Scientists: Bush Distorts Science

The Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization, also issued a 37-page report, "Scientific Integrity in Policymaking," detailing the accusations. The statement and the report both accuse the Bush administration of distorting and suppressing findings that contradict administration policies, stacking panels with like-minded and underqualified scientists with ties to industry, and eliminating some advisory committees altogether.

The scientists listed various policy issues as being unfairly influenced by the administration, including those concerning climate change, mercury emissions, reproductive health, lead poisoning in children, workplace safety and nuclear weapons. New regulations and laws are necessary to fix the situation, the statement says.

"We found a serious pattern of undermining science by the Bush administration, and it crosses disciplines, whether it's global climate change or reproductive health or mercury in the food chain or forestry -- the list goes on and on," said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, said he was disappointed in the report, and called it biased.

He said he was troubled by the fact that some very prestigious scientists signed the statement.

A little more detail. I'm also amazed that the White House response merely charges bias without examining any empirical issue. You'd think this one response, of all responses, would contain argument and evidence rather than mere assertion.

The PM's pork-barrelling protectionism

We know that as an economic rationalist he hates taxes, especially new taxes. But as a prime minister with elections to win he loves a levy. A levy is, of course, not a tax, because it is spelt quite differently. So when the deregulation of the sugar industry began to cause the prime minister political problems in 2002 he went straight for his bag of levies.

Australian consumers are currently paying 3c a kilo of sugar. The deregulation of the industry was designed to lower costs and increase efficiency. The sugar levy was designed to increase costs. Howard might have found it hard to think of a reason to isolate the sugar industry from the reforms faced by the rest of the economy, but his party strategists made sure that he also thought up a reason to keep sugar-farmers in marginal seats happy all the same.

And now he has to worry about the impact of the so-called free-trade agreement on the voting intentions of the sugar-farmers.

While his early proclamations on the benefits of an FTA were designed to shore up his credentials as a free-trading economic rationalist, his ultimate decision to press ahead with a deal that gave up on free trade in sugar was based firmly on domestic politics.

Much has been made of the importance of United States domestic politics in determining the nature of the Australia/US FTA but it was Australian politics that was the major constraint.

There was no real need to wrap up the agreement so quickly. The Australian negotiators took only half the time taken by those of other countries who have negotiated FTAs with the US. The PM is right that such an opportunity comes along only once in a generation, but it was politics, not ideology, that drove him to rush the deal and deliver a disappointing result.

But, having failed to extract a price from the US sugar-farmers, Howard is now determined to extract a price from Australian taxpayers. The fact is, someone has to give the Australian sugar farmers some more money or Howard may lose office.

The problem for the PM now is that having placed the sugar-farmers on the public teat he cannot remove them before the next election, no matter how much they demand.

Ah well, we'll see how bitter the pill is when the fine print, for that matter the gross print, is released. I wonder if anyone's yet told the cattlegrowers about the floor price which allows, even after 18 years, for tariffs and quotas to cut back in?

Apparently the Bush administration will not submit the FTS to congress for ratification until May. Why then was it announced but not published in January? The urgency because of US politics theory was based on the behaviour of US legislators in an election year. Surely that would mandate submitting it ASAP?

Twenty Nobel Laureates Versus Bush

Specific examples follow, such as the suppression of EPA studies that conflicted with administration positions on climate change and the Clean Air Act. I actually found several items on the list of abuses a bit surprising. For example, the scientists note that the administration is 'supporting revisions to the Endangered Species Act that would greatly constrain scientific input into the process of identifying endangered species and critical habitats for their protection.' That's true, but given that it's only a proposed policy and Bush probably won't get the law passed, I found it odd to see it singled out here.

Far more interesting, though, is this complaint:

In making the invalid claim that Iraq had sought to acquire aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment centrifuges, the administration disregarded the contrary assessment by experts at the Livermore, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

And so Bush's abuses of intelligence to justify war with Iraq and his abuses of science finally merge. If the American public realizes that Bush's willingness to twist information to support his policies is systematic and fundamental to the way he operates, he will truly be doomed in the 2004 election. Perhaps more than any other part of this scientist statement, this sentence should terrify the president.

Finally, the statement ends with legislative proposals to prevent such abuses in the future--for example, laws prohibiting the censorship of scientific reports and the packing of scientific advisory panels. Interestingly, there's no discussion of ensuring that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which Bush has minimized and shipped out of the White House, plays a much bigger role in future administrations. Maybe the scientists felt it was inappropriate to tell presidents how they ought to staff their own office.

The recent brouhaha over job stats exemplifies the whole thing, as does the Bush approach to fiscal projections. You'll not be shocked to hear I do not plan to vote for John Howard but, with the exception of greenhouse issues, his government has at least been prepared to deal with real facts rather than fantasy.

Our Present Political Mess

Of course I understand the desire to not repeat the error of 2000 that leads to this - but look at what this thinking does: it guarantees that the media gets to choose the candidate of the Democrats. Why? Because you personally are an expert on which candidate actually corresponds to your own ideas, so if you vote on the basis of who represents your own thinking best you might vote for a Dean, a Kuninich, a Sharpton, an Edwards, or a Kerry or a Clark because they hold your ideals and articulate them in a way that appeals to you. But if you vote on the basis of 'who can win?' you have to depend on the media, because only they can tell you what the people elsewhere with whom you have no direct contact are actually thinking and going to do. So, you give them all the power.

I'll have to think about this a little, but on first reading it looks persuasive.

Amid Iraq-Bound Guardsmen, Bush Acts to Blunt Foes' Barbs

In discussing Iraq and its weapons programs, Mr. Bush noted that he was not alone in judging Mr. Hussein to be a threat to the world. 'My administration looked at the intelligence information and we saw danger,' he said. 'Members of Congress looked at the same intelligence, and they saw danger. The United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence, and it saw danger.'

Some Democrats in Congress say the intelligence they were shown by the administration had been stripped of caveats or ignored dissenting views about the threats it purported to document. The United States was unable to get the votes it needed in the United Nations Security Council to win explicit authorization to invade Iraq just before the war.

Bush is not acting (except in the Martin Sheen sense). Misrepresenting is not action. And the UN inspectors reached a radically different conclusion - that more inspections were necessary.

Intelligence agency head comes out as newspaper source

FRANK LEWINCAMP: The seminar was conducted under the Chatham House rule, there was a further injunction given clearly to the students, including Mr Forbes, both before and after my presentation that there be no attribution, citing or disclosure of any of the information presented.

I have spoken to Mr Forbes on about four occasions since the seminar, most recently when he called me last Friday to say that an article about intelligence reporting on Iraq WMD would be appearing in the Age the next day. He did not tell me the content of the article.

As to the content of Saturday's article, I have given testimony to this committee in June and November last year about the key judgements which DIO provided to government on the state of Iraqi WMD.

There are similar statements in the article about a latent WMD capability able to be activated at short notice and the degree of weaponisation being unknown, but I have never made and would not make some of the statements attributed to the official in Mr Forbes article.

For example, I have never said that the Bush administration's claims justifying an invasion were exaggerated, nor have I said that the Government was told that Iraq WMD did not pose an immediate threat.

Overall, the article characterises these issues in ways in which I do not. There are judgements in there with which I disagree and views that I do not hold.

This is the second time a high security official has fallen on his sword. It will be interesting when the parliamentary committee report (those parts not yet leaked) is finally released.

Honours list, Public Service Medal

Walter Frank LEWINCAMP, Narrabundah, ACT, for outstanding public service in the provision of high quality intelligence for the strategic planning and conduct of the Australian contribution to the Iraq War.

Lewincamp is director-general of the Defence Intelligence Organisation. He appeared today before the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee. Clearly he enjoys the confidence of the government in dealing with defence intelligence matters.

George Bush, Make-Believe President

This is an entirely new doctrine of war for the United States. In a Cincinnati speech five months before the start of the Iraq war, Bush described it thusly, explaining why the U.S. had to act 'now' against Hussein: 'America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.'

But we knew then that the Iraqis no longer had a credible nuclear program, and we know now that they also didn't have the weapons about which President Bush said there was 'no doubt.'

It wasn't Iraq that was peddling nuclear technology to rogue nations and terrorists. It was Pakistan, our 'ally' in the war against terror. Clear evidence shows that Washington knew this several years ago. Yes, President Bush knew it when he took the oath of office in January 2001. And he never told us, not even after 9-11.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy - after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by American-trained Cuban exiles - didn't point fingers at the CIA or anyone else. Instead, he told the National Security Council that 'we're not going to have any search for scapegoats . . . the final responsibilities of any failure is mine, and mine alone.'

George Walker Bush, who said he was going to 'restore honor and dignity to the White House,' could learn something from that history. Truth is better than fiction when you're sending your youth into battle.

This is the heart of George's AWOL problem. He claims to be a war president (as though that was an excuse) but his National Guard service turns out to have been an exercise in cronyism and absenteeism rather than any actual danger. The issue's become a proxy for other issues, like the war claims and the fiscal policy, where finding definite facts is so much harder.

No oral sex please, this is clean-living Singapore

Singapore's 77-year-old chief judge has given an earthy defence of his country's notorious prohibition on oral sex - declaring the law should be upheld to safeguard Asian standards of decency.

Sending a 25-year-old former policeman to jail for 12 months for receiving oral sex from a teenage girl, Chief Justice Yong Pung How said that despite growing permissiveness in some countries there were 'certain offences that are so repulsive in Asian culture'.

'There are countries where you can go and suck away for all you are worth,' the judge said.

'People in high places do it for all they're worth. I'm not an expert, but you read about it in the papers. But this is Asia.'

Justice Yong was hearing an appeal by Annis Abdullah against the severity of his two-year prison sentence for receiving oral sex from a girl, originally described by prosecutors as 16 years old, but later revealed to be 15 and a minor. Under Singapore law, oral sex, anal sex and homosexual intercourse are defined as acts 'against the law of nature' and punishable by up to 10 years in jail.

I look forward to the Man of Steel denouncing His Honour's judgment as an example of the distinction between Australian and Asian values. Our prime minister has, after all, never been afraid to put his money where his mouth is on such issues. It's just a pity he didn't suck it up over the FTA when his friend George refused to come across.

This trade deal could have been better. But Howard blinked

In reality, FIRB is no barrier, and lifting its threshold for approval in non-sensitive areas will have little effect. There is no way we will attract the US manufacturing investment that poured across the border into Canada and Mexico.

The view that a bad deal was better than none implies that if this deal collapsed, the US would never offer the same concessions again. It implies that the US industries that stand to gain so much from this deal - manufacturers, drug companies, service industries, Hollywood - would give up and walk away, rather than pressure the next US administration to produce a comprehensive offer.

I doubt that too. Last year in similar circumstances, the Mexico-Japan trade deal broke down when Japan refused to open its market to Mexican pork exports. Mexico's gutsy President, Vincente Fox, refused to blink. Back in Japan, the impasse whipped up pressure for farm reforms, and now the Japanese are back to the table.

That is what I suspect John Howard should have done: stood tall, and let it be seen that the sugar lobby was blocking the US from a deal that would have benefits for its wider economy.

That would have increased pressure for farm reforms in the US, preserved Australia's credibility as a global fighter for free trade in agriculture, and allowed us to come back in a non-election year to finish the deal.

Hear, bloody hear. But that course would have required a certain amount of political courage and meant starting an election year with a foreign policy defeat. It would also have fed back into the war. As the Miami Herald said, the US has no better friend than Australia, and if that is less important than the US sugar, beef and dairy lobbies it rather weakens the obsessive bowing and scraping that Howard thinks is foreign policy.

The government can easily answer this argument. It can publish the treaty now.

Iraqi Panel Pivots on U.S. Plan

Even so, Sistani's demand -- and the resulting lack of Shiite political support -- stalled implementation of the caucus plan and led the Bush administration to invite a team of U.N. experts, led by former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, to determine whether early elections would be feasible. Brahimi and his team left Iraq over the weekend after spending a week meeting with political, religious and social leaders.

Brahimi indicated last week that he believed nationwide, direct elections could be held late this year, according to people who met with him. Although Shiite leaders would prefer elections to be held sooner and rival Sunni leaders want them to be held later, both sides appear to be willing to embrace the idea of elections at the end of the year, several Sunni and Shiite leaders said.

With expectations running high that Brahimi will support the idea of elections later this year or early next year, Sunni members have been backing away from the caucuses. Talabani, the Kurdish leader who hosted the Nov. 15 meeting in his palatial riverfront villa and had been a staunch supporter of the caucus proposal, said on Sunday that 'elections are the best way to express the opinions of the Iraqi people.'

Ahmed Chalabi, a moderate Shiite who has been an ally of many in the Bush administration, also has rejected the caucus plan, calling for elections before June. If that does not occur, an official of Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress said, the organization would also support a handover of sovereignty to the Governing Council.

If Chalabi won't support the caucus plan then it's a dead duck. This is what happens when you put together cleverdick plans to spin a process of effective appointment by the CPA into national elections. The Bush administration ends up arguing an impossible position that everyone knows is driven only by the US electoral cycle.

The least discussed element of the November package is the security agreement between the US and Iraq. In keeping with the retrocolonialism that passes for deep thought in the Bush administration Iraq is required to sign an agreement with the US which will legitimise a continuing US military presence.

2. Agreements with Coalition on Security

• To be agreed between the CPA and the GC.
  
  
• Security agreements to cover status of Coalition forces in Iraq, giving wide latitude to provide for the safety and security of the Iraqi people.
  
  
• Approval of bilateral agreements complete by the end of March 2004.

Does the Bush administration imagine that after winning the point on the caucus plan the Shi'a leadership is then going to ignore the matter of the security agreements or consent to a Guant�namo on the Tigris?

9/11 Families Valentines Letter to President Bush

We ask you to stop playing politics with the 9/11 attacks. September 11 was many things, but it was a victory for no one but the terrorists. When your administration treats it like a success story and your political party uses the World Trade Center site as the backdrop for the Republican convention this fall, we are offended. We have witnessed the photograph of you on the telephone on September 11 sold by your campaign as a fundraising vehicle. We have read Republican party officials' acknowledgement that the national convention was planned in New York City at the latest possible date in order to 'flow seamlessly into the commemoration of 9/11.' And we have witnessed your administration's lack of cooperation with the Independent Commission investigating 9/11. On November 27, 2002, you stated, 'the investigation should carefully examine all the evidence and follow all the facts, wherever they lead. We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of September the 11th. It's our most solemn duty.'We ask you today live up to that promise. As president of the United States, you well know that our nation's future is more important than any one person�s political career. We ask you, Mr. President, will you renounce the exploitation of September 11th for partisan political gain?

You claim that September 11th made you a war president. But this is not true. By responding to the terrorism of 9/11 with an unending 'war on terror,'and a doctrine of pre-emptive war, you and your administration chose this path. After September 11, the entire world reached out to the United States with compassion. Rather than building on that good will and ushering the world into a new era of mutual cooperation, an effort that would have required true statesmanship and a willingness to deal honestly with the root causes of terrorism, you appealed to our fears and to the worst in human kind. Your domestic and foreign policies have reduced our nation's leadership, leaving us less secure, less free, less respected and less able to deal effectively with the genuine threat of 21st century terrorism.

Most war presidents, the real ones, have seen war as a somewhat heavier burden than an excuse for poor performace.

On the drawing board

If ever a master plan were needed, it is in Redfern. And good design can help restore something like normalcy, according to Dillon Kombumerri, one of Australia's few Aboriginal architects.

Kombumerri, who is with the Aboriginal Design Unit, Merrima, based in the NSW government architect's office, has been working on a master plan for Redfern and the block, as this Whitlam-era exercise in urban land rights and affordable housing is known.

Most of the original houses - 68 of the 91, according to the Government - have already been demolished. Those that remain are in a poor state, although the drug dealers who have insinuated themselves are not complaining.

Kombumerri once worked for the custodians of the block, the Aboriginal Housing Company, so he knows the dispiriting history of attempts at urban renewal. Even so, he feels there is no choice but to be optimistic. 'I can't see it not succeeding,' he says.

Within weeks the master plan will go to the housing company and the Government. It will offer suggestions not just for new housing on the block but for linkages with public open space and the rail line.

Merrima has a good record. Carr should ensure that their master plan is considered in a hurry.

Spark that fired racial tinderbox

Shane Phillips, of the Tribal Warrior Association, said he knew of two witnesses who were prepared to testify to a coronial inquiry that police were chasing TJ in the minutes before his death.

It is testimony that will be hotly contested.

One eyewitness came forward yesterday to say the suspicion that police had chased TJ to his death was based more on rumour than reason.

The man, an immigrant local who would not give his name, told The Australian he had not seen TJ riding his red pushbike ahead of police when they came hurtling eastward up Phillip Street before eventually finding their way to the crash site.

He saw two officers run towards the impaled boy and lift him from the fence before placing him on the laneway and attempting to resuscitate him.

It is understood a passerby who phoned the ambulance and flagged down police after finding TJ on the fence post holds the key to how police came to find him and why they were travelling so fast.

NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney, Area Commander Bob Waites and the two officers who arrived on the scene insist they had not been chasing TJ before he died.

Three inquiries are running, by the NSW ombudsman, the state coroner and the critical incidents team within the police department. The witnesses have conflicting stories. The community has heated opinions. The politicians are trying to impose their own narratives on the event. Perhaps none of the inquiries can out the immediate causes of the riot.

But immediate causes are just triggers fired into a situation that has existed in Redfern for a long time. The story is not all police attitudes, or community failure, or racial tensions. The real story is that parts of Redfern have been a riot waiting to happen for a long time and what the individuals did or did not do was not going to stop it happening.

The Left Coaster: Bush's Character Problem

People don't necessarily vote for a challenger to an incumbent unless they seriously question whether the incumbent deserves reelection. If enough people believe that Bush had good reasons to lie about Iraq, they won't necessarily see this is enough of a reason to look for someone else. And if they believe the lies about his tax cuts helping the economy (and remember, people have been conditioned to believe taxes are really, really evil so all tax cuts must be good), then they might decide the Bush was wrong on Iraq, but still deserves to be elected. Until enough people really start to see who George W Bush is and until they realize that they have been conned, the 2004 election is destined to be in the hat (and certainly the big money is eager to purchase another round of Bush policies).

Howard v Latham is a slightly different proposition, if only because there is much less of a gap between Howard's image and his actual record that there is between Bush's image and his record. The analysis is interesting because we know the Australian people also believe Howard lied over Iraq, but they do not yet see that necessarily a bad thing.

Certain passionate bloggers (yours truly among them) tend to think exposing the lie is enough. You actually need to expose not just the lying, but the motives for the lying and that is a much harder proposition.

Brogden's riot response: bulldoze Redfern

NSW opposition leader John Brogden today labelled as thugs those who left up to 40 police injured in a violent riot at Redfern and said bulldozers should flatten the inner Sydney suburb.

His comments came as the NSW Premier Bob Carr announced three inquiries would be conducted into the cause of the riots and the death of teenager Thomas Hickey, said today.

Mr Carr said the coroner would investigate how the 17-year-old died after a cycling accident in nearby Waterloo on Saturday, and what police involvement there may have been in his death.

The teenager's death sparked a violent riot in Redfern as members of the community lashed out at police, who they blame for the incident.

Police have denied they were chasing the teenager when he came off his bike on Saturday and was impaled on a steel fence, suffering fatal injuries. He died early yesterday.

Mr Carr said today the police critical incident team also would conduct an inquiry into any police involvement in the incident, which would in turn be overseen by the Ombudsman.

But Mr Carr said police had his full confidence and backing in the way they handled the riots.

'I've got full confidence in the way police tackled this incident ... we have full confidence in the police and they have our full backing,' Mr Carr told reporters.

Carr and Brogden's forthcoming text How not to deal with riots should be an interesting read.

The Brogden statement (I think he means The Block, not the whole suburb of Redfern) grimly exposes the guy's inexperience and his willingness to jump anything, including the shark, for coverage, any coverage. Either that or he's suffering a severe testosterone imbalance this week.

The Carr statement is, in its way, worse. The coroner and a police department internal review will investigate the incident. Couldn't he just wait for the inquiry outcomes?

PM's political plea to church

In a pre-emptive strike this election year, Prime Minister John Howard has asked church leaders not to favour political parties.

The Daily Telegraph newspaper said today Mr Howard had accused some church leaders of indulging in 'partisan' politics which was offending and dividing congregations.

'I think church leaders should speak out on moral issues but there is a problem with that justification being actively translated into sounding very partisan,' Mr Howard told the Telegraph.

'I don't deny the right of any church leader to talk about anything.

'But I think, from the point of view of the unity of the church, it stresses and strains when the only time they hear from their leaders is when they are talking about issues that are bound to divide their congregations.'

Boldface mine. This is getting almost as weird as the super decision. The churches are unlikely to pay much attention (nor should they) and the statement just makes the Man of Steel look like his political touch is getting a little rusty.

British spy op wrecked peace move

A joint British and American spying operation at the United Nations scuppered a last-ditch initiative to avert the invasion of Iraq, The Observer can reveal.

Senior UN diplomats from Mexico and Chile provided new evidence last week that their missions were spied on, in direct contravention of international law.

The former Mexican ambassador to the UN, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, told The Observer that US officials intervened last March, just days before the war against Saddam was launched, to halt secret negotiations for a compromise resolution to give weapons inspectors more time to complete their work.

Aguilar Zinser claimed that the intervention could only have come as a result of surveillance of a closed diplomatic meeting where the compromise was being hammered out. He said it was clear the Americans knew about the confidential discussions in advance. 'When they [the US] found out, they said, 'You should know that we don't like the idea and we don't like you to promote it.''

The story of the US/UK decision for war gets stranger and stranger. Why were they in such a hurry to get the troops rolling at all costs? The UK certainly can hardly deny the spying operation. It is prosecuting a GCHQ whistleblower for disclosing the operation. We can at least exclude fear that Britain, without action, would face 45 minute WMD strikes.

Africa needs Nile water but Egypt won't share

The Nile Water Agreement of 1929, granting Egypt the lion's share of the Nile waters, has been criticised by east African countries as a colonial relic. Under the treaty, Egypt is guaranteed access to 55.5 billion cubic metres of water, out of a total of 84 billion cubic metres.

The Egyptian Water Minister, Mahmoud Abu-Zeid, recently described Kenya's intention to withdraw from the agreement as an 'act of war'. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former secretary-general of the UN, has predicted that the next war in the region will be over water.

The Nile treaty, which Britain signed on behalf of its east African colonies, forbids any projects that could threaten the volume of water reaching Egypt. The agreement also gives Cairo the right to inspect the entire length of the Nile.

It has been gravely resented by east African countries since they won their independence. Kenya and Tanzania suffer recurrent droughts caused by inadequate rainfall, deforestation and soil erosion. The proposed Lake Victoria pipeline is expected to benefit more than 400,000 people in towns and villages in the arid north-west of Tanzania.

'These are people with no water,' said the Tanzanian Minister for Water, Edward Lowasa. 'How can we do nothing when we have this lake just sitting there?'

Yikes, and I thought the politics of the Murray-Darling were complex. The politics of the Tigris-Euphrates, and for that matter the Colorado, are difficult as well. This also suggests that perhaps empire is not quite as good at settling disputes between colonised nations as some of us would like to believe.

Infertile Crescent: The Decline of Iraq

Iraq sits along a stretch of land once so productive that the whole region � which included present-day Syria, Iran and Jordan � was known as the Fertile Crescent. In ancient times, the area led the world in agriculture and technology. It's hard to reconcile that history with the reality of today, when the term "Infertile Crescent" would seem more appropriate.

and:

The First World can respond to these Third World problems in one of three ways. It can provide humanitarian aid once a crisis has arisen. It can ignore the situation as long as possible and then intervene militarily once the crisis cannot be ignored (at a cost, in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, of an estimated $100 billion per intervention when you add up all the potential costs of military action and rebuilding). Or it can intervene before a crisis to stave off looming problems.

There are lots of other countries teetering on the brink. We will be hearing more from Bangladesh, Haiti, Nepal, Indonesia and others. Even for a country as wealthy as the United States, there is a limit to the number of $100-billion interventions we can afford, and there are many alternative uses at home for that money - improving our schools, say, or fixing Social Security or establishing universal health insurance.

The most effective and least expensive approach would be to help Third World countries solve their basic environmental and public health problems before they cripple societies. The cost of a global program to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis - the world's three most costly infectious diseases - is estimated by public health organizations at about $25 billion, or one-quarter the cost of a single military intervention.

Attacking problems before crises is a policy that differs in motivation (though not in policies pursued) from a traditional humanitarian response that comes out of a moral commitment to address crises. Its motive is selfish. Preventing chaos abroad benefits the United States. President Bush would be on the right track with his policy of pre-emption if he were aiming at pre-empting crises, rather than at pre-empting military aggression.

In today's globalized world, any country can pose a threat: Just look at Somalia and Afghanistan, which rank among the poorest, weakest, most isolated countries on Earth. We can't take on the whole world militarily. Keeping weak countries from getting into the kind of trouble Iraq found itself in would ultimately save the U.S. money - and generate global political capital.

Iraq has been misgoverned for centuries. The reason is not the evil of its rulers (that is a necessary, not sufficient, cause). The real reason is the ecological devastation Jared Diamond is writing about. An impoverished environment produces an impoverished society and impoverished societies tend to have rulers who are bad, mad and dangerous much more frequently than prosperous societies. On the other hand, prosperous societies can get a tad grandiloquent:

I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, legitimate king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four rims of the earth, son of Cambyses, great king, king of An�an, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of An�an, descendant of Teispes, great king, king of An�an, of a family which always exercised kingship, whose rule [the gods] B�l and Nabu love, whom they want as king to please their hearts.
�

When I entered Babylon as a friend and when I established the seat of the government in the palace of the ruler under jubilation and rejoicing, Marduk, the great lord, induced the magnanimous inhabitants of Babylon to love me, and I was daily endeavoring to worship him. My numerous troops walked around in Babylon in peace, I did not allow anybody to terrorize any place of the country of Sumer and Akkad. I strove for peace in Babylon and in all his other sacred cities. As to the inhabitants of Babylon who against the will of the gods were [enslaved?], I abolished the corv�e which was against their social standing. I brought relief� to their dilapidated housing, putting thus an end to their main complaints. Marduk, the great lord, was well pleased with my deeds and sent friendly blessings to myself, Cyrus, the king who worships him, to Cambyses, my son, the offspring of my loins, as well as to all my troops, and we all praised his great godhead joyously, standing before him in peace.

As far as I know George Bush has not read the Cyrus cylinder, but it really does sound amazingly familiar. The rhetoric of empire is not distinguished for its originality.

Cyrus occupied Babylon, then the centre of the civilised world, in 539BC. By 330BC the deteriorating ecology of Iraq enabled Alexander to put an end to the Persian empire. Despite growing environmental problems the Persians had retained enough military force to conduct a number of pre-emptive wars in the Aegean in order to keep the world safe from the unruly Greeks. Militarism is not a permanent solution, especially if the soil in the imperial breadbasket is going saline. (BTW, Cyrus' religious policy assumed that the local chief god, Marduk or Yahweh for instance, was always the same as Ahuramazda and that other religions therefore were identical with his own.)

Diamond identifies soil erosion as a major threat to our civilisation, one we are doing nothing about:

He said the media focused on fossil fuel problems, climate change, biodiversity, logging and forest fires, but not on the soil because it was less spectacular.

"There are about a dozen major environmental problems, all of them sufficiently serious that if we solved 11 of them and didn't solve the 12th, whatever that 12th is, any could potentially do us in," he said. "Many of them have caused collapses of societies in the past, and soil problems are one of those dozen."

And if you haven't read Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, you should.

Caveat: Saddam Hussein is guilty of crimes against humanity and should be punished for those crimes.

John Quiggin: NYT on FTA

A surprising number of commentators have made the claim that only anti-US or anti-government motives could explain opposition to such a deal. The (nearly) universally negative reception it has received outside Australia suggests the opposite - only partisans of the government or those who advocate unconditional compliance with the wishes of the US Administration could support it, once they have examined all the evidence (The fact that the details are still secret, and that the summaries released in the two countries differed radically is, of course, evidence in itself).

John's post about kills the pro-FTA arguments dead, as does the selection of opinion pieces he quotes. The sad fact, to recapitulate the Miami Herald (boldface mine):

Unseemly? America has no better friend than Australia. Yet such is the power of American sugar interests, the Bush administration has forced Australia to continue quotas on its sugar exports to America. That was a price for achieving the not-exactly ''free trade'' agreement signed last weekend. But look on the bright side: Restrictions on beef imports will be phased out over 18 years.

If this is the best the Howard/Bush chemistry can achieve then maybe it's time to close down the congaline. And why is the text being withheld?

Blair's claim is simply incredible

The Guardian has a report by a former intelligence officer analysing the Blair claim that he (unlike his defence secretary and his just resigned leader of the commons) did not know the 45 minute claim related only to CBW battlefield weapons.

One: neither Cook nor Hoon saw fit to tell the prime minister, for whatever reason.

Two: the intelligence was not considered important or accurate enough to explain to him in detail - even though it appears in the September 24 dossier at least three times and in the prime minister's own foreword.

Three: Blair had to rely on verbal briefings from the JIC chairman and others, who told him about the 45 minutes bit of the intelligence but omitted to mention that it referred only to battlefield weapons, and neither the prime minister nor any of the brilliant young staff asked the obvious question.

Four: the original SIS report mentioned the 45-minute time, but made no attempt to distinguish between strategic and battlefield weapons - even though the service was aware that the report was about battlefield munitions.

Five: the prime minister's daily written intelligence brief from the Cabinet Office included the 45 minutes point but not the crucial distinction between battlefield and strategic weapons. And not a single member of the Cabinet Office assessments staff (the most brilliant intelligence analysts in the UK) spotted this or thought it important.

This is not the case of a few guardsmen out of step or a few trumpeters out of tune. This is like holding trooping the colour but forgetting to tell the Queen the correct date.

Lieutenant Colonel Crispin Black worked for defence intelligence from 1994-96 and was on the intelligence assessment staff from 1999-2002

Well, Canberra is not London and here we have precedents for forgetting to tell the governor-general the correct date.

The Government Must Be Crazy

Equally concerning is that under the proposed deal, the government will effectively be signing away our sovereignty - our right to make decisions independent of outside influences - in two of the most important areas: quarantine laws and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Under the deal, the US has won the right for American representatives to sit on the Australian bodies that determine our quarantine laws

Similarly, the US has won the right to have American representatives sit on the Australian board that decide which medicines will be subsidized by Australian taxpayers' money.

It takes little to appreciate the army of savvy US legal experts that will be aggressively advocating Australia's subsidization of American pharmaceuticals.

And US Pharmaceutical companies already receive enormous assistance from their own government through a sophisticated range of publicly funded intellectual property supports.

This astounds me. I will not comment further until we finally get the text instead of DFAT's increasingly odd summaries. Why can't the government just post the text?

Link via comments at John Quiggin.

Error 404

Yes, those lying, imperialistic dogs have lied to you again. They have told you that would would find http://www.windsofchange.net//archives/004594.html. here but we do not have such a file.

That file is not even within 100 miles of this website. That file is committing suicide because it has been shamed and Allah will roast its stomach in hell.

Look around. Do you see the file they claimed was here? No! But we will be sending so many files to them that their weak and stupid browsers will scream for our mercy. And we will show those browsers no mercy whatsoever. We will show no mercy because the infidel dogs of (none) who sent you looking for the file deserve no mercy. The bones of their programmers will be left to bleach in the terrible heat of the desert sun!

Ummm...

Probe to Include Bush

In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to bolster the case for war.

The move puts claims made by President Bush and other senior officials in his administration squarely in the sights of the committee's investigation, and could add to the White House's political troubles as it tries to keep questions about the war from becoming a drag on Bush's reelection campaign.

The White House and Republican leaders in Congress had sought for months to confine the inquiry to the performance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and to insulate the administration. But the Senate panel voted unanimously Thursday to expand the probe after some GOP members appeared ready to break from the Republican position.

Some weeks, just nothing seems to go right...

Barbie's valentine for blond Aussie Blaine

'Like other celebrity couples, their Hollywood romance has come to an end,' Mattel marketing vice-president Russell Arons said.

Adding insult to injury for Ken, Barbie has a new fella, Blaine. He's a fair dinkum blond Australian boogie boarder, dark roots and all.

And she now boasts a deeper tan, boardies, a bikini top and a carefree attitude to match.

But Anne Hollonds, chief executive of Relationships Australia, fears for their future.

Evidently Barbie has been spending too much time with the Man of Steel. On the other hand 'barbie' is used in Brazil to mean a gay man who looks like, well, a Ken doll. And hopefully this obscure lexical reference will save me from the kind of shameless flipflopping that's recently hit The Road to Blainedom. And I'll get the hits anyway...

Craven call anything but cool

An astute Liberal Party observer of the Prime Minister for years said yesterday: 'There is an old saying in politics: beware of an old man in a hurry. Howard is an old man desperate to win the next election because he can now see he should have gone last year, and if he now loses he'll just be lumped in with everyone else except, of course, Menzies, his hero.

'So jettisoning friends and colleagues and policies is what he's going to do if he thinks he must to win. Yet the reality is that what happened this week is the end of Howard politically.

'Speak to Queensland's Ron Boswell. He was close to resigning after Thursday's meeting. He can't believe that Howard, who has built a 30-year career on supposed politically integrity, could be so breathtakingly naive not to see the effect on the public mind of what he's done. I mean, it's not his decision on super so much. It's the fact that in eight years of government Beazley and Crean never had a win on anything, ever, and both were treated by Howard with complete contempt the entire time.

'Now, in just two months, Latham has the Government turned entirely on its head. In only six parliamentary sitting days he's caused Howard to make the most craven backdown of his political career. I mean, Howard has been defending the parliamentary super scheme for 30 years. Every prime minster since Chifley [who introduced MPs' superannuation in 1948, even if it was nothing like the pot of gold the scheme would become over the years] has managed to defend it - except, now, Howard.

'And if Howard has gone to water like this in February, how will he ever get through an election still eight or nine months away?'

For weeks there have been rumours of a leadership challenge by Abbot and Costello. The Backflip of Steel probably means that challenge will happen sooner, much sooner, rather than later.

We must act now over Israel's wall

It is highly unlikely that the British government would have mustered the necessary support for military action against Iraq if it had not assured MPs of two things: that Iraq possessed lethal weapons of mass destruction, and that action against Iraq would form part of a broader engagement with the problems of the Middle East.

The motion for war passed on March 18 last year in the House of Commons explicitly welcomed 'the imminent publication of the Quartet's roadmap as a significant step to bringing a just and lasting peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians and ... endorses the role of Her Majesty's Government in actively working for peace between Israel and Palestine'.

Those that were persuaded of the case for war would almost certainly have been more sceptical if they had known what we know now about the state of British and US intelligence. They would also almost certainly have been more sceptical if they had known that by now there would be practically no sustained momentum for peace in the Middle East from London and Washington.

At the time, the line from the White House was that the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad - that cutting off Saddam's support for Palestinian terrorism was the essential first step. But apart from President Bush's photo opportunity in Aqaba and some bold speeches, there is little to show for British and American efforts. The most recent public action of the two governments has been to try and prevent the International Court of Justice from ruling on the legality of Israel's security wall.

The US and the UK have been forced into a position that not only looks unreasonable, but also makes it almost impossible for them to be seen as honest brokers by the Palestinians.

The time for inaction is over. Without concrete steps to dismantle settlements, reroute the wall and start negotiations on a final settlement, preferential trading terms for Israel should be suspended by the EU. The Middle East is too important for Europe's own security to wait for the Americans.

Sir Menzies Campbell is [UK] Liberal Democrat deputy leader and foreign affairs spokesman

What did happen to the theory that the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad? Somehow I've missed all the mentions of it lately.

Daschle opposes free trade plan

In the past, Daschle said, he's generally backed free-trade agreements and hoped potential problems could be worked around. But, he said, this one would be too damaging to rural America.

The deal is probably a way to repay Australia for its help in the war in Iraq, Daschle said. But he thinks the United States needs to take care of its cattle producers first. That means resolving mad cow concerns before opening the borders to Canadian cattle. Daschle said the U.S. Department of Agriculture has only found 28 of the 80 cattle from the herd in which the infected cow in Washington state was discovered. The livestock were born in Canada before being transported to America. The USDA has announced it's ending that investigation.

Australia is the United States' 13th largest trading partner. The trade agreement should lead to slightly higher beef exports for both countries. Tariffs on exports will be phased out over two decades.

Daschle said he will offer amendments that will eliminate cattle and beef from the agreement. He'd like them left or taken out of other trade pacts as well.

Congress is expected to vote on the Australia agreement next week.

I guess John Anderson will shortly indicate Australia's consent to the excision of beef by declaring it would be unAustralian to have an FTA without beef. The Man of Steel will then announce that it's both antiAmerican and unAustralian to even question whether the FTA, in its final form after passage through Congress, is not the best thing since sliced bread.

I understand the government would like all congaline volunteers to contact them as soon as possible.

More seriously, the vaunted Howard/Bush chemistry could not get sugar included in the current form of the agreement. By the time congress debates it the Howard chemistry will be totally ineffectual.

Howard's super backflip

Mr Howard said he was acting even though he did not think MPs' overall income package was too generous. 'But people think the super's generous and rather than this thing drift on for months as the subject of a partisan political debate I've decided to act immediately to get it off the agenda.'

Mr Latham said he welcomed the Government's response to the initiative he had put forward 'to rebuild public trust and confidence in our democracy'.

'It been eight years in Opposition for the Labor Party and it's the first time we have changed the law from Opposition,' he said.

Mr Howard indicated earlier that he would not follow Mr Latham's example and reduce his loadings. 'I will take the entitlements I have under the existing scheme', as had every other prime minister, he said.

Short of a sudden invasion of the borders by anti-American sugar growers I think we can expect quite a lot of Howard backward double flips with pike and twist before the election.

In fact, he's written a sort of compressed history of his entire prime ministership:

'I think the policy is wrong, but if adopting it is what it takes to get re-elected then I will.'

Next: Latham on prime ministerial cellar reform...

Agricultural subsidies vs. free trade

To a North Dakota radio station, U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick vowed that he would stand like Horatius at the bridge to block Australian sugar. The quotas can be considered among the bearable transaction costs of democracy, keeping North Dakota's, Minnesota's and other states' growers of sugar beets and Florida's, Louisiana's and other states' growers of sugar cane from starving. Or seceding. Or being forced to grow something else. But protectionism is unconservative, unseemly and unhealthy -- lethal.

Unconservative? Protectionism is a variant of what conservatives disparage as ''industrial policy'' when nonconservatives do it. It is government supplanting the market as the picker of economic winners. Another name for industrial policy is lemon socialism -- survival of the unfit.

Unseemly? America has no better friend than Australia. Yet such is the power of American sugar interests, the Bush administration has forced Australia to continue quotas on its sugar exports to America. That was a price for achieving the not-exactly ''free trade'' agreement signed last weekend. But look on the bright side: Restrictions on beef imports will be phased out over 18 years.

Is protectionism lethal? Promoted by Democrats hawking their compassion, protectionism could flatten somewhat the trajectory of America's rising prosperity. But protectionism could kill millions in developing nations by slowing world growth, thereby impeding those nations from achieving prosperity. Developed nations spend $1 billion a day on agriculture subsidies that prevent poor nations' farmers from competing in the world market.

Sugar quotas, although a bipartisan addiction, are worst when defended by Republicans who actually know better, and who lose their ability to make a principled argument against the Democrats' protectionist temptation. Fortunately, splendid trouble may be on the horizon.

Last September's collapse of the World Trade Organization's ministerial meeting in Canc�n meant that the pernicious ''peace clause'' was not renewed. For nine years it has prevented the WTO from treating agricultural subsidies as what they obviously are -- market distortions incompatible with free trade. For Americans, a fight over that is worth having, and losing.

The Man of Steel, ably assisted by the Foreign Minister of Kleenex, is developing an argument that Labor, the Democrats, the Greens are mired in anti-Americanism because they criticising the USFTA.

Today's Age carried a good specimen of the beast:

But Labor should look before leaping. For one thing, the politics are fraught. There is no doubt where John Howard thinks the mainstream is on this.

More than that, however, it comes down to a fundamental policy choice: for Labor, is this really the issue, the agenda, on which to say no to America?

All that argument, like Howard's, is really saying is that US policy must never be questioned. When the US media are questioning the FTA for the same reasons as Labor that looks an exceedingly shallow argument.

Spy agencies to face new WMD inquiry

Australia's spy agencies can expect an external inquiry into their handling of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction within months.

The Howard Government is expected to agree to an independent inquiry into the Australian agencies' assessment of secret reports from US and British intelligence bodies after a parliamentary committee reports next month.

The committee's findings are unanimous, without the usual dissenting report on political lines, and a recommendation for an independent inquiry is expected.

The bipartisan parliamentary intelligence committee - chaired by former Howard government minister David Jull and including former Labor leader and defence minister Kim Beazley - is highly regarded, and its findings and recommendations will be hard for the Coalition to resist.

The Government and intelligence agencies may not accept all the findings of the report, but John Howard is likely to follow the examples of US President George W.Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and order an inquiry into the intelligence agencies' collection and analysis of information about Iraq's chemical weapons and nuclear capability.

Pressure has grown for an independent inquiry and an explanation as to how Australian troops were committed to the war in Iraq, and why no evidence of chemical weapons stockpiles has been found since.

The Prime Minister continued yesterday to defend the Government's decision and did not rule out an independent inquiry.

'I take the opportunity of repeating that the decision taken by the Government was the right decision. It was based on the intelligence available to us at the time. I have no regrets of any description about that decision,' Mr Howard told parliament.

'The world is better off as a result of what we did and this Government has nothing to apologise for.'

The world will be better off, if and only if, Iraq becomes a better place in the long run and that is yet to be seen. So is any long term damage to the credibility of the US and its intelligence. It's also yet to be seen what impact the Iraq war will have on Australia's standing in our region where sheriff's stars may not be a badge of popularity.

Expert warns NASA can't afford Mars plan

An aerospace executive warned a presidential commission Wednesday that NASA does not have enough money - or bright young stars - to achieve President Bush's goal of returning astronauts to the moon and flying from there to Mars.

'It would be a grave mistake to undertake a major new space objective on the cheap. To do so, in my opinion, would be an invitation to disaster,' said Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp. and head of a panel that examined the future of the space program for the first President Bush.

Augustine was among five aerospace experts who addressed the first public hearing of the current President Bush's space exploration commission, held in Washington.

Commission member Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who is director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, asked Augustine whether $15 billion a year for 10 years would be enough to set NASA on course to fulfill the moon-and-then-on-to-Mars vision put forth by Bush one month ago. The space agency's annual budget has been around $15 billion in recent years.

Augustine pointed out that during the next decade, NASA will still have the enormous cost of running all its centers, the space shuttle fleet and the international space station, not to mention conducting research. He said the nation traditionally has underestimated the cost of big programs.

Tyson pressed Augustine, asking: 'Are you suggesting $150 billion over the next 10 years would not be enough if it all went to that mission?'

Augustine replied that he had not done enough analysis to give an answer, 'but I guess if I had to bet, I'd bet that it wouldn't be enough.'

Seems like a really silly project to close down Hubble for. While strictly, NASA cites safety reasons for the Hubble closure, I see the real reason as the drive to get the shuttle/ISS program closed down ASAP to free what little money is available for the grand Mars design.

That the weaknesses in the station and shuttle programs are the product of precisely the same fiscal compromises that already afflict the Mars project doesn't seem to have registered yet.

US alliance comes at a price

Tow and Lyon say Howard's support for the US has put at risk Australian gambits for inclusion in emerging Asian institutions, but that Howard has found the risk acceptable.

In joining the US bandwagon so wholeheartedly, Australia has ignored the sorts of concerns about the Bush administration reflected in the recent US Army War College paper by research professor Jeffrey Record.

Record's paper, which has angered the Bush administration, argues that the invasion of Iraq was "an unnecessary preventive war of choice" that took resources from the more critical fight against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, which was behind the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington and Bali.

Like many US and other security experts, Record says the administration's goals are unrealistic and condemn the US "to a hopeless quest for absolute security" and are fiscally, politically and militarily unsustainable.

While the Howard government limited the size and duration of Australian military participation in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has joined Britain's Blair administration in echoing US justifications for the war despite its failure to find Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction and despite continuing violence in Iraq.

Defence and security policy will be front-line election issues this year.

The clarity of government policy offers the Labor Party, which has more nuanced views, an opportunity to challenge the government if it has the political courage to conduct a debate that goes beyond ritual and irrelevant declarations of support for the US alliance.

Australia has nothing to apologise for in relation to the alliance. It is a loyal US ally. It gives - and receives - real benefits from the alliance, and accepts that Australia cannot expect automatic US support in a regional crisis.

The US is a global power with global interests and Australia is not necessarily relevant to its calculations. With the US military now overstretched at the zenith of its global hegemony, Australia might do well, to paraphrase former British prime minister Henry Palmerston, to accept that the US has no permanent friends but only permanent interests.

In defence policy terms, that implies that even nations in cozy alliances need to be ready to fight alone. Being a deputy does not guarantee that the sheriff will always be on hand.

No-one knows if George Bush will be re-elected in 2004 and the Howard government has essentially built an entirely new foreign policy based only on the personal chemistry between Bush and Howard. That personal chemistry seems to generate barbecues and ranch visits but not many trade concessions. There is no feasible way that the chemistry side of the relationship can ever be higher - and it has gained us almost nothing in the new FTA.

Beyond that, the Howard government has essentially abandoned a multilateral approach in favour of congalining the USA. The FTA will have repercussions in Asia, just as the Howard doctrine (wrongly called the deputy sheriff doctrine) did. Australia's purchase of the JSF will have repercussions.

There's a big opportunity here for Iron Mark to start chipping away at the rusty spots on the Man of Steel. The biggest of them is the sheer embarrassment level of a government that seems incapable of even asking if Australia's interests could ever diverge from those of the Bush administration.

As Hugh White told the National Press Club last October:

For better or worse, depending on your view of the case, this problem looks set to fade, as the Bush Doctrine meets reality in Iraq's Sunni triangle. My hypothesis is that we will see no more Iraqs � major military operations to achieve regime change and political reconstruction in states of concern. First, I do not think there are any more opportunities: neither Iran nor North Korea offer practical military options at acceptable levels of cost and risk. Second, there is a question of resources: America�s military strength is great but not unlimited, and as long as it has forces on anything like the current scale committed in Iraq, it would be hard to undertake any other major operations. Money is also an issue, with the US fiscal deficit approaching $500 Billion. And third, there is politics: this northern spring talk of Empire blossomed all over Washington, but this has not survived the first winds of autumn, nor the colder realities of the US presidential primaries.

So if the Bush Doctrine has had its day, what follows? Much depends on Iraq, of course, which will remain for better or worse the overriding preoccupation of American foreign 5 policy for a long time to come. The idealistic hopes of the neo-cons now seem unlikely to be fulfilled, but similarly neither do the gloomiest predictions of the pessimists. Iraq is no Vietnam. I�d plan on a middling outcome, neither very good nor very bad, and an America that is neither imperial nor isolationist. In fact, two years after 9/11, the US is getting back to normal.

That means, among other things, getting back to worrying about China. It also means getting back to the long-term post Cold War realignment of US strategic posture and military basing around the world, including in Asia. I think in the long run that has big implications for Australia. One of those implications is a larger reliance on allies to look after problems in their own regions.

Perhaps there no permanent deputies, just permanent interests.

Courting leaders

Today's Guardian reports that Blair's moral qualities are under threat .

Mr Mandelson, who remains one of the prime minister's closest allies, said there were some inside and outside the Labour party who were exploiting the Iraq issue in order to harm Mr Blair's integrity. 'They do not seem to care what the cost may prove to be to the party or government,' he said.

I would have thought Blair's integrity incapable of being harmed by political attacks. The perception of his integrity, certainly, but not his integrity itself. It is in fact patently absurd to say that criticism is destroying Blair's integrity, as if he were a medieval king an needed everyone to bend the knee.

The same courtly language has flourished in the US recently, most famously as:

MR. RUSSERT:� Is it appropriate to call the president of the United States a deserter?

The best answer to that is to restate its terms slightly, either as:

Is it appropriate to call the president of the United States a draft-dodger?

or:

Is it appropriate for the president of the United States to be a deserter?

Is it appropriate for the president of the United States to procure a burglary?

I am not aware of anyone feeling that Clinton should be exalted above the draft-dodger language, although that is a much lesser charge than desertion. Nor does anyone any longer contend that Nixon was above the law.

I am equally unaware of the US media, including the eminent Mr Russert, investigating the AWOL issue much beyond the kind of appalling vista investigation made famous by Lord Denning. If you declare even the question too appalling, there is simply no way you can ever investigate it. And that is not a happy thought.

Clark to end presidential bid

Retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark will end his Democratic Party presidential campaign, aides said late Tuesday.

The one-time NATO supreme commander will travel to Arkansas to make the announcement in his home state, they told CNN.

Earlier Tuesday, Clark made his usual stump speech to supporters in Tennessee, but spoke of America's future -- not his own.

Well, now there are three. Will Clark's people shift their support to Edwards or Kerry? If they go to Kerry the exercise is over and the DNC front-loading strategy - piling everything on early to ensure the nomination is decided quickly will have succeeded. And failed.

The Iowa caucuses were less than a month ago. Kerry has yet to face the blowtorch to the belly and the front-loading design has made it impossible for him to be tested as, say, Dean was tested and failed. Kerry's electoral performance between now and November will tell if front-loading was a very good idea. One hopes Kerry will remember that Dean, in particular, made the war and the economy the issues on which he is now running but did not, before Dean showed him how, dare to raise.

Meanwhile, on the other side of US politics, I am beginning to suspect that the Bush principate may have passed its use-by date. A certain aphorism by the founder of Bush's party about fooling all of the people some of the time should be required reading.

Govt unable to quantify free trade deal

The fluctuating exchange rate made it difficult to put a dollar figure on the exact economic benefit from the Australia-US free trade agreement (FTA), Treasurer Peter Costello said.

Fisheries Minister Ian Macdonald said the economic benefit would be worth around $4 billion, a figure based on a previous government-commissioned report which did not take account of the absence of sugar from the deal.

The report - quoting a figure of $US2 billion - was also released when the Australian dollar was considerably weaker.

Mr Costello told ABC radio the FTA deal was overwhelmingly in the national interest but refused to be drawn on its exact economic worth.

'A benefit of $US2 billion on an exchange rate of 50 (US) cents is different to a benefit of $US2 billion on an exchange of 78 (US) cents,' he said.

'Of course these things move.

We know they move. We just wonder how much that US$2 billion is worth with sugar excluded, and beef postponed by 18 years. With the AU$ expected to reach US$0.80 within six weeks how will that effect the FTA?

About that text...

Both houses of federal parliament resumed yesterday. Senator Hill, Defence Minister and Leader of the Government in the Senate has evidently developed telepathic abilities. He answered a string of detailed questions about the benefits of an agreement he has not read.

Read this question, if you will, and consider the text I've boldfaced:

Question without notice

Senator HILL: I have to say, Senator Carr, for your benefit, that he has done an excellent job in negotiating this agreement for Australia. On the substantive part of the question as to when the full text will be available, as of yesterday I was unable to get a firm answer on that.

Senator Carr: Haven't you got a copy?

Senator HILL: No. There was a suggestion of a fortnight, but I suspect it might take a little longer than that. What is the timetable for implementation? The timetable is that the enabling legislation should be passed during this year. That will mean that the process within the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties will need to be a prompt one. The government will certainly be approaching it expeditiously and looking to that committee being provided with the information that it requires as quickly as possible. We would urge the committee to go about its job in order that we might meet that time frame. That is, no doubt, an ambitious time frame but, with benefits so great for Australia as flow from this particular agreement, the government is obviously anxious to be able to bring it into effect as quickly as possible.

Incidentally, the foreign affairs department advises anyone with a query to email them at us_fta@dfat.gov.au. '_' is, of course, an illegal character in an email address and the address therefore does not work.

Where is the text? Why can't it be published?

Nats to take on PM in party room

The National Party MP Ian Causley, a former president of the NSW Canegrowers Association, said the outcome of the negotiations was 'deeply disappointing' and promised to take his complaints direct to Mr Howard in the party room.

The FTA is 'probably good for Australia, but not so good for rural industry,' he said.

Mr Howard's suggestion that canegrowers should leave the land with government compensation raised particular concern.

'The solution is not just another reform package aimed at getting farmers off their farms,' said Peter Lindsay, the Liberal member for the sugar seat of Herbert.

'That just undermines the whole industry, by making the mills uncommercial.' The answer was a comprehensive package encouraging alternative use of cane, in 'power generation, biofuels and other areas'.

The National Party whip and member for the highly marginal sugar growing seat of Hinkler, Paul Neville, said encouraging some farmers to leave the industry risked serious flow-on effects, because of its integrated nature.

The independent and former National Party MP Bob Katter, who holds another sugar seat, was more blunt.

'Specifically on the 15th, 23rd and 28th of January, [the Trade Minister] Mark Vaile said sugar was a non-negotiable part of the deal,' he said. 'The growers believed there would be no deal without sugar. I believed it myself.

'We were lied to and stabbed in the back. Then they deliberately held back the news until after the Queensland election.'

Mr Katter predicted that the Government would lose at least five marginal sugar seats in Queensland and northern NSW as a result.

Someone please wake me when the Nats have finished going through the motions and the Man of Steel has finished giving them promises, such as sugar being non-negotiable.

A Misreading of the Law

More to the point, the Reynolds case raises a central question that Hutton misses completely. If Gilligan's broadcast was so terrible, if the Blairs were having sleepless nights as a result of being accused of deceit, if the prime minister was shunned at home and abroad as a liar, the law has a simple remedy, the one adopted by Albert Reynolds in the case that Hutton makes so much of: sue for libel. Reynolds was himself a prime minister (of Ireland) but if it is thought beneath the dignity of a serving UK PM to resort to the courts, why did poor, maligned, isolated Alastair Campbell not sue himself, especially when (he would have us believe) his own honour was so grossly impugned? And what about the Mail on Sunday, where Gilligan's greatest excesses of character destruction were to be found? Campbell makes much of his hatred of the paper: here was a chance to take it to the cleaners. Had this course of action been adopted, the judge and jury who heard the case would not have been constricted by the terms of reference with which Hutton misled himself. There would have been questions about the context and a proper cross-examination of the principal actors. The jury might not have been able to avoid asking itself about those supposed weapons of mass destruction that this supposedly unsexed up dossier was so certain about.

In truth no such suit would have succeeded, which is why none was launched. Perhaps the most disappointing feature of Lord Hutton's report is his failure to appreciate the distinction between stopping the media in advance from publishing something and punishing a media outlet for wrongful publication after the event. It is the second of these that our defamation laws are concerned with. Newspapers and other media seek legal advice, balance the risk, take a chance here, are caught out there, settle, apologise, pay damages if all else fails. Even if a case reaches court and the defendant draws a Hutton, an appeal can ensure that the matter is heard before a more balanced bench. But the law is set against the first approach, seeing a challenge to our democratic culture in the prior restraint of the media. Thus, the laws of libel have long rejected efforts by litigants to prevent publication, on the grounds that, if there is any chance of publication being justified, the place to argue the point is in court after publication, not before. The same applies to trade libels, injurious falsehood and similar claims. Contempt of court laws were changed some years ago specifically to prevent the stifling effect of spurious libel writs being issued in order to be able to invoke the contempt laws to shut the press up. It was the prior restraint dimension to the Spycatcher affair, all those endless injunctions, that ultimately led to a series of Strasbourg rulings against the government in 1991. The Human Rights Act, enacted by Labour in 1998, takes great care to protect the press and other media from injunctions obtained without their participation, and designed to foil reports which have not yet been run. Lord Hutton ignores all this. Instead he would create a mini court of law inside the BBC, staffed no doubt by cautious lawyers, whose job it would be to examine all news broadcasts for evidence of 'false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians'. An ideal Hutton world would have such commissars everywhere.

Reynolds is about the remedies available after an item is published. Hutton is about restraint before publication. Hutton misreads Reynolds in the most egregious manner. Hutton almost, in fact, breaches his own standard of 'false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians'. Certainly Hutton made such false accusations against at least one BBC editor whom he neither heard nor warned.

The obvious solution is to make the conclusions of judicial inquiries appealable and to ensure that the kind of open process you get in a trial can be had in an inquiry.

Not Everyone Got it Wrong on Iraq's Weapons

The fact, independent of the findings of any commission, is that not everyone was wrong.

I, for one, was not. I did my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up their allegations regarding Iraq's WMD and, failing that, spoke out and wrote in as many forums as possible in an effort to educate the publics of the United States and the world about the danger of going to war based on a hyped-up threat.

In this I was not alone. Rolf Ekeus, the former head of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, has declared that under his direction, Iraq was 'fundamentally disarmed' as early as 1996. Hans Blix, who headed UN weapons inspections in Iraq in the months before the invasion in March 2003, stated that his inspectors had found no evidence of either WMD or WMD-related programs in Iraq. And officials familiar with Iraq, like Ambassador Joseph Wilson and State Department intelligence analyst Greg Theilmann, both exposed the unsustained nature of the Bush claims regarding Iraq's nuclear capability.

The riddle surrounding Iraq's WMD was solvable without resorting to war. For all the layers of deceit and obfuscation, there existed enough basic elements of truth and substantive fact about the disposition of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programs to permit the Gordian knot to be cleaved by anyone willing to try. Sadly, it seems that there was no predisposition on the part of those assigned the task of solving the riddle to do so.

The everyone was wrong meme is a nice try, but does not really achieve much. There is a distinction between everyone went to war and everyone believed in WMDs. casting the net of those who made war to include those who believed in WMDs is a spectacular example of the fallacy of composition, but a fallacy all the same.

Responsibility lies with those who made the war. Their claim, shown here to be untrue, that everyone got it wrong does not absolve them.

ALP wary state boom will mean federal bust

Yet anyone extrapolating Peter Beattie's latest landslide into Labor gains at the federal election should look back to what happened after his previous landslide victory in 2001.

Labor won 47.2 per cent of the vote on Saturday, down from 48.9 per cent in 2001. Yet in between, the November 2001 federal election saw Labor's vote fall to 34.7 per cent in Queensland, against 45.6 per cent for the Coalition.

That means a quarter of voters who chose to make Peter Beattie Premier at the past two state elections also voted to make John Howard Prime Minister.

It is a repeat of last March's NSW election, when Bob Carr romped home in a state where federal Labor has struggled since 1996.

Indeed, Howard's majority is built entirely on Coalition support in the two rugby league states. The Coalition holds 48 seats north of the Murray to 26 for Labor. In the rest of the country, Labor holds 37 seats to the Coalition's 35.

As in NSW, some of the widest disparities in Labor support occurred in the outer suburbs. Like Sydney, Brisbane is surrounded by suburbs that elect Labor MPs with massive majorities to State Parliament, while sending Liberal MPs to Canberra.

The average house prices and incomes may be lower, but outer Brisbane is populated by voters with the same sort of aspirations as those in outer Sydney.

I think this election will be decided in the ring of outer suburban seats around Sydney and Brisbane and a group of regional seats in NSW and Queensland where the government's trade policy goes against major agricultural interests. And those seats are precisely where Latham's appeal is likely to be strongest and the spin about core and noncore promises likely to weakest.

Trade deal could cost my seat

Asked if the deal could cost the MP her seat, Mrs Kelly said: 'It well could.'

Mrs Kelly is one of a number of coalition MPs in the so-called Queensland sugar seats who will be under pressure due to the government decision to agree to keeping sugar out of the deal.

The shape of the federal election is starting to show, and losing sugar seats in North Queensland looks like one of them.

Australia clinches free trade deal with US

The United States and Australia signed a trade agreement today that officials say will eliminate duties from more than 99 per cent of American manufacturing exports to Australia.

But in a blow for Australian sugar producers, the otherwise comprehensive agreement would not provide any more access to the protected US sugar market, an Australian official said.

The pact would also not lead to 'blue sky open trade' in the dairy sector, but would still provide much more opportunity for Australian dairy farmers to sell their products in the United States, the official said.

In another controversial sector, the pact would lead to free trade in beef over an 18-year phase-in period, he said.

'The Australian ambition in agriculture had to be moderated, but it will be a very, very good agreement for Australia,' the official said.

The text is not yet available. More when it is. Meanwhile:

• sugar farmers can get stuffed
  
• beef farmers can wait 18 years for removal of tariff protection
  
• all agricultural sectors can wait forever for a reduction in US non-tariff protection such as their billion dollar subsidy schemes
  
• quota protection remains in several agricultural sectors apart from sugar
  
• the deal requires US congressional approval although not Australian parliamentary approval
  
• no-one's taken any account of trade diversion if Asian markets look elsewhere for products they previously imported from Australia
  
• mysteriously, the negotiators had a sudden rush to success within a day of the voting in Queensland
  

All told, it makes for a great press release and will probably cost the government 3 seats in North Queensland. It will be interesting, after Saturday night's performance in the Queensland tally room, to see what Bob Katter Jr makes of this.

A little heavy Hansard

Back in September 2003, the Intelligence and Security Committee expressed concern about the way the 45-minute claim as presented in the September dossier. The Government Response to the Intelligence and Security Committee Report on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction has now appeared, although with an odd lack of fanfare. To quote:

12. But the Committee also criticises (paragraphs 110 and 111) the way in which some of the detail in the dossier was presented. It believes that the uncertainty over Saddam�s chemical and biological capacity should have been highlighted to give a balanced view; that the nature of the threat should have been more clearly spelt out, in particular that Saddam was not considered a current or imminent threat to mainland UK; and that the most likely chemical and biological munitions to be used against Western forces were battlefield weapons (artillery and rockets) rather than strategic weapons. The Committee also notes (paragraph 112) that, as the dossier was for public consumption and not for experienced readers of intelligence material, the context of the intelligence on the 45 minutes claim should have been explained, in particular the fact that it was assessed to refer to battlefield chemical and biological munitions and their movement on the battlefield.

13. The Government believes that the dossier did present a balanced view of Iraq�s CBW capability based on the intelligence available. The dossier made clear (paragraph 14, page 16) that the withdrawal of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) had greatly diminished the ability of the international community to monitor and assess Iraq�s continued efforts to reconstitute its programmes. It also noted (paragraph 13, page 16) that UNSCOM was unable to account for significant quantities of agents, precursors and munitions.

The British government had an opportunity to correct the 45 minute error. It did not do so. Unexplained and undeveloped statements that merely say: 'We were right' do not assist their case, except to suggest they have attended Lord Hutton's school for arguing the impossible.

Tony Blair claims to have told parliament exactly when he understood that the 45 minute claim applied only to battlefield weapons. I have searched the Hutton report debate and Blair's appearance before the Liaison Committee. Beyond saying it was after the war vote on 18 March he has not actually given an exact time. I suspect he will have to give a more exacting answer or face much more exacting questions in the next few days.

According to the Independent, the Joint Intelligence Committee sent an assessment to the government before 18 March 2003 in which they stated that the 45 minute claim applied only to battlefield CBW weapons. Has the Man of Steel seconded some of his staff to Number 10? Did Blair throw the JIC assessment overboard?

A little light Hansard

In his resignation speech of 17 March 2003, Robin Cook told the House of Commons:

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term?namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for years, and which we helped to create? Why is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam's ambition to complete his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN inspectors?

In today's debate on the Hutton report, Tony Blair said that he did not understand (when the September dossier was published) that the 45 minute claim did not refer to nuclear weapons but only to battlefield weapons.

Blair was then asked if he knew the difference before the war vote on 18 March, and answered:

Richard Ottaway (Croydon, South) (Con): The Prime Minister says that all the intelligence about the 45 minutes was made available. As he will be well aware, it has subsequently emerged that this related to battlefield weapons or small-calibre weaponry. In the eyes of many, if that information had been available, those weapons might not have been described as weapons of mass destruction threatening the region and the stability of the world. When did the Prime Minister know that information? In particular, did he know it when the House divided on 18 March?

The Prime Minister : No. I have already indicated exactly when this came to my attention. It was not before the debate on 18 March last year. The hon. Gentleman says that a battlefield weapon would not be a weapon of mass destruction, but if there were chemical, biological or nuclear battlefield weapons, they most certainly would be weapons of mass destruction. The idea that their use would not threaten the region's stability I find somewhat eccentric.

Cook addressed this issue later in the same debate:

There is one question that I have for the Butler inquiry to consider. I think that it falls within its remit, however narrow that may be. I have never doubted that Ministers believed all the information in the September dossier when that dossier was presented to Parliament, but I would be surprised if they believed all of it by the time the House was asked in March to vote for war. I say that because in between those two points we had two months of inspections by Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. We had given those inspectors, perfectly properly and correctly, our intelligence to guide them where to look, and they found nothing. Hans Blix has observed, "My God, if this was their best intelligence, what was the rest like?"

Those blank results were fed back to our intelligence agencies by the weapons inspectors. I would like the Butler inquiry to consider whether that knowledge that our intelligence had proved faulty changed any of the evaluation by the intelligence agencies of the threat from Saddam. If so, why did Ministers not tell the House before we went to war?

I shall pick up on the exchange between the hon. Member for Croydon, South (Richard Ottaway) and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister earlier this afternoon. If I heard it correctly?I may have misheard it?the hon. Gentleman asked my right hon. Friend whether he was aware by March that we were considering battlefield weapons rather than wider long-range weapons of mass destruction.

If I heard him correctly, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said no. I am bound to say that I was surprised by that answer. The House will recall that in my resignation speech I made the very point that we were considering battlefield weapons and that Saddam probably had no real weapons of mass destruction. I invite my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence, who will reply to the debate, to consider with his advisers whether it might not be wise to qualify the Prime Minister's answer when he replies. I find it difficult to reconcile with what I knew, and what I am sure my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister knew when we had the vote in March.

Defence Secretary Hoon then confirmed his evidence before Hutton on 23 September 2003 (Para 225). Asked why he had not briefed Blair he resorted to bromides about how government works but then let the cat out of the bag:

The 45-minute claim was used so frequently not because it could be linked to the threat of missiles reaching here but because it was the only information in the document that implied that Iraq must already have the weapons, because it could get them to an unstated location 45 minutes later. That was the only evidence, and it contradicted the actual conclusions of the JIC, which is why so much was made of that claim.

It seems that Blair could not be briefed on the 45 minute claim because abandoning it would mean abandoning the very notion that the CBW weapons even existed. Be very clear when you read the Hoon speech:

it was the only information in the document that implied that Iraq must already have the weapons

.

Clearly, the Blair government has decided to adopt the Sgt Schultz defence first pioneered by the Man of Steel.

The prime minister's knowledge of the battlefield weapons/strategic weapons difference, and the time of that knowledge, was then a principal point of contention in the Commons debate on the Hutton report. Let us return to His Lordship himself:

A consideration of this distinction does not fall within my terms of reference, but the distinction was noted and commented on by the ISC in paragraphs 111 and 112 of its report presented to Parliament by the Prime Minister in September 2003:

111. Saddam was not considered a current or imminent threat to mainland UK, nor did the dossier say so. As we said in our analysis of the JIC Assessments, the most likely chemical and biological munitions to be used against Western forces were battlefield weapons (artillery and rockets), rather than strategic weapons. This should have been highlighted in the dossier.

Is it really Blair's position that he did not read the September 2003 ISC report, or the March 2003 Cook speech, and that at no stage between September 2003 and Match 2004 no-one made him aware of the difference. And is that really a credible position?

In summary Blair ought to have known the 45 minute claim related only to CBW battlefield weapons because:

• Cook knew and said so publicly in March 2003 before the war vote
• Hoon knew at some unspecified time before the war vote
• the ISC knew in September 2003
• in Britain the ISC reports to the prime minister

Lord Butler: the man who will investigate

During the Scott inquiry, Lord Butler achieved notoriety by defending Whitehall doublespeak and secrecy to a sceptical judge: 'You have to be selective about the facts,' he said, arguing that government had been entitled to mislead about, for example, delicate negotiations with the IRA or impending devaluations of sterling.

'It does not follow that you mislead people. You just do not give the full information ... It is not justified to mislead, but very often one is finding oneself in a position where you have to give an answer that is not the whole truth.'

He joined in ministerial attempts to undermine Scott's inquiry, although he directed his fire ostensibly at the media, saying the inquiry should 'undo ... the damage that had been unfairly done to our system of government, to the reputation of the civil service and to individuals'.

Southerly Buster is forced to conclude the only reason Lord Butler is to head this inquiry is that Sir Humphrey Appleby is unavailable. A cabinet secretary who has twice failed to find any evidence of ministerial wrongdoing is the perfect candidate to hand down another whitewash.