The Cult of the CEO

They're corporate superheroes who lay claim to ever more millions - for better or for worse. And it's usually the little people who pay.

Four years ago, US president Bill Clinton went to Mississippi to visit the home of Bernie Ebbers and WorldCom, the company Ebbers had founded. At the time, the baby telco had expanded like a teenager on steroids to have a market value of $US120 billion.

"I came here today because you are the symbol of 21st-century America," Clinton said. "You are the embodiment of what I want for the future."

Oops. These days such symbols lie shattered in financial ruins and the future seems to belong to anyone but the Bernie Ebbers of the world. Instead, the global economy is still counting the real cost of billions of dollars worth of dodgy accounting, of grandiose business dreams unconnected to financial reality and of a corporate greed so pervasive that it makes previous eras of excess seem almost sweetly old-fashioned.

But of all the extraordinary corporate stories of the 1990s, none has been more powerful than what Gideon Haigh chooses to call the cult of the CEO. This cult might have been most advanced in the US, but Australia typically picked up the trend with blind enthusiasm.

Chief Executive Officer of the United States George Bush exemplifies the cult of the celebrity CEO as do CEO of the Commonwealth of Australia John Howard and CEO of the United Kingdom Tony Blair. None of the three have produced very stellar performances. All have problems with corporate governance issues, whether it's Bush insisting that 'advise and consent' makes consultation on judicial appointments unconstitutional or Howard trying to solve problems with the Senate by acquiring even more power for himself.

But CEO Blair's PR machine has managed to move from a cult to actual worship. Appearing before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Alastair Campbell said:

I find it incredible and I mean incredible that people can report based on one single anonymous uncorroborated source - and let's get to the heart of what the allegation is - that the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the intelligence agencies, people liker myself connived to persuade Parliament to send British forces into action on a lie. That is the allegation. I tell you, until the BBC acknowledge that is a lie, I will keep banging on, that correspondence file will get thicker and they had better issue an apology pretty quickly.

And essentially that argument, repeated in similar terms in Australia and the US, is that we cannot think about the possibility of sexed-up intelligence because it would mean disbelieving the relevant CEOs. We know that sexed-up intelligence was used because we know the Niger claim was untrue. We know that sexed-up intelligence was used because we know, for example, that Rumsfeld's claim of WMDs deployed around Tikrit and Baghdad was untrue.

An injunction never to disbelieve the CEO was not good enough for HIH or Enron. It should not be good enough for Australia, the UK or the US.

Told to heel, this dog's still got bite

'It was a dark and stormy night. ASIO was knocking at the door ..." Apologies to Snoopy (and the late Charles Schultz), but I've been looking at a blank screen for well over an hour and that's the best I can come up with. Daryl Williams, QC, would understand. Williams is the federal Attorney-General, the country's first law officer. For 15 months he's been trying to write, not the great novel but a regime of bleak interrogation laws under which people can be arrested - the Howard Government prefers "detained" - for no reason other than what they might know, even if they don't know that they know. No such legislation has previously applied in Australia. Ever. Well, it does now.

Williams has authored, finally, a piece of legislation the Senate could accept. It took two inquiries, huge controversy, two rewrites, a year of wheeling and dealing with Labor's Senate leader, John Faulkner, and a great deal of political bullying and parliamentary brinkmanship. Now it's here, for three years, minimum. What it is is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2002. All 40 pages of it, plus protocols. And, in the end, the Senate did not approve it - the Labor Opposition did.

People who can't count pretend that four independents (Tasmania's Brian Harradine and Shayne Murphy, South Australia's Meg Lees and Queensland's Len Harris) hold the Senate balance of power. They don't. They only share it - with two Greens, seven Democrats and 28 Labor senators. The Government, with 35 senators, needs four of the others - any four, whoever - to join it for a simple Senate majority on any given piece of legislation. Mix and match, if necessary. And if Labor backs the Government, whatever the issue, there isn't a thing the others, the 13 minor party/independent also-rans, can do to stop them. Game, set and match.

So while the Democrats came to the Government party in 1999 to get the GST into law, and John Howard's accident-prone Communications Minister, Richard Alston, has again failed spectacularly, this time to seduce the four independents to end Paul Keating's 1986 cross-media rules, it is Labor who has bargained with the Coalition to allow Williams to have his new ASIO powers for three years, minimum.

They are much-watered-down powers to the ones Williams and his Prime Minister first wanted 15 months ago. But they're still powers the others refused to endorse. Thus when the final vote was taken two nights ago, the two big battalions lined up to crush the tiny rest, 51 votes to 12, with only Tasmania's Brian Harradine from among the "others" voting with the major parties.

and:

ASIO does not have to knock on your door, either. Nor does ASIO do the arresting. They simply accompany the wallopers. Section 34JA says any police officer who "believes" a person named in an ASIO warrant is on "any premises ... may enter the premises, using such force as is necessary and reasonable, at any time of the day or night for the purpose of searching the premises for the person or taking the person into custody".

And exactly how much force can police use? Well, section 34J says any person subject to a warrant "must be treated with humanity and with respect for human dignity, and must not be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, by anyone exercising authority under the warrant or implementing or enforcing the direction". Yet police can shoot you if they think it "necessary and reasonable" and they have all the authority in the world to do so, even if you're guilty of nothing except maybe taking fright and running, or some other panic reaction.

Section 34JB says: "A police officer may use such force as is necessary and reasonable in a) taking a person into custody, b) preventing the escape of a person from such custody, or c) bringing a person before a prescribed authority for questioning, or d) detaining a person in connection with such a warrant." However, police "must not use more force or subject the person [under warrant] to greater indignity than is reasonable and necessary". Nor can police "cause the death of, or do grievous bodily harm to, the person unless the officer believes on reasonable grounds that doing that thing is necessary to protect the life or prevent serious injury to another person, including the officer [my emphasis]".

Reassuring, indeed.

Alan Ramsey looks set to become Oz' answer to Paul Krugman if he keeps this up. The digest for the Act is deeply scary. That Labor would combine with the Coalition to pass it is scarier still. The Amnesty International analysis is somewhat out of date but damning. These are the people who tell us that a charter of rights would be a bad thing because our liberties are safe in the hands of the parliament and do not need further protection. And this is the opposition that claims it has policies to offer the Australian people.

In March 1763 William Pitt addressed the House of Commons:

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!

This sort of ancient common law is supposed to replace the horrors of governments having to observe human rights. Bugger that, opposing the bill might cost Labor votes.

Suddenly, America has a brash neighbor up north

Canada has long been the United States' virtually invisible neighbor to the north.

But suddenly it is coming out of its shell - and sharpening an identity that increasingly looks like a slice of Europe on America's back porch.

It's moving to become the third nation on the planet to legalize gay marriage. It's primed to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. And it vocally opposed the US war on Iraq.

These moves reflect a growing cultural assertiveness - especially on the importance of tolerance and multiculturalism, which are enshrined in Canada's version of the Bill of Rights. The shift is increasingly putting the US and Canada - the world's biggest trading partners - on a cultural collision course.

"We look at you Americans and see the [National Rifle Association], rigged elections, Christian fundamentalists, and pre-emptive wars," says Michael Adams, author of the best-selling "Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values." By contrast, Canada is a place that prizes "peace, order, and good government." It's "a social welfare state where we raise taxes to pay for transit, housing, and more," he says.

Canada's newfound assertiveness stems, in part, from a growing confidence in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, adopted in 1982. It's akin to the US Bill of Rights. But it guarantees, for instance, equality for women, aboriginal groups, and minority-language groups.

It's led to Canada even having a cabinet position for multiculturalism.

And it's one reason for Canada's wide-open immigration policy. Fully 18 percent of Canadians are foreign born, compared with about 10 percent of Americans. In Toronto, 40 percent of residents are foreign born.

Recently Canadian courts have also interpreted the charter to guarantee rights for gays, including the right to marry.

All in all, "It's not just that Canadians are comfortable with diversity," it's something they are increasingly proud of, says Andrew Parkin, codirector of the Center for Research and Information on Canada in Ottawa. "They're now saying this is what makes them proud to be Canadian."

I know that neither Howard nor Crean are especially strong on envisioning what Australia stands for, other than assuring that refugees do not achieve their preferred migration outcomes, but there should be room in our politics for a vision of what Australia might and should be. A better reaction by the traditional parties to the idea of a charter of rights might be a good start.

He's back!
The BBC says:

Looking thinner and greyer than three months ago during his daily press briefing, [al-Sayyaf] declined to tell the Arab TV stations about the final days before Baghdad fell.

"The time is not yet ripe to say what happened. When history's ready, then we can talk about it," he said.

He refused to retract his wartime claims that Iraqi forces were "burning the Americans in their tanks", saying only that his reports came from "authentic sources - many authentic sources".

He said the war was "a difficult situation, not for one individual, but for everybody".

He denied being part of Saddam Hussein's inner circle, saying he was a professional doing his job.

All those rumours he was working on the SARS issue for Beijing or on the WMD issue for the White House must have been grossly exaggerated.

Well it's about F-ing Time
As Jody over at Naked Writing says...

[US] Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Sodomy Law

snark of the week
A letter to the Asia Times:
Dear Asian times. The United States (with little help from the useless Northern Alliance who from first hand accounts retreated at every possible chance) killed at least 5000 Taliban supporters US turns to the Taliban, Jun 14. It was a f****** bloodbath. Second, the United States military has a long and honorable tradition of reporting military deaths, so the myth of not reporting the truth in causalities is bullshit. Thirdly, the second the Taliban resurface, the United States and its allies would f****** annihilate them. It would be retarded (which is an accurate description for all you f****** homo jihadists) for the Taliban sympathizers to assemble forces. The US technology and ferocity of our weapons systems caught the enemy off guard in 2001 and it would do so again now. Fourthly, The USSR's military was a joke and if it wasn't for the CIA and the stinger missiles, the anti-communist forces would have never won. Even if there was a resurgence in Taliban activity, the United States would win. Finally, as for the "surge in gorilla attacks' you must referring to when some illiterate taliban sympathizer sets up poorly constructed rockets to fire haphazardly and completely miss their targets. Stop your f****** propaganda. Do the civilized world a favor and find another way to make yourselves useful to the rational world.
F... you truly,

Senate derails media merger bill

The Government's push to deregulate the media industry was derailed last night when the Senate voted to ban mergers of newspapers and TV stations.

Labor, the Democrats, Greens and the three independents supported Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine's move to amend the proposed media ownership bill to prohibit TV and newspaper mergers in the mainland capital cities.

The Government voted against the amendment which would prevent Rupert Murdoch buying a TV station or Kerry Packer buying a newspaper company like Herald publisher Fairfax.

The Communications Minister, Richard Alston, said the "watershed amendment" would not achieve any of the Government's objectives to overhaul the media ownership regime.

The Government's bid to relax the media ownership restrictions now seems to doomed to fail, because it will not support the bill with Senator Harradine's amendment.

Without the amendment the Government is unlikely to secure the four extra votes it needs to change the media ownership laws. "It would be a shame if the Government threw the baby out with the bathwater and voted against the bill just over the protection of some big players," Senator Harradine said.

Sadly the ASIO bill passed with opposition support but at least the media bill is dead as a dodo. Considering the talents of the responsible minister the dodo is not an inappropriate metaphor.

Live link to UK parliamentary inquiry on WMDs

Alastair Campbell claims he sexed the dossier down, not up.

Not me, guv
From the BBC:

Two of Mr Straw's former cabinet colleagues, Clare Short and Robin Cook, have already said the public were misled.

Shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram said Mr Straw's evidence had "left Alastair Campbell out to dry".

"If the government's credibility is to be established, it is vital that Alastair Campbell answers the relevant questions openly and completely and does not seek to hide the truth in a miasma of clever words."

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said there was a sense of "not me guv" which would make Alastair Campbell's questions session something like "high noon".

He said the intensity of Mr Blair's speeches had left nobody doubting the immediacy of going to war, despite Mr Straw's insistence the words "immediate" or "imminent" were not used about the Iraqi threat.

I continue to be amazed, first at the power of opinion which has now forced parliamentary inquiries in 3 of the 4 coalition countries and second at the tortured arguments being used to prove that a large arsenal of WMDs ready to fire at 45 minutes' notice is somehow not an immediate or imminent threat. US Senator Byrd has again laid out some of the more salient quotes, the non-immediate, non-imminent and non-threatening ones.

New reef found in Australia

The reef is in unusually deep and murky waters.

A new coral reef has been found off the coast of Australia. Its 120 square kilometres sit in murky waters 30 meters below the surface, leaving researchers rethinking their understanding of the world's reefs.

In May, researchers cruised into Queensland's Gulf of Carpentaria to study the transport and dispersal of sediments from coastal rivers. Instead they found themselves charting a previously unknown reef. "We were quite surprised," Peter Harris of Geosciences Australia. "Initially I thought it was an old relic reef."

The find hints that there may be many more reefs lurking in rarely-studied waters. "It shows you how little we know about reefs," says James Darwin Thomas of the National Coral Reef Institute in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The Australian crew spent 5 days mapping the sea floor with echo beams. As each day's work added to the image, it became clear that they were cruising atop a reef, recalls Harris. So they lowered a video camera. "We were surprised to see corals growing there in such abundance," he says. They carefully collected samples to study upon their return to the lab. � Geosciences Australia

New Guinea Went Bananas: Agriculture's roots get a South Pacific twist

Situated in the South Pacific islands, remote New Guinea seems an unlikely place for the invention of agriculture. Yet that's precisely what happened there nearly 7,000 years ago, according to a new investigation.

Inhabitants of this tropical outpost cultivated large quantities of bananas about 3 millennia before the arrival of Southeast Asian seafarers, say archaeologist Tim P. Denham of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and his colleagues. Agriculture thus arose independently in New Guinea, the scientists conclude in an upcoming Science.

Until now, convincing evidence for ancient agriculture came only from the Middle East (SN: 10/28/00, p. 280), China, the eastern United States (SN: 9/20/97, p. 180), South America, and a region encompassing parts of Mexico and Central America (SN: 5/24/97, p. 322). Reports in the 1970s that New Guinea belonged in this group were criticized for relying on patchy remains and uncertain dates from an excavation of a swampy highland site called Kuk.

"Only a few regions were geographically suited to become homelands of full agricultural systems," says archaeologist Katharina Neumann of J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, in a commentary accompanying the new article. "New Guinea seems to have been one of them."

This discovery challenges the traditional notion that agriculture inevitably led to the rise of large civilizations with stratified social classes, Denham and his coworkers assert. Current New Guinea societies are relatively small and grounded in egalitarian practices, much as they seem to have been before the rise of agriculture, according to the researchers.

You've seen the movie, now try and find the truth
Atrios blogs in some detail about a forthcoming 11 September movie. It is worth reading, if only for his final question:

UPDATE: Alert readers raise the question: Which will be released first: the 911 report, or the 911 movie? I say the movie. Any takers?

Sadly the real question is whether the fiction or the factual account will do more to sway people's attitudes.

Wise appointment confirms why the system needs fixing

Because the new Governor-General is one man's choice and because politics dictated that choice had to be extremely cautious, a selection which broke with convention was never a possibility.

There was never a chance, for example, that Howard would be the first prime minister to choose a woman for the job.

But these are the reasons why this choice confirms that the current system is a failure. A choice in which political imperatives are the overriding factors compromises the chances of a governor-general who is the people's choice candidate.

But it says a lot about the parlous state of the Australian republican movement that despite the Hollingworth debacle John Howard was under very little pressure to do other than he has done.

I would argue it also compromises any sense of reality that in the twenty-first century we are all cavorting about insisting that autocratic appointment of the head of state is the only safe or even thinkable way to go. If the debate was informed by any sense of history the commentariat would realise they sound like chaps in frock coats at Versailles circa 1780.

duplicity and the Roadmap
There's a weird argument being raised here and there that, if the Bush administration is lying about the threat of WMDs, the duplicity is not relevant because the outcome of the Iraq war was good. People who believe that should turn to what is happening to the Roadmap.

From the Guardian:

At the Middle East summit with Mr Bush in Aqaba this month, Mr Sharon committed himself to dismantling nearly 100 Jewish "outposts" in the West Bank. But only a dozen have come down, and about 10 more have been constructed.

Only one of those dismantled was inhabited and it was taken down the day before a visit to Israel by Mr Powell, leading to speculation in the Israeli press that it was done for show.

Ephraim Halevy, the director of Israel's national security council and former head of the Mossad spy agency, resigned yesterday after losing a battle for influence over Mr Sharon's approach to the road map.

Several months ago, Mr Halevy warned the prime minister that George Bush was serious about the road map and that Tony Blair was exerting considerable influence over the US president on the issue. Mr Halevy argued that Israel should draw up its own plan and announce that it would lay out the path and conditions to peace.

Mr Sharon's chief aide, Dov Weissglass, disagreed and persuaded him that the hawks in the White House would ensure that the road map was never taken seriously and that Mr Bush was duping Mr Blair.

"Either they've been playing us the entire time or they're playing the British," Mr Weissglass said in March.

When a government starts on the road to public lying (for whatever motive) that fact is known to other governments. What is Bush going to say to Israel? What is Bush going to say to governments like Iran which see themselves facing the same kind of propaganda campaign that Iraq faced? 'Read my lips'?

Senate may still rebuff media changes

Senator Alston said Australia would be left in the "information stone age" unless the Government's plans were adopted.

"You want a dynamic and expanding sector, to provide more media opportunities, not less. I think you will see new companies coming in from offshore and a much healthier environment as a result."

According to Senator Alston, it was not Rupert Murdoch or Kerry Packer who was leading the charge for change.

"Murdoch and Packer are already very well entrenched. They are doing very nicely, thank you," he said. "It is pretty much the rest of the industry who are out there saying, 'We need these changes'."

The Government's plans received a blow on Friday when independent Senator Brian Harradine said he would amend the bill to prevent mergers of major TV stations and newspapers in capital cities.

Labor, the Democrats and the Greens oppose the changes, as do many community groups. A spokesman for Friends of Fairfax, Alan Kennedy, said they would reduce diversity and hurt consumers.

"It's an extraordinary example of a mates-helping-mates decision on the media," he said. "It will mean fewer media proprietors and fewer media outlets."

Senator Meg Lees has linked her support for the changes to increased funding for the ABC, but Senator Alston was non-committal on this issue yesterday.

"We'll continue to explore all the possibilities," he said.

Senator Alston has actually declared victory over deregulating the media on a number of occasions and he has not enacted anything yet. The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Media Ownership) Bill 2003 would:

* remove controls on the foreign ownership of television
* provide for exemptions to the cross-media rules in certain circumstances, and
* ensure that local news services are maintained in regional areas subject to exemptions
from the cross-media rules.

I suggest that each of those of changes would be bad for the diversity of views and bad for Australia. The new media argument raised by Senator Alston is fairly silly. 11% of the community get their information from new media. That is only a marginal impact and in any case new media content is dominated by the ABC, News Ltd, PBL and Fairfax - all traditional news providers. If the senator really wants to get us out of the stone age he might have a look at repealing his net censorship laws.

My guess is that Senator Lees and Senator Harradine will both bolt and the bill will fail.

global coffee goes flat
The excellent Oligopoly Watch reports:

But the anti-globalists may have less to worry about than they thought. A recent story in Business Week (June 9, 2003, ?For Starbucks, There?s No Place Like Home?) reveals that Starbuck?s international move is turning out to be a bust. There are over 1,500 international stores now, but they are net money losers. Japan, the largest overseas Starbucks presence, has reached a capacity, and is now losing money. Starbucks has closed its stores in Israel, and exiting joint ventures in Switzerland and Austria.� In Britain and Germany, growth is stalled.

The big reason, according to Business Week, is local competition. In all of these countries, once the concept of a coffee bar catches on, there spring up local versions with lower prices that take business away from the costly Starbucks. There?s no indication that this is fueled mostly by anti-Americanism (though Starbucks stores, like MacDonald?s, have been targets of anti-war protests). It seems to be a rare case of real-world limits on multinational growth, and the interesting thing is that it?s based not on protectionism, but on local preferences.

About a year ago my favourite cousin came back from a trip muttering, with an expression of genuine shock, that you cannot get decent coffee in New York. Some months later Starbucks outlets began sprouting all over Sydney like bad mushrooms after rain. It would be interesting to see how well they're doing in Oz against more traditional coffee bars. I did find one mention in The Age:

Despite the money being spent at the moment by these US giants and Hudson and the brand and marketing power they bring, Melbourne's traditional coffee retailers remain unperturbed.

Sisto Malaspina, a partner of one of Melbourne's most famous coffee establishments, Pellegrini's, on Bourke Street, said he was all for them as he believed they were good for coffee drinking in Australia generally.

"It's a good thing for everyone because it introduces coffee to a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise go into a coffee shop like us, and it also gets the young people into coffee too.

"Their coffee is good - our coffee is excellent," he said.

Mr Malaspina reports that Pellegrini's business has been unaffected by the emergence of these chains in the CBD - Pellegrini's is selling more than 500 cups of coffee a day - with caffe latte the most popular drink and espresso (short black) also showing a bit of a revival at the moment.

He has no plans to introduce a Caramel Rooitea Ice Blended at any stage soon

Serious conflict-of-interest disclosure. Some in my suburb are quite proud that Macdonalds had to close their outlet here for want of business.

Otro poema de los dones
Jorge Luis Borges


Gracias quiero dar al divino Laberinto de los efectos y de las causas
Por la diversidad de las criaturas que forman este singular universo,
Por la raz�n, que no cesar� de so�ar con un plano del laberinto,
Por el rostro de Elena y la perseverancia de Ulises,
Por el amor, que nos deja ver a los otros como los ve la divinidad,
Por el firme diamante y el agua suelta,
Por el �lgebra, palacio de precisos cristales,
Por las m�sticas monedas de �ngel Silesio,
Por Schopenhauer, que acaso descifr� el universo,
Por el fulgor del fuego,
Que ning�n ser humano puede mirar sin un asombro antiguo,
Por la caoba, el cedro y el s�ndalo,
Por el pan y la sal,
Por el misterio de la rosa, que prodiga color y que no lo ve,
Por ciertas v�speras y d�as de 1955,
Por los duros troperos que en la llanura arrean los animales y el alba,
Por la ma�ana en Montevideo,
Por el arte de la amistad,
Por el �ltimo d�a de S�crates,
Por las palabras que en un crep�sculo se dijeron de una cruz a otra cruz,
Por aquel sue�o del Islam que abarc� mil noches y una noche,
Por aquel otro sue�o del infierno,
De la torre del fuego que purifica
Y de las esferas gloriosas,
Por Swedenborg, que conversaba con los �ngeles en las calles de Londres,
Por los r�os secretos e inmemoriales que convergen en m�,
Por el idioma que, hace siglos, habl� en Nortumbria,
Por la espada y el arpa de los sajones,
Por el mar, que es un desierto resplandeciente
Y una cifra de cosas que no sabemos
Y un epitafio de los vikings,
Por la m�sica verbal de Inglaterra,
Por la m�sica verbal de Alemania,
Por el oro, que relumbra en los versos,
Por el �pico invierno,
Por el nombre de un libro que no he le�do: Gesta Dei per Francos,
Por Verlaine, inocente como los p�jaros,
Por el prisma de cristal y la pesa de bronce,
Por las rayas del tigre,
Por las altas torres de San Francisco y de la isla de Manhattan,
Por la ma�ana en Texas,
Por aquel sevillano que redact� la Ep�stola Moral
Y cuyo nombre, como �l hubiera preferido, ignoramos,
Por S�neca y Lucano, de C�rdoba
Que antes del espa�ol escribieron
Toda la literatura espa�ola,
Por el geom�trico y bizarro ajedrez
Por la tortuga de Zen�n y el mapa de Royce,
Por el olor medicinal de los eucaliptos,
Por el lenguaje, que puede simular la sabidur�a,
Por el olvido, que anula o modifica el pasado,
Por la costumbre, que nos repite y nos confirma como un espejo,
Por la ma�ana, que nos depara la ilusi�n de un principio,
Por la noche, su tiniebla y su astronom�a,
Por el valor y la felicidad de los otros,
Por la patria, sentida in los jazmines, o en una vieja espada,
Por Whitman y Francisco de As�s, que ya escribieron el poema,
Por el hecho de que el poema es inagotable
Y se confunde con la suma de las criaturas
Y no llegar� jam�s al �ltimo verso
Y var�a seg�n los hombres,
Por Francis Haslam, que pidi� perd�n a sus hijos por morir tan despacio,
Por los minutos que preceden al sue�o,
Por el sue�o y la muerte, esos dos tesoros ocultos,
Por los �ntimos dones que no enumero,
Por la m�sica, misteriosa forma del tiempo.

The accession of Queen Victoria

Saturday June 24, 1837

QUEEN VICTORIA - The accession of our young queen is a circumstance full of hope and promise. Humanly speaking, it is perhaps desirable that the event should have been postponed a few years, that her character might have become more fixed, and her acquaintance with the world and with those branches of knowledge which are peculiarly appropriate to her situation and her duties, more enlarged. But it has been ordained otherwise, and, we have no doubt, ordained for the best.

From all that we have read and heard, her majesty's conduct hitherto seems to have been marked by great propriety both of feeling and demeanour. Her address to the privy council, on the day of her accession, which will be found in a subsequent column, was every thing that could be wished; and there is not a true Englishman who will not warmly respond to her prayer, that "Providence may give her strength for the performance of the work to which she has been thus early called." The declaration, beautiful in its composition, and constitutional in its spirit as it is, has been savagely criticised and misrepresented by the Times. We trust, however, and believe, that very many even of the tories recoil with unmingled disgust from the hateful spirit which that journal so perseveringly evinces.

That would all be a quaint piece of history if Australia did not have a constitution which describes a mythical Australia largely ruled by Queen Victoria. More to the point the royal prerogative remains intact, although it it is in the hands of the prime minister, and authorises more than faintly monarchical statements like:

PRIME MINISTER: I'm the person who was responsible for them going and if the outcome had been very different people would not have been reluctant in anyway to criticise me and I'd have accepted responsibility for it. I don't think it's unreasonable that I welcome people home. He says I hog the limelight. Well, I'm the Prime Minister, I'm the person who's to blame, I'm the person responsible. If I didn't turn up? Just imagine if I didn't turn up at the parade and I said nothing - people would say, for heaven's above, he's the bloke who sent us, he hasn't even come along to welcome us back.

Iran muddies Afghanistan's waters
The Asia Times again reports US/Taliban negotiations.

KARACHI - With the ground situation in Afghanistan expected to deteriorate even further in the coming weeks, Pakistan will once again serve as a back yard for US military and diplomatic initiatives to contain the spreading guerrilla warfare.

At the same time, Iran, which is steadily being pushed against the wall by the United States, still has a few cards left to play in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq, in an attempt to tie down harassed US forces further in those countries and divert attention from itself.

and:

The decision for these operations follows the breakdown of tentative talks among the United States, Pakistan and the Taliban. A first contact was dismissed out of hand by the Taliban because the go-between was former Taliban leader Mullah Ghous, who had been expelled from the hierarchy when the Taliban were still in power in Kabul. Another round of talks with a more acceptable intermediary was held in Quetta, Pakistan, but they failed to make any headway.

and:

And the re-emergence of the Taliban movement suits some elements in Pakistan, who hanker after the days when Pakistan, through its support of the Taliban, wielded much influence in Afghanistan - for example, the former director general of the Inter-Service Intelligence, Lieutenant-General Mehmood Ahmed. Mehmood was chosen by Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf to talk the Taliban into a peaceful solution to the Afghan situation after September 11, 2001, when Pakistan, under US pressure, renounced its support of the Taliban. Instead, though, Mehmood prepared the Taliban to fight the United States. He was removed from his post when the US attacked Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, and placed under house arrest. He has now been released, and serves as managing director of Fauji Fertilizer (a production unit owned by the Pakistani army).

Such hawkish elements in the army and among Pakistan's militant groups are just waiting to make Afghanistan their playground once again.

Unlike Saddam, the Iranians are unlikely to sit and wait for the US to come to them. Unlike Saddam, the Iranians control a cohesive and powerful state that has not been wrecked by years of sanctions and bombings. The US armed forces are stretched thin covering Afghanistan and Iraq. I am almost prepared to bet that we will soon be told the way to relieve the military pressure in Afghanistan and Iraq is to take out Iran.

US wages war from within Iran

With commendable stupidity usually only reserved for the most powerful and isolated from reality, President George W Bush has managed to go some way towards repeating the catastrophic mistakes of Lyndon Johnson and ensnare the United States in an increasingly unpopular and probably unwinnable foreign military involvement. Just two months after the sudden collapse of organized Iraqi resistance to the US-led invasion, US troops are back in a Vietnam-scenario with the ambushing of military convoys, the regular use of grenades and rocket launchers against isolated American targets and indeed suicide bombers.

It has always been a truism that if you cannot avoid wars, then at least learn the lessons of previous conflicts. This, however, the US has signally failed to do. Not content with the ultimate failures of the campaigns in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, of Somalia, and indeed even Afghanistan, to achieve the stated aims and the supposed improvement in the state of the inhabitants of those nations, the US has blindly embarked on a dangerous and unsound course of action. US forces are already launching operations suspiciously similar to the "search-and-destroy" tactics of 40 years ago and with a similar response from an increasingly hostile civilian population.

Using a marked degree of devious propaganda about the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction and largely in the dark about the true allegiance and likely response of the majority of Iraqis, the US has now succeeded in alienating much of both the developed and Third World, and indeed signaled to both Russia and China that Washington's new-found military belligerence and diplomatic toughness are a profound threat to their influence and future powerbase. Not content with expending much of America's wealth and the lives of its young service personnel in largely fruitless campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington is now clearly preparing the ground for an attack on Iran.

What offends me most about the neo-realpolitik school of diplomacy is that it is so damn unrealistic. Their prewar claims of WMDs, a clear and serious threat, a brief occupation, a light occupation force are all now discredited. The carnage they said would never happen continues and their only response is Rumsfeld trying to spin the number of US and British dead by conflating dissimilar statistics. These people have been spinning so long they've forgotten there's a real world which cannot be spun. If Iraq was a distraction from the failures against al-Qa'ida I guess logic dictates a new distraction to disguise the failure in Iraq.

Tehran here we come. The same drivel about light mobile forces and no need for a large garrison can be expected as well. After all, it worked in Afghanistan didn't it? And in iraq?

Iraq democratizing Iran?

In Najaf, SAIRI cadres are actually hoping that the Iranian Islamic Republic will not influence Iraq; they'd rather see the new Iraqi experiment being able to democratize Iran. Meanwhile in Qom, the Grand Ayatollah Saanei, who talked to Asia Times Online last year, has told French daily Le Monde that "it is out of the question to transfer our system to Iraq. The United States should not interfere politically in Iraq, and this also applies to ourselves." Saanei remarked that all great "sources of imitation" - or marja'a, the highest echelon of the Shi'ite clergy - who have lived in Qom, all of them came from Najaf. For him, Najaf and Qom complement each other.

Will Iran and Iraq complement each other? The answer may hinge on the impact of the more than 3,000 Iraqi Shi'ite religious leaders who came back home from exile in Iran. If a separation between religion and politics successfully takes place in Iraq, the road is paved for a secular Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi regime being able to give the Iranian theocracy a democracy lesson. If the Americans allow it, of course.

The whole article should be read, if only because the neologism 'occuberator' deserves to get a run. More seriously, there must be someone among the Bush advisers who knows something about the tensions between Iraq's Shi'a clergy and Iran's. Surely? Please? Maybe?

snark of the week
From Hellblazer:

The Libertarian utopian fantasy is that if we could all just communicate, everything would be all peachy and we'd live in some Libertarian free market love fest of ideas. But like all Libertarian utopias, it just descends into despotism and roving bands of warlords. Heathers on crack.

Blogdom is the Somalia of the web.

I was beginning to worry...

Whale Watchers Demand Voice at World Whaling Body

BERLIN (Reuters) - Whale watchers say their industry, now worth over $1.5 billion per year, has come of age, and want recognition at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) -- to the consternation of whaling nations.

The International Alliance for Commercial Whale Watchers (IACWW) made its first appearance as an observer at the annual IWC meeting this week and called for the body to recognize their industry, and that whaling threatens it.

They also want the commission to tackle conservation issues, such as pollution, which pose a risk to whales.

"We see ourselves as the new whalers," Frank Future, the Australian head of the fledgling IACWW, told Reuters.

Whaling nations, led by Japan and Norway, insisting the IWC should stick to its original aim of deciding hunting quotas. They say conservation and whale watching are side issues.

This is amusing. Given the fairly parlous state of the old whalers I'd love to be a fly on the wall while they argue that slaughter is good but more profitable nonlethal industries are bad.

Bush's 9/11 coverup?

For months, the commission was struggling to get by on a minuscule budget of $3 million. That low funding and the yearlong delay in creating the commission stand in stark contrast to previous panels formed to investigate momentous disasters in American history.

For instance, on April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg, killing approximately 1,500 of its 2,200 passengers. According to historians, Titanic survivors began disembarking in New York at 10 o'clock on the night of April 18. The next morning at 10:30, a special panel of the Senate Commerce Committee was gaveled into session inside the ornate East Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Last year, when Cheney called Daschle to urge him to limit any hearings into 9/11, the V.P. argued it would drain sources away from the war on terrorism. By contrast, just 11 days after Japanese bombers hit the U.S. with a sneak attack killing nearly 3,000 people, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating a commission to "ascertain and report the facts relating to the attack made by Japanese armed forces upon the Territory of Hawaii on December 7, 1941 ... and to provide bases for sound decisions whether any derelictions of duty or errors of judgment on the part of United States Army or Navy personnel contributed to such successes as were achieved by the enemy on the occasion mentioned." It was the first of eight government-led investigations into the Pearl Harbor.

The Warren Commission, headed by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, was formed just seven days after President Kennedy was assassinated. Last February, after seven astronauts died when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated 200,000 feet above Texas, NASA's Columbia Accident Investigation Board was created 90 minutes after the incident; $50 million was immediately set aside for the probe. And in just four months, the board has already made public significant findings about the crash investigation.

By contrast, nearly two years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the 9/11 commission only recently opened up its New York City office. The commission's budget has been increased to $14 million, but many experts say that's still far short of the sum needed to do the job right.

It's just weird that the US could hold an independent commission while fighting World War II but not now. But then an independent commission might ask why US air defence was AWOL that morning.

Bumps in the Road Map

The recent promises by Sharon's government to eliminate some, or even all, of the "illegal" settlement outposts (as if to imply that all the settlements are not equally illegal) should not be allowed to obscure Israel's long-term policy vis-�-vis the occupation, most concretely demonstrated by the vast, multimillion-dollar "separation wall" now under construction. Seventy-five miles of this forbidding structure have already been built, with a total projected length of more than 200 miles. The wall, which is more than twenty feet high, with guard towers, electronic fences and two-lane patrol roads, would annex up to 10 percent of the West Bank to Israel; it has already cut off thousands of Palestinians from the rest of the West Bank and from their agricultural lands. The 40,000 citizens of Qalqilya, for example, are now surrounded on three sides by this wall, and most of their farmland has been seized. They are now virtually imprisoned.

This is a grim scenario, but the situation still offers some possibility of forward movement. A recent poll by Israel's Jaffee Institute for Strategic Studies shows that 56 percent of Israelis--up from 48 percent last year--would "support a unilateral withdrawal from the territories in the context of a peace accord, even if that meant ceding all settlements." Here is the signpost for a realistic road map that could be charted by the Bush Administration. If the Administration were to insist unequivocally on a total Israeli withdrawal from the territories as part of a regional peace treaty, it would find widespread support within Israel, perhaps far more than expected. And Washington could use the power of its purse to ease the transition, guaranteeing a subsidy for every Israeli settler moving back to Israel proper. There would no doubt be resistance from the Washington lobbyists and Congress, but the Administration would have compelling arguments on its side. Thirty-two months of conflict have not only devastated the Palestinian civil society and economy, they have led Israel to a dead end. The dream of Greater Israel has become a nightmare.

It would be a very good thing if John Howard, his new role as the hyperally, suggested this course to the Bush administration. It would be an even better thing if George Bush looked more closely at the failure of Greater Israel and applied the lessons of that failure to the project for Greater America.

Governmental cock and bull about Iraq
Andrew Wilkie writes:

But sooner or later the cock and bull surrounding Iraq and WMD is going to catch up with the Australian Government. The deception and its consequences are just too great to be ignored.

The Government sold us the war on the basis of Iraq's "massive" WMD program. The image was of a huge and deadly arsenal imperilling us all. Time was of the essence.

Allowing the chief United Nations weapons inspector, Hans Blix, the little more time he asked for would have been foolish (even though the Coalition is now taking for itself much more than the little extra time he asked for.)

However, no huge program has been found. If the WMD program was destroyed just before the war it must have been small. And whatever may yet be found would need to be so limited in scale as to have been concealable during weeks of searching.

Wilkie is a former senior analyst with the office of national asessments. He appears on Thursday before the house of commons select committee on foreign affairs.

The coalition governments are just going to have to learn that you can't fool all of the people all of the time in a world of asymmetric media. No doubt Wilkie will appear before the inevitable Australian inquiry as well. The prime minister's bleat that: 'Those from the opposition who now seek to denigrate what this government and this country do are, in effect, calling for the restoration of Saddam Hussein as the ruler of Iraq.' will not make the questions go away.

Downer and intelligence
From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer today said he was told Bali could be a terrorist target four months before the deadly attacks that killed more than 200 people - but Australia had no intelligence information or specific advice that the Bali attack was likely to occur.

Speaking to reporters in Darwin, Mr Downer said the warning came from an Office of National Assessment (ONA) analyst who was theorising about likely targets for terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah (JI) in the South-East Asian region.

Officers from the ONA met Mr Downer on June 18 and 19 last year and one officer told him Bali, the Indonesian province of Riau, and Singapore would be attractive targets for the JI terrorist network.

"This was hypothesising, it was theorising by one particular analyst; it wasn't based on any (specific) information that he had," Mr Downer said.

"Of course, perceptive as it turned out, ... (because it was) based on theorising by one particular analyst and not based on any hard information, there was no sense among the officials or ONA that we should upgrade our travel advisories.

"Our travel advisory was already warning people about possible terrorist attacks in Indonesia."

I'm glad the foreign minister views intelligence with such a sceptic eye. Now if only he had done the same with the intelligence on the missing WMDs, but somehow when there's a war to justify mere hypothesis seems good enough for the minister.

snark of the week
From the Sydney Morning Herald

The insults have been visceral. "Many in the Labor Party await with bated breath for Mark Latham to do more damage to the Liberal Party than he does to the Labor Party and taxi drivers with his pronouncements," said Beazley in Perth on Thursday, a sly reference to the feisty Member for Werriwa's notorious punch-up with a wayward cabby.

I put that back to Latham on my radio show. "The taxi driver was stealing my property and Kim Beazley's trying to steal the Labor leadership off Simon Crean. I'm happy to tackle them both," he shot back. Solidarity forever, comrades.

I guess it's been a really snarky week or...

A snark is a long time in politics.

NGOwatch on Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch, in a report promoting sexual confusion among students in public schools, recommends groups that promote same-sex marriage, and have been associated with NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association).

Click here here to read more on the Human Rights Watch website.

Human Rights Watch promotes "sexual orientation" rights. "Sexual orientation" encompasses numerous behaviors, including illegal activity.

See Appendix here for a list of sexual orientations from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition.

Human Rights Watch denounces abstinence programs.

Click here here to read more on the Human Rights Watch website.

Human Rights Watch advocates for gays in the military.

Click here here to read more on the Human Rights Watch website.

Human Rights Watch demands release of some detainees at Camp X-Rayin Guant�namo Bay.

Click here here to read more on the Human Rights Watch website.

Note the alleged link to the DSM actually goes to another rightwing thinktank's critique of the DSM.

yet more regime change
The Asia Times reports:

The AEI and another right-wing group, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, have announced that they are launching a new website (www.NGOWatch.org) to expose the funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs, and particularly their alleged efforts to constrain US freedom of action in international affairs and influence the behavior of corporations abroad.

The organizations are especially alarmed by what they see as the naivete of the Bush administration and corporations that provide NGOs with funding and other support. "In many cases, naive corporate reformers, within corporations and in government, are welcoming them," complained John Entine, an AEI fellow.

To mark the site's launch, AEI, which is funded mainly by major corporations and right-wing foundations, also held an all-day conference called "NGOs: The Growing Power of an Unelected Few" that featured a series of presentations depicting NGOs as a growing and largely unaccountable threat to the Bush administration's foreign-policy goals and free-market capitalism around the world. The conference was co-sponsored by a right-wing Australian think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.

I am calling on all like-minded bloggers to attend a conference called 'Ultraright US Thinktanks: The Growing Power of an Unelected Few'.

US meets Taliban
The Asia Times reports:

According to a Pakistani jihadi leader who played a role in setting up the communication, the meeting took place recently between representatives of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Taliban leaders at the Pakistan Air Force base of Samungli, near Quetta.

The source told Asia Times Online that four conditions were put to the Taliban before any form of reconciliation can take place that could potentially lead to them having a role in the Kabul government, whose present authority is in essence limited to the capital:

Mullah Omar must be removed as supreme leader of the Taliban.
All Pakistani, Arab and other foreign fighters currently engaged in operations against international troops in Afghanistan must be thrown out of the country.
Any US or allied soldiers held captive must be released.
Afghans currently living abroad, notably in the United States and England, must be given a part in the government - through being allowed to contest elections - even though many do not even speak their mother tongue, such as Dari or Pashtu.

If true, this is insane. Perhaps regime change in 2 countries at the same time is not as easy as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz claim after all?

I've been some imagining. Of course I'm a hopeless idealist but what if the great powers had restricted their interventions in the Middle East to cases of international humanitarian intervention? What if Mossadegh had not not been deposed by the CIA? What if the US had not armed Saddam with chemical weapons in order to fight Iran? What if the Soviet Union had not imposed its own guy in Afghanistan?

Given the unhappy record of previous interventions why should we expect Iraq to be any better? What have the war party learned from previous interventions that they are applying in this intervention? So far the only possible answer to the last two questions is nothing and nothing.

The Road to Surfdom and Pandagon blog the same story.

UN push for Mid-East peace

Mr Annan said the introduction of US officials next week to monitor the road map was "a beginning, and it may be enough if the parties are able to break the cycle of violence".

"In the interim, I would like to see an armed peacekeeping force act as a buffer between the Israelis and Palestinians," he said in New York.

Mr Annan disputed the decision by the US and Israel to try to sideline Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat from the peace process, saying he had "not been entirely negative".

The Roadmap is going nowhere. Israel's effort to ensure its own security does no more than incite Palestinian retaliation. The Palestinian government does not have the capacity to provide security. A third party needs to do it.

And (just quietly) wasn't the occupation of Iraq going to guarantee a Middle East peace settlement?

constitutional tunnel vision
We all know the Howard model (if it even makes it to a referendum) will get rejected by the people. The speculation on why Howard is pushing it is fun. Speculating on why labor would support it is sad.

What's sadder is the vacuum the debate is happening in. The states have constitutions. New South Wales sends deadlocked bills to a referendum and empowers the legislative assembly to pass supply without consent of the legislative council. Victoria (roughly) follows the Howard model. Victoria treats supply bills the same way as NSW.

Victoria has also enacted a highly declaratory rule:

Section 16A. The principle of Government mandate
(1) It is the intention of the Parliament that regard should be given to the following principle--


The Council as a House of Review will exercise its powers in recognition of the right and obligation of the current Government to implement--


(a) the Government's specific mandate--the policies, promises and initiatives which were publicly released by or on behalf of the Government during the last election campaign; and
(b) the Government's general mandate--to govern for and on behalf of the people of Victoria.
(2) The principle in sub-section (1) is not to be construed as limiting the powers of the Council, the Assembly or the Parliament.".

Queensland, the ACT and the Northern Territory have taken the more drastic option of not having a second chamber. Why does federal constitutional debate always happen in a vacuum?

Great moments in science

Well, it's something I always wanted to know.

Time drags for stoned rats

Cannabis makes rats lose track of time, robbing them of the ability to discriminate between short and long periods.

This may help explain why human users may be less adept at tasks that require sustained concentration.

For some reason it took me forever to blog this story.

snark of the week
From the Sydney Morning Herald:

But it [the Australian government] refused to acknowledge the inevitability of organised carnage, going so far as to mislead the US about Indonesia's intentions. During the Tampa affair, a momentary failure of communication from the military to the Government laid the basis for a sustained and grotesque political abuse of raw intelligence in the children overboard scandal.

The increasing frequency of leaks and unauthorised briefings from the Washington and London intelligence communities are sure signs they know they're being set up. After all, these guys wrote the manual on dirty tricks. That's why the British papers are suddenly full of unnamed MI6 poobahs complaining about interference by Tony Blair's office. And why a lot of CIA guys have been bitching to The Washington Post about the number of times Vice-President Dick Cheney would loom over their shoulders, cracking his knuckles and choking everybody with warm clouds of Old Spice while he rumbled about how much he was looking forward to kicking Saddam's butt.

Wouldn't you massage the raw intel, just a smidge, just to stop the VP massaging your carotid artery with his knuckledusters?

Bear it in mind the next time someone tries to sell you a blurry picture of a secret missile base, or to convince you of a secret plot to smuggle terrorists into the country via leaky fishy boats. Because, you know, international terrorists just love to travel by leaky fishy boat and they always announce their arrival by twirling a few kids in the air over their heads, before tossing them to the fishes.

The intel says so.

The inevitable carnage in Aceh also seems not to be happening or not to require any Australian action.

Kim goes West
I'm amazed. When the Beasley challenge to labor leader Simon Crean was announced I assumed it would be a cakewalk. A week later I'm shaking my head. Having lost 2 federal elections in a row Kim Beasley chose to run on the one single platform guaranteed to lose him the leadership.

Running on your own charisma would seem poor tactics when you've lost 2 elections. When the said charisma campaign is precisely the way you lost the said elections it seems amazingly poor tactics indeed. When your program was to stand for nothing and compromise on everything it takes amazingly bad political judgment to run for leader on a program of standing for nothing and compromising on everything.

Crean has campaigned on policy and he's done it bravely and effectively. If the labor caucus have a brain between them between them they'll stick with Crean. And that is not something I could have imagined saying a week ago.

Carnage
From the ABC:

Hamas vowed revenge for Israel's helicopter gunship attack of just over 24 hours ago and it has delivered in swift and brutal terms. The militant Palestinian group has claimed responsibility for a bombing on a crowded Jerusalem bus during peak hour, which has killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 60.

Within an hour, Israel hit back with a missile attack on a car in Gaza City, which killed seven people including two senior Hamas members and wounded dozens of bystanders. Then a short time later Israeli helicopter gunships fired more missiles in Gaza killing at least two more Palestinians.

It's one of the worst eruptions of violence in this three-year Intifada and it comes exactly one week after the peace summit in Aqaba in which the Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to work toward a peace settlement.

The United States President has again condemned the violence and while the Israeli Government has defended its assassination attacks, both the Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen and Yasser Arafat are now calling on all Palestinian factions to stop their attacks against Israel.

When the Roadmap was first published and agreed to by the parties I expressed scepticism here and there. I was partly wrong, Sharon has gone much further than I expected, but the Roadmap leads nowhere as long as the Palestinian side does not control its extremes and the Israeli side maintains the assassinations policy and the settlements.

It seems to me that the Palestinian authority does not have (if it ever had) the capacity to control Hamas and the others. Perhaps destroying the Palestinian authority's security infrastructure was not Israel's brightest policy initiative. How that capacity can be increased enough to satisfy Israel's demand for security is really the only question and the Roadmap does not address that effectively. Transatlantic phone calls will not suffice. International boots on the ground might and those who supported the Iraq invasion on failed state grounds should ask themselves about the situation in the Occupied Territories.

How not to manage a colony

The pro-war people never really bothered to understand the anti-war argument, lost in their fantasies of Churchill and Munich, 1938. A less apt analogy could not have been drawn. What many anti-war people argued was not that the US would lose the Main Force war against Iraqi units, but would find the second war, the guerrilla war, impossible to win. That Iraq would seem to provide a victory, but that Iraqi history indicated that an armed opposition was likely to explode at some point. The reason you didn't want to tip over Saddam, is that you didn't want to see what he was sitting on.

Well, now we do, and we're bungling it. What reason have we given an Iraqi to be loyal to us? At the end of the day, why should Iraqis endorse any of our plans for their country? The Iraqi people may well decide that the best role for the US is in leaving their country. That hasn't happened yet. But, at the end of the day, are we going to provide a reason for Iraqi cooperation without a tank on every corner to ensure it?

While DailyKOS is always worth reading, this piece is outstanding.

Rumsfeld rediscovers state sovereignty!
Speaking in Germany:

Rumsfeld said that the world must strengthen organizations that allow nations to cooperate against a threat, "we must take care to not damage the core principle that undergirds the international system - the principle of state sovereignty," he said.

The secretary said he sees respect for the principle of sovereignty eroding. "We see it ? in my view ? in the International Criminal Courts claim of authority to try the citizens of countries that have not consented to ICC jurisdiction," he said. "We see it in the new Belgian law purporting to give Belgian courts 'universal jurisdiction' over alleged war crimes anywhere in the world."

I am now doing intensive research to discover which nations the International Criminal Court has invaded and occupied without the authority of the United Nations.

Howard speeches on WMDs
From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Four months ago, on February 4, John Howard made a ministerial statement to Parliament lasting an hour. He began: "My purpose today is to explain why Iraq's defiance of the UN and its possession of chemical and biological weapons and its pursuit of a nuclear capability poses a real threat to the stability and security of our world ..."

On March 12, Howard announced, in a national television address: "The Government has decided to commit forces to action to disarm Iraq. We are determined to join other countries to deprive Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons capable of causing death and destruction on a mammoth scale ..."

On March 20, the day of the US-led invasion of Iraq, Howard told Parliament: "We have made a very strong commitment to disarming Iraq. We have done [so] because we believe it is in Australia's long-term national interest. We do worry about the ultimate and fateful coming together of weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism."

On April 10, the day Baghdad fell, Howard told reporters: "I've said all along we wouldn't expect to get hard evidence of chemical and biological weapons until well after hostilities ceased. They've been obviously passed around and hidden."

Howard told Parliament on May 14: "Australia did the right thing. We brought freedom and liberty to an oppressed people. That is something about which we should always be properly and eternally proud." And Iraq's supposed chemical and biological weapon stockpiles? Howard, amid a brief reference well down in a 40-minute speech: "The hunt for these weapons will not be easy ..."

After a six-week recess Parliament resumed on May 13 for the budget. Iraq remained all-but ignored. Three weeks of sittings were dominated by the Hollingworth serial and Labor's leadership pantomime. Labor's Harry Jenkins (Vic) told the House a week ago: "There has been an eerie silence on Iraq since this Parliament reconvened - only two speeches [by Howard and Simon Crean]. If you compare this to the lengthy debates [before the invasion] you will see how ironic the silence is."

Labor's Kevin Rudd asked the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, the next day about US and British intelligence failures in the assessment of stockpiled Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, now a major issue in London and Washington. Downer replied, stoically: "[Australian intelligence assessments] remain confident in the judgement that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction materials and capability in the lead-up to the war. Over time - we have to be patient - we will get a comprehensive picture of Saddam Hussein's weapons program."

I am glad the federal opposition could find time to put down one (count it) one question on the issue of WMDs.

Howard on WMDs
From Howard's appearance on the ABC last night:

TONY JONES: This leads us, though, anyway to the rationale for the war on Iraq, for joining it in the first place.

Does it matter if no weapons of mass destruction are found in the end?

JOHN HOWARD: I wouldn't say it doesn't matter.

I wouldn't say that at all.

It's too early to make a judgment.

People should be more patient.

TONY JONES: They should be, but people are asking questions now as to where these weapons are.

If none are found, what are the implications?

JOHN HOWARD: I think, Tony, that question should be asked, and I'd be very happy to answer it if after the elapse of a reasonable amount of time such a conclusion is reached.

But it's too early, there are too many sensitive sites, the international team of 1,300 or 1,400 is only now being assembled.

It is altogether too early for people to say, "There definitely haven't been and won't be any evidence found "that Iraq had a WMD capacity before the war started."

Those are issues that obviously I'll be asked about.

If those things happen, then I'll be --

TONY JONES: When will be the appropriate length of time?

When will we know one way or another?

JOHN HOWARD: Certainly some time from now.

I'm just a poor simple blogger but I could swear I heard John Howard tell parliament that WMDs were a matter of certainty. If we now have to wait 'some time from now' to know about WMDs why the hell did we just fight a war over them?

Accepting responsibility

After the Bay of Pigs disaster when the CIA tried to invade Cuba and failed, President John F. Kennedy took personal responsibility and ordered an independent investigation.

In fact, the incompetent invasion had been planned during the Eisenhower administration, so JFK easily could have blamed the mess on his predecessor.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Franklin Roosevelt established an investigative commission chaired by Justice Owen D. Roberts, a Republican Supreme Court member who had been the prosecutor for the notorious Teapot Dome scandal.

The War on Terror is not a war. It's a rhetorical device. If a nation at war can survive an independent inquiry into Pearl Harbour in the face of World War II it can probably survive an inquiry into 11 September or the missing WMDs. All 3 coalition nations now face mounting pressure for inquiries.

John Howard raised the beginning of a defence last night - we believed what we were told. George Bush and Tony Blair do not have a similar defence available. It's high time all 3 leaders started accepting responsibility.

neoliberalism and the executive
The Senate debate is rolling out along not unpredictable lines. The proposal is electorally dead so naturally labor is thinking of supporting it. I think it's interesting that neoliberal governments seem to believe in the centralisation of power in the executive at all costs.

Conservatives advocate checks and balances. Neither Howard nor Bush have ever seen checks and balances as anything but a road bump on the path to the enactment of their program. Certainly they do not recognise that scrutiny and deliberation are likely to improve any proposal.

The classic was the security laws we had to have after 11 September which were then left unused for months.

Tinker, tailor, spinner, spy

The irony is that the Prime Minister's reluctance to have the truth of all this investigated by an independent inquiry presided over by a judge stretches him on the same sort of rack that he used against Saddam Hussein. In the prologue to the conflict, Ministers asserted, and none more evangelically than Mr Blair himself, that if the Iraqi dictator had nothing to hide, then he would be fully co-operative with the arms inspectors.

That argument is now turned against Mr Blair. If he has genuinely nothing to fear from the truth, then he should be prepared to establish a comprehensive, independent inquiry.

I am surprised by this development. The antiwar majorities disappeared from the polls in Britain and Australia almost as soon as war began. If those majorities now decide that war was based on a lie, that's grim, sad news for Blair and Howard. Howard is already falling back on the predictable defence that he accepted intelligence given to him by the US and UK governments. I am not sure if that argument will run in Australia. It certainly has no traction in Britain.

My guess is that there will be an inquiry and that its findings will have massive impact in Canberra and Washington as well as London. To survive, Blair needs a good explanation for the total absence of a vast arsenal ready to fire in 45 minutes. A couple of contested trailers of mass destruction are no longer enough.

special Queen's Birthday snark of the week
From the London Times:

We cling to the monarchy as an anchor to the past and to the country that we once were as if that was a positive statement in its favour. Yet it is precisely because it is such an anchor that we need to throw it overboard and set ourselves free. Until we rid ourselves of the feudal mania which fixates on the banal preoccupations of an ordinary 18-year-old boy, who happens to have been born into the Royal Family, we will forever remain the class-ridden, class-anchored, class-obsessed society we have too long been.

In all truth I doubt abolishing the monarchy would achieve much of the author's object. The media would just grow a cinematic mania for Hollywood types.

I did not have sexual relations with that intelligence
All right, no-one's actually said it yet, but I'm sure it's coming.

Is Blair lying?

What both men forget, or ignore, is that we live in an age of asymmetric media. The BBC reaches the most educated Americans, the full range of British newspapers from the Sun to the Guardian are now daily reading for Americans. Americans can gain the same understanding of British politics available to Britons and vice versa. The internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate. So Blair's Question Time is news in the US as it happens. A US Congressional Committee's actions are reported in real time to the UK. Allegations in British newspapers are no longer reported second hand, but read and discussed daily. It takes no more effort to quote from the Guardian than the New York Times and live broadcasts of BBC4 are a browser away.

If the prewar WMD intelligence is shown to have been negligent or dishonest, asymmetric media will cause a few earthquakes in Canberra as well. It's well-known that both US and UK intelligence are leaking an avalanche at the expense of Bush and Blair. The one factor that the DailyKOS does not include is that I would guess the odd French or German intelligence document might well find its way to a backbencher or two in the house of commons.

The Australian Parliament: Time For Reformation

Leaving aside the question of the functions of parliament, and proceeding to the second question: What is wrong with parliament that it needs reform? The implicit answer of the orthodox reformers is that it puts too many difficulties in the way of governments governing, too many limitations on the power of governments to do what they like between elections. This naturally leads to a further question: Why should governments have absolute power between elections? What advantage would we gain by removing parliamentary limitations on government power? Usually the orthodox reformers have no answer. If pressed, they say it is because the country must have certain legislation. Currently it appears that we must have certain media ownership legislation, which is self-evidently good for us. How we are to know that it is good for us without thorough examination through parliamentary processes is not explained. The claim is also made that we must be economically efficient, and we will regress economically if the government does not have unfettered power to do what is economically good for us. The same people, however, tell us that at present, under the current parliamentary system, the economy is doing wonderfully well. Perhaps we could have an even more efficient economy if the government were all-powerful. If asked for an example of an efficient economy, these people usually cite the United States, the country which has the most rigorous institutional and political constraints on the power of the government.

In any event, the argument that powerful government equals economic efficiency has been blown out of the water. The American academic Arend Lijphart conducted a detailed study of stable modern democracies, rating them according to whether they have more majoritarian systems (in which one party wins power with few limitations) or proportional or consensual systems (in which parties are compelled to share power and compromise). He found that, on a range of economic and social indicators, including economic growth, inflation and employment, the proportional/consensual systems clearly outperformed the majoritarian systems. This finding has been supported by a recent comparison of Australia's economic performance with that of the Netherlands, Lijphart's most proportional/consensual country..4 In spite of their only argument having been decisively refuted, the proponents of orthodox "reform" press on. Every so-called reform of parliament turns into a proposal to reduce it to a rubber stamp. We have been provided with a perfect example in recent days. A proposal to change the parliamentary term to four years was floated, probably initially to fill in time between afternoon tea and the cocktails at a party conference. This change is said to be self-evidently necessary for economic efficiency. We were not given time to consider whether, if politicians now are short-term thinkers, incorrigible pursuers of quick political advantage and pork-barrellers, adding a possible extra year to their term would turn them into statespersons and great forward planners. The proposal immediately developed into schemes to nobble the Senate entirely, to allow the government, under various guises, such as joint sittings, to pass any legislation it liked and, as a necessary by-product, to avoid any parliamentary accountability. If these schemes appeared too drastic, perhaps we would buy the old chestnut of 'stopping the Senate blocking supply'. As this usually involves allowing the government to call anything 'supply', the effect would be the same.

Australian government is about modified majoritarianism. By its nature, a federal government always commands a majority in the House. Any bill supported by both government and opposition always passes the Senate. All Howard's reform would really do is lock the opposition out of the process, so naturally the hereditary political geniuses in the federal parliamentary opposition are tempted to support this.

Empire of lies
From the Washington Post:

The latest vogue in Washington is the proposition that it really doesn't matter whether Saddam Hussein maintained an arsenal of unconventional weapons in recent years. American troops may not have uncovered any evidence of the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration was warning about, the argument goes. But they have found plenty of proof that Iraq suffered under a brutal dictator who slaughtered thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of his own people, and that is reason enough to justify the invasion. We disagree. We are as pleased as anyone to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but the United States cannot now simply erase from the record the Bush administration's dire warnings about the Iraqi weapons threat. The good word of the United States is too central to America's leadership abroad ? and to President Bush's dubious doctrine of pre-emptive warfare ? to be treated so cavalierly.

Like most Americans, we believed the government's repeated warnings that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threatened the security of the world. The urgent need to disarm Saddam Hussein was the primary reason invoked for going to war in March rather than waiting to see if weapons inspectors could bring Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs under control.

It would still be premature to conclude that Iraq abandoned its efforts to manufacture and stockpile unconventional arms after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991. But after weeks of futile searching by American teams, it seems clear that Iraq was not bristling with horrific arms and that chemical and biological weapons were not readily available to frontline Iraqi forces.

Like most Australians, I shared the expectation of most Americans that WMDs would be found. I thought the war was wrong, for various reasons, but I am astonished that there is no sign of the vast arsenal ready to go on 45 minutes' notice. Even if the outcome for the Iraqi people is desirable that does not excuse those leaders who appear to have shown either duplicity or incompetence in dealing with intelligence issues.

The US is not popular in the world and that popularity is falling dramatically as a direct result of this war. Before we listen too gently to those voices who claim what the hell, we did over an evil tyrant we should ask them about the Congo, about Burma, about Aceh. Without the WMDs what distinguishes those places from Iraq and if liberation is a good and sufficient cause to go to war when will the coalitions of the willing assemble?

Worse than that, the US armed forces are already dramatically over-stretched. We now know that US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld deliberately reduced boots on the ground to prove a point. We now know that prewar estimates of a 250 000 troops to maintain the occupation were not, as the war party claimed at the time, exaggerated.

In his rage and impatience for an easy solution George Bush told the US Congress that the US is not subject to the decisions of others. Because of the over-stretch the US needs allies to maintain the occupation. Those who would promote lying as an act of state should think long and hard. The lies make it difficult to persuade allies to contribute troops. And the lies make it difficult for the Iraqi people to believe anything the coalition tells them. Lying costs.

Howard on Senate deform

And not surprisingly when you look back through the history of constitutional examination you find some nuggets and I found a nugget back in 1959, it was a joint parliamentary committee on constitutional reform and it has impeccable bipartisan credentials. One member of it was the then Member for Werriwa, Edward Gough Whitlam, and the other was Sir Alec, or later to become Sir Alec Downer, that well known South Australian Liberal, the father of our present Foreign Minister, a former Minister in the Menzies Government and former Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. And what that committee essentially recommended was that the Constitution should be altered by referendum to provide that if legislation were rejected on a number of occasions by the Senate in the way described in section 57 now there could be a joint sitting of the two houses called without the necessity to hold a double disillusion. And that if the legislation were passed that joint sitting then it would become law. I think that could offer some years into the future a way of providing a more modern and contemporary and workable method of resolving differences between the two Houses. And it is the Government's intention to prepare and issue for public debate a discussion paper on such a proposal, we have not made a decision as yet to commit ourselves to the holding of a referendum, at this stage we have made decision to commit ourselves to the issuing of a discussion paper and the initiation through it of public debate. We have to find a way which is moderate and non-threatening and which respects the desire of the Australian people often to differentiate their vote between the House of Representatives and the Senate to resolve the deadlocks that we are facing. The proposition that every time a bill that is important to a government that in our case has been elected on three consecutive occasions, the proposition that the only way you, for years into the future, are going to solve that dilemma is by going to the expense of having often a premature double disillusion of Parliament, is I think increasingly unacceptable in the modern Australia in which we now operate. I know that constitutional referendums are notoriously difficult to get passed, we tried to break the nexus between the size of the House of Representatives in the Senate back in 1967, and that was overwhelmingly defeated, even though it had the support of both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party, and we all know the history of more recent constitutional referendums.

But that doesn't absolve me or the Government of the responsibility of trying to find a way around this challenge. Conditions could exist for a double disillusion of the Parliament, in fact technically they exist now, although let me repeat my view that the current parliament ought, absence special circumstances, run its full term. No Prime Minister responsibly forswears his right to call an election if the circumstances are required, but I have the strongest possible view that the Australian people rightly visit electoral judgement on prime ministers and premiers who go expeditiously on an earlier occasion than they might to the polls without a proper reason based on public policy. But double disillusions in the present circumstances would not produce as good an outcome in the Senate for us as would a half Senate held at the normal time towards the end of next year. And they are all the circumstances that I have to take into account. So I take this opportunity my friends of saying to you very frankly that we do need to look at whether the time has come to alter the deadlock provisions of the constitution. And if after that process of three months consultation we thought there was a reasonable prospect of community support the likelihood is that the Government would seek to run the referendum in conjunction with the next general election, whenever that occurs. Now let me repeat this is not a radical proposal. It is a moderate, practical, sensible, long ago thought of idea to resolve what in some circumstances is a legislative nut without the necessity of the constitutional hammer of an expensive and of course inappropriate double disillusion.

This is a radical proposal which would enable the executive to pass any laws it wished. It will be defeated at referendum.

Afterthought
Just to feed my pretensions to run a blog of record, Section 57 of the Constitution reads:

Disagreement between the Houses.
57. If the House of Representatives passes any proposed law, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, and if after an interval of three months the House of Representatives, in the same or the next session, again passes the proposed law with or without any amendments which have been made, suggested, or agreed to by the Senate, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, the Governor-General may dissolve the Senate and the House of Representatives simultaneously. But such dissolution shall not take place within six months before the date of the expiry of the House of Representatives by effluxion of time.

If after such dissolution the House of Representatives again passes the proposed law, with or without any amendments which have been made, suggested, or agreed to by the Senate, and the Senate rejects or fails to pass it, or passes it with amendments to which the House of Representatives will not agree, the Governor-General may convene a joint sitting of the members of the Senate and of the House of Representatives.

The members present at the joint sitting may deliberate and shall vote together upon the proposed law as last proposed by the House of Representatives, and upon amendments, if any, which have been made therein by one House and not agreed to by the other, and any such amendments which are affirmed by an absolute majority of the total number of the members of the Senate and House of Representatives shall be taken to have been carried, and if the proposed law, with the amendments, if any, so carried is affirmed by an absolute majority of the total number of the members of the Senate and House of Representatives, it shall be taken to have been duly passed by both Houses of the Parliament, and shall be presented to the Governor-General for the Queen's assent.

Downsizing in disguise

The streets of Baghdad are a swamp of crime and uncollected garbage. Battered local businesses are going bankrupt, unable to compete with cheap imports. Unemployment is soaring and thousands of laid-off state workers are protesting in the streets.

In other words, Iraq looks like every other country that has undergone rapid-fire "structural adjustments" prescribed by Washington, from Russia's infamous "shock therapy" in the early 1990s to Argentina's disastrous "surgery without anesthetic." Except that Iraq's "reconstruction" makes those wrenching reforms look like spa treatments.

Paul Bremer, the US-appointed governor of Iraq, has already proved something of a flop in the democracy department in his few weeks there, nixing plans for Iraqis to select their own interim government in favor of his own handpicked team of advisers. But Bremer has proved to have something of a gift when it comes to rolling out the red carpet for US multinationals.

This is really not surprising. The Argentines have done almost everything demanded of them under the Washington consensus and their economy is a shambles. The Iraqis, of course, have no choice about accepting the Washington consensus. It's ironic that the Bush administration are happily telling the world that big-F freedom now prevails in Iraq and then wondering why so much of the world regards American-style freedom as a dubious proposition.

Aristotle on Blogs

All the same, as we have said, the causes and principles which they describe are capable of application to the remoter class of websites (topoi tou histou) as well, and indeed are better fitted to these. But as to how there are to be updates, if all that is premissed is the Linked and the Unlinked, and Present and Past, they do not even hint; nor how, without updates and change, there can be generation and destruction, or the activities of the links which traverse the web. And further, assuming that it be granted to them or proved by them that blogs (blogoi) are composed of these factors, yet how is it to be explained that some are lesser, and others greater? For in their premisses and statements they are speaking just as much about virtual as about mathematical objects; and this is why they have made no mention of markups (anasemeia) or links or other similar phenomena, because, I presume, they have no separate explanation of virtual things.

Further confirmation of my theory of the antiquity of blogging.