Shaping things to come
The war is happening. The bombs are falling and people are dying. What do we do now?

Paul Krugman talks about Things to come:

What scares me most, however, is the home front. Look at how this war happened. There is a case for getting tough with Iraq; bear in mind that an exasperated Clinton administration considered a bombing campaign in 1998. But it's not a case that the Bush administration ever made. Instead we got assertions about a nuclear program that turned out to be based on flawed or faked evidence; we got assertions about a link to Al Qaeda that people inside the intelligence services regard as nonsense. Yet those serial embarrassments went almost unreported by our domestic news media. So most Americans have no idea why the rest of the world doesn't trust the Bush administration's motives. And once the shooting starts, the already loud chorus that denounces any criticism as unpatriotic will become deafening.

So now the administration knows that it can make unsubstantiated claims, without paying a price when those claims prove false, and that saber rattling gains it votes and silences opposition. Maybe it will honorably refuse to act on this dangerous knowledge. But I can't help worrying that in domestic politics, as in foreign policy, this war will turn out to have been the shape of things to come.

What happens now is in the hands of the people. Australians know this government will stop at almost nothing in order to court domestic opinion by offending foreign governments. We had the (now inoperative) Howard doctrine about Oz as deputy sheriff. We had the threat of pre-emptive strikes against Southeast Asian nations even though most ASEAN members are co-operating fully in the anti-terrorist campaign. We have continuing emphasis on the military side of the War on terror even through we know from the Bali aftermath that old-fashioned police investigation is what actually works. We have defiance of the UN human rights system after a half-century of bipartisan support for that system.

Howard had Tampa and Bush had Iraq. Indeed Howard managed to spin Tampa so well that we feared refugees from the Taliban and al-Qaida more than we feared the Taliban and al-Qaida themselves. Australians have an advantage. 68% of us oppose this war and that number will not go away in the near future. Wars grow less, not more, popular as they go on.

We must conclude either that Howard is a fool, a view which nothing in his career supports, or that each of those gaffes was a carefully-crafted appeal to certain groups in the electorate. Howard's ordinary Australians show a surprising similarity to the views of those who supported Hanson once upon a time. Like Bush, Howard has learnt how to win elections by dog-whistle politics and whipping up an atmosphere of alarm and apprehension.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere it is being said that the peace movement has failed. It has not. AS Tim Dunlop writes:

From the start we have been fed lies, half-truths, dubious conclusions, tendentious links and an ever-shifting series of justifications for this war. We have been given bogus information about Saddam seeking uranium from Niger, trumped up charges about the intended use of a bunch of aluminium tubes, doctored intelligence transcripts, misinterpreted or even phoney satellite images, exaggerated reports about his nuclear capability (which now know to be non-existent), and worst of all, the persistent attempt to link this invasion of Iraq with the atrocities of September 11, 2001.

The movement against the war in Indochina achieved its object in years, not weeks. The anti-apartheid movement achieved its object in decades, not weeks. What we have to do is ensure that Bush, Howard and their ilk do not get to decide the shape of things to come.

Lastly, we should all support the troops. That does not mean endorsing this immoral military adventure. It means calling to account those who launched this war and risked the lives of those troops for imperial adventure and political advantage.