It's the US policy, stupid

'Public opinion in the Arab world and Muslim world cannot be cavalierly dismissed,' according to the report, which stressed that the gap between professed US values - which are widely appreciated among Muslims - and actual policy is often too deep to ignore or paper over.

'Citizens in these countries are genuinely distressed at the plight of Palestinians and at the role they perceive the US to be playing, and they are genuinely distressed by the situation in Iraq,' it said.

Publication of the report, entitled 'Changing Minds, Winning Peace', comes amid growing concern among US policy elites about a rising tide of anti-US feeling in the Islamic world.

Just last week, a second task force of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York reported that the rise in anti-Americanism in Muslim countries and beyond was so great that it was 'endangering our national security and compromising the effectiveness of our diplomacy'.

'Growing anti-Americanism means that foreign leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to cooperate with us,' said CFR chairman Peter Peterson, who served as Treasury Secretary under former president Richard Nixon. 'That is a sober and practical reality.'

Perhaps the neoconservatives should have considered that opinion leaders in the Middle East can read the US press. Perhaps they should have factored in the expanding anti-American system as part of the costs of their cost-free war.

Stop Wasting Money

This shortfall in oil earnings, not the lack of foreign assistance, is the real cause of Iraq's financial crisis. Each reduction of one million barrels per day translates into lost revenues of about $30 million at today's world market price of $30 per barrel. If Iraq increased its oil exports by one million barrels a day -- which it could achieve with a cessation of attacks on its infrastructure -- it would have about $10 billion per year in additional revenues to begin reconstruction.

Iraq's oil production could probably rise to about five million barrels per day within three years, or an extra $30 billion to $40 billion per year -- enough not only to restore basic services, but to achieve big improvements in living standards and economic growth in the medium term. Iraq would not need official development assistance at all.

The biggest costs in Iraq are not for reconstruction but for U.S. troops. America will pay an astounding $51 billion per year for 140,000 troops. If the United States withdrew its troops and gave just a fraction of the financial savings to Iraq in 2004, there would be plenty of revenue to run the Iraqi government.

By focusing global attention on an economic crisis that does not really exist, America has diverted public attention from serious crises that do. Consider the battles against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. About eight million people will die of these preventable and treatable diseases in 2004.

In 2001, the world created a global fund to fight them. Yet for fiscal year 2004, the Bush administration is committing just $200 million to that fund. For every one of these dollars, the administration is committing $350 to Iraq. These are grotesquely distorted priorities.

It's time for the world to tell America some hard news: Stop wasting so much money on military spending and redirect your efforts toward the world's poor. That's a financial effort that the world can and should join.

There's just so much wrong with the theory that we broke Iraq and must fix it. It puts the private conscience of Westerners ahead of the political will of the Iraqis. It continues the imposition of the Washington Consensus without Iraqi consent.

But the real reason is that the Iraq project would be hard to achieve under a competent and disinterested leadership. A president who lets his staff tell him what the world is thinking, and leaves a major breach of US law unaddressed for months, just does not have the competence or disinterest to do anything for Iraq.

MI6 flaws exposed by former diplomat

[Sir Peter] goes on: 'It would make a huge difference in assessing the value of a report from say 'a source close to the president', to know whether that source is the vice-president, or a household servant, or someone with whom the president lunches occasionally.'

This attack is aimed directly at Sir Richard and Mr Scarlett, who assured No 10 that their second-hand source for the claim that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes was 'an established and reliable line of reporting'. The threat was then hardened up under political pressure from Downing Street.

GCHQ, which provides electronic intercepts, is dismissed by Sir Peter as rarely useful. He monitored foreign wars from London and found it impossible to distinguish the flood of inaccurate or misleading intercepts from accurate ones.

The intelligence agencies offered to monitor secret talks he was having with one foreign delegation, he says, when they reported back to their own capital. But the only intercept they produced after weeks of expense was a single paragraph of a draft agreement, which turned out to have been originally drafted by Sir Peter himself.

I hope the wife of Sir Peter does not same the same fate as She Who Must Not Be Named. More seriously the intel collection for Iraq seems to have suffered all those faults and then been seen by credulous political leaders desperate for a reason to invade Iraq.

Bush Orders Full Cooperation in Leaking of Name

The Justice Department said on Tuesday that it had begun a full investigation into whether Bush administration officials illegally disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer to journalists, and the White House directed its staff to cooperate.

I suspect the New York Times meant this headline to say: 'Bush Orders Full Cooperation in Investigation of Leaking of Name'. If I'm wrong, do they know something we don't?

A bad day at 1600

I sometimes wish the Bush Administration would stop self-destructing for day or two, just so I can get some sleep.

Definitely the snark of the week.

Blair: I've not got a reverse gear

'I can only go one way. I've not got a reverse gear.'

Mocking his current standing in the polls, Mr Blair told delegates: 'The time to trust a politician most is not when they're taking the easy option. Any politician can do the popular things. I know I used to do a few of them.'

'We've been far better at defeating ourselves than the Tories have ever been,' Mr Blair said.

The Prime Minister delivered his much trailed uncompromising message on Iraq saying: 'Iraq has divided the international community. It has divided the party, the country, families, friends.

'I know many people are disappointed, hurt, angry. I know many profoundly believe the action we took was wrong. I do not at all disrespect anyone who disagrees with me.

'I ask just one thing: Attack my decision but at least understand why I took it and why I would take the same decision again.

'Imagine you are PM, and you receive this intelligence and not just about Iraq but about the whole murky trade in WMD .... So what do I do?

'Say 'I've got the intelligence but I've a hunch it's wrong'?' he asked the conference.

I am alarmed. I am not sure Australia would allow the sale of cars without a reverse gear on safety grounds. British traffic must be horrendous if the cars are unable to ever go backwards.

I am equally alarmed that Blair claims to have 'got the intelligence'. He did not, and no amount of splendid rhetoric and flashing eyes will long conceal the plain fact that no WMDs have been found. Once you read the speech in light of that fact, all you have is the same silly claims based on patent untruth that we've heard since the UN debate last year.

Why Costello's $7.5b surplus is a burden, not a boon

Underneath the rhetoric of fiscal rectitude, the Government's fiscal strategy is the same as the mug householder - to retire debt at any cost. For instance, the dividends forgone from the sale of half of Telstra are greater than the interest saved on the retirement of debt. The leaseback arrangements from the sale of Government property such as the Foreign Affairs headquarters are far more expensive than the previous situation in which the Government owned the buildings.

In order to meet these self-imposed burdens, Commonwealth taxation has increased from 23.5 per cent of GDP in 1996 to 25.4 per cent of GDP in 2003 after adding back in the proceeds of the GST, which is a Commonwealth tax that replaced the wholesale sales tax in 2000.

But as a result of this policy, households have an additional burden. As the Government undermines Medicare (eroding the real value of the scheduled fee for medical consultations so that fewer doctors bulk-bill), underfunds public hospitals so that more patients are forced to use private hospitals in order to get timely elective surgery and education funds are switched from government to private schools to encourage the middle class to shift their children from government to private schools, the burden of debt is shifted from the Government to households.

This cost shifting (along with the housing bubble caused by permissive monetary policy) has contributed to the explosive growth in household debt, from $290 billion in 1996 to $660 billion now.

The 2002-03 $7.5 billion surplus should be seen as a burden rather than a boon. It is money that has been taken from the income-expenditure stream unnecessarily because it could have been used to create extra economic growth and jobs.

The latest exercise in cost-shifting is the medical insurance levy. Doctors are going to have little choice but to pay up. That will make the declining value of the scheduled fee (PDF) even less attractive. As a direct result of government policy, then, bulk-billing will fall even further and that can fuel further claims that Medicare is hopelessly broken and should be scrapped outright.

Actually spending the surplus to plug the growing gap between rich and poor would interfere with the Howard government's re-election drive.

The Green Man: Art - Ethics - Culture - Science

Attempts to repatriate the live sheep stuck on a ship somewhere in the Arabian Sea have come unstuck. Allegations have been made that some of the sheep have thrown their lambs overboard.

'We don't want that sort of sheep in Australia' said an outraged John Howard.

What's more, rumors are spreading that some middle eastern terrorist sheep have infiltrated the flock.

'Scare mongering on border security served the Liberal Party at the last election and it will form an important part of the strategic approach we will be taking at the next election. Just let those namby pambies in the Labor Party try and win when we have fear on our side.' he went on to say.

I'm appalled at The Green man's suggestion that the Man of Steel would attempt to fleece the electorate by pulling the wool over our eyes yet again.

No Comment

Blogspeak had a hiccup because of a troll who started posting evil code into comments. Harry's fixed it, although some of your deathless prose (and mine) might have disappeared. Along the way my blogger template got very weird and I did not have the heart to fix the poor thing or put it out of its misery.

And you thought this was all going to be about Australia's failure to ensure sheep ships are shipshape or something...

Shades of Kelly

In a twisted play on a game that governments have recently become fond of, officials of the Bush administration may have deliberately disclosed the identity of their own undercover CIA agent - to get even with her husband.

The incident has echoes of the David Kelly case in Britain, where the weapons expert was named and shamed after the administration realised he had told the media that the Iraq dossiers were 'sexed up'. Dr Kelly later committed suicide.

The American case, now gathering steam, may claim political victims as a Justice Department inquiry is underway and an outcry is building up over the dirty tactics. The Democrats are milking the political fallout while a defensive President George W Bush has reportedly threatened to fire anyone responsible for the leak.

To outsiders, however, the episode signals that the Bush administration will play hardball with its critics at home - just as it will crush its enemies abroad.

If this ends up before a congressional committee or a criminal court it will be interesting to see what extra documents our prime minister will discover no-one told him about.

Who's Sordid Now?

For example, in July two enterprising Middle Eastern firms started offering cellphone service in Baghdad, setting up jury-rigged systems compatible with those of neighboring countries. Since the collapse of Baghdad's phone system has been a major source of postwar problems, coalition authorities should have been pleased.

But no: the authorities promptly shut down the services. Cell service, they said, could be offered only by the winners in a bidding process - one whose rules, revealed on July 31, seemed carefully designed to shut out any non-American companies. (In the face of strenuous protests the rules were revised, but still seem to favor the usual suspects.) Oddly, the announcement of the winners, originally scheduled for Sept. 5, keeps being delayed. Meanwhile, only Paul Bremer and his people have cellphones - and, thanks to the baffling decision to give that contract to MCI, even those phones don't work very well. (Aside from the fact that its management perpetrated history's biggest accounting fraud, MCI has no experience in building cell networks.)

Then there's electricity. One reason Iraq still faces blackouts is that local experts and institutions were excluded from the repair business. Instead, the exclusive contract was given to Bechtel, whose Republican ties are almost as strong as Halliburton's. And if a recent story in The Washington Post is accurate, Bechtel continues to ignore pleas by Iraqi engineers for essential spare parts.

Meanwhile, several companies with close personal ties to top administration officials have begun brazenly offering their services as facilitators for companies seeking Iraqi business. The former law firm of Douglas Feith, the Pentagon under secretary who oversees Iraq reconstruction, has hung out its shingle. So has another company headed by Joe Allbaugh, who ran the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000 and ran FEMA until a few months ago. And a third entrant is run by Ahmad Chalabi's nephew.

There's a moral here: optimists who expect the administration to get its Iraq policy on track are kidding themselves. Think about it: the cost of the occupation is exploding, and military experts warn that our army is dangerously overcommitted. Yet officials are still allowing Iraqi reconstruction to languish, and the disaffection of the Iraqi public to grow, while they steer choice contracts to their friends. What makes you think they will ever change their ways?

Traditional liberal democratic measures, like open tendering for contracts, work better because they're more efficient. The The New Right project seems to have a lot to do with cronyism and not much to do with getting things done quickly and well. You would expect people who worship so sincerely at the altar of the market to advocate competitive tendering.

You'd also wonder why the Bush administration seems incapable of functioning under the same democratic checks and balances as, for instance, the Roosevelt administration fought World War II. A commission of inquiry met within days of Pearl harbour. Somehow I suspect Osama bin Laden might be slightly less dangerous than were Germany and Japan. But I could be be wrong...

Shorter Right-Wing Punditry's Reaction to the Valerie Plame Affair: An Internal Dialogue

Why would master do this? Why he tricks us, and betrays us?

No, it couldn't have been master! Master is good and kind, and gives us wriggly fishes from his table, so juicy sweet! No, no, never master!

But why would the names of lady spiesies be in the newspapers? It's so confusing, it makes our brainses feel all swirly and bad!

No, master never said those nassty things! Never! It was the lady spysy herself who did it, never master! Gollum! Gollum!

It must have been ... libruhlss!! Yes, libruhs, all conspirings and scheme-ings! Tricksy, sneaksy, and false! Libruhls have always hated the precious! They want to destroy the precious! But we won't them, will we, precious! We will wring their necks!

This puts a whole new spin on a late-night conversation with a friend passionate about theology and Tolkien. 'Bush is a wraith', my friend said, 'he's told so many lies to get where he is that there's nothing left of him.' After Wilsongate I am beginning to agree.

Consider this baby's plight, judge asks Ruddock - National - smh.com.au

The department's plan to help S included buying her a toddler's walking aid called a Jolly Jumper, which Family Court judge Richard Chisholm felt inadequate.

'The important thing in this regard is how it came about that S's care was so poor that her muscle development came to be delayed,' he noted in a judgement over their release.

'Inserting a particular device into an unsatisfactory environment seems to me so far from any real solution that it does not warrant detailed discussion.'

Justice Chisholm concluded he did not have the power to make interim orders for the family's release.

But he asked the Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, to give careful and compassionate consideration to the family's urgent needs.

This appalling story is a suitable memorial for Philip Ruddock's administration of the immigration portfolio, now that he is moving to attorney-general as part of the reshuffle

Is Bush's War in Iraq A "Brain Fart"?

Do you think Zinni is angry over the war? He did get worked up as he ended his speech:

'We should be...extremely proud of what our people did out there....It kills me when I hear of the continuing casualties and the sacrifice that's being made. It also kills me when I hear someone say that, well, each one of those is a personal tragedy, but in the overall scheme of things, they're insignificant statistically.' (Perhaps he had in mind the comment Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made in June, when he played down attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq by saying, 'You've got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month; there's going to be violence in a big city.') Zinni continued: 'When we put [our enlisted men and women] in harm's way, it had better count for something, It can't be because some policy wonk back here has a brain fart of an idea of a strategy that isn't thought out.'

Brain fart? That's not quite a military term. But those are fighting words. And Zinni practically counseled his audience to rebel against the Bush administration. U.S. troops, he said, 'should never be put on a battlefield without a strategic plan, not only for the fighting--our generals will take care of that--but for the aftermath and winning that war. Where are we, the American people, if we accept this, if we accept this level of sacrifice without that level of planning? Almost everyone in this room, of my contemporaries--our feelings and our sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and lies, and we saw the sacrifice. We swore never again would we do that. We swore never again would we allow it to happen. And I ask you, is it happening again? And you're going to have to answer that question, just like the American people are.'

Brain fart. Garbage and lies. Never again. This was harsher rhetoric than Zinni deployed on Nightline, though his message was essentially the same. With such talk, he is in sync with Senator Ted Kennedy, who was blasted by Republicans for calling the war a 'fraud.' Note to Kennedy and other critics of the war: Fire away. If a Republican counter-attacks, you can always reply, at least I didn't say Bush is asking Americans to give their lives for a war based on mental flatulence.

It's a lovely phrase, but I think it should be roundly condemned as inaccurate. The phrase is dependent for its force on the dubious proposition that those responsible for this war have a brain between them.

Rewriting history could leave museum looking past it

The National Museum of Australia risked becoming a political plaything if it attempted to sanitise Australian history, according to the former head of Washington's Smithsonian Institution.

Professor Frank Talbot made his warning in a submission to the controversial inquiry into the National Museum's review of exhibitions and public programs.

The review's findings, released in July, found the institution was not politically biased but recommended more emphasis on early European migration.

Talbot's letter is among more than 100 written submissions posted on the museum's website.

'A museum that follows the political line of whatever group happens to be in power is not a museum. It is a disaster, and becomes part of public propaganda,' the submission says.

'One is reminded of museums, art and science being deformed in communist Russia. We do not want our museums to be playthings in the political arena.'

Talbot, director emeritus of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, is a former director of the Australian Museum and a member of the Pigott committee that led to the establishment of the museum.

Seems to me that the History Wars should be resolved by debate. This effort to rework the NMA is getting dangerously close to history by fiat.

Universal Church of the Interactive Network - prayer

Our future, which art within us,

Hallowed is our aim�

Thy gateway come�

Thy downloads done�

As Earth be worthy of heavens.�

Give us this day our daily bandwidth.�

And protect our addresses,�

as we forgive those�

who spam against us.

Lead us not into frustration,�

but deliver us from Microsoft:�

For thine is the client,�

The server and the protocol�

forever and ever.�

Amen.

Umm...

Slaughter of great whales leads to marine life decimation

The wildlife of the north Pacific has been devastated by a remarkable 50-year chain reaction set off by commercial whaling, scientists claimed yesterday. Numbers of sea lions, sea otters and several species of seals have crashed in recent years, because of the mass slaughter of more than 500,000 whales in the Pacific between 1949 and 1969, the researchers believe.

As the great whales such as sperm, fin and sei whales disappeared under the harpoon, killer whales, which used to prey on them extensively, were forced to find new food sources and switched to the smaller marine mammals, causing their numbers to plunge in turn, the group of American marine biologists say.

Harbour seals declined first, followed by fur seals, then sea lions and most recently sea otters. Their alarming declines had been a mystery.



The scientists, whose theory is in The Journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, contend that a 'domino effect' set off by the huge post-war whaling boom, led by Russian and Japanese whalers, is the real root cause.

If true, it is one of the most chilling examples yet of how man's large-scale interference with ecosystems can have unintended and terrible consequences elsewhere.

Bugger! I thought I was part of an irresponsible rent-a-crowd opposed to whaling because whales are big, cuddly and cute. Now it looks like they actually play a serious environmental function. I'll just have to find another cause.

TV ads blamed for rise in child obesity

The [British] government's food standards watchdog yesterday published the first hard evidence blaming television advertising for the excessive consumption of junk food that is causing an increase of obesity among young people.

The Food Standards Agency said it commissioned the big research programme to look into the possibility of a link between the promotion of foods and children's eating behaviour.

In spite of protestations of innocence by the food manufacturers and advertisers, it established beyond reasonable doubt that advertising influences what children eat as well as the brands they prefer.

The agency said it may consider recommending health warnings on packets of soft drinks and snacks, or restrictions on the advertising of these products as well as of fast-food chains such as McDonald's.

There must be some reason that Big Food spends so much on advertising. A subsidy to advertisers perhaps?

Bush's mourning-after blues

On the home front the President's approval ratings were positively dizzying, in the high 80s. No doubt John Howard hoped he would bathe in the reflected glory of a presidential tour.

How the landscape has changed.

The US leader is likely to touch down in Australia on October 22 for less than 24 hours. Unlike Bill Clinton's 1996 visit to Australia, when adoring and swelling crowds thronged around him, there will be no majestic speeches with Sydney Harbour as a backdrop, no long walks along the beach at Port Douglas. And certainly no midnight jam sessions with jazz musicians at The Basement club in Sydney as there was on a recent post-presidential Clinton visit.

Bush will address the Federal Parliament but it will be an almost perfunctory occasion.

The reality is that the George Bush who will arrive in Australia next month is a shrunken figure, suffering plummeting opinion poll ratings and skyrocketing unemployment at home, and mockery abroad. His domestic opponents characterised last week's speech to the United Nations, in which he sought its financial, military and civilian aid for the rebuilding of Iraq - although without relinquishing any US control - as 'begging'.

and:

If Bush thinks his visit to Australia will provide some relief from such scepticism and hostility, he is deeply mistaken. It is not the usual suspects he needs to worry about - the undergraduate anti-Americans who would protest against the presence of any US president.

Extensive Roy Morgan research for the BBC says that while Australians continue to feel a deep fraternal bond to the American people - 63 per cent feel favourable towards them - Australians just don't like Bush: 49 per cent actively dislike him, compared with 45 per cent who don't mind him. They consider him arrogant in his unilateral use of power and in the thrall of right-wing religious fundamentalists.

The US President will receive a cordial reception when he addresses Parliament, but even inside the building, away from the baying crowds of extreme protesters, there will be dissent.

The really interesting question is why we don't feel the same way about John Howard.

[US] House Probers Conclude Iraq War Data Was Weak

Moreover, Goss and Harman dispelled the assertion, made frequently by administration officials, that they possess more concrete information about Iraq's nuclear intention, but are unable to disclose it because it remains classified. 'We have not found any information in the assessments that are still classified that was any more definitive,' the two wrote Tenet.

On this point, the letter said the committee 'had reviewed extensively the allegations that there was a disconnect between public statements by administration officials and the underlying intelligence.'

The letter continued: 'We do believe . . . that if public officials cite intelligence incorrectly, the IC [intelligence community] has a responsibility to go back to that policymaker and make clear that the public statement mischaracterized the available intelligence.' It does not say whether Tenet fulfilled that responsibility.

The authors are the Republican chairperson and the Democratic vice-chair of the US House intelligence committee. Australia's public officials and intelligence agencies have clearly failed to carry out this duty, beyond the avalanche of statements telling us that no-one told the prime minister.

When John Howard made his statements before and during the Iraq War he had no idea that any of the raw intelligence would ever become public knowledge. The Hutton inquiry is the only reason we know (for example) about the 14 February JIC report which said that that a war was likely to exacerbate the chance of any WMDs falling into the hands of terrorists.

We need an independent judicial inquiry to tell us precisely what the prime minister was told. It is clear the WMDs either do not exist or are no longer in Iraq. If they did exist their absence means the JIC report was correct and they are now in the hands of terrorists.

Clearly the prime minister's prewar account of the WMDs was badly wrong. If so, the Australian people are entitled to know whether that results from incompetence or duplicity.