment of an independent Palestinian State. They do have a right to that, and I welcome the cautious moves to appoint a prime minister for Palestinethe Palestinian Council I think you call it, and I hope we get something out of that and I think theres a great hunger around the world and I want to make sure that we keep trying. I think it was a mistake that those representatives of the Palestinian Council were not allowed to participate in that conference in London. But can I just say again, how can you ask the Israelis to reach out to certain initiatives when these suicide bombers keep blowing up kids and university students and everything.

Comment: Can Howard really get away with saying that the US “can say what it chooses on (reshaping the middle-east”? He’s already admitted we’re a close ally, and his actions show that when where the Americans lead he follows on request. And can he really get away the meaningless vagueness of “we’re not necessarily saying exactly the same thing on reshaping the Middle East” How much contempt does he expect the Australian people to cop?

***

James Grubel, AAP: Mr Howard. I just want to follow up on your comments a moment ago about the rules of engagement for Australian forces in the Gulf. Presumably some thought has been given to this, given that events are coming to a head. Can you explain to us now whether there will be limits on will our SAS troops be involved in frontline activities going into Iraq, and can you explain to us will the FA18s over there be limited in the sort of missions they can undertake, or will they be given a free rein to attack Iraqi strongholds?

Howard:

No, well look, I cant go into that detail. Were just running a little bit ahead of ourselves in asking me to go into that detail. But what I was doing was stating the principle, and that is that there will be separate rules of engagement and there will be a targeting policy to be approved if all of those things become necessary, and that that will be determined by Australia. I mean obviously the Defence Minister and I will be very directly involved in that.

Comment: Webdiarist Jack Robertson has focused on the unanswered question of the rules of engagement for quite a while now. The ROE must be in place by now, awaiting a tick when Bush presses the war button. But there can be no discussion on debate, as usual. We’ll be told after Howard sends us to war.

Hi. On each side of the war against war, hopes soar, hopes dive, hour by hour now. Resignations abound, timetables slip, and the world waits, mesmerised.

I’m off to Melbourne to record an arts chat show on a book about violent sex and a movie about punk rock – seems crazy stuff to think about now, but the demands of my diary are a comfort of sorts. Life goes on, for now. Back Thursday.

Today’s entry is by a stalwart, always-passionate contributor on the war, Jack Robertson, who’s more directly connected to the war than most as his brother is in the SAS. He’s written two letters to the future – one to John Wojdylo, the other to ‘Brian Dabeagle’, who wrote to Webdiary last week saying he was in the SAS and that Howard had committed the force to war a year ago. (A letter to the SAS?)

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Letters to the future

by Jack Robertson

Dear John Wojdylo,

Mate, I’m not sure why you’re suddenly so inspired to bray somewhat hysterically – like an Andrew Bolt or a Piers Akerman – that Saddam Hussein’s enduring regime is partly my fault, since I am Against Human Rights in Iraq. That I ‘give the green light for dictators.’ That I ‘have failed to consider the viewpoint of the Iraqi people’. That ‘neither [I] nor Amnesty are focussing on the individual’. That I ‘have you not bothered to find out what the Iraqi people think before involving [my]self in actions that would influence their fate’. That ‘Iraqis seeking liberty have become an abstraction to [me] – [I’m] preoccupied with [my] own concerns, in [my] self-centred world, despite the lip-service [I] pay to noble ideals’. That I am ‘clearly imprisoned by the rationalisations inside [my] head, by this self-obsession, and have lost the ability to see the world outside, the world of another person – particularly the world of the Iraqi desiring liberty’.

John, there’s a shameless audacity to this attack that makes me grin a bit nervously, and, even though I said I wasn’t going to jabber on about this foregone conclusion of an invasion any further, overheat the keyboard yet again in long response.

But how the hell do I answer your accusations? Do I whine back at you about much time I spend as Balmain AI co-convener writing letters, articles and appeals, helping run market stalls, collecting furniture, collecting money, collecting members, collecting signatures and advocating on behalf of Iraqi refugees and Iraqi HR-abuse victims – along with a lot of others – who ‘desire liberty’? Or would that be more ‘Western self-obsession’, Western moral preening, Western do-gooder-hood? It strikes me as so.

But I simply have to protest that it’s asking a bit much to expect me to cop it sweet when someone like you tries to blame us anti-invasionists for Saddam. All the warhawks are doing it these days, I notice.

Yeah, you’re not the first pro-war ‘Born-Again Human Rights Believer’ who’s berated me over my refusal to support the act of bombing Baghdad into HR submission, John. Nor, no doubt, will you be the last. ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’. Jesus.

John – I can’t be sure, but I might just have written my first letter in protest against Saddam’s regime way back in 1983, the year I first joined AI. That was back in the days when Donald Rumsfeld was shaking the man’s hand and selling him weapons, and the Brits were financially-backing his mustard gas factories, knowing exactly what he was up to with the Iranians and the Kurds.

Now you may say ‘let’s forget about those mistakes, let’s get on and make amends now’. Maybe there’s an arguable argument for a Human Rights invasion somewhere, but why do you so desperately need to make it by painting harmless lefty plonkers like me as the HR enemy? Is your case in fact so flimsy and tenuous that you need a ‘bad guy’ against which to set it firmer? Must I – to prove my HR credentials to your satisfaction – climb heartily aboard your Iraq invasion bandwagon?

In any case, mate, a few minor points: As far as AI itself is concerned, they, as usual, have ‘no position’ on the power-politics of the invasion. I only disclosed my involvement with AI – while making it clear that my views were personal – because the piece I wrote at the time was a response to an earlier attack, on the same grounds as yours now, on HR groups in general (Take a risk for human rights: Back Bush).

I wasn’t then and am not now arguing on behalf of anyone but myself. Incidentally, I’m not a ‘senior’ person in AI. I’m the co-convener of a volunteer grass-roots group which has about eight active members. I can’t remember seeing too many pro-war hawks at our last public letter-writing day, either. Why is it that HR only becomes important to so many neo-cons when there’s a sexy war to fight in its name?

If you wish to know more about my general views on HR, then go back over the Webdiary archives and read some of my stuff from the Tampa time. If you want to know how I’d deal with Saddam’s hateful regime, read my alternative plan (Looking for John Curtin).

You’ll notice that my explicit aim in that (two-month-old) alternative is to get rid of Saddam. A plan which, contrary to your other claims, cheerfully and pragmatically employs the Great Satan’s (very handy, sometimes) military power, and in a far more moral, intelligent and focussed HR way than full-scale invasion and occupation will (oh, and I get the UN to pay the bill for the Yanks, too). That is, it’s anything but ‘Utopian’.

Sorry to mess up your knee-jerk lefty stereotyping, John, but I spent a good deal of my time in uniform finding practical solutions to real-world problems – floods, bushfires, aerial search-and-rescues, the odd delicate ‘crowd situation’, h/c medical evacuations, and so on.

It’s you, I think, who are the real Utopian – vague, assertive, short-sighted, unpractical, seeming to believe that an invasion will magically ‘cure everything’, even if it’s run by, and/or for the partial benefit of, oil ‘parasites’, to use your term.

You’re blindly hoping for the best, John, and not remotely preparing for the worst. Others – men like my brother and ‘Brian Dabeagle’ – will have to deal with that. You’ll notice that no-one has mentioned RULES OF ENGAGEMENT yet, by the way. Thoughts, John? Which ‘Iraqis desiring liberty’ shall we have these men kill in our names, mate, and which not? And how will we have them tell the difference in the heat of combat? Do you remotely care, John? Or is it their ‘real world problem’ to solve alone, out there on the solitary battlefields?

And my kind of plan is also far, far more likely to achieve a good HR and democracy outcome in Iraq in the long run than yours, mate, since mine involves a degree of active Iraqi participation, rather than simply a passive acceptance of your Western ‘largesse’, and the imposition of an external military/expatriate government.

You’ll agree that the West didn’t bring the Wall down by bombing Leipzig flat first; the inspiration and some assistance came from the West, sure, but the true, lasting urge for freedom welled up from within. That was certainly how all the people of Dresden still saw things when I lived there eight years later.

It was the same case with East Timor. And in every other post-war liberation that has stuck, too. You can’t democratise a country by imposed force, mate, any more than you can smack a child into adulthood. You’re supposed to inspire, demonstrate, show, lead by brilliant example.

After WW2, until now, that’s just how the gentle, democratic West, wherever in the unfree world it has achieved lasting results, has done it: by lifting struggling, rising Peoples up with a helping hand, mate, not smashing them further down with a swinging fist, in the vague hope that we’ll create an entirely new People in our own image from the pile of hard-smote corpses.

‘Shock and Awe’, and then proud, strong self-determination for Iraqis? More like dulled, numbed submission, I would have thought, John. Or angry, anarchic rejection. But we shall see.

But did you actually bother to read my alternative plan for the use of the West’s power, before you decided to declare me a self-obsessed, Utopian, pro-Saddam ignoramus who was too pathetic to try to exercise it at all? Does my willingness to use military force – intelligently – to help the Iraqi people save me from your stern lecture? Does it put me on the side of the righteous war angels? No? You’re either with-us-or-against-us, Jack?

Back to writing wussy HR letters for me, I suppose. I wonder if I will be excluded, by the triumphant warhawks, from any immediate post-Saddam celebrations that take place in Iraq? In the same way that John Howard and the neo-conservatives retrospectively appropriated the cause of the East Timorese, after a lifetime of opposing their independence.

Those like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and Tom Uren and my Balmain AI predecessors and countless others, who spent thankless wilderness years trying to keep that issue in the global spotlight, might as well never have existed as far as the ‘pragmatists’ of the world were concerned. And now in East Timor, as in Afghanistan, the warhawks have wandered off again, uninterested in the longer-term security of that new nation, not particularly worried by what the militia might get up to in the future.

Because you’ll note, John, that the Australian government who so nobly ‘gave’ the East Timorese their independence have not wasted much time in stiffing them over the Timor Gap. Have a read of the Downer transcript over at www.crikey.com.au, mate; are these the kind of ‘free’ negotiations that await the newly ‘free’ people of Iraq when it comes to the untapped Western Desert oilfields, I wonder?

Is this what our SAS soldiers will soon be fighting for in Iraq? So that a pompous, silver-spoon prat like Downer can deliver the ‘free’ Iraqis a smug ‘lesson in democratic politics’, too? Is this the way to help ensure that those fiercely-independent, proud East Timorese do not rise against the Colonialists again?

Can’t you see the mistakes we risk making? It’s one thing for a fledgling democratic government to accept a skewed revenue split on disputed Greater Sunrise resources in the name of short-term ‘realpolitik’. It’s quite another to expect that the fledgling democratic people beneath it will do the same in the longer run. How long before the anger filters down, and up, again? How long before such rank neo-paternalism starts to bite?

You warhawks keep wanting to use force to bring stability to the unstable world. Sometimes, as in East Timor, force is needed; yet you then seem unable or unwilling to treat the newly-stable world with fairness and honesty and decency in the long-term, which is the only way it is ever going to become permanently stable. Australia and East Timor are now both equally part of the world community of the free; except that Australia is still more equal and free than East Timor, and Downer has just arrogantly and publicly rubbed the militia’s noses in it. How stupid are we? And do you think the Indonesian masses, the estranged, resentful ones who might be drawn to groups like JI especially, won’t draw ugly conclusions from such strutting, private-schoolboy behaviour?

John, there is an ugly dishonesty at work in your attack on me: I don’t agree with your plans for carpet-bombing Baghdad into freedom; ergo, I must be ‘against Human Rights in Iraq’. These tactics, so typical of your side in this debate, hit me like a battering ram. A righteous club. An intellectual cosh. It’s childish nonsense, but it’s impossible to counter, and that’s exactly why this invasion is going ahead. We just can’t hold back a zealous, charging steamroller with logic, reason, fact, foresight, or careful thinking about what exactly we’re unleashing in the longer term.

But enough about me, John. (A touch self-obsessive, no?) Mate, there are many Iraqis, here in Australia, around the world, and in Iraq, too, who don’t share your views that we in the West should ‘liberate’ Iraq by pure brute force. This debate is dividing Iraqis, just as much as it is dividing the rest of us.

Which is the more arrogant decision to make on behalf of them? To invade and occupy their country, or not to invade and occupy their country? Neither of us can say. I simply don’t know what ‘most’ Iraqis want. To live in a free and just country, certainly; but how, exactly? And does a ‘free’ and ‘just’ Iraq mean different things to a Shi’ite, a Ba’athist, a Kurd, a Persian, an Arab, a gay, a woman, an Israel-hating and a Western-expatriate Iraqi? I bet it does.

But you tell me, John. You’re the one about to summarily take over the joint, and tell everyone who lives there what ‘free’ and ‘just’ is going to mean to them all, from now on. I wish you luck. Personally, I just don’t know what all the many different, individual Iraqis want. Maybe they don’t yet, either.

Although we can make confident judgements about what they don’t want; to be tortured, beaten, imprisoned, raped, executed. Or blown to smithereens by a Tomahawk cruise missile, John. You’re quite wrong about AI, by the way – concentrating on individuals is exactly what our little group does.

We identify specific cases of HR abuse, and try to target those. Why? Because we can be sure of individual HR-abuse when we see it. What we can’t be so sure of is the ‘big picture’, the ‘sweeping solution’ that people like you – the real Utopians – love so much. That’s why AI has no over-reaching position on the ultimate pros and cons of this invasion and occupation. Though respect for international laws and covenants and organisations, however imperfect, does remain the fundamental basis for its work, and its best hope for the future.

We all want to ‘do something to help Iraq’, John, but we just don’t know what that might mean, perhaps beyond getting rid of Saddam. Or perhaps not, too. Or how we are going to go about ‘doing something to help Iraq’ once we have done that first bit, or even in fact whether our summary ‘getting rid of Saddam’ in this all-conquering, humiliating way isn’t going to make ‘doing something to help Iraq’ forever-after impossible for us. We just don’t know what all the twenty-three million individual Iraqis want, John. I don’t, anyway.

Still, pro-invasionists like you get bored by plodding, case-by-case grass-roots work. You crave the quick fix, the instant HR revolution, the ‘grand vision’, the control-freak external imposition of democratic order, freedom, justness. But because the Iraqi internal question is such a complex one, you’re all a bit confused about your good intentions; even Tony Blair – the great moral, Just War Crusader – is now once again suggesting that Saddam can in fact stay in power if he simply disarms fully.

I’m sorry, I’m now all confused again. This is your problem, John. For all your pompous bluster, none of you war-hawks have a clue what your invasion aim really is. Is it a WMD invasion? Is it a regime change invasion? Is it a democratisation invasion? A HR invasion? A terrorism-busting invasion? As Somalia should have shown us, having no clear, constant aim is a recipe for a humanitarian disaster.

I reject Margo’s claim that ‘it doesn’t matter what the reason for the war is if its effect is to liberate the Iraqi people’. That’s a dishonest, dangerous, backwards way of writing it, Margo. It’s true enough if the second clause does end up prevailing, but putting it that way leaves everything to chance, makes everything absolutely a hostage to ever-changing fortune. If we wish to make sure that the effect of the invasion is to liberate the Iraqi people, then we MUST start by saying: “The aim of this invasion is to liberate the Iraqi people’, first and foremost, and all else comes second.” Otherwise, conflicting aims interfere with each other. Then we must ask ourselves: what does liberating the Iraqi people mean? Installing a military government? Installing an expatriate crook like Chalabi as leader? Making a hell of a big mess, and then asking the UN to help clean it up?

John, what if our imposed liberation leads to a polite request from the newly-liberated people of Iraq to hand over fully-nationalised control of their newly-liberated oilfields? (Cf: Downer’s patronising ‘approval’ of the East Timorese government’s embrace of private firms to run their gasfields.) Or what if a majority-Shia democratic government decides they do not wish to award the Halliburton Oil Services company their oilfield reconstruction contracts? What if they prefer to have the Chinese, the Russians, the French do it? Or what if the Kurds decide they wish to assume control of Kirkuk? What if the new Iraqi government has no desire to smash OPEC? In short, John, what happens when ‘liberation’ means that serious conflict arises between the ‘invasion oil parasites’ and the ‘invasion democrats’? Who do you think will prevail? How do you think the Iraqis – all the different and conflicting groupings there will be – will respond? Will the Iraqis consider themselves truly ‘liberated’? These are real-world questions, John. This is what awaits us post-Saddam.

As you yourself point out, the politics of oil and the politics of Iraq – of the whole Gulf – have always been impossible to separate. Yet it has nearly always been the politics of oil that has prevailed in the region, and (now) disastrously so for the West. The long-term hegemony of oil over democracy in Saudi Arabia is, if we care to tell ourselves the truth, precisely what gave us al-Qaeda in the first place. What makes you so blithely sure that this invasion, run almost exclusively by oil men, is going to make Iraq turn out differently?

This is the whole point of my obsession with the black, sticky stuff in the Persian Gulf, John. The long-term ramifications of how the globalised world shares its spoils around. Not because I care less which oil-men get rich and which don’t – American, French, Russian, Chinese, British, is not the point. But because I don’t wish to be blown up by resentful Iraqi-born al-Qaeda terrorists in the future, any more than I wish to be blown up by resentful Saudi-born al-Qaeda terrorists now. Or Indonesian-born ones. Or Pakistani. Or East Timorese. We simply cannot keep treating non-Western Peoples as lesser Peoples, John. Not in the name of realpolitik – or human rights, or democratisation, or any other nice words, for that matter. Nice words are just nice words. Actions count. Our long-term actions in Iraq will count most of all.

The first Principle of War is ‘selection and maintenance of the aim’. If we don’t know and state clearly exactly what we are going into Iraq to achieve, then we go into Iraq inviting confused, anarchic disaster. We CANNOT put our soldiers into a pre-emptive combat zone on the basis of ‘suck it and see’, mate. Are they liberators? Peace-keepers? Peace-makers? Humanitarian aid workers? Nuke-busters? Counter-terrorists? (What are their Rules of engagement?)

Or are they just oil conquerers? I suggest to you, John, that in the absence of any rigid, limiting and public clarification of the aim from the Western warhawks – before you start this pre-emptive war – this last description is the only one that long history will ultimately recognise as fitting. I hope very much that I am proven wrong, and you are proven right.

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Margo: I published an email last week from ‘Brian Dabeagle’, who said he was an Australian SAS officer. I do not know if it is genuine. The email follows, then Jack’s reply.

I am a currently serving soldier in Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) and believe me it has taken weeks, if not months of agonised soul searching as I have tried to decide whether to make my views public or not.

As you can understand, if my identity is revealed, my career (in a job that I love) is finished and as such I have taken some steps to protect my identity. However, some of the information that is in this email is not on the public record (but not vital to operational security) and can be checked to confirm my bona fides. I write this because I am sick of John Howard and the Federal Government’s lies about our position re Iraq and our role within the coalition.

By the time that you read this, it is quite possibly too late to influence the outcome of events regarding our involvement, but at the very least maybe one of you guys may have the courage to make the public a little more aware of what really is happening regarding our (the SAS) role in this conflict.

John Howard stated that we had only recently started preparing for this looming conflict. Bullshit! We, that is, 1 SAS Squadron (please refer to it as One SAS Squadron, not 1st SAS or anything else) were given orders to prepare for a war with Iraq around July 2002.

The Australian Special Air Service Regiment was specifically asked for by US planners after they had observed our performance in Afghanistan, where we demonstrated a capability that had been neglected by other Special Forces units who until recently had deemed it obsolete. Our skills in what is termed Strategic Reconaissance (SR) are unsurpassed by any other Special Forces unit in the world. This includes other so called Tier 1 (a system of rating free world Special Forces units devised by the yanks – Tier 1 being the highest rating) units, including the Brit SAS, US Delta and US Dev Group units.

What happened was we were initially deployed into areas deemed ‘clean’ by the coalition as we were viewed by the US command as really just a token gesture made by the Australian Government (as was our deployment to Kuwait in 98). We were also viewed as an ‘unknown’ quantity as our last real operational deployment working with the yanks was Vietnam. But, because we had maintained the skills of remaining ‘behind the lines’ for much longer periods without resupply or external support, we started to find things that had remained un-noticed by the coalition. Taliban & al Qaida forces started to reappear in the areas we operated in, thinking the area was secure. And, we started to find things that had been missed by the coalition as they passed through. Our discoveries led to some of the coalition’s biggest successes and suddenly the US planners started to realise that we were providing a service that they no longer had the capability to provide AS EFFECTIVELY.

Consequently and as a result of our operations in Afghanistan the relationship between the Australian SAS and our US counterparts is closer than at any time in our history. It is because of our ability to provide a service to the US effort that CANNOT be as effectively carried out by US forces that we were specifically asked for by the Pentagon right at the start of planning. Our role in this conflict is crucial to the outcome and there is no way that we can be taken out of the conflict without seriously affecting the US operational capability. Our planning was at such an advanced stage that whilst the parliamentary debate was raging, we were already into advanced planning of specific targets (not just general planning, but actual targets and operations) … quite contrary to what John Howard was stating. Without going into too much detail (for obvious reasons) what we will be doing is absolutely vital to the successful prosecution of the war. There is no way we are going to be withdrawn. This is nothing like Kuwait in 98, back then we were “untested” in the eyes of the yanks, now we are crucial to their plans.

So why am I sending you this? Because I am proud to be a professional soldier (not a nazi as I felt on the Tampa) and relish the job that I do, but I am concerned that as a human being that the war we are about to embark on is wrong. As important is the fact that I think that Howard is pandering to the will of that redneck Bush, without considering the long term consequences of this action, not just for Australia but for the whole world. He is lying to Parliament, he is lying to the people of Australia and no doubt he will lie to the dependents of any of us who don’t come back. This Government has a history of the latter as Kylie Russell, Jerry Bampton and the next of kin of the Blackhawk disaster can attest to.

As I mentioned at the start of the email, I think that maybe it is too late to do anything to affect our deployment, but at least if the truth as to our build up and deployment is made public, maybe it will give the parliament and the people of Australia food for thought.

***

Dear Brian Dabeagle,

I’m writing this letter working on the assumption that you are genuine. Your comments about operations in Afghanistan ring true, even if your claimed identity is in fact not; especially your allusions to the Seppo’s loss of capacity (or appetite) for bandit country recce ops longer than a couple of days at a time. (Guess those poor wannabe Tom Cruises start to pine for their PX Big Macs, huh?)

But then this sort of information – about the differences between US and Brit-Oz Spec Ops philosophy, in these tech-heavy times – is, as you yourself note, hardly a state secret. So if you’re not who you say you are – if you’re just some shit-stirrer with an interest in the SAS and an axe to grind (because you failed the Cadre course, say) – then you are beneath my contempt, mate. Especially for your references to the Regiment’s past casualties, including the Blackhawk disaster. If you are not in fact truly one of ‘your’ guys as you claim you are, you are making a public fool of me here, and a mockery of the history the Regiment and AAAvn have long shared.

But in fact those SAS NOK names you mention are partly why I choose to take you at face value. None of us like to throw the names of departed comrades around lightly. Nor, as you note, is it an easy thing for a proud professional soldier to break ranks and try to send a rocket up the lazy, ignorant, uncaring Citizens in whose name he is being sent off to fight by a thoroughly opportunistic and cowardly government.

The content of your letter tallies with my experiences of working with the SAS and the Yanks (albeit yonks ago now), and of my own readings of official and public information (especially re Operation Anaconda). So I will take you at your word. More fool me if you’re a sad cyber-con-artist, I guess. It won’t be the first time I’ve made a fool of myself due to a natural excess of Citizenly idealism.

Brian, I just wanted to say thanks for risking everything. I don’t mean your next promotion, either; I mean the whole ‘Andy McNab’ thing. (You will know what I mean.) The greatest asset the SAS Regiment has is its fraternal closeness, its tightness, its low, low profile (even though Howard’s men have made you jump through so many public hoops lately. What simpering Army PR clown agreed to put your medal-winners on the front page of the f**king national newspapers, mate?). But if you’re worried that you may now have run against that close-knit grain yourself, then don’t.

Mate, for what my opinion is worth, what you’ve tried to do is priceless leadership. Real leadership. Looking after the interests of the soldiers under your command. Christ knows that Peter Cosgrove – such a tamed, politicised pawn these days (an Australian General presenting Logies???) – just doesn’t seem interested in that side of soldiering, anymore. Apparently.

Mate, I agree with your implied view that this government has nothing but contempt for our professional soldiery. Howard, Reith, Max Moore-Wilton, Miles Jordana, Jane Halton – these grubby civilians have been cynically using you and our Navy and our Air Force as political tools for ages, now. If it all turns to shit in Iraq, there is every chance they will duck for cover all over again, just as they all did during the children overboard fiasco, and leave your boys flapping in the wind.

So what you did by writing to Margo and Bob Brown may not achieve much, but it was necessary, and it was right, and it was in the very best traditions of the Australian officer corps. (And WHAT, by the way, are your bloody CO and your RSM up to these days? Why don’t THEY get off their arses and start protecting their soldiers’ interests, too? Or are they sycophantic political placemen by now, too? Where’s a Jim Wallace when you need him?)

Again for what it’s worth, I’ve tried hard and often in the past to get answers out of Howard and his useless gaggle of tamed backbench arse-lickers. You might have read my latest letter to him, over Christmas last year, about the Tampa stuff, about the various HR accusations which have left your guys exposed, undefended, and no doubt feeling angry. Dave Marr’s book on all that comes out today. I hope he hasn’t stiffed you guys. I don’t think he will have.

My brother – if you’re for real, you’ll know him well – and I have never spoken much about what went on up north. He is well aware that I write for Webdiary, and knowing that I have become a bit of a wet, HR-Lefty in my post-AAAvn career, he is ruthlessly tight-lipped about the sensitive Op. stuff when we communicate now, which is pretty rarely, anyway. (If you’re for real, you’ll know why. Incidentally, if any of the Regimental boys bad-mouth him on account of me and my sad civvy grandstanding-by-association here, tell them to f**k off. I can assure you that he spills no unit fraternal stuff to a shiny-bum like me. He thinks I’m a bit of a wet-Lefty himself, actually. He is relentlessly schtum and proper.)

But one personal thing he did once casually say in passing is that he went up to the Tampa/Manoura fiasco ‘prepared to lose his job’ over it, if necessary. For mine, that grubby episode – the one during which this government made you feel like a Nazi – remains the most disgusting misuse of a world-class Special Operations asset by any Australian politician, ever. Howard – the self-proclaimed ‘ANZAC’s mate’ – pissed on the Regiment during that affair, Brian. Just as his government pissed on our Navy, via Operation Relex.

I’ve attached below for your wry bemusement the letter I received in reply to my Xmas greetings to the PM, mate. It came not from the PM himself, of course – like most pollies these days, he likes to construct an arse-covering ‘paper-chase buffer’ between himself and the real world – but from some minor functionary. Note the weaselly language. Note the complete ignoring of the core requests about HR abuse, and the buck-passing of responsibility to a Federal Court that this government usually treats with contempt. Note the sheer dulling meaninglessness of it. The utter disconnection from reality, the ‘one-way, on-message, spin delivery’, completely bereft of any engagement with the questions I asked.

If you received a wafty, waffly reply like that to an O-Group ‘question of fact’ from one of your dopey troopers, you’d kick him from arsehole to breakfast, and rightly so. Sloppy language leads to sloppy ops, mate. Nice words mean nothing. Actions count – as your pointers to those casually-ignored NOK names underscores. A dead soldier’s widow gets a dead soldier’s scrawny pension. Peter Reith runs away from the Tampa Senate Enquiry, with a raised middle finger for the Australian public on one hand, and a massive golden handshake from the tax-payer in the other. Straight into a lucrative consultant’s job shifting units for Tenix Defence Industries. All the while, protected by our ‘ANZAC’s hero’ PM. It sucks. And no-one in the press gallery gives a blind shit for more than ten seconds.

But the rubbish, bureacratic response below is in exactly the same vein in which this Prime Minister refuses to debate the issue of Iraq in Parliament, or answer media questioning about our involvement because it’s all still ‘hypothetical’. I wonder if the Welfare Officers back in Perth are having much luck calming the Regiment’s wives with that one, mate! No, he simply goes on controlled, friendly, talkback radio stations, and condescendingly chook-feeds us Australian Citizens, in whose collective name you will soon kill fellow human beings, his meaningless bullshit, without any return pressure at all.

A new age of magic interpretation of the world, Brian, in which all that matters is that the powerful retain control of the means by which they ensure that their interpretation of the world is the one that is most widely promulgated. “I acknowledge your concerns about these allegations and wish to assure you that the government has acted decisively but compassionately to protect Australia’s territorial integrity.” The second clause entirely disconnected from the first. Weak public language. Dead public language. ‘Nice’ words, backed up by ZERO action to investigate the damning claims made against you, our soldiers, much less to defend you with pro-active linguistic precision. The kind of moribund, dulled, vacuous public language that Heinrich Heine, and George Orwell, and every other writer worth reading, recognises is both necessary precursor to, and braying harbinger of, yet more of mankind’s ‘accidental’ inhumanity to man.

Death by default, mate; falling into war, simply because our public leaders refuse to speak precisely and bluntly in timely time. Waffle, waffle, buck-pass, lie, spin, waffle – then bang. (Oh – are we at war?)

Yes, apparently we’re at war already, mate: ‘The War On Terror’, Brian. What a crock of shit. Have you ever come up against one of them nasty ‘Terrors’ in combat, mate? Goodness! Whatever does a ‘Terror’ look like? However does one kill a ‘Terror’? H&K burst? Glock double-tap? Wombat gun? With helpless f**king laughter?

And does the meaningless, disconnected, surreal, bureaucratic pap below from this faceless Howard underling – in response to my urgent queries about internationally-promulgated HRW allegations that you and your men ‘beat refugees with batons and used unnecessary force against vulnerable refugees’ on the Tampa – fill you with confidence now, mate, as you head off to help start the most unpopular war in Australia’s history? A REAL one, this time, not a convenient ‘wag the dog’ one: a war on terror when it should still just be a fight against crime (one we are winning, too, closing in on Osama’s murdering thugs). Do you feel happier going into pre-emptive battle, knowing that this ‘Mr Richard Sadleir – Deputy Secretary, International Division, DPM&C’ is standing right behind you?

Oh yeah, and if this war does go badly, rest assured that the right-wing media – especially the rah-rah war-bloggers and the Murdoch Press – will run for cover just as quickly as the neo-con politicians and their pet paper-shufflers do, mate. You watch the buck-passing explode onto the broadsheets.

In fact, it’s already going on now – pre-emptively you could say. Even blokes like Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan are backing off a bit now, lobbing the hot ‘non-UN invasion’ hand grenade strictly in Howard’s direction, as they recognise that just maybe the Bushies are nuts, after all. The Australian is re-trumpeting its ‘kids overboard’ scoop in a vaguely anti-Howard riff; even Greg Sheridan’s mostly gone back to whining about disengagement with Asia – another oblique hack at Howard.

They’re all setting themselves up with escape routes, Brian; all getting in a position to re-adjust their stances, their focus, their personal Op Ed ‘spin’ so that if this all goes strategically wrong, they can stay on top of ‘public debate’ by shifting seamlessly, without a backwards glance, to other issues.

The Australian political media is starting to look ahead, mate. To Costello, to Abbot, to the post-Howard era, to ‘ongoing economic reform’. It’s a bit pathetic, I know, but that’s the way the Baby Boomer Op Ed leaders have learned over the years to work the McLuhanite Mass Meeja game, mate. Play along with stirring up a newsworthy ‘event’ – a leadership tiff, a little war, a ‘law and order’ panic – and then stand back tut-tutting and sighing as the rest of us (especially our pollies) try to cope with whatever it all unleashes. Always tearing off their acres of copy, yet never actually getting involved in making our society better themselves. Modern political journalism is the ultimate freeloader’s career, Brian. The ultimate way to get close to the dirty action without having to get your own hands the slightest bit dirty. The ultimate ‘public eye’ contact sport, all with no risks attached.

Howard will go down one day, just as Keating, Hawke, Fraser, Whitlam, McMahon and Gorton went down. Yet Laurie Oakes is still in there, tearing down a Cheryl Kernot just for kicks, just for a Walkley. Alan Ramsey – who once upon a time was gutsy enough to stand up in Parliament and shout ‘You LIAR!’ when a politician told a lie on the public record – is still there, still trying to help take down our elected political leaders (back then it was Gorton, now it’s Crean).

These guys learned this trade from Alan Reid – maybe the first and most devious, shit-stirring, game-playing modern political journalist in Australia’s long line of devious, shit-stirring, game-playing, modern political journalists. There’s been plenty of good journos, too – men like Neale Davis and Greg Shackleton, who knew what war was, and ALWAYS screamed the truth about it in public, as loud as they possibly could.

There’s still plenty of good ones now, too, but they’re all too cowed, or cowardly, or self-interested, or just plain ignorant to give a shit about a letter like yours. You’ll notice, mate, that no-one has really touched it, not even Margo. Even though – if it turns out that you are for real – what you say about SAS planning would expose this government’s posturing, and thus Bush’s and Blair’s too, as the purely convenient bullshit that it really is.

But then maybe the whole lying edifice of justification for invasion – the WMD, the UN resolutions, the HR, the ‘democracy for the Middle East’, the ‘last chances’, the ‘real and present danger’ – might tumble down, too. Some stories, mate, are maybe a little too hot, especially those where the press is implicated, too.

Who are these journalist colleagues of yours, Margo, and where exactly do they get off freeloading like this on the rest of us? Why do you get to be the gate-keepers of public truth? Why are some things off-the-record, and some things on-the-record? Why is it that you, and you alone, get to decide which becomes a public spectacle, and which remains an insider’s secret – Sheridan’s cosy off-the-record chats with Kissinger, Keating’s Kirribilli Pact, Hawkie’s shenanigans in office, Richo’s backroom doings, all the little open secret Canberra goings-on that, by withholding them from us, make your lot feel bigger and more important than the rest of us? Why do YOU get to decide that Cheryl Kernot’s private emails are worthy of placing on the public record, Laurie Oakes, but that Brian Dabeagle’s public letter is not? Have you tried to check it out? If not, why not?

And then there is modern war, the ultimate media-insider’s spectacle now. Do you ever wonder how the average Australian or American would react to seeing some of the insider combat footage from the first Gulf War, Brian, the un-CNN-sanitised stuff? The savage, disproportionate, technically-triumphant butchery that goes on nowadays, all in the name of gentle democracy? ‘Smart bombs’. ‘Shock and Awe’. ‘Full spectrum dominance’. Do we the people understand what this actually looks like? Jesus Christ – you simply have to laugh bitterly at our trusting ignorance, don’t you. Or else you’d probably cry.

And it’s bitterly ironic, Brian, in a sick post-modern kind of way: as the ‘new journalism’ becomes more and more invasive and pervasive and ubiquitous and instantaneous in peacetime, we get to see less and less of what happens in wartime than we used to. So much ‘Reality TV’, so little plain, old-fashioned reality on TV.

Carmen Lawrence has written about this on this site. We’ll see almost nothing of this war’s violence, even though, in Iraq, there’ll be thousands of war correspondents swarming the joint. And every single one of them, even the good ones, will be desperate to make their names from all the death and destruction that unfolds. They’ll want to be the next Peter Arnett, or Richard Carlton, or Martin Bell, or Walter bloody Cronkite, or whoever. Try not to think too much about the big bucks, the future book deals, the Larry King interviews and the celebrity the more opportunistic, the more successful among them will doubtless extract from this next bloody, newsworthy event, mate, as you help put the bloody show on for their and our dirty, vicarious pleasure. (Maybe you should write a book yourself, like McNab, and make a killing from the killing too, mate. Why not? Everyone else, from CNN down, will be. Better retirement plan than a pissant widow’s pension, I would have thought.)

Since East Timor, and especially right now, the media can’t get enough of you guys. (Makes a change from when I was in, I s’pose.) But never forget one thing, Brian: exposing a military f**k-up is a major, name-making news coup, and this time around the Gulf paddock, you will probably not get any leeway from the Press, if there’s a Pulitzer or a Walkley in the offing.

Underlying public opinion is largely ambivalent about this war, for one thing, which means that explicit public opinion is highly-unstable, and will turn viciously if it doesn’t go near-perfectly well. And if there’s one thing that the commercial Press especially hates above all else, mate, it’s to be on the wrong side of public opinion for too long.

If it turns to shite, the Murdochians will swing against the whole misadventure in a flash. Just remember that when our boys really needed his support, the pompous Piers Akerman was throwing pig’s blood at our Vietnam soldiers and calling them ‘mercenaries’. Back then, of course, the smart, ambitious journo made his name by being anti-war, not pro-war. Times change, mate! Either way, I’ll guarantee you now that most Boomer journalists of his latter-day pro-war ilk simply won’t be much help in making damned sure that the politicians and the press, and not the soldiers, shoulder responsibility when some angry Iraqi calls one of your diggers a baby-killer, and might even have the accidental grounds to do so.

Nope; you won’t get top cover from these tame media clowns any more than you’ll get top cover from the PM’s office. If Regimental NOK really have been screwed around by this government, then dear Piers has hardly gone out of his way to help publicise their plight, has he. Nor has Miranda Devine, who at the time of one Regimental combat death you mentioned made a huge meal of it with a resoundingly patriotic column, you might recall.

These pro-war journalists are not the soldier’s friend, Brian. Their own upward career trajectories are simply far too precious for them to ever admit they got something wrong. So if it does go wrong in Iraq, they will simply quietly move on to other matters as the current politicians retire quietly, and they will end up taking no responsibility at all. The war they have pushed for, pushed hard and long to help make happen, will retrospectively become simply an inevitable, ill-judged, well-meaning (but disastrous, tut-tut) piece of old news. They’ll ignore its aftermath, just as they are now ignoring Afghanistan’s aftermath.

In the world of ‘new journalism’, mate, there is no such thing as truth or history, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. There is only what gets written today. Aging Boomer journos and intellectuals and ‘celebrity thinkers’ never die or fade away, Brian. They just keep putting a fresh sheet of A4 in their typewriters and printers, keep tap-tapping merrily on, forever retrospectively changing their opinions and their opinion-histories as they go, changing with the times and the newsworthy trends to stay in the risk-free public game.

Still, for what it’s worth, Brian, I take you at face value, and I take your going public like this so seriously it hurts, even if no-one else does. If you’re a fake who’s just made a dickhead of me, then good for you. I hope you feel pleased with yourself, now. But those who haven’t served in uniform – and especially in the SAS – will find it very hard to grasp the magnitude of what it is you’ve done, and as a former officer I cannot accept the possibility, if you are for real, that no-one will acknowledge your gutsy attempt to tell the truth publicly, and what it has cost you to do so. So I take you at your word, and say again: thanks for trying, mate. Excuse me if I’m being a bit presumptuous or over-the-top, but I promise you I’ll continue to make a fool of myself, doing whatever I can, in whatever bloody public forum I can find some space in, to make sure you and your soldiers are not let down by this government, its compliant media, and we the Australian people, whatever happens in Iraq. ‘Whatever I can’ probably won’t be much at all, mate. My stupid letters to our politicians and our press will probably continue to be ignored, as usual, as the self-obsessed rantings of a borderline green-pen loon. Sigh.

But the really important thing to take on board is this, I think: right now there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of us nobody Australian ‘loons’ who, while we may oppose this invasion vehemently, are rock-solid in our support of you and your colleagues personally. We are with you personally with a white-hot, Australian passion. And there is NO WAY we are going to allow you guys to carry the can for what we vehemently oppose being done in our names in the first place, and especially for whatever might go badly wrong with it.

So go onto the two-way in Iraq with one thought only. You have a job to do for now. Just do it, and do it as well and as humanely as you can. You will simply be fulfilling your part of the paradoxical bargain the professional soldier of a civilised country makes with his Citizens – to commit uncivilised acts in our name, when we, the non-violent guardians of our shared civilisation, ask you to. It is up to us, not you, to take full responsibility as a society for those uncivilised acts, even those of us who don’t support you being there, or being there in the pre-emptive way that you will be there. If it turns out that they were unnecessary and ill-judged uncivilised acts, or in grave error, then the responsibility will then especially lie with us.

You may have no useful top cover from our politicians and our press, Brian, but I am utterly sure – having marched in the peace rallies a few weekends ago and having heard nothing but deep concern and support, among those gentle civilised crowds, for you and your men – that you have buckets and buckets of top cover from the Australian people.

We will do our best to make sure that the responsibility for, and any subsequent moral pain resulting from, this war is – unlike all other wars before – appropriately shouldered by the people who have made this war happen. I hope whatever it is that you and your men are ordered to do in Iraq turns out brilliantly, for both Iraq and the West, mate, and that the likes of John Wojdylo get to consign the likes of me to the dustbin of history with a vindicated sneer.

I truly hope my opposition to this invasion and occupation, and especially my oil obsessions, end up making exactly the self-obsessed, Western loser of me that John claims I am. Better that I turn out to be hysterically wrong, and then simply go away and shut up, than that I turn out to be right.

Good luck, Brian. Stay sharp. Safe return. Say hi to my ratbag brother if you see him around the place.

Warmest regards,

(Stephen John) Jack Robertson

Captain AAAvn, 1987-1994

***

PS: A pathetic post-script. Here is the final, operative paragraph of my Christmas letter to our leader:

To that end, I respectfully request you to a) publicly respond on behalf of my brother and his ADF colleagues to the HR abuse accusations in the HRW Report, and do your best to ensure that the mainstream press gives that response the fullest coverage; b) publicly state for the record – ‘before the fact’, so to speak – that responsibility for any such accusations against any member of our ADF that are subsequently proven lies ultimately not with them, but with you, your Ministers and your government for placing them in such difficult, non-military situations in the first place; and c) re-affirm that all past, present and future activities relating to ‘border protection’, on the part of our soldiers, sailors and airman, along with our AFP and ASIO, have been, are, and will continue to be, carried out with your government’s full authorisation, support, supervision and acknowledgment. Thank you.

And here is John Winston Howard’s reply. This is what we have backing up our soldiers in Iraq, if and/or when HR abuse allegations are made against them there, too:

Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet

18 February 2003

Dear Mr Robertson,

Thank you for your letter of 14 December 2002 to the Prime Minister regarding human rights abuse allegations against Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel. The Prime Minister has asked me to reply on his behalf.

I acknowledge your concerns about these allegations and wish to assure you that the government has acted decisively but compassionately to protect Australia’s territorial integrity. Australia has a proud humanitarian record and the government remains committed to meeting Australia’s humanitarian obligations. On 17 September 2001, the Full Bench of the Federal Court of Australia confirmed that the Australian government acted within its powers in taking the action it did in relation to the people rescued by the MV Tampa. The government, through the ADF, ensured that those on board were properly cared for through the provision of appropriate food, shelter, medical assistance and other supplies.

The Prime Minister has on numerous occasions expressed his strong support for the ADF in the performance of its many difficult roles. Specifically, on the day that the Special Air Service personnel took control of the MV Tampa, the Prime Minister made a statement expressing gratitude to the ADF personnel involved in the operation. Separately, he has reaffirmed the country’s pride in the courage, integrity and professionalism of all the ADF personnel.

Thank you for bringing this matter to the attention of the Prime Minister.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Sadleir

Assistant Secretary, International Division, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet

Arse-covering, bureaucratic, meaningless nonsense. Our soldiers are, in my opinion, gravely exposed. It’s time to get angry about it, and fulfil our responsibilities as Citizens to them, by DEMANDING real honesty and accountability from this government, at last. Over to you, Australian Press. Start doing your jobs.

“I’ll be in Washington on January 20, 2005 when President Dean is inaugurated. This is a must do for me. It’s not a nice to do, it is a must do!” Harry Heidelberg

Harry Heidelberg is a Webdiary columnist and regularly reports to Webdiary on the Howard Dean campaign for US president.

 

TUESDAY, YANKS TIME:

Hi Margo

It sure sounds like you and some of the Web Diarists have been having fun. Great to hear from Polly Bush and Don Arthur in Strange encounters.

It’s pre dawn here in California and I’m drinking coffee as I will every morning this week. My body clock will return to normal just as I am catching the flight back to Europe. Can’t say American dripolator coffee (yeah, they have one in the rooom) is as good as a European espresso. Oh well, better than nothing.

I just watched Al Gore and Howard Dean speaking live from Harlem. Of course New York is three hours ahead of here so it’s looking a lot more like breakfast time on the East Coast.

Al Gore was introduced as the “elected President of the United States” and the crowd cheered. Every single time I see him I think of what may have been. I suspect I am not alone.

Today Al Gore officially endorsed Howard Dean as the Democratic candidate for President. Both Gore and Dean spoke in clear and impressive terms.

There is no waffling at the centre for them. They are in the mode of firing up the core of the Democratic Party. The true believers if you like. Some call the tactic risky, to be so strident and to be so clearly anti-Bush. I think it makes perfect sense.

I think electorates in more than one or two countries are tired of risk free politics. It becomes boring. We want to see politicians take clear non-waffling positions. We want to see them lead and we want to be inspired. A positive, hopeful agenda.

As I’ve said before, I’ll be in Washington on January 20, 2005 when President Dean is inaugurated. This is a must do for me. It’s not a nice to do, it is a must do!

Gore and Dean are clear on the war. Dean is the only Democratic candidate who was clearly against the war in Iraq from the beginning. The others waffled. Gore called it a “quagmire” and I think we will be hearing that word more often.

The election campaign is under way. Later today both Dean and Gore will be flying to Iowa. The famous Iowa caucus, states like Iowa and New Hampshire. States of political history.

George Bush is now to pump record funds into Medicare (focusing on a prescription drug benefit) but it seems this decision has made no change to his popularity. The latest poll shows the country divided with slightly more being against Bush than for him.

PS: WOW

Just saw a dynamite TV ad. It was a Santa Claus. The voiceover was saying “Yes big contributors, this is a very special Christmas for you”. Then the Santa started ticking off things that he would deliver, that interestingly included “more power to big media corporations”. At the end the cheery music stops and you notice the Santa is wearing texas style cowboy boots. Then the voice says, “You see big contributors, your dreams will come true because your Santa is in the White House”. Then a black and white picture of Bush comes up and there is silence.

I know US political ads are often dramatic but I thought that one was incredible.

No punches will be pulled in this campaign.

Hi. The clock is ticking, it’s the final countdown to war – whatever cliche you use, we’re all scared. Very scared. Don’t you wish you were John Howard? He’s never had doubts that he was doing the right thing. Me, I’ve always feared people without self-doubt.

 

Here’s what Howard told TV journalist Mike Hosking in New Zealand yesterday:

Hosking: Is this the greatest test of your leadership so far?

Howard: This is the most difficult issue I’ve had, yes.

Hosking: How hard have you wrestled with it?

Howard: You always anguish over something like this, but I have never thought of changing my position. Never.

Lucky Howard! Lucky Australia? There’s lots of doubt among other world leaders. A mainstream American journo at the Davos meeting of world heavyweights in January wrote this background note on the mood, the fear, and the angst at the top of world political, economic and military power:

I spent a week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum (WEF). I was awarded a special pass which allowed me full access to not only the entire official meeting, but also private dinners with the likes the head of the Saudi Secret Police, presidents of various countries, your Fortune 500 CEOS and the leaders of the most important NGOs in the world. This was not typical press access. It was full-on, unfettered, class A hobnobbing.

This sweet little chalet village was during the WEF packed with about 3000 delegates and press, some 1000 Swiss police, another 400 Swiss soldiers, numerous tanks and armored personnel carriers, gigantic rolls of coiled barbed wire that gracefully cascaded down snow-covered hillsides, missile launchers and assorted other tools of the national security trade. The security precautions did not, of course, stop there. Every single person who planned to enter the conference site had special electronic badges which, upon being swiped across a reading pad, produced a computer screen filled color portrait of the attendee, along with his/her vital statistics. These were swiped and scrutinized by soldiers and police every few minutes – any time one passed through a door, basically. The whole system was connected to handheld wireless communication devices made by HP, which were issued to all VIPs. I got one. Very cool, except when they crashed. Which, of course, they did frequently. These devices supplied every imaginable piece of information one could want about the conference, your fellow delegates, Davos, the world news, etc. And they were emailing devices – all emails being monitored, of course, by Swiss cops.

Overall, here is what I learned about the state of our world:

* I was in a dinner with heads of Saudi and German FBI, plus the foreign minister of Afghanistan. They all said that at its peak Al Qaeda had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism — the rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but about 200 are dead or in jail.

* But Al Qaeda, they say, is like a brand which has been heavily franchised. And nobody knows how many unofficial franchises have been spawned since 9/11.

* The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, “Yeah, it’s bad, but recovery is right around the corner”. This year “recovery” was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable – fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were “deflation”, “long term stagnation” and “collapse of the dollar”. All of this is without war.

* If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war and it is anything short of a quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with (a) resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries whose currency is guaranteed against the dollar (which is just about everybody except the EU), (and) a near cessation of all development and humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic funk for minimally 5 to 10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.

* Not surprisingly, the business community was in no mood to hear about a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich – whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody – are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes.

Plenty are also infuriated because they disagree on policy grounds. For example:

* If Al Qaeda is down to merely 200 terrorists cadres and a handful of wannabe franchises, what’s all the fuss?

* The Middle East situation has never been worse. All hope for a settlement between Israel and Palestine seems to have evaporated. The energy should be focused on placing painful financial pressure on all sides in that fight, forcing them to the negotiating table. Otherwise, the ME may well explode. The war in Iraq is at best a distraction from that core issue, at worst may aggravate it. Jordan’s Queen Rania spoke of the “desperate search for hope”.

* Serious Islamic leaders (eg the King of Jordan, the Prime Minster of Malaysia, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia) believe that the Islamic world must recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations. And, most importantly to the WEF, it means flourishing free trade and support for entrepreneurs with minimal state regulation. (However, there were also several Middle East representatives who argued precisely the opposite. They believe bringing down Saddam Hussein and then pushing the Israel/Palestine issue could actually result in a Golden Age for Arab Islam.)

* US unilateralism is seen as arrogant, bullyish. If the U.S. cannot behave in partnership with its allies – especially the Europeans – it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS as well. Company leaders argued that they would rather not have to deal with US government attitudes about all sorts of multilateral treaties (climate change, intellectual property, rights of children, etc.) – it’s easier to just do business in countries whose governments agree with yours. And it’s cheaper, in the long run, because the regulatory environments match. War against Iraq is seen as just another example of the unilateralism.

* For a minority of the participants there was another layer of anti-Americanism that focused on moralisms and religion. I often heard delegates complain that the US “opposes the rights of children”, because we block all treaties and UN efforts that would support sex education and condom access for children and teens. They spoke of sex education as a “right”. Similarly, there was a decidedly mixed feeling about Ashcroft, who addressed the conference. I attended a small lunch with Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other prominent Christian fundamentalists working the room and bowing their heads before eating. The rest of the world’s elite finds this American Christian behavior at least as uncomfortable as it does Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist behavior. They find it awkward every time a US representative refers to “faith-based” programs. It’s different from how it makes non-Christian Americans feel – these folks experience it as downright embarrassing.

* When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win over the nonAmerican delegates, the sharpest attack on his comments came not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative – it came from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!

I learned that the only economy about which there is much enthusiasm is China, which was responsible for 77% of the global GDP growth in 2002. But the honcho of the Bank of China, Zhu Min, said that fantastic growth could slow to a crawl if China cannot solve its rural/urban problem. Currently 400 million Chinese are urbanites, and their average income is 16 times that of the 900 million rural residents. Zhu argued China must urbanize nearly a billion people in ten years!

The US economy is the primary drag on the global economy, and only a handful of nations have sufficient internal growth to thrive when the US is stagnating.

The WEF was overwhelmed by talk of security, with fears of terrorism, computer and copyright theft, assassination and global instability dominating almost every discussion.

I learned from American security and military speakers that: “We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet.”

These WEF folks are freaked out. They see very bad economics ahead, war, and more terrorism. About 10% of the sessions were about terrorism, and it’s heavy stuff. One session costed out what another 9/11-type attack would do to global markets, predicting a far, far worse impact due to the “second hit” effect – a second hit that would prove all the world’s post-9/11 security efforts had failed. Another costed out in detail what this or that war scenario would do to spot oil prices. Russian speakers argued that “failed nations” were spawning terrorists – code for saying, “we hate Chechnya”. Entire sessions were devoted to arguing which poses the greater asymmetric threat: nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Finally, who are these guys? I actually enjoyed a lot of my conversations, and found many of the leaders and rich quite charming and remarkably candid. Some dressed elegantly, no matter how bitter cold and snowy it was, but most seemed quite happy in ski clothes or casual attire. Women wearing pants was perfectly acceptable, and the elite is sufficiently Multicultural that even the suit and tie lacks a sense of dominance. Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel room of the President of Mozambique – we were viewing it on closed circuit TV – I got juicy blow-by-blow analysis of US foreign policy from a remarkably candid head of state. A day spent with Bill Gates turned out to be fascinating and fun. I found the CEO of Heinekin hilarious, and George Soros proved quite earnest about confronting AIDS. Vicente Fox – who I had breakfast with – proved sexy and smart like a – well, a fox. David Stern (Chair of the NBA) ran up and gave me a hug.

The world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or (with) great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive – especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally – better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi-tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.

***

The New York Times yesterday announced its opposition to war without UN sanction (The Sydney Morning Herald has yet to state its position):

Saying No to War

Within days, barring a diplomatic breakthrough, President Bush will decide whether to send American troops into Iraq in the face of United Nations opposition. We believe there is a better option involving long-running, stepped-up weapons inspections. But like everyone else in America, we feel the window closing. If it comes down to a question of yes or no to invasion without broad international support, our answer is no.

Even though Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, said that Saddam Hussein was not in complete compliance with United Nations orders to disarm, the report of the inspectors on Friday was generally devastating to the American position. They not only argued that progress was being made, they also discounted the idea that Iraq was actively attempting to manufacture nuclear weapons. History shows that inspectors can be misled, and that Mr. Hussein can never be trusted to disarm and stay disarmed on his own accord. But a far larger and more aggressive inspection program, backed by a firm and united Security Council, could keep a permanent lid on Iraq’s weapons program.

By adding hundreds of additional inspectors, using the threat of force to give them a free hand and maintaining the option of attacking Iraq if it tries to shake free of a smothering inspection program, the United States could obtain much of what it was originally hoping to achieve. Mr. Hussein would now be likely to accept such an intrusive U.N. operation. Had Mr. Bush managed the showdown with Iraq in a more measured manner, he would now be in a position to rally the U.N. behind that bigger, tougher inspection program, declare victory and take most of the troops home.

Unfortunately, by demanding regime change, Mr. Bush has made it much harder for Washington to embrace this kind of long-term strategy. He has talked himself into a corner where war or an unthinkable American retreat seem to be the only alternatives visible to the administration. Every signal from the White House is that the diplomatic negotiations will be over in days, not weeks. Every signal from the United Nations is that when that day arrives, the United States will not have Security Council sanction to attack.

There are circumstances under which the president would have to act militarily no matter what the Security Council said. If America was attacked, we would have to respond swiftly and fiercely. But despite endless efforts by the Bush administration to connect Iraq to Sept. 11, the evidence simply isn’t there. The administration has demonstrated that Iraq had members of Al Qaeda living within its borders, but that same accusation could be lodged against any number of American allies in the region. It is natural to suspect that one of America’s enemies might be actively aiding another, but nations are not supposed to launch military invasions based on hunches and fragmentary intelligence.

The second argument the Bush administration cites for invading Iraq is its refusal to obey U.N. orders that it disarm. That’s a good reason, but not when the U.N. itself believes disarmament is occurring and the weapons inspections can be made to work. If the United States ignores the Security Council and attacks on its own, the first victim in the conflict will be the United Nations itself. The whole scenario calls to mind that Vietnam-era catch phrase about how we had to destroy a village in order to save it.

President Bush has switched his own rationale for the invasion several times. Right now, the underlying theory seems to be that the United States can transform the Middle East by toppling Saddam Hussein, turning Iraq into a showplace democracy and inspiring the rest of the region to follow suit. That’s another fine goal that seems impossible to accomplish outside the context of broad international agreement. The idea that the resolution to all the longstanding, complicated problems of that area begins with a quick military action is both seductive and extremely dangerous. The Bush administration has not been willing to risk any political capital in attempting to resolve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, but now the president is theorizing that invading Iraq will do the trick.

Given the corner Mr. Bush has painted himself in, withdrawing troops even if a considerable slice remains behind would be an admission of failure. He obviously intends to go ahead, and bet on the very good chance that the Iraqi army will fall quickly. The fact that the United Nations might be irreparably weakened would not much bother his conservative political base at home, nor would the outcry abroad. But in the long run, this country needs a strong international body to keep the peace and defuse tension in a dozen different potential crisis points around the world. It needs the support of its allies, particularly embattled states like Pakistan, to fight the war on terror. And it needs to demonstrate by example that there are certain rules that everybody has to follow, one of the most important of which is that you do not invade another country for any but the most compelling of reasons. When the purpose is fuzzy, or based on questionable propositions, it’s time to stop and look for other, less extreme means to achieve your goals.

***

Voon C. Chin

Thank you for providing the Webdiary as effectively as you have in this time of international crisis. There is currently so much confusion in the media its hard to separate propaganda (both government and corporate) from the news. The Howard government has taken so many liberties with the Australian public that my only surety in this matter is in their dishonesty.

As a child I asked my father how I would ever be able to discern the truth from the media. He answered that Truth is a collage of facts. Each fact as true or as untrue as the other – depending on what you want to believe. But if you REALLY want to know the truth then place all the different pieces before you and the truth will present itself. If you don’t like what you see then you can be sure its the truth. Thank you for providing the canvass.

***

What is this new world order we’re watching develop, or should I say mutate, amid this terrifying chaos? Here’s Chris Murphy’s analysis.

Balancing hegemony: The real New World Order begins to emerge

by Chris Murphy

So what if the United Nations does fracture? Presumably the United States, having shown its contempt for the organisation by totally ignoring world opinion, will officially pull out, leaving the rest of the world to ponder the future of alliances.

My guess is that the vast majority of nations will decide to remain in the U.N. for two reasons – it offers support to the powerless, and it provides a global forum for the lesser powers to influence the powerless. Very soon the world will find itself divided into two camps, one governed by U.S. foreign policy, and the other most likely led by a European-Asian alliance.

Let’s be clear: The United States is not totally isolated in the United Nations. At the government level at least, it already has the support of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia and Japan to launch a “unilateral” attack on Iraq. And when the Security Council sits down this week to vote on the proposed U.S.-U.K. resolution, there are likely to be a number of other states willing to side with the Americans.

George W. Bush showed last week that he is willing to call the UN’s bluff. He may just be hoping that he can find the numbers, but in reality he is left with no choice. He must break through or break. Three of the permanent members of the Security Council – France, Russia and China – have indicated they are prepared to veto the proposed resolution. Bush knows, however, that he cannot abide by any U.N. decision disallowing an attack on Iraq. With 250,000 coalition troops biting at the bit on Iraq’s borders, he knows that to defer “decisive action” now would not only mean his own political suicide but the destruction of Republican neoconservative orthodoxy for decades to come, as well as a severe loss of face for the American nation.

Not going to war, therefore, is simply not an option for Bush. The question therefore must be: What happens if and when the U.N. has been ignored by the world’s only superpower?

Leaving aside the grave doubts that many now have about a post-war Iraq, the much broader concern must be with the structure of global politics if the U.S. abandons the U.N.

In very simple terms, I believe the world will be divided into those who are “with” the United States and those who are “against” it. After all, according to George Bush’s own simple view of the world, there can be nowhere in between.

There are very many reasons to question the need for a war, and certainly a war that puts a premature end to the gradual dismantling of Iraqi weapons programs via UN weapons inspections. These reasons have been expounded by those opposing the US in the UN, most notably France.

But, in the world of international politics, all is never as simple as it seems. As much as we know that the Americans are pursuing their own agenda in the UN for their own self-interested reasons, we can be absolutely certain that the the French and others are certainly pursuing a hidden agenda for their own reasons, too. And it has little to do with reasoned argument.

This is make or break politics. For the big players, the results may well be death or glory, in geo-political terms. If nine or more members of the UN Security Council support the proposal for war, then France will be effectively sidelined and diminished as a world leader. It’s sphere of influence will be severely deflated to a point where it encompasses little more than – perhaps – its close German ally and a short list of former French colonies.

The UN may also be saved, but only because the Americans will have won for themselves a very handy tool for endorsing any future foreign adventures.

However if the Security Council rejects the US-UK proposal for war and the “coalition of the willing” decides to go to war without UN endorsement, the UN will be seen to have “failed”. But, although it will be diminished as a truly international body, if US is opposed by the French, Russians, Chinese and others, then the remnants of a fractured UN will present quite a prize – a fully constituted international body just waiting for a new leader to emerge from the next round of international power politics.

My guess is that this is probably what recent French manoeuvring on the world stage has really been all about. And it has been no coincidence that the other dominant power in the European Union, Germany, has been fully supportive of the French. It may even explain the “suicidal” strategy of Tony Blair to support George Bush in the face of massive public opposition.

If the Security Council votes this week to oppose a United States-led war on Iraq, then we will all be almost certainly witnessing the next great moment in world history, one just as momentous as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

Just as the start of the First World War signalled the beginning of the 20th century, this week’s imminent event will no doubt be seen to mark the beginning of the 21st century and how the world is shaped for the next 100 years.

One side of this split in world power can be clearly observed already. The US will obviously continue to wield immense military and economic power across the globe. Its philosophy will be simple – the spread of Western-style democracy and capitalism.

Yet the US will not be left unchallenged as it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In many ways this new balance of power will resemble the resumption of another Cold War, except this time the US will be opposed not by one ideology but by an alliance of democratic states and authoritarian regimes.

We will witness the emergence of an increasingly self-confident and strident European power sharing the stage with a staunchly authoritarian yet increasingly capitalistic China.

The “New Cold War” will not be a military stand-off but an economic one. The new race will not be waged in terms of arms or outer space but in terms of trading partners and resources.

The rest of the world will be left to choose – or be chosen – between these two alliances. To some extent, this has already happened. Clearly, Britain wants to be America’s main ally, sitting on the doorstep of Europe but looking firmly west for strategic guidance. Japan has signalled that it will remain strongly allied with the US, no doubt fully aware of its vulnerability in the face of an expanding and expansionist China. And Canada will be forced – for geographic reasons but somewhat reluctantly – to rejoin the American “team”.

On the other side, the (new) European Union will vie with China for leadership of the “anti-American” group. Who belongs to this group will be anyone’s guess.

But one thing is certain: Henceforth, international alliances will almost totally depend on the economic power wielded – and the benefits offered – by these two opposing spheres of influence. If they play their cards right, developing countries could be the main beneficiaries of this immense power play.

***

Max Phillips

Disclosure: Max is a member of The Greens

You say: “In the end, it gets back to whether you think the war will help or hinder world peace. In the end, pro and anti war debaters are focused on this question, and the moral arguments for and against war are subsidiary. In other words, we’re all thinking real politic here, whether we’re for or against the war, and for or against Australian involvement.” (A letter from the SAS?)

I disagree that we all believe that moral or ethical arguments are subsidiary to real politic in regard to the war. If you look at the slogans anti-war protesters carry on their banners, most are about ethics over any pragmatic real politic – “No Blood for Oil!”, “You Can’t Bomb for Peace!”, “How Many Children Per Litre?”. In fact many of us on the anti-war side would argue that ethics and real politic can not be divorced.

You write: “He [Wojdylo] seems to be saying that it doesn’t matter what the reason for the war is if its effect is to liberate the Iraqi people. I can go along with that, provided there are guarantees the peace will also be just.”

This seems to be the utilitarian argument – “the greatest good for the greatest number” and it seems that the pursuit of this goal legitimises discarding ethical considerations. Perhaps it can be condensed and expressed as: “If we kill 100,000 Iraqi children so that 400,000 can be saved from the long-term tyranny of Saddam Hussein then the price is worth it, the war is just.”

I’m no expert of philosophy of ethics, but I will try and have a go at why such thinking is wrong and will lead to bad decisions.

Let me pose some other utilitarian questions:

* If the genocide of 900,000 indigenous people of West Papua and the destruction of their culture would lead to the greater prosperity for 200 million Indonesians, is the price worth it?

* Is it OK to deny basic human and legal rights to the prisoners of Camp X-Ray because it pleases 100 million Americans?

* If the physical torture of John Wojdylo provides immense pleasure for 200 Web Diary readers, does this more than make up for the pain that John will feel?

* Can someone murder John Howard for what he believes is the greater good of 19 million Australians?

I don’t think it is acceptable, nor sensible, to make decisions on a solely utilitarian basis. To replace ethics with a ledger book in which we calculate a balance of human lives and happiness is a big mistake.

If we start calculating the justice of a war by the same methods we use to judge the prudence of a business deal or a chess move, then we have lost our humanity. It would be better to admit we are barbarians and are adhering to tribal loyalty than to pontificate about the ‘justice’ of murdering thousands of fellow human beings.

And exactly who should hold and administer the utilitarian ledger book? The mightiest power? The Security Council? The General Assembly? The media? The protesting public? John Wojdylo? I’m not sure anyone but God, if she exists, has that right.

Appealing to “real politic” pragmatism to justify the abandonment of ethical considerations is a recipe for disaster. Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther-King are just three prominent figures whose philosophy claimed that ethics and action must not be divorced and to do so will not solve a problem, only prolong it.

If we look at the spiral of violence in Israel/Palestine it is obvious that the many pragmatic moves by both sides do nothing to solve the situation, rather the lack of ethics on both sides only inflames and prolongs the whole conflict.

When less ethical people (war criminals and terrorists) are in power the conflict and suffering only deepens.

If we look closer to home, the ALP abandoned its ethics in the name of pragmatism when the MV Tampa sailed into Australian politics. Their pragmatic stance failed to win the election and the abandonment of ethics has cost both the soul and effectiveness of the party.

Conversely the ethical stance of the Greens has catapulted them from the fringe to a real force in Australian politics. Meanwhile the pragmatic Democrats flounder in their puddle of pragmatism.

Pragmatic but unethical actions might seem to solve a problem in the short term, it might create a sense of security, but it can never solve a problem in the long term. To really solve a problem it must be through ethical means. It must be with love not hate, cooperation not conflict, peace not war.

Basically what I’m struggling to say is that you can’t abandon ethics in pursuit of an ethical outcome. It is internally inconsistent. You can’t bomb for peace. You can’t kill one Iraqi child to save another. It just doesn’t make sense.

Margo: The argument John Wojdylo is making is that the Iraqi people have collectively decided that the deaths of some of their number are acceptable for the good of all. If anyone is qualified to make that decision it is they, and only they.

Hi. So the US will ask the Security Council to vote mid-week, and last Friday John Howard booked the National Press Club for a speech on Thursday, March 13. The US/UK/Australia deadline for Saddam to disarm is Monday week, March 17. Howard could well tell us we’re about to declare war on Iraq in the face of world opinion and in defiance of the UN.

 

Latest reports state that Bush and Blair will give Saddam a list of weapons he must destroy or account for within six days to avoid an attack. Today’s Observer (Blair sets out final terms to avoid war) states:

Britain and the US are to publish a set of disarmament ‘trip-points’ detailing specific weapons in his arsenal that the United Nations has listed in a private report to the Security Council circulated this weekend. With the international community seemingly split on whether the Iraqi dictator should be given more time to comply with resolution 1441, British officials told The Observer that the targets would be based on the UN report by Hans Blix, the head of the weapons inspectors.”

… It was clear last night that the international community was facing the final make or break week on Iraq. In a desperate plea for more time, France said yesterday it would not support the resolution and made an official appeal for a summit of world leaders to discuss the looming conflict. Russia also said it was opposed to any resolution that ‘authorised war’.

…The British and US ‘trip points’ will be based on a summary draft of Blix’s UN report circulated by Number 10 yesterday. The document demands that Saddam:

* accounts for Iraq’s al-Hussein missile system and 50 Scud Bs which the UN says ‘may have been retained for a proscribed missile force’;

* explains the illegal import of 131 Volga engines for its al-Samoud 2 missile system and why Unmovic, the UN inspections team, had later found 231 engines and documentation for a further 150;

* accounts for and destroys 550 mustard gas shells and 350 R-400 bombs, which are capable of carrying chemical and biological weapons, which are still outstanding;

* reveals the whereabouts of 80 tonnes of mustard gas as well as VX, Sarin and Soman gas.

It is likely that the resolution will be voted on by the middle of this week. If Britain and America succeed in getting the nine votes needed to pass the resolution then Saddam would have until 17 March to comply. If he did not do so military conflict would begin soon after.

Unlike Tony Blair, John Howard has played a dangerous, contemptuous political game to avoid public discussion and debate. He won’t talk about joining the Yanks in a strike until the Council decides whether to authorise it. This cuts off any discussion of the role we’d play after regime change. Any chance of debate about our rules of engagement in the invasion are similarly cut off – we haven’t decided whether to go to war, so we haven’t signed off on them yet.

Both Blair and Howard say their goal is not regime change. That means they’re joining a war led by a nation whose objective they oppose. How can we invade Iraq them walk away from the responsibilities of the occupation? How can we invade without agreeing to the US occupation plans? How can it be acceptable to invade a country but take no responsibility for the aftermath? The world will hold us accountable for actions and events in which we play no part. Without a UN sanction, we will be outcasts in the world community and completely reliant on the United States for our security in a region which sees us as the enemy. No wonder Howard now wants us to join the US missile defence plan.

It looks like he’s signed up to the Bush national security strategy of a US free of the constraints of international law and the UN, doing what it like for what it perceives to be in its interests. He just never told us, that’s all. (The strategy is published in Manifesto for world dictatorship, and bears striking similarities to the strategy of the right wing think tank ‘Project for the New American Century’ discussed in A think tank war: Why old Europe says no.)

John Howard has already walked away from Kyoto with the US and he wants to walk away from multilateralism in trade too and tie us to the US through a free trade deal which could see our foreign ownership restrictions on Qantas, Telstra and Woodside.

Howard appears to have decided he’ll go all the way with the Bushies. We’ll be with em, whatever happens; we’ll say yes, whatever they ask. Howard will put us in the eye of the storm. We’re becoming the 51st State, yet Howard has told us nothing of this tumultuous change in our foreign policy. History did indeed begin for Australia on September 11, 2001.

Maybe Howard’s devilishly clever, but stifling debate before the war leaves him way open to trouble if things go wrong. A war without UN sanction would unite the ALP and Simon Crean would go for broke against the war. Vietnam revisited, except that this time public opinion would be behind the peacemaker, not the warmonger, as Crean would start his campaign with the majority of Australians backing him. Howard – without Labor or, if public opinion holds, the majority of Australians – would have the blood of Australian casualties on his hands alone.

A Howard decision to go in with the Yanks without UN endorsement would trigger the most important security debate in Australia we’ve had for a long, long time after a debate Howard refused to have. Compared to the UK, we are grotesquely uninformed about the ramifications of what we’re doing.

***

I recommend The Financial Times’ Bush’s future is in Blair’s hands by Linda Bilmes, who teaches public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and was assistant secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton.

She argues that Bush could not now go to war without Blair’s support, because it keeps US public opinion onside and the Democratic Party in check:

Opinion polls show popular support wavering for an invasion without international backing. Mr Blair’s stance allows the White House to maintain its “coalition of the willing” strategy, which will be politically essential if UN support is not forthcoming.

Second, Mr Blair is critical in maintaining bipartisan support for the war. He has a close relationship with Bill Clinton, the former president, and maintains a dialogue with likely Democratic contenders for the presidency, such as senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina. Most Democrats see him as “one of us”. This is a powerful factor in the Democrats’ public acquiescence in Mr Bush’s tough line.

She also paints a chilling picture of the war’s timetable, saying Bush wants the war over and the mistakes fixed before the 2004 presidential election year.

More important still are Mr Bush’s sinking approval ratings on the economy. CNN’s latest poll shows his support at 53 per cent – down from more than 80 per cent after September 11 2001 (and 20 percentage points lower than Mr Clinton’s support on the day he was impeached). Popular support for his tax-cutting stimulus package is also weak. Sooner or later the domestic political debate will move away from foreign policy and focus on jobs and the stock market. The Bush team knows full well that an end to war uncertainty, rather than tax cuts, is the most effective way to boost the flagging economy and create a rally on Wall Street.

So an early – and quick – war is critical to fit with the US political agenda. By contrast, Mr Blair has no such constraints. If the war were postponed six months to allow more inspections, it would strengthen his political position at home, which has been weakened by the prospect of a war without UN approval. Should he opt to shift his stance – say, to play the role of honest broker who forges a consensus between the Americans and the Europeans – that would almost certainly thwart the administration’s ability to invade Iraq this month. It would also reopen the war as a live political issue in Washington. In short, it would be bad news for Mr Bush. Mr Blair is the pivotal operator in ways that even he may not fully appreciate.

So Tony Blair, the third way man with visions of a multilateral approach to Kyoto and other intractable problems only the world acting together can address, the man who said September 11 was an historic opportunity for the centre-left to take charge of the future, could – if the UN says no to war now and he accepts the decision – destroy the fundamentalist, unilateralist, neo-liberal right-winger in control of the world’s superpower and save himself. Who’d be Tony Blair today?

In his post-September 11 speech to the nation, Blair said:

This is an extraordinary moment for progressive politics. Our values are the right ones for this age: the power of community, solidarity, the collective ability to further the individual’s interests.

…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. “By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more together than we can alone”.

For those people who lost their lives on 11 September and those that mourn them; now is the time for the strength to build that community. Let that be their memorial. (Blair vision)

Is a US/UK strike on Iraq in defiance of the UN what Blair had in mind to build community? Will he save Bush’s skin – the man whose policies are inimical to progressive world politics? Will that be his legacy?

The Observer reports today that the British government has arrested an employee at the top-secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in connection with the leak of an American ‘dirty tricks’ surveillance sting on Security Council members yet to declare their position on war:

Officials at GCHQ, the electronic surveillance arm of the British intelligence service, were asked by the Americans to provide valuable information from ‘product lines’, intelligence jargon for phone taps and e-mail interception. The document was circulated among British intelligence services before being leaked (observer). See also The spies and the spinner and UN launches inquiry into American spying.

Today, a piece in this week’s Jane’s Defence Weekly forwarded by Scott Burchill on doubts in defence and intelligence circles on the wisdom of war, and Tim Gillon comments on the authenticity of the email I published Friday from someone who says he’s in Australia’s SAS and that Howard had already committed SAS troops to war (A letter from the SAS?). To end, reader George Crones’ first piece for Webdiary, a dialogue with the young writer of a column in the Herald last week waxing lyrical about the school kids march against the war.

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Scepticism mounts among defence and intelligence officials

David Mulholland, JDW Business Editor, London

Jane’s Defence Weekly, March 05, 2003

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.

Such opposition was witnessed on 26 February in the UK Parliament – one of the largest voting revolts in the past 100 years. It is also becoming clear that many military and intelligence officials in both the US and UK, who are not in a position to speak publicly, are deeply sceptical of the Bush administration’s apparent rush to war.

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.

“President George W Bush’s speech on Iraq is significant, mostly because it reveals that he long ago made a decision for war and has always viewed the inspection process as an impediment to war to be overcome, rather than a means to avoid war,” said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. “War was always his first option. The president paints a positive picture of post-war Iraq that is likely to prove wildly optimistic.”

Retired US Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, former head of the US Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East, said the administration is ignoring public reaction in the Muslim world about a US invasion of Iraq. In October he said: “Anti-Americanism, doubts about this war, concern about the damage that may happen, political issues, economic issues and social issues have all caused the [Arab] street to become extremely volatile. I’m amazed at people that say that there is no street and that it won’t react. I’m not sure which planet they live on because it isn’t the one that I travel. I’ve been out in the Middle East, and it is explosive; it is the worst I’ve ever seen it in over a dozen years of working in this area in some concentrated way. Almost anything could touch it off.”

Another former Reagan administration official said that Bush appears to be set on the course of action he has already decided because he is out of his depth and is unable to understand the nuances of the arguments that oppose an immediate war with Iraq. “He just doesn’t have the experience to be dealing with these issues.”

This may have to do with Bush’s seeming inability to change course in reaction to changing circumstances, a congressional source said. “With the exception of attacking Afghanistan in response to [11 September 2001], something that Bush had no choice about, he has not changed one iota of his agenda despite it being formed during a time of strong economic growth and a different perception of security threats.”

Most sources interviewed for this analysis agreed that the Bush administration has backed itself into a corner and cannot reverse course at this point. It has now put too much political capital into a war. Backing out now would likely wreck Bush’s image as a strong leader and focus the US voting public on the faltering US economy and the lack of appropriate policy initiatives.

“There’s no going back,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “US credibility is on the line. The only possible outcomes now are either Iraq is disarmed or Saddam is deposed.” Cirincione said: “You can move a lot of stuff to the [Persian] Gulf without going to war, but once you start mobilising the [US Army’s] 101st Airborne, you are going to war.”

Several sources said that reports of special forces units being deployed to Iraq showed that real preparations for military action are already taking place. Many said that such actions do not take place until a decision to attack has been made.

Cirincione also said that war with Iraq was likely to be sooner rather than later because Bush’s popularity is drying up. “Backing for a war is falling,” he said. “Fifty-nine per cent are now in favour of giving the inspectors more time. That’s not very good considering that Bush has been focused like a laser on Iraq to the exclusion of all other foreign and domestic issues.”

Several sources said an attack would likely begin as soon as 14 March. O’Hanlon said that while there is a remote chance that action could be delayed until the autumn if there were enough pressure, ultimately an attack is inevitable because Bush’s self image would not allow him to change his mind.

2003 Jane’s Information Group

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Tim Gillin in Sydney

I have a friend who is ex-SAS and an active member of the Australian commando and special forces veterans’ organisation. Last September he told me about meeting with SAS Afghan veterans who were quite critical of the performance of US CIA “cowboys” in Afghanistan. His uniformed informants said the CIA personnel provoked the prison uprising over there through their own unprofessionalism. This was well before media coverage of these events.

So the kind of critical views expressed in A letter from the SAS? do not strike me as unusual, although posting them to the press certainly is. The views are very similar to the opinions voiced by my veteran friend.

Similarly the discussion from your correspondent about the Australian SAS strategic recon skills twigs with what I have learned from my friend as well.

There is a myth that military personnel are all “gung ho” types. Most background books on the SAS, for example, describe the average trooper as intelligent and interested in world affairs, and widely read. Their is no reason to assume they live in some kind of warmongers’ hothouse.

In fact those leading the charge to war in Iraq more often than not seem to be denizens of civilian think tanks. In contrast, there has been a string of retired military leaders from the US, UK and Australia who have urged a more cautious approach. In fact one prominent and right wing US anti-war web site calls the current pro-war wave “The Attack of the Chicken-hawks” (antiwar).

Your correspondent’s use of the little known term “Dev Group” is interesting. This is the unit name for US Navy SEAL’s maritime counter-terrorist unit, a name that is not widely used in the media. I suppose the one hint of skepticism I have about your correspondent’s letter is not so much his viewpoint, but his use of the term “SAS”. This is more of a media than a military convention. The more common labels are SASR or ASAS. However he may have been using the more common usage.

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For Whom the (School) Bell Tolls

by George Crones

A reply to Classroom struggle: school’s out for peace, unity and social justice by Lauren Carroll Harris in Thursday’s Herald (smh).

One thing I particularly admire about Webdiary is the level of informed argument that has taken place over the last few months about the situation in Iraq and the broader issue of the War on Terrorism. I have tried to maintain an open mind about both sides of the argument and am still in the process of making a decision as to which side I support.

I have generally refrained from making comments (other than supplying a few links of interest over the last week or so). However having read the opinion piece by Lauren Harris I felt it needed to be challenged on several of its points however. This is not a criticism of the anti-war position (which I am still deciding about) but rather a criticism of the demonstration and its “coverage” in Lauren’s article. If only Lauren had been reading Web Diary perhaps she would have done her position more justice!

I have included her text in bold italics, with my comments following.

March 5 was a historic day.

Yes it was. On March 5 in 1956 the United States Supreme Court upheld a ban on racist segregation in universities and schools. Now that is something worth celebrating.

Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech on March 5 in 1946. It is also the day that Joseph Stalin died in 1953 after 29 years in power. Its ironic that 50 years after his death, we witness a demonstration that effectively supports the continuation of another dictator.

Something tells me that March 5 will be better remembered for important events like this rather than a relatively small group of students missing an afternoons school.

It was the beginning of an international youth movement against war on Iraq.

Perhaps that is something better judged by history, but it certainly looks like it is going to be a short movement (if the movement exists at all). It might have been better for the organisers to set the movement up as against all wars that way at least they have something to do when the war in Iraq (if it happens) is over. I’m betting that the movement won’t last as it looks set to be a short war.

High school students, university students and other young people united to take a message loud and clear to world leaders: there is a better solution to this conflict, and we’re prepared to fight for it.

So the better solution is something worth fighting for? Hmmm.

The slogan? Books not bombs.

I am sure that world leaders – if they are even aware at all that a student protest occurred – are not going to be swayed by simplistic slogans such as this. I know I would be convinced if I saw someone carrying a piece of cardboard with a rhyming slogan written on it, but unfortunately I am not a world leader.

Students feel that the money which will be spent on the military would be better spent on upgrading educational facilities, public housing and hospitals. The Howard Government is unwilling to say just how much money will be devoted to the war, but it is sure to be in the billions. In comparison, $1.5 billion could restore public education funding to pre-1990 levels, or increase the number of available child care places by 10 times.

Ideally governments would have enough money for everybody to be kept happy. Governments make decisions about allocation of resources every single day and by their very nature some of those decisions could be wasteful. Depending on who you are and what you believe in you are obviously going to support some of these decisions and oppose others. Clearly, students have an interest in supporting increased funding for education.

Opposing the war in Iraq for the reason that it is going to cost money doesnt seem to be a particularly defensible position – at least morally – in light of this. Taking this argument to its extreme, then we probably shouldn’t have wasted money on East Timor either. Funnily enough I can’t recall too many people complaining about how much that cost us (or is still costing us for that matter).

History has unfortunately very rarely been without conflict of some kind. Whilst I am all for an end to military conflict, it is not particularly realistic and is different to saying that we don’t need a defence force. Whilst there are totalitarian regimes and dictators, we need the military. Whilst there needs to be peacekeeping forces sent around the world, there needs to be someone to send.

Ideally there won’t be a war. Saddam might voluntarily disarm, step down and go into exile, or he might be deposed by his own people. However if a war does eventuate and if we participate in it – a decision which John Howard already seems to have made without having the integrity to be upfront to the Australian people about it – then it would be more appropriate to estimate the costs after the event and not before.

The tactic? To encourage students to leave their classrooms, a walkout to show their opposition to Australian involvement in war on Iraq, UN sanctioned or not.

Students who are marching for or against something when the alternative is missing school are not particularly convincing. I would have been more convinced of their commitment to the cause if the protest had been on a weekend and they had to wear uniforms. Then at least you would know they were giving their own time up rather than just missing class.

As it is, taking an afternoon off from class to go wander through the city and wade in Hyde Park Fountain doesn’t strike me as showing opposition to anything but school. I will be following the NSW Education Department’s actions against those who missed school with some interest.

One thing that is confusing (and this is the case with most of the anti-war protests) is what everyone involved actually stands for. Thankfully Lauren has cleared things up nicely for me. Apparently, the protest was not actually about stopping the war in Iraq. Lauren and her fellow protesters have no problem with the US and the UK attacking Iraq (with or without sanction) – they just don’t want Australia to be involved. I would have respected the protest more if it had actually took a stance against the war, rather than just saying that they are happy for others to do our dirty work for us.

The reason for the protest? War is not the answer to terrorism…

Armed conflict by itself is definitely not the answer to terrorism. However, any war on terrorism is going to include conflict. If it were the only part then the war would be doomed to fail. To me fighting terrorism also means giving people access to things like education, health, welfare and basic freedoms – in other words winning the peace as well. If this happens then terrorist leaders will find it much harder to recruit people willing to kill and/or die for their causes in future.

(Incidentally, having access to these freedoms implies living in a democracy, which means that somehow or other regimes like that the one in Iraq have to be toppled.)

So far we have heard precious little about these things from George W Bush, which I find worrying. America has been good at resolving the military aspects quite quickly (and Iraq will probably be no different), but it is too soon to see how it does on everything else.

It would have been easier to accept that post-war Iraq would have a successful transition to democracy if the situation in Afghanistan was more settled by now (although I acknowledge that there are clear differences between the essentially secular regime of Saddam and that of the Taliban which make the situation harder to compare).

…and will only result in the senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. Aid agencies, including Oxfam, estimate that 80 per cent of war casualties will be civilians. Many students carried handmade banners and placards with slogans like “No war for oil – not in my name” and “How many lives for a gallon of oil?”

There are innocent deaths all around the world every day, which is a terrible tragedy. This is something definitely worth fighting to prevent, and I am looking forward to the day when we have a wars on hunger, poverty, illiteracy and disease, rather than just a war on terror.

Whilst I don’t accept that there will be hundreds of thousands of casualties as a result of the war, I can accept that there will be some innocent civilians who are going to lose their life. I could even accept that the Iraqi soldiers are not exactly willing participants but have no choice in the matter given that they serve a dictator – they too could be seen as innocents (in the sense that any death diminishes us).

If the war in Iraq leads to the end of Saddam’s regime and the beginnings of a democracy then the Iraqi people will be much better off. Aside from an end to his brutality, a successful war (if there ever is such a thing) will also mean an end to UN Sanctions.

From what I can gather, since beginning after the previous Gulf War, the UN Sanctions have directly led to the deaths of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis. Ending the sanctions means that these senseless deaths can hopefully be stopped. To me that is reason enough to go in and end Saddams regime. The UN has a lot of blood on its hands and it is time it started to make amends.

The students who attended were also protesting against other injustices and drawing links with other social issues. One speaker pointed out that refugees are the logical consequence of war, and that millions of Iraqis will be displaced. Another highlighted the plight of Iraqi women, questioning whether much will differ for them after a regime change.

Were the organisers of the protest clear and upfront to those who participated in the protest about what they were actually marching for? So far it has been about no Australian involvement irrespective of what anyone else does; war not being an answer to terrorism; innocent deaths in Iraq; refugees; and the plight or Iraqi women.

Some of these ideas seem to be contradictory. Not that a protest has to be about one thing only, but it should at least be consistent and people involved should know and agree about what they are marching for or against.

The mood? Passionate, exuberant, political and angry. Ten thousand young people filled Sydney with colour, music and chants as they marched from Town Hall to Hyde Park.

Ho hum. I have often wondered about the accuracy of crowd numbers at protests or events. I guess it is only natural for organisers to want their event to be seen as successful and, in the case of protests, this generally means bumping up the numbers who were present.

Yesterdays SMH reports that more than 3000 students mounted a rowdy protest, which I suspect is closer to the truth than the 10,000 suggested by Lauren. Not that that is unimpressive. Having 3000 students marching for something (assuming they know what it is) is worth taking note of.

Don’t belittle the importance of what you do by assuming that everyone will write you off if there aren’t huge crowds. (Having seen the number of people in attendance, it was impressive enough as is).

The demonstrators felt ignored and that their only choice was to vote with their feet by walking out of school and sending the urgent message: we have a war to stop.

So now the protest was about stopping the looming war on Iraq? I should have added that to the list above.

Many students remarked to me during the day that they had never seen anything like it. One University of Sydney student put it this way: “There are two superpowers in the world today – the US and the global anti-war movement.”

Well whilst the US is concerned with Iraq, perhaps the other superpower (*ahem*) could take care of North Korea for the rest of us.

The walkouts were likened to the mass moratoria against the Vietnam War in the 60s and 70s during a period of mass youth radicalisation. In short, the protest was an empowering celebration of unity in the face of international warmongering and a climate of increasing fear and hatred.

Well at least the “youth of today” feel empowered.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that the vast majority of young people don’t support this war. But the demonstrations on March 5 were only the tip of the iceberg of the mass anti-war sentiment that exists among our youth.

Not everyone supports the war, but that is a long way from suggesting that the vast majority don’t. If you arent careful, people will start to think you sound like a politician when you make that kind of claim. Next you will be saying that you have a mandate.

Since the start of the year, anti-war groups on high schools have blossomed, and more students have started to actively campaign in their schools against war. And these young people have the support of much of the broader community too. In the run-up to the demonstration, rally organisers received calls from parents who wanted to help their sons and daughters publicise the walkout by distributing leaflets and posters. Furthermore, some P&C Associations even encouraged students to join the demonstration.

Ah, I guess that is the mandate. I apologise for likening you to a politician when you clearly have the support of the people on this matter.

But the real question is: what are the next steps for the youth anti-war movement? In a move that contrasted sharply with the Australian Government’s commitment to war, despite overwhelming popular opposition to it, a proposal was put to the crowd as to whether another walkout should be called for 1pm, March 26 at Hyde Park.

Hmm, realising it isn’t that hard to get time off school, you then decided you want more time off?

Students voted enthusiastically and unanimously to protest again, and to take the campaign against war and racism back to their schools too. We hope that next time we are joined by other sectors of the anti-war movement – trade unions, teachers, parents, community figureheads and others.

I guess it is only fair that if students get time off everyone else should as well.

The demonstrations confirmed two things. This war is a cutting-edge issue in politics today and John Howard has failed to convince the majority of the population that Australia should be involved.

The demonstrations confirm nothing other than that there was a demonstration. Anything beyond that and you start to get into murky waters. Given that you can’t even decide what the protest was about, perhaps you should hold off claiming that you represent the majority of the population of Australia.

There is no democracy in this country until Howard submits to the will of the majority.

One of the wonderful things about living in a country like Australia is the fact that we live in a democracy unlike Iraqi. In a democracy you are allowed to express differing viewpoints to those held by the government of the day and you don’t have to worry about you or your family being taken away and tortured or shot unlike Iraqi.

If you disagree with John Howard (as many do) then feel free to protest and feel free to vote him out at the next election – unlike Iraq, John Howard doesn’t have 100% of voters in his country supporting him.

If you are looking for a pithy ending to your opinion piece then please don’t insult our intelligence and suggest that we don’t have a democracy in this country. Perhaps if you tried the alternative you might be better positioned to realise the difference.

 

The arena of the angry bull. Image by Webdiary artist Martin Davies, www.daviesart.com

Reader Alun Breward writes: “I found this article on the website of German news magazine Der Spiegel this week. I thought it was one of the best pieces of journalism on the Iraq conflict I have read and so I translated it.” Thanks Alun! Here we go.

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This war came from a think tank

by Jochen Boelsche, spiegel

It was in no way a conspiracy. As far back as 1998, ultra right US think tanks had developed and published plans for an era of US world domination, sidelining the UN and attacking Iraq. These people were not taken seriously. But now they are calling the tune.

German commentators and correspondents have been confused. Washington has tossed around so many types of reasons for war on Baghdad “that it could make the rest of the world dizzy”, said the South German Times.

And the Nuremburg News reported on public statements last week by Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer to an inner circle in the US that war can only be avoided if Saddam not only disarms, but also leaves office.

Regime change is a condition that is in none of the barely remembered 18 UN resolutions. The Nuremburg News asked in astonishment whether Fleischer had made the biggest Freudian slip of his career or whether he spoke with the President’s authority.

It’s not about Saddam’s weapons

So it goes. Across the world critics of President Bush are convinced that a second Gulf War is actually about replacing Saddam, whether the dictator is involved with WMD or not. “It’s not about his WMD,” writes the German born Israeli peace campaigner, Uri Avnery, “its purely a war about world domination, in business, politics, defence and culture”.

There are real models for this. They were already under development by far right Think Tanks in the 1990s, organisations in which cold-war warriors from the inner circle of the secret services, from evangelical churches, from weapons corporations and oil companies forged shocking plans for a new world order.

In the plans of these hawks a doctrine of “might is right” would operate, and the mightiest of course would be the last superpower, America.

Visions of world power on the Web

To this end the USA would need to use all means – diplomatic, economic and military, even wars of aggression – to have long term control of the resources of the planet and the ability to keep any possible rival weak.

These 1990’s schemes of the Think Tanks, from sidelining the UN to a series of wars to establish dominance – were in no way secret. Nearly all these scenarios have been published; some are accessible on the Web.

For a long time these schemes were shrugged off as fantasy produced by intellectual mavericks – arch-conservative relics of the Reagan era, the coldest of cold-war warriors, hibernating in backwaters of academia and lobby groups.

At the White House an internationalist spirit was in the air. There was talk of partnerships for universal human rights, of multi-lateralism in relations with allies. Treaties on climate-change, weapons control, on landmines and international justice were on the agenda.

Saddam’s fall was planned in 1998

In this liberal climate there came, nearly unnoticed, a 1997 proposal of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) that forcefully mapped out “America’s global leadership”. On 28 Jan 1998 the PNAC project team wrote to President Clinton demanding a radical change in dealings with the UN and the end of Saddam.

While it was not clear whether Saddam was developing WMD, he was, they said, a threat to the US, Israel, the Arab States and “a meaningful part of the world’s oil reserves”. They put their case as follows:

“In the short term this means being ready to lead military action, without regard for diplomacy. In the long term it means disarming Saddam and his regime. We believe that the US has the right under existing Security Council resolutions to take the necessary steps, including war, to secure our vital interests in the Gulf. In no circumstances should America’s politics be crippled by the misguided insistence of the Security Council on unanimity.” (clintonletter)

Blueprint for an offensive

This letter might have remained yellowing in the White House archives if it did not read like a blue-print for a long-desired war, and still might have been forgotten if ten PNAC members had not signed it. These signatories are today all part of the Bush Administration. They are Dick Cheney – Vice President, Lewis Libby – Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld – Defence Minister, Paul Wolfowitz – Rumsfeld’s deputy, Peter Rodman – in charge of ‘Matters of Global Security’, John Bolton – State Secretary for Arms Control, Richard Armitage – Deputy Foreign Minister, Richard Perle – former Deputy Defence Minister under Reagan, now head of the Defense Policy Board, William Kristol – head of the PNAC and adviser to Bush, known as the brains of the President, Zalmay Khalilzad – fresh from being special ambassador and kingmaker in Afghanistan, now Bush’s special ambassador to the Iraqi opposition.

But even before that – over ten years ago – two hardliners from this group had developed a defence proposal that created a global scandal when it was leaked to the US press. The suggestion that was revealed in 1992 in The New York Times was developed by two men who today are Cabinet members – Wolfowitz and Libby. It essentially argued that the doctrine of deterrence used in the Cold War should be replaced by a new global strategy.

Its goal was the enduring preservation of the superpower status of the US – over Europe, Russia and China. Various means were proposed to deter potential rivals from questioning America’s leadership or playing a larger regional or global role. The paper caused major concerns in the capitals of Europe and Asia.

But the critical thing, according to the Wolfowitz-Libby paper, was complete American dominance of Eurasia. Any nation there that threatened the USA by acquiring WMD should face pre-emptive attack, they said. Traditional alliances should be replaced by ad-hoc coalitions.

This 1992 masterplan then formed the basis of a PNAC paper that was concluded in September 2000, just months before the start of the Bush Administration.

That September 2000 paper (Rebuilding America’s Defences) was developed by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Libby, and is devoted to matters of “maintaining US pre-eminence, thwarting rival powers and shaping the global security system according to US interests”. (RAD)

The cavalry on the new frontier

Amongst other things, this paper said, the USA must re-arm and build a missile shield in order to put itself in a position to fight numerous wars simultaneously and chart its own course. Whatever happened, the Gulf would have to be in US control:

“The US has sought for years to play an ongoing role in the security architecture of the Gulf. The unresolved conflict with Iraq provides a clear basis for our presence, but quite independent of the issue of the Iraqi regime, a substantial US presence in the Gulf is needed.”

The paper describes these US forces stationed overseas in the raw language of the Wild West, calling them “the Cavalry on the New American Frontier”. Even peace efforts, the paper continues, should have the stamp of the USA rather than the UN.

Gun-at-the-head diplomacy

Scarcely had President Bush (jnr) won his controversial election victory and replaced Clinton than he brought the hardliners from the PNAC into his administration. The old campaigner Richard Perle (who once told theHamburg Times about ‘gun-at-the-head diplomacy’) found himself in the key role at the Defense Policy Board. This board operates in close cooperation with Pentagon boss Rumsfeld.

At a breath-taking pace the new power-bloc began implementing the PNAC strategy. Bush ditched international treaty after international treaty, shunned the UN and began treating allies as inferiors. After the attacks of 11 September, as fear ruled the US and anthrax letters circulated, the Bush cabinet clearly took the view that the time was ripe to dust off the PNAC plans for Iraq.

Just six days after 11 September, Bush signed an order to prepare for war against the terror network and the Taliban. Another order went to the military, that was secret initially, instructing them to develop scenarios for a war in Iraq.

A son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch

Of course the claims of Iraqi control of the 11 September hijackers never were proven, just like the assumption that Saddam was involved with the anthrax letters (they proved to be from sources in the US Military). But regardless, Richard Perle claimed in a TV interview that “there can be no victory in the war on terror if Saddam remains in power”.

The dictator, demanded Perle, must be deposed by the US as a matter of priority “because he symbolises contempt for all Western values”. But Saddam had always been that way, even when he gained power in Iraq with US backing.

At that time a Secret Service officer from the US embassy in Baghdad reported to CIA Headquarters: “I know Saddam is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch”. And after the US had supported the dictator in his war with Iran, the retired CIA Director Robert Gates says he had no illusions about Saddam. The dictator, says Gates “was never a reformer, never a democrat, just a common criminal”.

But the PNAC paper does not make clear why Washington now wants to declare war, even without UN support, on its erstwhile partner.

A shining example of freedom

There is a lot of evidence that Washington wants to remove the Iraqi regime in order to bring the whole Middle East more fully under its economic sphere of influence. Bush puts it somewhat differently – after a liberation that is necessitated by breaches of international law, Iraq “will serve as a dramatic and shining exampled of freedom to other nations of the region”.

Experts like Udo Steinbach, Director of the German-Orient Institute in Hamburg, have doubts about Bush’s bona fides. Steinbach describes the President’s announcement last week of a drive to democratise Iraq as “a calculated distortion aimed at justifying war”.

There is nothing currently to indicate that Bush truly is pursuing democratisation in the region.

“Particularly in Iraq,” says Steinbach, “I cannot convince myself that after the fall of Saddam something democratic could take shape.”

Control the flow of oil, control your rivals

This so called pre-emptive war that the PNAC ideologues have longed for against Iraq also serves, in the judgement of Uri Avnery, to take the battle to Europe and Japan. It brings US dominance of Eurasia closer.

Avnery notes:

“American occupation of Iraq would secure US control not only of the extensive oil reserves of Iraq, but also the oil of the Caspian Sea and the Gulf States. With control of the supply of oil the US can stall the economies of Germany, France and Japan at will, just by manipulating the oil price. A lower price would damage Russia, a higher one would shaft Germany and Japan. That’s why preventing this war is essential to Europe’s interests, apart from Europeans’ deep desire for peace.”

“Washington has never been shy about its desire to tame Europe,” argues Avnery. In order to implement his plans for world dominance, says Avnery, “Bush is prepared to spill immense quantities of blood, so long as it’s not American blood”.

The world will toe the American line

The arrogance of the hawks in the US administration, and their plan to have the world toe their line while they decide on war or peace, shocks experts like the international law expert Hartmut Schiedermair from Cologne. The American “crusading zeal” that can make such statements he says is “highly disturbing”.

Similarly Harald Mueller – a leading peace researcher – has long criticised the German Government for “assiduously overlooking and tacitly endorsing” the dramatic shift in US foreign policy of 2001. He says the agenda of the Bush administration is unmistakable:

“America will do as it pleases. It will obey international law if it suits, and break that law or ignore it if necessary … The USA wants total freedom for itself, to be the aristocrat of world politics.”

Infatuated with war

Even senior politicians in countries backing a second Gulf War are appalled by the radicals in the White House.

Beginning last year, responding to the PNAC study, long-serving Labour MP Tam Dalyell raged against it in the House of Commons:

“This is rubbish from right wing think tanks where bird-brained war-mongers huddle together – people who have never experienced the horror of war, but are infatuated with the idea of it.”

Even his own leader got a broad-side: “I am appalled that a Labour PM would hop into bed with such a troop of moral pygmies.”

Across the Atlantic in mid February, Democrat Senator Robert Byrd (at 86 years of age the so-called “Father of the Senate”) spoke out. The longest serving member of that Chamber warned the pre-emptive war that the Right were advocating was a “distortion of long-standing concepts of the right of self-defence” and “a blow against international law”. Bush’s politics, he said “could well be a turning point in world history” and “lay the foundation for anti-Americanism” across much of the world. (Byrd’s speech is at A lonely voice in a US Senate silent on war.)

Holding the rest of the world in contempt

One person who is absolutely unequivocal about the problem of anti-Americanism is former President Jimmy Carter. He judges the PNAC agenda in the same way. At first, argues Carter, Bush responded to the challenge of September 11 in an effective and intelligent way, “but in the meantime a group of conservatives worked to get approval for their long held ambitions under the mantle of ‘the war on terror'”.

The restrictions on civil rights in the US and at Guantanamo, cancellation of international accords, “contempt for the rest of the world”, and finally an attack on Iraq “although there is no threat to the US from Baghdad” – all these things will have devastating consequences, according to Carter.

“This entire unilateralism”, warns the ex-President, “will increasingly isolate the US from those nations that we need in order to do battle with terrorism”.

I’d like to respond to Zainab Al-Badry (Iraqi Australians: War splits a family), first by addressing what she wrote and later by providing some excerpts from articles that include the views of many, many more Iraqis than Zainab and her circle of friends, both inside and outside Iraq.

But first I want to relate an email I received today from northern Iraq:

Dear John,

Thank you for your message. I am answering you by satellite from Sulaimania in northern Iraq. … I would like to say that the overwhelming majority of the people here in Iraq are eagerly awaiting their deliverance from Saddam Hussein. In fact the only anti-American opinion I have encountered has been from the foreign journalists. The reaction of everyone here who saw the marches against disarming Saddam on TV was total dismay that good people around the world would wish to consign the Iraqis to living in the mass concentration camp that Saddam has made this country…

Regards

Ahmed Allawi

Zainab Al-Badry and I have conversed in Webdiary a few times before. Zainab put forward her views in Saddam’s Will to Power and It’s about judgement, not belief, and I thought I’d answered her points pretty definitively in ‘Saddam’s Will to Power’ and Loving Hitler.

One thing I didn’t note then is that Zainab is clearly jaundiced against the Americans, whatever they do and however they go about things, even if it’s with a UN mandate. For example, here’s what Zainab said in An A-Z of War:

I am sure many people will say this is a different situation and we have no choice but to defend our country. I will say this to them, YES we do have choice and that is not blindly following the American path. All that we are going to get out of this war is the dead bodies of our beloved ones. The ends DO NOT justify the means.

Back then, Zainab was writing about the war in Afghanistan, which was sanctioned by the UN, and which liberated the Afghans from the Taliban. Life is undoubtedly better now in Afghanistan, despite the problems.

Nevertheless, Zainab hasn’t changed her tune, and is even using exactly the same words in the Iraq context.

In ‘Loving Hitler’, I explained why Zainab’s blaming the Americans for Saddam’s actions was factually wrong. I included a long excerpt from an eye-witness that demonstrated Saddam’s thinking about the start of the war against Iran. Saddam’s decision had nothing to do with the Americans (least of all the Republicans, which weren’t even in power then), and everything to do with Saddam’s megalomanic dream to control Middle East oil.

Yet Zainab persists with her historical falsification in her latest piece. She wants to remember history as she pleases, because the conspiracy theory suits her worldview. How much more of her view is something that is rationalised and imposed on reality, rather than based on reality?

She is simply against wars fought mainly by Americans, at all cost:

“I have one son and I want to say this: There is absolutely no reason in my mind that justifies sending him to war.” [A-Z of War]

Yet, in ‘It’s about judgement, not belief’, she agrees with me that if we don’t act now it “would give him the power to threaten us with unleashing the Holocaust unless we submit to his will”.

She states it very clearly: “I couldn’t agree more.”

What’s more, Zainab knows that Saddam has WMD and is very dangerous:

“Or maybe the US is absolutely sure that he in fact does not have WMD left. I do not believe this last theory, in fact the most terrifying scenario I could imagine is if Saddam found himself with his back to the wall. He would use whatever was in his hands, regardless of the consequences.” (It’s about judgement, not belief)

Moreover, in ‘Loving Hitler’, I argued very clearly and carefully why a democratic Iraq might be on the horizon if we act now, though the risk of failure exists; but if Saddam Hussein is allowed to win, a democratic Iraq will be impossible for decades.

So, all in all, Zainab seems to believe that all a dictator has to do to succeed in his mad grab for power is to take his entire population hostage, by acquiring WMD and threatening to use them against his own people; that we must submit to any tyranny as long as it is horrific enough; that once the dictator chooses this path, as soon as he threatens us with unleashing the Holocaust, nobody has any choice but to submit to his will.

Zainab’s stance is a formula for every dictator’s success.

What I find most saddening in Zainab’s stance is that she insults the intelligence of the Iraqis who are not like her, who are not free, and want liberty:

“I am fairly sure that most if not all the Iraqi people there see this coming war as their only chance for freedom, but also bear in mind that a sinking person clings to any straw to save his life.”

As if they’re so desperate that they cling to any hope unthinkingly. Zainab condemns any personal judgement they make in advance as a function of their interminable hunger for relief. Rational judgement is out of the question.

Using her analogy, Zainab wants to take the straw away from them and let them die.

But the way they lead their life is their choice, not Zainab’s. They see their choice differently than she sees it, for one reason or another. Zainab writes:

“People in Iraq do not see any of the consequences of this coming war except it might give them their freedom.”

This is not correct. The Kurds in the north understand the risks very well. (See the account of the Kurdish autonomous zone in Saddam Hussein’s Desire for Genocide).

Zainab, why have you ignored finding out what these people think? Why do you trivialise the serious choices that your countrymen are consciously making?

“Their death and the destruction of their country is a side issue for them – they are used to wars, they’ve been living in a continuous war for the last 23 years. Ask any one of them and the most they would say is, ‘What more could happen to us? If I die who cares, death is freedom?'”

“Ask any one of them?” Zainab hasn’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in her home country lately.

Zainab, enough of your countrymen desire liberty through democracy – and not the nihilistic liberty of death – to have made serious plans for Iraq’s future. These plans may or may not be realized, there is always risk – but why do you deny in advance that democracy is possible in Iraq? Are you prejudiced against democracy? Why do you give democracy no chance right from the outset? I have already explained this in ‘Loving Hitler’.

As I explained in ‘Will to Power’ and ‘Loving Hitler’, this view – shared by Noam Chomsky and the SMH’s Paul McKeogh, to name just two – is not an objective view.

Here’s the rub. The core of Zainab’s view is that one may never choose to risk life and property to earn freedom. Perhaps the one ruling influence in this view is fear – a fear that paralyses and allows the status quo to continue.

It’s not just Zainab’s husband that disagrees with her. So do the following prominent Iraqis:

* Khalid Kishtaini, Iraq’s most famous satirical writer: “Don’t these marchers know that the only march possible in Iraq under Saddam Hussein is from the prison to the firing-squad? The Western marchers behave as if the US wanted to invade Switzerland, not Iraq under Saddam Hussein.”

* Awad Nasser, one of Iraq’s most famous modernist poets: “These people are mad. They are actually signing up to sacrifice their lives to protect a tyrant’s death machine.” (Comment about human shields.)

“Are these people ignorant, or are they blinded by hatred of the United States?” (Comment on antiwar marchers in London, who vociferously welcomed Tony Benn onto the podium, the day after he had appeared on TV to tell the Brits that his friend Saddam was standing for “the little people” against “hegemonistic America”)

* Fadel Sultani, president of the National Association of Iraqi authors: “I had a few questions for the marchers. Did they not realize that oppression, torture and massacre of innocent civilians are also forms of war? Are the antiwar marchers only against a war that would liberate Iraq, or do they also oppose the war Saddam has been waging against our people for a generation?”

* Hashem al-Iqabi, one of Iraq’s leading writers and intellectuals: “The death and destruction caused by Saddam in our land is the worst since Nebuchadnezzar. These prosperous, peaceful and fat Europeans are marching in support of evil incarnate.”

He said that, watching the march in London, he felt Nazism was “alive and well and flexing its muscles in Hyde Park”.

* Abdel-Majid Khoi, son of the late Grand Ayatollah Khoi, Iraq’s foremost religious leader for almost 40 years, spoke of the “deep moral pain” he feels when hearing the so-called “antiwar” discourse: “The Iraqi nation is like a man who is kept captive and tortured by a gang of thugs. The proper moral position is to fly to help that man liberate himself and bring the torturers to book. But what we witness in the West is the opposite: support for the torturers and total contempt for the victim.”

Khoi said he would say “ahlan wasahlan” (welcome) to anyone who would liberate Iraq.

* The Iraqi grandmother who was refused the microphone at the London antiwar demonstration. Here’s part of the article by Amir Taheri, an Iranian journalist who also used to write for the Guardian (nationalreview). The authoritarian behaviour of protest organizers is scandalous:

‘Could I have the microphone for one minute to tell the people about my life?’ asked the Iraqi grandmother.

I spent part of last Saturday with the so-called “antiwar” marchers in London in the company of some Iraqi friends. Our aim had been to persuade the organizers to let at least one Iraqi voice to be heard. Soon, however, it became clear that the organizers were as anxious to stifle the voice of the Iraqis in exile as was Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

The Iraqis had come with placards reading “Freedom for Iraq” and “American rule, a hundred thousand times better than Takriti tyranny!”

But the tough guys who supervised the march would have none of that. Only official placards, manufactured in thousands and distributed among the “spontaneous” marchers, were allowed. These read “Bush and Blair, baby-killers,” ” Not in my name,” “Freedom for Palestine” and “Indict Bush and Sharon.”

Not one placard demanded that Saddam should disarm to avoid war.

The goons also confiscated photographs showing the tragedy of Halabja, the Kurdish town where Saddam’s forces gassed 5,000 people to death in 1988.

…

But the bulk of the crowd consisted of fellow travelers, those innocent citizens who, prompted by idealism or boredom, are always prepared to play the role of “useful idiots,” as Lenin used to call them.

They ignored the fact that the peoples of Iraq are unanimous in their prayers for the war of liberation to come as quickly as possible.

The number of marchers did not impress Salima, the grandmother.

“What is wrong does not become right because many people say it,” she asserted, bidding us farewell while the marchers shouted “Not in my name!”

Let us hope that when Iraq is liberated, as it soon will be, the world will remember that it was not done in the name of Rev. Jackson, Charles Kennedy, Glenda Jackson, Tony Benn and their companions in a march of shame.

***

The following article by Yousif Al-Khoei, director of the Khoei Foundation in London was published by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (irq).

The Shia Factor

Although previously betrayed by the West, ordinary Iraqis still look for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

For most of Saddam Hussein’s iniquitous rule, the Iraqi people have been caught between a rock and a hard place – the rock of Western support for Saddam, and the hard place of the Arabs’ silence about his atrocities. The West and the Arabs both bear responsibility for Iraq’s suffering. Both bear a measure of responsibility for the current calamity – the likelihood of fresh military action – in face of which the Iraqi people are quite powerless.

As Iraq once again braces itself for war, the mood of many Iraqis – even in Iraq itself – is not the same as the mood in the Arab and Muslim street. The Iraqi people have suffered so much at the hands of Saddam Hussein. They do not have the luxury of saying an unqualified “no” to war.

Nobody likes war. It would surely have been possible, if it were not for Western blunders, to get rid of Saddam without war. Military action will represent the failure of Western diplomacy and the West’s “civilised” institutions. But if Saddam stays in power, if he is let off another time, the damage would be enormous.

Ever since the creation of the modern state of Iraq, the Shias, who form the majority of Iraq’s population, have been marginalised. The marja’iyya – the highest acknowledged authorities of Shias worldwide – enjoy great influence among the Shias of southern Iraq, and in the Baghdad slums where Shias live in appalling conditions, but play no direct part in the running of government.

This has been the exclusive preserve of the Ba’ath party, through which Saddam rose to power, for the past 35 years. After its successful coup in 1968, the Ba’ath moved quickly to secure sole control of the country and lost no time in putting into practice a well-thought-out plan to weaken the Shia establishment. Some tribal leaders were lured with oil money and the infrastructure of Shia theological schools was destroyed. In the first of many blows to the spiritual leadership, Mehdi al-Hakim, son of Grand Ayatollah Mohsen al-Hakim, was accused of being a spy. In the following years, thousands of clerics said to be of Iranian origin were expelled to Iran.

The regime put its hand on Shi’ism’s most significant celebrations. It took vigorous measures to control Ashura, the re-enactment of the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein, by setting up roadblocks that interfered with pilgrims and penalising even government employees who visited the shrines.

In the Iraqi media, which is officially controlled, the Shias were conspicuous only by their absence. You could see a whole programme on Najaf – site of one of the two most famous theological colleges in the Shia world – without seeing a turban. Clerics were edited out of every clip unless they were there to praise the government.

In 1973, the Ba’ath broke new ground in its persecution of the Shias by executing five Shia clerics accused of belonging to al-Da’wa, the largest of the Shias’ underground political organisations. In 1975, the regime closed the handful of private schools owned by Shias in the name of “nationalisation”. Shi’ism has never been recognised in the educational system of Iraq. The national curriculum teaches only Sunni Islam.

Persecution escalated with the Iranian revolution of 1979, reaching a shocking climax with the execution of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr el-Sadr and his sister, Bint Huda, in 1980. Thousands of Shias were rounded up and any young person going to a mosque was immediately accused of belonging to al-Da’wa. Even Shias who became secular to avoid this persecution were targeted. Some were killed; others were expelled to Iran – among them the virtual entirety of the Shia merchants who dominated Baghdad’s central bazaar.

In the 1980s, Iraqi Shias found themselves fighting their co-religionists across the border in Iraq. When Grand Ayatollah abu al-Qasm al-Khoei refused to lend his support to the war, many of his closest associates were arrested. Saddam’s fight against his own Shias was cleverly confused with the fight against Iran: to oppose the war was unpatriotic, Saddam said, conscripting huge numbers of Shia youth.

After Saddam’s defeat in Kuwait in 1991, the suppression of the popular uprising against the regime in southern Iraq made clear, once and for all, Saddam’s hatred of the Shias. The tanks that crushed the uprising carried the slogan “No Shias after today.” Shia shrines were destroyed and the integrity of the Shia faith questioned. The old town of Kerbala was razed – homes, shops, shrines and religious centres. More than 100 of the Grand Ayatollah’s staff were arrested. The Grand Ayatollah himself was detained, at age 92, and taken by force to military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad.

Three months after the uprising, when calm had been restored, a historic Shia mosque in the northern city of Samarra was bulldozed. Saddam was attempting to erase all traces of Shia identity – in every part of the country.

Today the number of Shia clerics in Iraqi jails almost certainly exceeds the number of clerics of any faith jailed anywhere in the world. More than 200 have been executed since the Ba’ath took power. Yet Saddam depicts himself as an Islamic leader. His son Odey Saddam Hussein, at the time when he was being touted as his father’s successor, went as far as to claim that he himself was Shia, in a transparent attempt to ingratiate himself with this potentially powerful group.

In 1991, President George Bush the father urged the Iraqi people to rise against the tyrant – and they did, both in the Kurdish north and Shia south. But after asking Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, America permitted Saddam to use his helicopters to crush them in the no-fly zone designed to protect them. It allowed him to kill the Marsh Arabs with his tanks after telling him he could not kill them with his planes. It watched, without reacting, the draining of the marshes and the destruction of their unique ecology.

Despite this terrible betrayal, most Iraqis will welcome the removal of Saddam Hussein. The Shias will certainly welcome the chance to play, at last, the role they should be playing in Iraqi national life. The Shias are frustrated and angry, but should not direct any of their anger towards Sunnis: in post-Saddam Iraq, Sunni and Shia must live, and work, together.

In 1991, the Shias showed maturity. They directed their anger not towards other ethnic or religious groups, but towards the regime. They did not kill Sunnis; they killed those who had worked with the regime.

Iraq lies at the very heart of the Arab world. Stability in Iraq is key to stability in the wider region. To this end Iraq needs a Marshall Plan to reconstruct the county and provide economic stability. It also needs to take control of its own political life. Iraq has many talented people and a strong middle class who will keep the country running. America will not be able to control Iraq by military means for long.

We will be grateful for the removal of Saddam Hussein. But our gratitude will not last if America wants to stay long.

***

When the Enemy Is a Liberator

By JOHN F. BURNS

New York Times, February 16, 2003

AMMAN, Jordan – Every day now, a flood of battered cars and buses arrives in this city, bearing migrants from Iraq. Many are men of military age who have driven across the open desert, or paid bribes to Iraqi guards at the border crossing 250 miles east of Amman, to escape being drafted into Saddam Hussein’s battalions. Crowding into lodgings on the hillsides of Amman’s old city, the Iraqis become wanderers in a no-man’s land, emerging by day to look for casual work, staying indoors after dark, all the time fearing Jordanian police patrols that hunt illegal immigrants and return them to the border.

Gathered around kerosene heaters in their tenements, the Iraqi men talk of a coming conflict, and what it will mean for them and their families. Since all gatherings inside Iraq take place in the shadow of Mr. Hussein’s terror, with police spies lurking in every neighbourhood, the talk in Amman offers a chance to discover what at least some Iraqis really think, and what they hope for now.

Almost to a man, these Iraqis said they wanted the Iraqi dictator removed. Better still, they said – and it was a point made again and again – they wanted him dead. The men, some in their teens, some in their 50’s, told of grotesque repression, of relatives and friends tortured, raped and murdered or, as often, arrested and “disappeared.”

But their hatred of Mr. Hussein had an equally potent counterpoint: for them, the country that would rid them of their leader was not at all a bastion of freedom, dispatching its legions across the seas to defend liberty, but a greedy, menacing imperial power.

This America, in the migrants’ telling, has enabled the humiliation of Palestinians by arming Israel; craves control of Iraq’s oil fields; supported Mr. Hussein in the 1980’s and cared not a fig for his brutality then, and grieved for seven lost astronauts even as its forces prepared to use “smart” weapons that, the migrants said, threatened to kill thousands of innocent Iraqis.

The men refused to accept that their image of the United States might be distorted by the rigidly controlled Iraqi news media, which offer as unreal a picture of America as they do of Iraq. But when it was suggested that they could hardly wish to be liberated by a country they distrusted so much – that they might prefer President Bush to extend the United Nations weapons inspections and stand down the armada he has massed on Iraq’s frontiers – they erupted in dismay.

“No, no, no!” one man said excitedly, and he seemed to speak for all. Iraqis, they said, wanted their freedom, and wanted it now. The message for Mr. Bush, they said, was that he should press ahead with war, but on conditions that spared ordinary Iraqis.

The conflict should be short. American bombs and missiles should fall on Mr. Hussein’s palaces and Republican Guards and secret police headquarters, not on civilians. Care should be taken not to obliterate the bridges and power stations and water-pumping plants that were bombed in 1991. And America should know that it would become the enemy of all Iraqis – and Muslims – if it prolonged its military dominion in Iraq beyond the time necessary to dismantle the old regime.

Although these Iraqis may represent a small sector of opinion – they fled their country in terror, after all – the conversations offered powerful clues as to how a war might play out across the wider Arab world. While polls in Europe and Asia show deep opposition to a war against Mr. Hussein, the mood among the 350 million people of the Arab states has been even more critical. Polls alone don’t capture how visceral anti-American feelings have become, spreading beyond traditional centres of hostility – mosques and other strongholds of conservative Islamists, Arab nationalists and others – across the spectrum of Arab society.

For years, mainstream politicians and other Arab leaders have conceded, at least privately, that Mr. Hussein is a monstrous tyrant whose ambition to acquire the most powerful weapons has made him, potentially at least, more of a threat to his neighbours than to Europe and the United States.

Two years ago, an Egyptian editor told a traveller back from Iraq that Mr. Hussein was “Israel’s best friend” in the Arab world, because the Arab failure to isolate and condemn him had the effect of blackening all Arab states in the eyes of the West.

But as the United States has ratcheted up pressure on Baghdad, Arab voices – politicians, intellectuals, businessmen and students – have remained largely silent about the miseries Mr. Hussein has inflicted on his people and the threat his weapons might pose. Instead, condemnation has been mostly reserved for the United States. How vitriolic it has become was clear in the way many newspapers treated the shuttle loss.

Along with militant imams who proclaimed the Columbia disaster to be God’s punishment for America’s “curses” on Muslims, there was this, typically, from a columnist in the Saudi newspaper Al Yaum: “The American view of the world crashed even before the Columbia. America, which sees itself as the symbol of freedom and justice, has become an arsenal of weapons in advance of a military campaign across the entire world. The world has become a map of targets for the American arrows represented by the trinity of war – Bush, Rumsfeld and Condoleezza, and behind them the famous ‘quiet’ man, Dick Cheney.”

On its face, the hostility promises only deeper trouble ahead for the United States. But there is another possibility, one that Arab leaders who are cooperating with the Americans are relying on as Mr. Bush’s moment of decision draws closer. These nations include Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which allow American military bases, as well as Jordan, where American troops would man Patriot missiles against missiles Iraq might fire at Israel and mount pilot rescue missions into Iraq.

The leaders of these nations, all monarchies, know that if an American war bogged down, with heavy casualties on both sides, their own legitimacy, never strong, would be challenged by their own people in ways they might not survive. For these rulers, it is crucial that any conflict be short and inflict minimal casualties on Iraq’s civilians.

At least one of the rulers, discussing American war plans with his advisers, has concluded that Mr. Hussein’s regime is apt to collapse quickly as non-elite army units surrender or change sides.

But it is not the rapidity of an American victory alone that sustains the hopes of these Arab rulers. The pro-American Arab leaders are confident of something that invites mockery among the Europeans and Americans who oppose any war: that American troops would arrive in Iraq’s major cities as liberators.

When Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the American commander in the Middle East, visited one Arab palace in recent weeks, Western diplomats reported, the Arab ruler quieted his restive courtiers by predicting that American forces would be met in Baghdad by Iraqis lining the street in celebration.

If that happens, anti-American opinions in the Arab world might swing, these rulers hope. There would then be revelations about the extent of what Mr. Hussein has inflicted on his people in 23 years. Just as the worst abuses of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were revealed after they were chased from Kabul and Kandahar, the full horrors of Mr. Hussein may be known only after his downfall.

That, America’s friends in the Arab world believe, might yet be enough to remake Mr. Bush’s image in places where he is now vilified, as if Iraq’s miseries were his fault more than they have been Mr. Hussein’s.

***

The following excerpt is from a two-year-old article, “Assessing the Iraqi Opposition”, by Faleh A. Jabar, visiting fellow at Birkbeck College, London University (March 23, 2001, merip)

A SILENT MAJORITY?

…

Perhaps the best available measure of opposition to the regime is the staggering growth in pilgrimage to the Shiite holy shrines. According to official figures, more than two million pilgrims (almost 10 percent of the total population, and around 20 percent of the Shiite population) headed to Karbala to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 1999. These figures should be read against the background of the activities of the late Ayatollah Muhammad al-Sadr, who was assassinated together with his two elder sons in Najaf in 1999. Al-Sadr was a handpicked government appointee, but he grew publicly critical of the Ba’th in his widely attended sermons. For the first time in a generation, a Shiite imam built vast networks of followers among the peasantry and the urban middle classes, and forged an alliance with influential urban merchants and tribal chieftains. Both urban merchants and tribal leaders have gained relative social power from the acute economic polarization that has accompanied ten years of war and sanctions.

***

Here’s another glimpse of what the general Iraqi mood might be. The article was written by Stephen F. Hayes, in The Weekly Standard.

Saddam’s Victims tell Their Stories

March 5, 2003

“Do you know when?” It is the question on all minds these days–those of stockbrokers, journalists, financiers, world leaders, soldiers and their families. When will the United States lead a coalition to end Saddam Hussein’s tyranny over Iraq?

The answer matters most to the tyrant’s subjects–like the man who asked the question of his friend in an early-morning phone conversation on Monday, February 24. The call came from Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, to the home of an Iraqi exile in suburban Detroit.

It used to be that Iraqis trapped inside their country would speak to each other and to friends outside in veiled language. For years, Saddam’s regime has tapped the phone lines of all those suspected of disloyalty, so an inquiry about the timing of a possible attack would be concealed behind seemingly unrelated questions. On what date will you sell your business? When does school end? When are you expecting your next child?

But few Iraqis speak in puzzles anymore. They ask direct questions. Here is the rest of that Monday morning conversation:

“Do you know when?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Are you coming?”

“Yes. I am coming. We will . . . ”

The second speaker, an Iraqi in Michigan, began to provide details but quickly reconsidered, ending his thought in mid-sentence. He says he was shocked by the candor coming from Iraq. “Never in the history of Iraq do people talk like this,” he said later.

“Why are you silent?”

“I’m afraid that you’ll be in danger.”

“Don’t be afraid. We are not afraid. This time is serious.”

“I am coming with the American Army.”

“Is there a way that we can register our names with the American forces to work with them when they arrive? Will you call my house at the first moment you arrive? I will help.”

For more than a year now, the world has been engaged in an intense debate about what to do with Saddam Hussein. For much of that time, the focus has been on the dictator’s refusal to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, his sponsorship of terrorism, his serial violations of international law, and his history of aggression.

Those arguments have in common an emphasis on interests, on threats. Absent from this debate–or at best peripheral to it–is the moral case for ending the rule of a tyrant who has terrorized his people for more than two decades. It’s a strange oversight since, by some estimates, Saddam Hussein is responsible for more than 1million Iraqi deaths since he took power in 1979.

Advocates of his overthrow are fond of pointing out that “he gassed his own people,” but this often has the feel of a bulleted talking point, not an argument. Their opponents readily concede that “Saddam is a brutal dictator,” and that “the world would be better off without him.” But they usually grant these things as a rhetorical device, as if to buy credibility on their way to opposing the one step sure to end that brutality–removal by force.

Those who oppose taking action say we can safely ignore Saddam Hussein because he is “in a box.” Even if they were right and Saddam were no longer a threat, they would ignore this other urgent problem: the 23 million Iraqi people who are in the box with him.

No one wants war. “I am a pacifist,” says Ramsey Jiddou, an Iraqi American who has lived in the United States since the late 1970s. “But it will take a war to remove Saddam Hussein, and of course I’m for such a war.”

Iraqi Americans overwhelmingly agree with Jiddou. Many of them are recent arrivals who came here after the Gulf War left Saddam in power in 1991. And many are in regular contact with friends and relatives still trapped in Iraq.

The views of those Iraqis back home “are the same as the Iraqi Americans,” says Peter Antone, an Iraqi-American immigration lawyer in Southfield, Michigan. “They are not free to speak, so we speak for them.”

ONE OF MY HOSTS had another question for me as we walked up to a modest one-story home in Dearborn Heights on the snowy afternoon of Saturday, February 22.

“Do you know the decisionmakers?” asked Abu Muslim al-Haydar, a former University of Baghdad professor and one of three English-speakers in the group of 20 Iraqi Shiites assembling here to talk with a reporter about Iraq. His tone was urgent, almost desperate, as he repeated himself. “Do you know the decisionmakers?”

The Iraqi Americans who live in suburban Detroit, some 150,000 of them, are the largest concentration of Iraqis outside Iraq. That’s saying something, since according to the United Nations, Iraqis are the second-largest group of refugees in the world. Some 4 million of them have left their homes since Saddam Hussein took power–an astonishing 17 percent of the country’s population. Despite the size of the Iraqi-American population, and despite the fact that no one is better acquainted with the ways of Saddam Hussein’s regime, their voices have largely been missing from the national debate. In the course of dozens of interviews over the last two weeks, it became plain that this oversight is a source of endless frustration to this community. Iraqi Americans have a lot to say, and the decisionmakers, in both the media and government, are not listening.

As we approached the house in Dearborn Heights, I told al-Haydar that with luck, some decisionmakers would read my article. On the porch, I added my shoes to a mountain of footwear, which, with a winter storm raging, had taken on the appearance of a snow-capped peak. We stepped inside. The room to the right contained a big-screen television (wired to the satellite dish on the roof) and a sofa. The room on the left was furnished with overlapping oriental rugs and, on the floor along the wall, colorful cushions that would serve as our seats for the next two and a half hours.

The group was all male and all Shiite, primarily from southern Iraq. In other ways, though, it was diverse–ranging from farmers to religious leaders to a former general in Saddam’s Republican Guard. The ages went from early twenties to perhaps eighties. Some came dressed in three-piece suits, some in tribal robes.

I proposed moving clockwise around the room for introductions and brief personal histories, a suggestion that prompted much discussion, all of it in Arabic. In what could be considered a bad omen for a democratic Iraq, my ad hoc translator, a young man named Ahmed Shulaiba, explained that elders and religious leaders generally have the option to speak first. But after more discussion, the introductions proceeded according to the suggested plan.

One elderly man in a flowing brown robe, however, gave up his turn, saying he preferred to speak last and that he wanted to make a statement. When he did, he passed me his Michigan State I.D. card as he began speaking.

“I want to introduce myself and ask a question. Are you ready? I am Mehsin Juad al-Basaid. For many years I was a farmer in Iraq. I was involved in the uprising in 1991. American pilots dropped leaflets telling us to start an uprising against Saddam. And we did. We sacrificed. I lost three family members. Fifteen days later the American Army was removed from the South, and left us to face Saddam alone. Now, I’m willing to go with the American Army. But what happened in 1991 must not happen again.”

Nearly everyone in attendance had spoken of his own involvement in the uprising. It’s worth spending a moment on what happened at the end of the Gulf War, because it influences the way many Iraqis, particularly the Shiite majority, see the United States.

After the devastating U.S. air campaign, American ground forces made quick work of the few Iraqi soldiers who put up a fight. At the same time, the U.S. government dropped leaflets and broadcast radio messages urging all Iraqis to overthrow Saddam. Ahmed, my translator, who was 15 in 1991, told me how he had learned that the Americans wanted Iraqis to revolt.

“I remember George Bush said, ‘There is another way for the bloodshed to stop. It’s for the Iraqi people and the Iraqi military to take matters into their own hands . . . ‘”

I interrupted to ask him if he was quoting the former president.

“Yeah, I remember that’s what he said.”

I interrupted a second time to ask him if he remembered how the message was delivered–radio, leaflets? His response was terse.

“Yes. I’ll tell you after I finish.”

With that, he resumed his word-for-word recitation of the president’s exhortation:

“‘It’s for the Iraqi people and the Iraqi military to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside, comply with the United Nations Resolution, and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.’ That’s what he said.”

Many Iraqis, both in the largely Kurdish north and the Shiite south, took this advice. American pilots bombed Iraqi weapons depots, allowing the rebels to arm themselves. As the Iraqi Army withdrew from Kuwait and retreated towards Baghdad, the rebels made significant gains. The numbers are disputed, but at the height of the uprising, opposition forces may have controlled as many as 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces.

Just as the pressure on the regime intensified, however, American and Iraqi military leaders met near the Iraq-Kuwait border at Safwan to sign a cease-fire. As the negotiations drew to a close, the Iraqi representative, Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmad, had a request, recorded in the official transcript of the meeting. “We have a point, one point. You might very well know the situation of the roads and bridges and communications. We would like to agree that helicopter flights sometimes are needed to carry some of the officials, government officials, or any member that is needed to be transported from one place to another because the roads and bridges are out.”

General Norman Schwarzkopf, representing the United States, playing the generous victor, told his counterpart that so long as no helicopters flew over areas controlled by U.S. troops, they were “absolutely no problem.” He continued: “I want to make sure that’s recorded, that military helicopters can fly over Iraq. Not fighters, not bombers.” Lt. Gen. Ahmad pressed the issue. “So you mean even helicopters that is [sic] armed in the Iraqi skies can fly, but not the fighters?”

“Yeah, I will instruct our Air Force not to shoot at any helicopters that are flying over the territory of Iraq where we are not located,” Schwarzkopf replied, adding that he wanted armed helicopters to be identified with an orange tag.

This moment of magnanimity would prove costly. Saddam’s soldiers used the helicopters to put down the rebellion, spilling the blood of tens of thousands of Iraqis to do so. On the ground, allied troops had reversed course and were now taking weapons from any Iraqis who had them, including the rebels. In the end, it was a massacre, with conservative estimates of 30,000 dead.

“Along Highway 8, the east-west route that ran from An Nasiriyah to Basra, the American soldiers could tell that Saddam Hussein was mercilessly putting down the rebellion,” wrote Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor in The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, considered the definitive account of the war. “The tales at the medical tent had a common theme: indiscriminate fire at men, women and children, the destruction of Islamic holy places, in which the Shiites had taken refuge, helicopter and rocket attacks, threats of chemical weapons attacks.”

The men who gathered that snowy afternoon in Dearborn Heights, many of them from Nasiriyah, were among those attacked by the Iraqi military in 1991. Several spoke of their confusion as they looked up to see Iraqi helicopters strafing the masses of refugees, and above the Iraqi aircraft, American F-15 fighter planes circling in the sky but doing nothing to stop the slaughter. (These images have contributed, perhaps understandably, to numerous conspiracy theories discussed widely in the exile community. One propounds the preposterous notion that American aircraft escorted the Iraqi helicopters responsible for killing Iraqi rebels and ending the uprising. As that hypothesis goes, the United States wanted to keep Saddam Hussein in power as its puppet dictator. Put together American support of Saddam throughout the ’80s with these vivid memories, and from the perspective of the Iraqis on the ground, the theories don’t seem terribly far-fetched.)

When we ended our formal Q and A, one man handed me a photograph of his son, who was killed in the uprising. Others gave me photographs and handwritten, homemade business cards. Someone gave me a plan, in Arabic, for postwar Iraq. Several men passed me their Michigan drivers’ licenses and state ID cards. Six gave me letters or prepared statements, some in Arabic and others in English. Mohammed al-Gased, who speaks only Arabic, must have had help translating his letter:

My name is Mohammed Al Gased, my family and I are refugees in the United States of America. I lost my nephew Haydir Ali Abdulamir Al Gased (the spelling of the name may be different). He was a participant in the 1991 Iraqi Uprising against Saddam. On March 18, 1991, he was wounded in the battle against Saddam’s army. In the same afternoon of the same day, he was transferred to one of the American military units located in Talillehem in the governate of Annasriya in southern Iraq. He was treated there; then was taken by American Military helicopter for a further treatment. The location is still unknown for us. After the fail of the uprising, most of us were forced to flee our homes. When we arrived to Saudi Arabia as refugees. I wrote a letter to the Red Cross asking if they have any information about him, and we got no answer. I also wrote to the Saudi Ministry of Defense. My brother, his father, was tortured by Saddam’s secret police so viciously it caused his death. His mother and the rest of the family are now residing in Sweden as refugees. In the name of humanity, we are asking you to help us find out weather or not he is still alive and where his about.

With the letters and statements and photographs came torrents of additional charges meant to demonstrate the brutality of Saddam’s regime. One man insisted that he knew the precise location of a mass grave, and provided very specific directions. He urged me to give these coordinates to the U.S. government but not to report them, lest Saddam dig up the grave and repair the ground. He said that Iraqis are well aware of these mass graves and predicted they will be found throughout Iraq when the current regime is out of power.

It must be said that many of these claims, including that one, are unverifiable. But they are consistent with Saddam Hussein’s long history of violence. As the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Iraq put it: “Extreme and brutal force is threatened and applied without hesitation and with total impunity to control the population.”

Of more immediate concern is the likelihood that Saddam will use civilians as human shields in the event of war, as he did during the first Gulf War. Bush administration officials are well aware of his willingness to sacrifice his own people, and they take seriously reports that he has begun preparations to do so.

One such account comes from Ali al-Sayad, an Iraqi American who reported to Defense Department officials a phone call he received last week from his cousin, a guard at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. The guard told al-Sayad that on February 11, Saddam’s agents began methodically moving thousands of prisoners from their cells to the dictator’s hometown of Tikrit, where many officials believe Saddam will take refuge when combat begins.

That’s a move that wouldn’t surprise Riadh Abdallah, a former general in Saddam’s Republican Guard. Gen. Abdallah served on Saddam’s personal security detail in Baghdad during the Gulf War. His brother, Abduli Alwishah, a member of the Iraqi parliament from 1984 to 1991 and head of a prominent southern Iraqi tribe, was a leader of the uprising at the end of the war. When Iraqi intelligence reported back to Baghdad that Alwishah had agitated against Saddam, Gen. Abdallah lost his position in the Republican Guard and was put on probation, then transferred to a teaching job and ordered to report to authorities once a week to show his face.

It could have been worse. Five other generals, including Barak Abdallah, a hero from the Iran-Iraq war, were executed for plotting against the regime.

By 1993, Alwishah and his family had left the Saudi refugee camp that they called home for 14 months and had resettled in the United States. That’s when his brother, Gen. Abdallah, was arrested and charged as an anti-Saddam conspirator and sent to a small prison in Baghdad for high-ranking officials accused as traitors. I asked him about the experience.

ABDALLAH: I was in jail for eleven months. There was no judge. They just put you in. If one was to be executed or put in jail, no judge. They put us in the same room as those five generals who were executed. And they were killed with big knives. Those people were killed with big knives hitting them on the neck. And the room had blood everywhere.

SH: Did you think you might be next?

ABDALLAH: Yes. I thought that they would do the same thing to me. Every day they told me that I will be executed.

SH: How long?

ABDALLAH: Eleven months. Intimidation every day. At that time they found out about a conspiracy by another person who was a big general, a doctor actually, from the same town as Saddam. His name was Raji al-Tikriti. It’s a very famous story in Iraq. And they made him a food for dogs.

SH: You were in prison when this happened? You heard about this?

ABDALLAH: They showed me these prisoners that were eaten by wild dogs. They made us–that was one kind of intimidation–they brought all of the generals and officers in the prison to watch it, to intimidate us. . . . They took us from jail and they put some blindfolds on our eyes and they took them off and we saw him. Before the dogs ate him we saw them read the judgment and they said why they were going to kill him. He was the head doctor for all the military, and he was the personal doctor for Saddam Hussein and for former Iraqi president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.

SH: Was he killed before this happened?

ABDALLAH: He was alive when these wild dogs . . .

SH: Do you remember what month this was?

ABDALLAH: It was the wintertime, but I can’t remember exactly because for 11 months I didn’t see the sun, nothing–I didn’t know what time. There was only spider webs in the room, so I didn’t know if it’s day or night. [Pause] Probably what you’re hearing is impossible to believe, but that’s what happened. And all that you’re hearing is nothing compared to everything else.

Abdallah later explained that Raji al-Tikriti was dressed in “prison pajamas” with his hands and feet bound when this was done to him. Abdallah and seven other prisoners were forced to watch. The five dogs, he said, “were like big wolves.”

Abdallah returned to teaching after his surprising release from prison. He taught with other senior military officials who, he said, ran terrorist training operations at Salman Pak and Lake Tharthar. The activities at Salman Pak are well known. Satellite images show an airplane, and defectors have revealed extensive training in terrorist operations–including hijacking–that have gone on there for years. Lake Tharthar, however, is new. Abdallah calls it the “Salman Pak of the sea,” where terrorists were instructed in “diving, how to wire, how to put charges on ships, how to storm the ships, commando operations.”

I asked him if the facility was used primarily for military training or terrorist training. “Terrorist. Not for the military. They were not Iraqi. They were all from other countries–maybe just a few Iraqis. And it’s very confidential.”

Tharthar is the largest lake in Iraq, constructed on the site of the Great Dam. That dam regulates a waterway that connects the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Tharthar is also the site of one of the largest of Saddam’s numerous palaces. In 1999, at a celebration of the president’s 62nd birthday, Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan opened a resort on the lake for the regime’s VIPs. The complex came at a cost estimated at hundreds of millions, and includes luxurious accommodations, several beaches, and an amusement park, complete with a merry-go-round and a ferris wheel.

Saddam Hussein and his allies blame the United States for the “genocide” caused by 13 years of U.N. sanctions. They claim that these sanctions, and the resulting shortages of food and medicine, have led to the deaths of more than 1 million Iraqis. Even leaving aside the vast resources Saddam has used to rebuild and conceal his deadly arsenal, the resort at Lake Tharthar helps put those charges in context. As Taha Ramadan noted at the resort’s ceremonial opening, “This city was built in the age of Saddam Hussein and during this period of sanctions. . . . This shows our ability to build such a beautiful city and to fight as well.”

A resort city, terrorist training camps, and a hungry population–all of this, says Abdallah, makes Saddam Hussein “the father and the grandfather of terrorists.”

THE DAY AFTER my meeting in Dearborn Heights, some 300 Iraqi Americans gathered at the Fairlane Club in suburban Detroit to hear from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and, finally, tell their stories in the presence of a high U.S. official. Wolfowitz had been invited by the Iraqi Forum for Democracy, a nonaligned, anti-Saddam, pro-democracy association of Iraqis in America. Television cameras–I counted nearly 20–lined the room. A handful of print reporters were there, too. Signs on the wall declared “Iraq United Will Never Be Divided” and “Saddam Must Go–Iraqis Need Human Rights.”

Wolfowitz is viewed as something of a hero here. Several Iraqi Americans I spoke to were aware that he was wary of Saddam Hussein as far back as the late ’70s, and remained so even as the U.S. government embraced the Iraqi dictator in the ’80s. Others credited Wolfowitz with expediting U.S. rescue operations when the Iraqi government put down the 1991 uprising.

“The U.S. Army had orders to leave Basra,” recalls Ahmed Shulaiba. “We were going to be crushed by the Iraqi Army, and we heard that one man from the press–we don’t know who he is–he called Paul Wolfowitz and told him about 30,000 people will be crushed if the American military leave them. And he [Wolfowitz] called [Secretary of Defense] Dick Cheney and they helped move us to the camp of Rafha [in Saudi Arabia].”

Wolfowitz later confirmed this account, though he downplayed his role. “The rebellion had basically been crushed,” he said. “It was a Sunday afternoon and I got a call at home from a reporter. I think it’s okay to name him, it was Michael Gordon [of the New York Times]. One of my kids answered, told me who it was, and I regretted the day I’d given him my unpublished number at home. I said, ‘Tell him I’m not interested in talking to him.’ My kid, whichever one it was, told me that Gordon was calling from Safwan [Iraq], and he says it’s important.”

Gordon told Wolfowitz that he had been interviewing U.S. troops in southern Iraq. Saddam’s forces were continuing to brutalize the Iraqi people. American soldiers, says Wolfowitz, “had been ordered not to do anything about it. Gordon said it was breaking their hearts.” Wolfowitz called Cheney and, after overcoming some internal resistance, they arranged to have allied forces expedite the refugees’ journey to camps in the Saudi desert.

Now, addressing those gathered in suburban Detroit, Wolfowitz spoke of the coming liberation of their country. It was a well-crafted speech, packed with details about the expected conflict and postwar Iraq (available on the web at http://www.defenselink=.mil/news/Feb2003/t02272003-t0223ifd.ht=ml ). He was interrupted repeatedly by enthusiastic applause, including several standing ovations. At one point, the audience broke into song, in Arabic, to celebrate the imminent end of Saddam’s rule. The Iraqi farmers who the night before had handed me photographs of their dead relatives were dancing with local religious leaders.

When Wolfowitz concluded his remarks, it was the Iraqis’ turn to speak to the world. Some spoke in English, some in Arabic.

“My name is Abu Muslim al-Hayadar. I used to be a university professor back in Iraq, but now I am working in social services to help refugees. I want to assure you and all other people around the world that we suffered so much and we are willing to work towards democracy as we are–most of us want to work in two phases. The liberation phase and the rebuilding phase. So please, please take it seriously, and we want it fast. Fast, as fast as you can. Thank you. Liberate Iraqi people please.”

Moments later, a man named Ahmed al-Tamimi stepped to the front of the stage with a young boy.

“I welcome you here. You are here in Dearborn and next month we welcome you in Baghdad and Iraq.

“In every heart here, in every person here, there is a scar on our hearts. But we can’t show the people in the world our scars on our hearts, but we can show the scars on the face of this young guy. He was, in that time in 1991, just one year. He was a child, and this is the father and his uncle, they participated in the uprising. . . . They beat the father, his father, his mother, and his wife. While they are beating the family they hear the cry of the child and they say who is the child? The wife said this is my child. They start beating him with their boots until the blood was all over and he had brain damage, partly brain damage.

“When [the father] came from Saudi Arabia to America, the first thing he did, he took the phone and talked to his wife and he said I want to talk to my son. And she started to cry. And she told him he is not talking, he is not talking. What happened? She told him, something happen in 1991. I can’t tell you. After that he find out what happened to his son.”

The program ended and the crowd gave Wolfowitz another standing ovation. They rushed to the stage and surrounded the speaker, a former academic unused to being treated like a rock star. It was a moving scene–perhaps a foreshadowing of the greeting American troops will get when Saddam Hussein is gone–but few people saw it.

Although several major newspapers covered the event, television networks mostly took a pass. Why? Certainly the language difficulties made live television coverage all but impossible. But the reactions of a producer for a prominent international broadcast network suggest another possible explanation. She said the event was “weird” and thought the Iraqis seemed “uncomfortable.”

“It was a pre-selected audience,” she inaccurately claimed. “Everyone here agrees with the administration.”

Pro-war propaganda, she concluded–never once considering the possibility that Iraqi Americans might actually be near-unanimous in their desire to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

It should be noted, however, that there were at least two Saddam sympathizers in the crowd. Before the speech, as TV crews checked their microphones and Arabic-speaking Iraqis studied translated copies of Wolfowitz’s prepared remarks, one Iraqi pointed out two men he said were “Saddam’s agents.” Regardless of whether that much is true, they plainly were not enjoying themselves. Each time their fellow Iraqi Americans saluted the dictator’s coming demise, these dour fellows sat expressionless.

After the meeting with Wolfowitz, journalists were asked to leave the room as the Iraqis met privately with representatives from the Pentagon for perhaps an hour. Defense officials explained to the Iraqis the various ways they can participate in the coming conflict. Many will accompany U.S. troops, serving as intermediaries between the Iraqis and their liberators. Others will join something the Pentagon is calling the “Free Iraqi Force,” a unit that will support combat operations inside Iraq. Still others will focus on a post-Saddam Iraq.

Later, Wolfowitz returned to the room and spent another hour talking with individual Iraqi Americans, answering their questions, and most important, listening.

One Iraqi American had a message he hoped protesters would hear:

“If you want to protest that it’s not okay to send your kids to fight, that’s okay. But please don’t claim to speak for the Iraqis. We’ve seen 5 million people protesting, but none of them were Iraqis. They don’t know what’s going on inside Iraq. France and whoever else, please shut up.”

Another, Hawra al-Zuad, is a 16-year-old student at an Islamic academy in suburban Detroit. Her sky blue headscarf seems to coexist comfortably with her marked Detroit accent. Although she doesn’t remember her family’s flight 12 years ago, she is eager to return to her native Iraq. “I’ll go visit right away,” she says. “I want to go see how it is over there. I forgot everything about it. I want to see my house, where I used to live when I was little.”

A good way to spend summer vacation, I suggest. She quickly corrects me.

“Spring break. I hope it’s spring break.”

Hi. George Bush’s final countdown press conference today threw up a statement I hadn’t heard before. He said:

“I’m convinced that a liberated Iraq will be – will be important for that troubled part of the world. The Iraqi people are plenty capable of governing themselves. Iraq is a sophisticated society. Iraq’s got money. Iraq will provide a place where people can see that the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds can get along in a federation.” (The transcript of today’s press conference statement is at whitehouse.)

As recently as late last month the US promised Turkey it would not allow a federation in Iraq: “The guarantees are meant to ensure that an independent Kurdish State – or even an autonomous Kurdish entity within an Iraqi federation – does not emerge along Turkey’s borders after (a US invasion).”(charlotte)

This deal was made just before the Turkish Parliament vote, which unexpectedly went down. Is Bush’s mention of a federation a threat designed to get that vote reversed?

What next? Will the world cave in? Bush certainly thinks it still might. He said today:

“If you remember back prior to the resolution coming out of the United Nations last fall, I suspect you might have asked a question along those lines – how come you can’t get anybody to support your resolution? If I remember correctly, there was a lot of doubt as to whether or not we were even going to get any votes, much – well, we’d get our own, of course. And the vote came out 15 to nothing, Terry. And I think you’ll see when it’s all said and done, if we have to use force, a lot of nations will be with us.”

Is he right? Your predictions, please.

In the devilishly complicated set of arguments for and against invading Iraq, one of the big sticking points is the morality of the war.

The US didn’t pretend the war was about liberation at first. The anti-war movement focused on civilian deaths as a moral argument against war, to which the US and the UK replied that the Iraqi people were prepared to suffer casualties to be liberated, so it was a just war as well as a necessary one. But the US/UK (Australia just mouths whatever Bush and Blair say first) do not go the next step to argue that the war is BECAUSE it is just. Indeed, Bush said today he hoped that Saddam would disarm or leave the country, in which case he wouldn’t invade. No liberation there.

John Wojdylo has carried the just war argument in Webdiary, and he’s convinced me on that point. I’ve just published Against Human Rights in Iraq, where he berates Jack Robertson for checking out of his obligations as a member of Amnesty International to protect human rights:

Now some questions to Jack Robertson. In Controil, you explain why oil is strategically important, and assert that this is the only reason for American action worth knowing. But you have not explained why liberating Iraq, as well as stopping Saddam Hussein, which would be byproducts of the war, are not worth knowing, so you haven’t made the case against war.

You’re fixated on American projection of power. But if you believe in human rights – as you should, because of your position as a leading member of Amnesty International in NSW – then you should at least explain why the Iraqis are wrong when they say that the only way to improve human rights in Iraq is by getting rid of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis want the Americans to invade, and they don’t care if the Americans control the oil afterwards. Why aren’t you putting the human rights of the Iraqis first?

I’ve also just published That Obscure Thing Called Reality, his reply to Iraqi Australian Zainab al-Badry’s plea for peace in Iraqi Australians: War splits a family.

We seem to be getting mixed up between the purpose of war and the effect of war. For me, John has won the argument about the morality of invading Iraq. He seems to be saying that it doesn’t matter what the reason for the war is if its effect is to liberate the Iraqi people. I can go along with that, provided there are guarantees the peace will also be just. There aren’t, at the moment anyway, and US history in the region gives no cause for complacency on the point.

But John’s point doesn’t mean Jack’s opposition to the war is wrong. In the end, it gets back to whether you think the war will help or hinder world peace. In the end, pro and anti war debaters are focused on this question, and the moral arguments for and against war are subsidiary. In other words, we’re all thinking real politic here, whether we’re for or against the war, and for or against Australian involvement.

I’d like John to address the question of whether war on Iraq is likely to make more people in the world free, and accorded more basic human rights, or less. If there’s a world war over this, if countries around the world are destabilised and strife breaks out, for example between the Kurds and the Turks, the Iranians and Muslim Iraqis, mightn’t the loss of life be more horrific than an invasion of Iraq?

This is a core disagreement between the United States and France. As Jacques Chirac said in his Time interview:

“I simply don’t analyse the situation as they do. Among the negative fallout would be inevitably a strong reaction from Arab and Islamic public opinion. It may not be justified, and it may be, but it’s a fact. A war of this kind cannot help giving a big lift to terrorism. It would create a large number of little bin Ladens. Muslims and Christians have a lot to say to one another, but war isn’t going to facilitate that dialogue. I’m against the clash of civilisations; that plays into the hands of extremists.”

The other core disagreement is about the role of the UN and the unilateralism of the US. The Washington Post today sets out the French case on this matter. An extract:

French See Iraq Crisis Imperiling Rule of Law

Concern Focuses on Future of International Order

By Keith B. Richburg

Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, March 6, 2003; Page A19

PARIS, March 5: As the Iraq crisis moves closer to war, France finds itself fighting a battle that officials see as far more important than what happens to a dictator in Baghdad. The issue now is the rule of law in international affairs and the danger that one country will exercise unchecked power over the world, French leaders say.

“There’s never been any doubt in our eyes that the Iraqi regime constitutes a threat to peace in the region and beyond,” Alain Juppe, leader of President Jacques Chirac’s ruling party, told Parliament last week. But he added: “Only the United Nations has the legitimacy to decide on the use of force to enforce its resolutions.”

In recent weeks, France has led resistance at the United Nations and in world forums against U.S. pressure to begin war against the government of President Saddam Hussein. Today its foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, issued a new challenge to Washington, coming together with his counterparts from Russia and Germany to declare that their governments will block a pro-war resolution in the U.N. Security Council.

“This is not about Saddam Hussein, and this is not even about regime change in Iraq or even the million people killed by Saddam Hussein or missiles or chemical weapons,” Pierre Lellouche, a legislator who is close to Chirac, said in an interview. “It is about what has become two conflicting views of the world.

“It’s about whether the United States is allowed to run world affairs and battle terrorism and weapons proliferation essentially with a small group of trusted allies,” or whether many nations should have a say, he said.

***

I received this email today from ‘Brian Dabeagle’, who says he’s an Australian SAS officer. I have no idea if it’s genuine – perhaps readers with knowledge of the SAS can give me their judgement. Brian sent this email to Bob Brown and me:

I am a currently serving soldier in Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) and believe me it has taken weeks, if not months of agonised soul searching as I have tried to decide whether to make my views public or not.

As you can understand, if my identity is revealed, my career (in a job that I love) is finished and as such I have taken some steps to protect my identity. However, some of the information that is in this email is not on the public record (but not vital to operational security) and can be checked to confirm my bona fides. I write this because I am sick of John Howard and the Federal Government’s lies about our position re Iraq and our role within the coalition.

By the time that you read this, it is quite possibly too late to influence the outcome of events regarding our involvement, but at the very least maybe one of you guys may have the courage to make the public a little more aware of what really is happening regarding our (the SAS) role in this conflict.

John Howard stated that we had only recently started preparing for this looming conflict. Bullshit! We, that is, 1 SAS Squadron (please refer to it as One SAS Squadron, not 1st SAS or anything else) were given orders to prepare for a war with Iraq around July 2002.

The Australian Special Air Service Regiment was specifically asked for by US planners after they had observed our performance in Afghanistan, where we demonstrated a capability that had been neglected by other Special Forces units who until recently had deemed it obsolete. Our skills in what is termed Strategic Reconaissance (SR) are unsurpassed by any other Special Forces unit in the world. This includes other so called Tier 1 (a system of rating free world Special Forces units devised by the yanks – Tier 1 being the highest rating) units, including the Brit SAS, US Delta and US Dev Group units.

What happened was we were initially deployed into areas deemed ‘clean’ by the coalition as we were viewed by the US command as really just a token gesture made by the Australian Government (as was our deployment to Kuwait in 98). We were also viewed as an ‘unknown’ quantity as our last real operational deployment working with the yanks was Vietnam. But, because we had maintained the skills of remaining ‘behind the lines’ for much longer periods without resupply or external support, we started to find things that had remained un-noticed by the coalition. Taliban & al Qaida forces started to reappear in the areas we operated in, thinking the area was secure. And, we started to find things that had been missed by the coalition as they passed through. Our discoveries led to some of the coalition’s biggest successes and suddenly the US planners started to realise that we were providing a service that they no longer had the capability to provide AS EFFECTIVELY.

Consequently and as a result of our operations in Afghanistan the relationship between the Australian SAS and our US counterparts is closer than at any time in our history. It is because of our ability to provide a service to the US effort that CANNOT be as effectively carried out by US forces that we were specifically asked for by the Pentagon right at the start of planning. Our role in this conflict is crucial to the outcome and there is no way that we can be taken out of the conflict without seriously affecting the US operational capability. Our planning was at such an advanced stage that whilst the parliamentary debate was raging, we were already into advanced planning of specific targets (not just general planning, but actual targets and operations) … quite contrary to what John Howard was stating. Without going into too much detail (for obvious reasons) what we will be doing is absolutely vital to the successful prosecution of the war. There is no way we are going to be withdrawn. This is nothing like Kuwait in 98, back then we were “untested” in the eyes of the yanks, now we are crucial to their plans.

So why am I sending you this? Because I am proud to be a professional soldier (not a nazi as I felt on the Tampa) and relish the job that I do, but I am concerned that as a human being that the war we are about to embark on is wrong. As important is the fact that I think that Howard is pandering to the will of that redneck Bush, without considering the long term consequences of this action, not just for Australia but for the whole world. He is lying to Parliament, he is lying to the people of Australia and no doubt he will lie to the dependents of any of us who don’t come back. This Government has a history of the latter as Kylie Russell, Jerry Bampton and the next of kin of the Blackhawk disaster can attest to.

As I mentioned at the start of the email, I think that maybe it is too late to do anything to affect our deployment, but at least if the truth as to our build up and deployment is made public, maybe it will give the parliament and the people of Australia food for thought.

 

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Scott Burchill recommends Britain’s dirty secret in The Guardian. It begins:

A chemical plant which the US says is a key component in Iraq’s chemical warfare arsenal was secretly built by Britain in 1985 behind the backs of the Americans, the Guardian can disclose.

Documents show British ministers knew at the time that the 14m plant, called Falluja 2, was likely to be used for mustard and nerve gas production.

Senior officials recorded in writing that Saddam Hussein was actively gassing his opponents and that there was a “strong possibility” that the chlorine plant was intended by the Iraqis to make mustard gas. At the time, Saddam was known to be gassing Iranian troops in their thousands in the Iran-Iraq war.

But ministers in the then Thatcher government none the less secretly gave financial backing to the British company involved, Uhde Ltd, through insurance guarantees. Paul Channon, then trade minister, concealed the existence of the chlorine plant contract from the US administration, which was pressing for controls on such exports. He also instructed the export credit guarantee department (ECGD) to keep details of the deal secret from the public.

The papers show that Mr Channon rejected a strong plea from a Foreign Office minister, Richard Luce, that the deal would ruin Britain’s image in the world if news got out: “I consider it essential everything possible be done to oppose the proposed sale and to deny the company concerned ECGD cover”.

The Ministry of Defence also weighed in, warning that it could be used to make chemical weapons. But Mr Channon, in line with Mrs Thatcher’s policy of propping up the dictator, said: “A ban would do our other trade prospects in Iraq no good”.

Scott also recommends Independent Iraqis oppose Bush’s war in The Guardian.