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The Road To 

Surfdom

March 18, 2004

Condiscending

I was busy putting lard on the cat's boils on Sunday morning so missed Condi Rice let this example of her insight into national security drop into the public sphere:

DR. RICE: ....But let's remember that we have already found that he certainly had the intent, this is someone who had used weapons of mass destruction in the past, who was continuing to try to pursue these programs, who had capabilities to develop these weapons, and who was the most dangerous regime in the world's most dangerous region....

MR. RUSSERT: More dangerous than North Korea?

DR. RICE: I think more dangerous than North Korea because--and it's not that North Korea isn't dangerous. Don't get me wrong. It's dangerous. But look at where he sits. He sits in the Middle East. This is someone that we had gone to war against in 1991 because he attacked and invaded his neighbor, Kuwait, and people were worried that he was on his way to Saudi Arabia. This is someone who in 1998 President Clinton used airpower and cruise missiles against because he said we can't allow him to sit there with his weapons of mass destruction. Yes, the most dangerous regime in the world's most dangerous region.

So the fruitcake regime with no nukes is more dangerous than the fruitcake regime with nukes. Check. Of course, she doesn't (this side of sanity, anyway) believe that, but the debacle in Iraqcle and how they got themselves into it leaves her no choice but to put up these inanities-as-facts. And so not only is our security in the hands of incompetents, but our political culture is debased by their inane rationalisations.

I am speechless

I am without speech:

In a morning meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Bremer warned the Iraqi leaders that they risked isolating themselves and their country if they continued to snub the United Nations. According to Iraqi and American officials, Mr. Bremer pointedly warned them of a "confrontation" with the United States if the Iraqis failed to invite the organization back.

New York Times

Professionalisation of the 'sphere

What Patrick said:

...and why Kevin Drum’s new Washington Monthly blog doesn’t load right. (And how about that lack of a blogroll, huh. So much for the “blogosphere,” as more and more of the best bloggers migrate onto sites that don’t link back to the rest of the “sphere.”)

And what Fred said too:

Kudos to Kevin -- and kudos to the Monthly for recognizing quality when they see it. While many publishers and editors half his age remain fearfully undercommitted to online journalism, Peters seems to have embraced its potential to enlarge the voice and the impact of the Monthly's mission and message. Bravo!

Things fall apart

I knew the President was going to make a big speech today about Iraq, but I only just noticed this on the President's schedule:

On Friday, he will visit with wounded soldiers at an army hospital and will address the ambassadors of countries that have contributed to the U.S.-led coalition that invaded both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mmmm. Will Spain still be represented? How about Poland? With comments like this from the Polish President, the conversation might be a little strained:

Poland's president, a key Washington ally in Europe, said Thursday his country was "misled" about the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and added he may withdraw troops early if Iraq is stabilized.

At the same time, President Aleksander Kwasniewski defended the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam, saying it "made sense."

Referring to prewar Western intelligence assessments of Saddam's arsenal, he told a news conference: "From the information that we have, the word 'misled' seems to me the right word. This is the problem of the United States, of Britain and also of many other nations."

Speech begins, Friends, colleagues, assholes.......

Actually, it might be interesting to see who shows up given the fact that it was never clear who actually was in the coalition of the willing. Remember all those countries who the Administration assured us were part of the COW but who didn't want to be identified? Remember Colin Powell?:

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, one, we didn't put together just the coalition of the willing. A coalition is always a coalition of the willing. And this particular coalition of the willing now has 47 nations; 47 nations are openly members of the coalition, and have asked to be identified with this effort. And there are many other nations that for a variety of reasons don't want to be publicly identified, but are also a part of the coalition of the willing.

Pretty funny that they wouldn't tell us who was in the COW and they're now running around screaming at John Kerry for not telling them which leaders told him they don't want Bush reelected.

Hey, America

You sometimes wonder aloud "why do they hate us?" when "they" seems to refer to any person anywhere who happens to not see things your way, friend or foe. Well, if you were in Congress yesterday, you might have found some answers to your question as a number of your leaders took the opportunity to abuse the voting public of an allied country:

With the Senate in recess, top House Republicans led the critique of Spanish voters who replaced a pro-U.S. government with the Socialist Workers' Party on Sunday, three days after terrorists' bombs killed 201 people in Madrid. The incoming government has signaled plans to remove Spain's peacekeeping troops from Iraq.

"Here is a nation who succumbed, politically, to threats of terrorism, changed their government," a decision "in a sense to appease terrorists," Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) told reporters. He contrasted Spanish voters to Americans, who increased GOP congressional majorities in the 2002 elections, 14 months after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told reporters, "If we follow the example of the new Spanish government, and we accept failure in Iraq and permit victory of the terrorists there, there will be no counting the number of people around the world who will suffer the consequences."

Then there was Henry Hyde:

"The vote in Spain was a great victory for al-Qaida" - the terror group purportedly responsible for the bombings of rush-hour trains, said Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House International Relations Committee.

Dickheads.

I guess Australia can look forward to the same congressional treatment if we happen to change government later in the year.

Between facts and norms

Tony Parkinson's piece, "If the West dances when al-Qaeda acts, the terrorists win", is emblematic of a type of article I've seen a few times since the Spanish election and I must admit, I don't don't understand what they are getting at. The objective, it seems, is to criticise to the point of smearing anyone who thinks there is an alternative to the Bush approach to terrorism while under their breath reserving to themselves the right to hold exactly the same views as those they have just criticised. You can't help but feel that such an approach is macho preening at best and unnecessarily divisive at worst.

So Parkinson's opening ploy is to set up the big picture problem, namely, that anyone anywhere ever who under any circumstances suggests a link between support for the Bush Administration's approach to the "war on terror"--especially (as they understand it) the Iraq theatre--and the likelihood of that making such a country a target of terrorism is necessarily giving comfort to terrorists everywhere:

The blame game across the Western world that accompanies each twist and turn in the war on terror is not only absurd, but dangerously corrosive. It serves only to give succour to the real villains of the piece.

The terse debate over whether US-led military action in Iraq heightened the risk of al-Qaeda attacks may be the stuff of frantic political posturing in Australia, as it is in Europe. But it threatens to overshadow the essential lessons to be drawn from what happened in Madrid.

Last Thursday, more than 200 commuters, innocently and peaceably making the journey to work, were slaughtered in cold blood.

This atrocity was carried out by extremists who sat down with train timetables and maps of suburban rail routes, to carefully - mathematically - plot how they would plant backpacks carrying plastic explosives on four passenger trains.

These were gruesome crimes against humanity: inexcusable in their savagery, unfathomable in their malice and impossible to justify. You would think this would strengthen dramatically the case for governments across the world to do all in their power to hunt down the attackers and, where possible, prosecute and punish them. But what do we hear instead?

In the immediate aftershock, Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar is accused of bringing disaster upon his nation, by aligning himself too closely to the Bush Administration on Iraq, thereby "inviting" the attacks.

His Popular Party is quickly voted out of office by an electorate swept up by anger, despair, confusion - and, yes, fear.

Next come the echoes of September 11 and Bali: the ritualistic braying that says the US and its allies in Iraq "have only themselves to blame" if heavy-handed interventions in the Arab and Islamic worlds come back to bite them.

(Spain's) Popular Party is quickly voted out of office by an electorate swept up by anger, despair, confusion - and, yes, fear.

Let's take it a step at a time.

As a summary of what happened, this is conveniently partial. For instance the claim that "Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar is accused of bringing disaster upon his nation, by aligning himself too closely to the Bush Administration on Iraq, thereby "inviting" the attacks" inexplicably deletes from the record the chief reason given by Spanish voters for their anger at the Popular Party in the wake of the attacks: namely, that they felt misled and manipulated by the government (apparently with good reason) as to who was responsible for the attacks. Account after account now suggests that this was the key source of their anger, but Parkinson simply leaves it out.

We might also note the use of the expression "blame game." We can intuit from the article that the blame game is when people who think differently to Tony Parkinson offer explanations, but that it does not include condemning the Spanish population, as he does, for doing what the terrorists wanted.

His characterisation of the Australian reaction is also noteworthy, if for nothing else other than its contempt (note the key phrases that express it):

Finally, as if on cue, opponents of US policy in this country (forgetting conveniently that Bali ever happened) anguish over whether Australia might be the next target: after all, doesn't Madrid prove the perils of fraternising with the superpower?

It is interesting that a journalist would rule out of order a mere question about cause and effect. According to Parkinson it is simply wrong, even in the wake of the slaying of two hundred fellow human beings, to even ask a question about (I mean "anguish over") what the ramifications for Australia might be. In fact, he goes further than that:

Apart from being inherently obnoxious, this line of thinking is wrong-headed, if not delusional. It's time to take a deep breath.

To this point, then, all Parkinson has done is offered an inaccurate account of the Spanish reaction and sought to demonise anybody of a different point of view as obnoxious, delusional and wrong-headed, not to mention anti-American and as "giving succour" to the terrorists.

This might all be news to Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, who was one of those who drew the link between Australia's involvement in Iraq and the risk of attacks in Australia. Maybe Parkinson can get away with, by implication, calling Keelty "obnoxious wrong-headed, delusional and anti-American" (though I sincerely doubt it) but I find it pretty hard to imagine that Mr Keelty has "conveniently" forgotten what happened in Bali. Keelty of course was the cop in charge of what remains one of the great success stories in the fight against terrorists, the prosecution of those responsible for the Bali bombing. I'd be reasonably confident he remembers it.

To this point of the article, one wonders, then, who exactly is having the knee-jerk reaction and who is being obnoxious and divisive. But the extraordinary section of the piece is yet to come. Having chastised the Spanish voting public for changing government and therefore giving in to terrorists, and having ridiculed the likes of Mick Keelty for being wrong-headed in drawing a link between Iraq and other terrorist attacks, Parkinson then offers his account of the Iraq connection:

Of course Islamist extremists were antagonised by the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. The Iraqi dictator was a kindred spirit, a generous and sympathetic backstop to al-Qaeda's violent narrative of revolutionary Sunni extremism. More importantly, they could not let Iraq slip from their orbit.

This has been evident in the orgy of violent assaults by foreign mujahideen in Iraq: ambulances being used to blow apart aid agencies; terror strikes against civilians, particularly Shiites. The aim: to intimidate anyone and everyone who might have a constructive role to play in the emergence of a new, pluralist Iraq. Clearly, the attack on Spain fits this pattern.

This beggars belief on two levels. First, it is an ill-informed account of recent history. Does anyone anywhere seriously believe that Islamist extremists of the sort setting bombs in Spain were antagonised by the defeat of Saddam Hussein? Is there one scrap of evidence that such extremists were supportive of the secular Ba'ath regime? Certainly extremist Muslims the world over are appalled at the US invasion, but it is hardly because of any love for Saddam's regime. To characterise Saddam as "a kindred spirit, a generous and sympathetic backstop to al-Qaeda's violent narrative of revolutionary Sunni extremism" is to fly in the face of all evidence. It is to buy into the worst excesses of the Bush Administration's case for war based on links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, a link they themselves, when pressed, admit does not exist, even as they continue to link them rhetorically. As to the claim that " they could not let Iraq slip from their orbit" - I don't even know what that means. Is Parkinson saying that such extremists were somehow in control of Iraq under Saddam?

The "orgy of violent assaults" Parkinson describes are a direct result of the invasion and the removal of the Ba'aath regime. They are not a angry response to the removal of Saddam but an opportunistic reaction to the mayhem and lack of security extant in that country under US occupation. People of good will can argue about the extent which that is being rectified, but no-one seriously doubts the occupation has opened up Iraq to the sorts of insurgency they are experiencing (people of good will can also differ as to whether the attacks are largely down to ex-Ba'athists or jihadists, another point Parkinson overlooks). You don't have to be for or against the Iraq war to recognise this: it is simply a fact and one acknowledged by George W. Bush when he announced that Iraq was "now the central front" in the "war on terror".

I said this account beggared belief on two levels. The second becomes apparent in the following paragraphs:

What are the repercussions, if any, for Australia? Does al-Qaeda or its franchises have the operational capacity and reach to launch a similar attack on Australian soil? For now, security chiefs seem confident they do not.

But does military involvement in Iraq raise an additional risk that this country's citizens or interests will be targeted, here or elsewhere in the world? Frankly, it seems pointless for anyone in the Howard Government to seek to deny this.

Amazing. Having described anyone who made such a link as obnoxious, wrong-headed, delusional and giving succour to terrorists, Parkinson now tells us that it would be pointless to deny the connection. What exactly was he trying to prove by his tirade, then, if he winds up accepting that such a connection exists? As I say, it beggars belief that he could level such criticisms only to ultimately acknowledge that they had a point.

I. Don't. Get. It.

Look, not everything in the article is wrong or silly. I agree completely with his characterisation of the craveness of the terrorists and the importance of defeating them. But it seems to me that this sort of article represents a knee-jerk and intolerant response to legitimate arguments throughout the world as to how to respond to the threats. It is a mild version of some of the anti-Spanish attacks that have filled the airwaves since the election. It also shows an incredible lack of concern for the feelings of not just the Spanish people in a time of massive national tragedy, but an intolerance towards ordinary Australians who are quite justifiably concerned about the potential for Australia to be attacked. In seeking to characterise all dissenters as anti-American nutbags (and please don't tell me that isn't the implication to be drawn from paragraph 9) the article merely seeks to close down other approaches.

The idea that journalists will tip a bucket on anyone who doesn't conform to their preferred approach is disturbing, but it shouldn't stop people everywhere from expressing their concerns, asking questions of their governments and holding them accountable for their actions, just as the Spanish people did regardless of what certain mindreaders will tell you about "what the terrorists want". It is absolutely true that we are a target no matter what we do, but to characterise dissent, questioning and any given election result as a capitulation to terrorism is thoughtless and unwarranted. I believe people like Tony Parkinson, the Prime Minister and others are genuinely concerned about how we deal with these issues. It'd be nice if they extended the same good will to people who happen to think there might be value in other approaches.

March 17, 2004

Your wish is my command

Looks like all the talk of Spain doing what al Qaedaish jihadists wanted was true:

A group claiming to have links with al Qaeda said on Wednesday it was calling a truce in its Spanish operations to see if the new Madrid government would withdraw its troops from Iraq, a pan-Arab newspaper said.

In a statement sent to the Arabic language daily al-Hayat, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claimed responsibility for the Madrid bombings that killed 201 people, also urged its European units to stop all operations.

"Because of this decision, the leadership has decided to stop all operations within the Spanish territories... until we know the intentions of the new government that has promised to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq," the statement said.

In which case, I just hope Americans hold firm and ignore al Qaeda's wishes, as presented in the same message:

The statement said it supported President Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom."

In comments addressed to Bush, the group said:

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization."

"Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

Clearly, then, a vote for Bush is a vote for al Qaeda!

[wonders]who will be the first to suggest that this is reverse psychology?[/wonders]

Blogjam 2

The new Blogjam is up at Web Diary and covers a range of stuff - hopefully it will send a few new readers into the wider blogosphere. Both Blogjams have sent a bit of email my way, with people mentioning blogs, many of which are new to me, including a couple of Australian expat efforts. There is Words of Mass Destruction written by an Australian in Bangkok, and Simon World, by an Australian in Hong Kong, who, apart from other things, has been following a story about an Australian extradition case. Haven't had a proper look at either site, but I will eventually. Also, John Abercrombie informs me that his new Powerup site is up and running after some early teething problems. In the meantime, if you've got a post for next week's Blogjam, send me an email with the link (to the specific post), a brief description and put blogjam in the subject line.

On a hiding to nothing

Steve Edwards asks a question that sets up a line of attack we can be sure will be sprung in the event of some sort of major terror attack in the US prior to the election:

The U.S. election is in November. Is there to be an October surprise?

Is there any safety in assuming that John Kerry would resist the temptation to cynically politicise said surprise?

Let's face it. If (and may it never come to pass) there is an attack, there is nothing Kerry can say short of "I quit as candidate and throw my full support behind Mr Bush and encourage everyone in America to vote for him as often as they can" that will prevent his political opponents from casting anything he says as an attempt to "cynically politicise" the event. Nothing.

March 16, 2004

Leading a horse to whisper

Paul Wolfowitz isn't exactly my favourite guy (though he did look cute as the centrefold in last month's Neo-Con Monthly) but he deserves some credit for not buying into the anti-Spain nonsense that has infected the public sphere here over the past few days, even when he was being goaded and led in that direction by the ever-awful Sean Hannity:

News from Georgeland

I'd just like to take a moment and endorse this comment by the President:

PRESIDENT BUSH: I think it's -- if you're going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you ought to back it up with facts.

And no, I'm not making it up; he really did say that.

What a Downer

The Australian government's treatment of Mick Keelty, the Commissioner for the Australian Federal Police, is a disgrace. I really can't imagine the Australian people reacting well to this sort of abuse when all Keelty said was what probably 90% of the population already believes, or fears. Howard having his heavies ring the guy and abuse him is one thing, but comments by Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, take the cake:

Mr Downer accused Mr Keelty of "expressing a view which reflects a lot of the propaganda we're getting from al-Qaeda".

All I can say is good luck to Brian Deegan who is apparently thinking of running against Downer at the next election.


[practice]Prime Minister Latham[/practice]

March 15, 2004

Chattering classes

I've seen it mentioned but not much - there was no warning at all about even the likelihood of the Madrid bombings:

Despite billions of dollars spent tracking Islamic radicals over the past 30 months, despite destroying their Afghan bases and putting thousands of agents on the streets, Western spies heard not a trace of "chatter" from Muslim militants before the bombers killed 200 rail commuters, security analysts said.

...The broader implication, experts say, is that security is still worse - perhaps far worse - than policymakers feared, even in countries such as Spain with experience of dealing robustly with political violence and which were well aware their support for United States policy in Afghanistan and Iraq had made them targets.

...No one would admit to being complacent, but until last week there was a strong feeling that an unprecedented global security effort was proving effective.

Although security services all say they expected an attack eventually, many thought that when it did come they would at least have a clue in advance.

The absence of any "chatter" - from email monitoring, telephone tapping and other spying - that pointed to Islamic radicals was one reason the authorities so quickly pointed the finger at Basque separatists, an older, better-understood foe.

...The absence of advance clues despite all efforts to snoop was a reminder of how elusive al Qaeda - or like-minded imitators - could be, said Marco Vicenzino of the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

"They don't need to communicate with headquarters. They've been probably living there for a long time. They mix into the society they live in. They can scout targets, plan in secret. And then: Bam! They strike. That's al Qaeda and its affiliates."

Seems to me this is a better issue to be worried about than under-informed speculation about whether the Spanish are supporting al Qaeda by changing governments.

Sleep-walking with the enemy

Billmon is making the oddest argument in this post which suggests that Spain delivered al Qaeda a victory. He seems to be saying that just because the American people are unlikely to reject George Bush and his policies, the Spanish people are also wrong to do it:

Lessons from Spain

Australia is to have an election this year. How am I to vote? Let me see if I've got this.

If there are no terrorists attacks before the due date, then according the supporters of the current government, I should vote for the incumbent conservative government of John Howard because they have kept us safe from terror and the other lot aren't to be trusted. If, however, there is a terrorist attack, I have to still vote for the incumbent because to change governments after a terror attack is to appease the terrorists, to hand them a victory.

Heads they win; tails I lose.

Spain no gain for Osama

Just a quick question for all those spinning the Spanish election result as a victory for al Qaeda. Remember when bin Laden issued the fatwa that included the following demand, that the US withdraw from Saudi Arabia?:

The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about "Human Rights" were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world.

The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (ALLAH'S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places -the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka'ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims- by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies. (We bemoan this and can only say: "No power and power acquiring except through Allah").

Remember what the US did? They withdrew:

The United States has said that virtually all its troops, except some training personnel, are to be pulled out of Saudi Arabia.

The decision was confirmed by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during a joint news conference with Saudi Defence Minister Prince Sultan.

Just wondering, but was this a victory for terrorism too? I mean, they did what Osama wanted, so it has to be, right? Just as the people in Spain apparently (arguably) did something the terrorists wanted and you are all accusing them of having gone soft on terrorism, so the United States, the Bush Administration, did something the terrorists wanted and so they must be soft on terror too. That's how it works, isn't it?

Let's unpack it a little. Here's what I said at the time of the US withdrawal:

Of course, loons like bin Laden will claim the US withdrawal as a victory for their methods, while at the same time refusing to back down or cease operating. The good thing about the withdrawal, however, is that it provides one less rallying point for the fundamentalist recruiters and this is a good thing.

Read the whole post for some context but the key point is that I'm trying to make a distinction between doing something the terrorists happen to want and capitulating to terrorism. As in the case of US withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, you can inadvertantly do the former without in any way being guilty of the latter.

This is a distinction the febrile critics of the Spanish people and the party they voted for seem to be missing.

Here's some facts. The PSOE, the Spanish socialist party who were just returned to power, were in government at the time of the first Gulf War and they supported the first Bush Administration's actions. The current party supported the United States' post-9/11 action against Afghanistan and intend to keep Spanish troops deployed there. The action in Afghanistan had wide support amongst the Spanish people. The new government may even keep Spanish troops in Iraq if that force comes under the control of the United Nations. We still don't know what action they will take against the perpetrators of the recent Madrid atrocity, but one supposes they won't be throwing them a party.

In other words, the claim that the party is soft on terrorism or anti-American is not supported by the facts. The further leap of logic that the Spanish people themselves, in the wake of the recent attacks, are playing into al Qaeda's hands is, at best, a ridiculous over-simplification, just as it would be to reach the same conclusion about the US withdrawal from Saudi Arabia. As I've said, it completely fails to make the distinction between doing something terrorists want (though let's also stress that we don't really know 'what the terrorists want' besides causing havoc and misery) and capitulating to terrorism.

This sort of reaction, where any deviance from the Bush war-party line is construed as pro-terrorism, or pro-dictator, is really getting old. It is starting to sound like desperation, a cover for their own failures. We saw the same tactic used during the lead up to the Iraq war where any opposition was spun as being pro-Saddam, a line still trotted out as the occasion demands. The attack on the still shell-shocked people of Spain is part of the same stupid mindset.

If the terrorists want to claim that the Spanish election is a victory for them, I say more fool them. I certainly don't see why we should give them the comfort of agreeing with them.

ELSEWHERE: Kevin comes to the same conclusion from a different angle.

March 14, 2004

Two days

It seems a result is in for the Spanish election:

Spain's opposition Socialist party on Sunday night claimed a surprise victory over the ruling Popular party in an election overshadowed by Thursday's terrorist bombings in Madrid which killed 200.

With almost 80 per cent of ther votes counted the Socialists were leading with 43 per cent of the vote against 37 per cent for the Popular party.

The dramatic turnround for the Socialists, led by José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, came after voters flocked to the polls. "Spaniards abandoned the Popular party because they were sick of the manipulation of Thursday's attacks" said Germa Bel, a Socialist deputy, referring to to the initial blame laid on Eta, the Basque terror group.

UPDATE: It's hard to know where to begin with this Instapundit post, but it's getting late, so maybe just one extract:

Meanwhile Mark Aveyard notes a contradiction: "Remember being told by the left that Saddam's regime and Al Queda had no relationship, that they actually hated each other? Now they're saying that Al Queda attacked Spain because the US ousted Saddam!"

Contradiction? Non-sequitur doesn't even cover it. Fucking stupid comes close, but that puts me over my "fuck" limit for the week and I may yet need it.

ELSEWHERE: Andrew Norton at Catallaxy identifies Australia as a "soft Western target":

This result (the election of the Socialist Party in Spain) tells Al Qaeda to focus on soft Western targets. Months of attacks on the US military in Iraq have seemingly made no difference to its resolve there, but one co-ordinated attack in Spain is likely to deal that country out of active international anti-terrorist operations. On that precedent, an attack in Australia just prior to the 2004 federal election would make a lot of sense to Al Qaeda strategists. It isn't clear that they have the capacity to carry out such an attack. But the rationale for it is a lot clearer than it was a week ago.

I'm not sure what he's getting at.

Meanwhile, flicking around the right of the blogosphere it is pretty clear that Spain is becoming the new France. If someone can explain the vilification currently aimed at the people of Spain, I'd be grateful.

AND ELSEWHERE: Alan makes a point we at a distance should keep in mind:

The right is proclaiming this a case of cowardice, of surrender. When 70 million Spaniards marched, knowing that a mass demonstration was liable to be the target of another outrage, they were not showing cowardice or surrender. they were defying terror and not on any symbolic flight deck.

Plenty more at his place.

Western civilisation 101

We have some relatives staying with us at the moment and they've offered to babysit our son for the night so Tanya and I can go to a movie. Looking at the guide I see the local cinema (walking distance) has a few things playing but the choice comes down to The Passion of the Christ or Starsky and Hutch. Think about that, Osama, and see if you can figure out why you and your bunch of loons are ultimately on a hiding to nothing.

We of the never-never

Boy, the Liberal Party is sure doing a bad job of dampening down leadership speculation, despite the willingness of the press to buy the, to my mind, hard-to-justify view that somehow Peter Costello ended all speculation with his single-word, ambiguous answer to a parliamentary question last week (see Chris Sheil for details of that).

Into the mix today we find that Tony Abbott is pledging not to challenge Costello if and when Costello takes over from Howard, if and when Howard happens to win the next election, and if and when Howard decides to step down during that new term, even though Howard has already tried to rule out that he will, running with the line that he will stay as long as the party wants him:

Health Minister Tony Abbott today ruled out challenging Treasurer Peter Costello for the Liberal leadership after Prime Minister John Howard steps down.

After more than a week of uncertainty, Mr Costello last week ruled out a leadership challenge to Mr Howard before the next election.

While Mr Costello is seen as the natural successor to Mr Howard, some observers believe the Treasurer may have missed his window of opportunity and one of the next generation of leadership aspirants, such as Mr Abbott or Education Minister Brendan Nelson, may step up to the mark.

But Mr Abbott told the Nine Network the view in the party room was that Mr Costello was the unchallenged heir apparent to Mr Howard.

"I think that Peter Costello has well and truly earned the right to be the next leader of the Liberal Party and the next prime minister of Australia," he said.

Asked if there was any chance he might challenge Mr Costello for the position, Mr Abbott said: "The point I've made is that I have no interest at all in running against Peter Costello for the leadership."

As near as I can tell, Abbott was never really a serious contender for the job anyway, so his little intervention is gratutious as well as taking the grave risk of reigniting the debate over whether Howard will actually serve out a new term - still a major problem in the Liberal reelection strategy. Abbott opened this line of inquiry right up:

Mr Abbott said if the changeover to Mr Costello occurred during the next three-year term, Australians would still be in a better position than if Labor won government.

"If, in the end, people were to get, say, two years of Howard and one year of Costello ... one year of Howard and two years of Costello or three years of Howard, in any event, it is a better outcome than three years of Labor, three years of uncertainty," he said.

Well yeah, of course you think that, Tony, but the PM has said he won't step down during the next term. You're not saying you don't believe him? Just chewing the fat? Know something we don't know? Chris Shiel's suggestion that a deal might have done between Howard and Costello is looking ever-more plausible.

Apart from reigniting leadership speculation just when they thought--and had convinced the press--that it was all behind them, Abbott's comments are also a precedent for every future possible leadership aspirant to rule out in advance that they will ever challenge any other future possible leader of the Liberal Party, and I look forward to statements in the near future from, say, Malcolm Turnbull and Brendan Nelson ruling out that they will ever challenge each other, Abbott, Costello or whomever else happens to be leading the party at some future point.

How odd.

My guess is that if Howard wins the next election, a suitable time period will elapse, Costello will challenge and Howard will run soft or perhaps graciously retire. Does anyone seriously think the Libs would go to a fifth term election with Howard as leader?

So what of Abbott's comments? Given that pollies rarely say this sort of thing without calculation, I'm sure people can speculate forever as to what it all really means. On the surface, though, they just look like a miscalculation - it was clear the party wanted this issue off the table. What am I missing here?

Regardless, it is on again - a vote for Howard is a vote for Costello.

March 13, 2004

911 days

Some arrests in Spain:

Spain arrested three Moroccans and two Indians on Saturday in connection with the Madrid train bombings, the strongest indication yet of a possible Islamic link to the attack on one of Washington's staunchest allies in Iraq.

The announcement by Interior Minister Angel Acebes came just hours before polls were to open Sunday in general elections weighed down by increasingly politicized debate over who carried out Europe's deadliest terrorist assault in 15 years.

There still seems to be a great deal of confusion over who is to blame for this crime. Am I right to think that this is unusual? My memory of other such attacks is that we generally know very quickly. My feeling is that there is an al Qaeda link given the size and coordination of the attacks. The likelihood of an al Qaeda/ETA collaboration seems very low to me and I must admit I would baffled as to what that would mean.

Nonetheless, a piece in a BBC article outlines the case against each organisation:

ETA:

# the material in the bombs was an explosive used in previous Eta attacks

# the attacks were not suicide bombings, but were carried out using remote-controlled detonations - again similar to previous Eta operations

# Eta has apparently tried to blow up trains travelling to Madrid before - a previous attack was foiled on Christmas Eve last year and two Eta suspects were arrested

# the bombings came three days before the Spanish general election - and over many years, Eta has chosen to stage attacks during election campaigns

Al Qaeda:

# the choosing of multiple targets in a simultaneous co-ordinated attack is a hallmark of the Islamic militant group

# al-Qaeda has threatened revenge on Spain for its government's backing of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq

# the scale of the devastation dwarfs anything that Eta has done in the past and is much more like an al-Qaeda operation

# Spanish police later found a stolen van containing an Islamic tape and seven detonators in the town of Alcala de Henares, where three of the four bombed trains originated

# a group called the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades has made a claim of responsibility on behalf of al-Qaeda, but it has been widely dismissed

To which we can add the recent arrests which, as noted, suggest an al Qaeda, or at least, Islamacist connection. Incidentally, the title of this post refers to this article which points out that there were exactly 911 days between the US attacks and the Madrid ones. Significant? I sincerely doubt it.

March 12, 2004

Clod

"He's God! I mean, this man is God! He's got millions of followers who would crawl all the way across the world just to touch the hem of his garment!"

"Really? It must be a tremendous hem."

--from Annie Hall
Woody Allen & Shelley Duvall standing in line to see the Maharishi

"Who's that, then?"

"I don't know. Must be a king."

"Why?"

"He hasn't got shit all over him."

from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Omnium catches real life imitating art.

King Canute

Wow, this has got to be the toughest job in blogging - a John Kerry site dedicated to correcting every false accusation levelled by the Bush Administration. Talk about trying to hold back the tide. (The blog is well-named too.)

And if you want to check the fact-checking, check this.

Madrid

Krokodilla is the travel blog of Australian musician, Sophia. She is currently working in Madrid and offers a personal account of the terror attack there.

For me, like everyone, I'm appalled by this latest attack on civilised values and actual human beings and wish I had something to say beyond expressing horror and grief over what has happened. As always, your heart goes out to the victims, their families and friends and you are reminded in the most appalling way of what previous victims around the world have had to live with and through. We all live in the shadow of such events, but for those most directly affected each subsequent day must be like the very first day, that very first moment when they realised what had happened and to whom it had happened. The hurt must be unbearable and how they go on is a mystery to me as well as a source of admiration. The people who perpetrate such violence could care less about all this but the rest of us should never forget it. The hurt never goes away.

LATER: Sophia also went to the street march in Madrid.

Oi, oi, oi

It would be wrong not to mention the fact that cricket's idiot savant, Shane Warne, reached an incredible milestone yesterday when he took his 500th wicket--only the second person in history to do so--which also happened to contribute to Australia chalking up an unlikely win (under the circumstances) against Sri Lanka. It would also be wrong not to mention the fact that in all the ten wickets he took during the match he didn't straighten his arm once.

Peter Roebuck gives an excellent account of Warne's haul, and it includes this observation:

His deliveries cannot be understood in isolation.

Absolutely spot-on.

Scott Wickstein also comments, and says this amongst other things: "Cricket's a game of eleven, not one." Scott, as we know, tends to dress right politically, but like a lot sports fans seems to have an pronounced socialist streak when it comes to sport: extolling the virtues of community over individualism; accepting measures like salary caps to level the playing field between rich and poor clubs; supporting massive government subsidies for such things as the Institute of Sport, stadium construction, sporting scholarships and the like, not to mention regulation such as the anti-syphoning laws. Scott knows I'm teasing (I hope!) but there really are a lot of sporting luvvies out there, aren't there?

March 11, 2004

Keeping America safe since September 12, 2001

There's another new GOP ad and it's a loo-loo (via Julia). The tag line is as follows:

"Now we face a choice. We go forward with confidence, resolve and hope. Or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting, and outlaw regimes are no threat," the ad says.

These guys are either first class idiots or they think we are. There's also a possibility that they are dishonest. Here's why. It is pretty well documented that the incoming Bush Adminsitration were almost contemptuous of the emphasis the outgoing Clinton Administration were putting on the threat of terror and were much more conerned with Russia and China. It is well documented, for instance, in the book The Age of Sacred Terror. I talked about this issue at length a while back, but let me just extract one section of that post, a quote from a Time story on the subject:

One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.

Berger attended only one of the briefings-the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject." The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House's point man on terrorism. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together.

Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."

And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that nobody predicted Sept. 11-that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.

As I point out in the earlier post, the Clinton Administration is not without blame, but for the current mob to pretend, as this ad does, that the Clinton Administration were blind to the threat and that Bush Administration were on top of it from the beginning is utter, utter nonsense. Again, they seem to be forgetting on whose watch 9/11 actually occured.

Blame Clinton

The President is always keen to point out that all the bad economic news occuring on his watch really began under the Clinton Administration. He's a little less inclined to note other things that began under the Clinton Administration. For instance, Mr Bush takes all the credit for Libya giving up its WMD program. Martin S. Indyk sees things a bit differently:

The fact that Mr. Gadaffi was willing to give up his WMD programmes and open facilities to inspection four years ago does not detract from the Bush administration's achievement in securing Libya's nuclear disarmament. However, in doing so, Mr. Bush completed a diplomatic game plan initiated by Mr. Clinton. The issue here, however, is not credit. Rather, it is whether Mr. Gadaffi gave up his WMD programmes because Mr. Hussein was toppled, as Mr. Bush now claims. As the record shows, Libyan disarmament did not require a war in Iraq.

The record, incidentally, is outlined in the rest of the article.

Grave mistake 4

We all know the Republican Party doesn't like people disputing their copyright claim on the emotion and images associated with the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. At every point since that day, they have not hestitated to invoke the attacks with proprietorial indifference, from the 2002 mid-term elections (most obviously in juxtaposing pictures of Osama bin Laden with Senator and Vietnam vet, Max Cleland) right through to the current batch of ads using images from 9/11. Beyond that, the party has not hesitated to trot out their one and only response to anyone who is critical of their plans in regard to national security and foreign policy, namely, to label them as soft on terrorism, unpatriotic, anti-Bush and therefore and ultimately anti-American.

As disgusting as the Cleland attack was there is a sense in which it falls within the admittedly rather over-stretched boundaries of acceptable political behaviour - at least Cleland actually was a Democrat Senator and his opponents were involved in an election fight with him. But what about someone who just happened to have a family member killed in the 9/11 attacks?

Consider the recent comments by Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie:

The head of the Republican Party angered 9/11 families again yesterday by saying only a "small segment ... who are very anti-war" objected to President Bush's use of Ground Zero scenes in his reelection ads.

...During a voter-registration drive in Washington Heights, Gillespie described those who complained as a "small segment of those who are very anti-war, not only anti-war in Iraq but were opposed to the military removal of the Taliban from Afghanistan."

He cited a press conference by an anti-war group called 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and noted the event involved Moveon.org, which is running ads bashing Bush.

Yes, that's right, the RNC Chairman is implying that some of the families who lost relaltives in the 9/11 attacks are soft on the Taliban. As the article points out, the people involved dispute Gillespie's claims about their partiship, their affiliations and their views on the war on terror, but even if we accepted them as true, does that justify Gillespie or anyone else in the GOP targettng these people?

What do you have to have gone through to be considered beyond the reach of the GOP smear machine? Really, is there some tragedy that could be inflicted on people that would allow the GOP to think, hey, this person has suffered enough? Even if they considered the person partisan, which there seems to be very little evidence of in these cases, isn't having had a loved one blown to bits by Osama and the boys enough to give you a pass to say something as obvious and understandable as "I'm not happy that the President is using images from that day in his reelection advertisements"? That they are beyond the reach of any implication that they are supporters of the Taliban? Is there some point at which the GOP might cut someone a bit of slack?

THEN THERE IS THIS: The Poorman notices Rush Limbaugh joining the mob lining up to chuck rocks at 9/11 families, and his post includes this very diginified response from one of the women vilified:

Mr. Limbaugh,

For your information, I am one of the widows you are wrongly accusing of being "schooled" by the Democratic Party.

My name is Kristen Breitweiser. I am not a Democrat. I voted for President Bush. So did my husband who was killed on 9/11.

I would encourage you to educate yourself on who I am, prior to your making erroneous statements about me on your radio show.

I would also encourage you to visit the website of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee(911independentcommission.org) of which I am a founding member.

The members of the Family Steering Committee (a non-partisan, completely self-funded organization) have been tireless advocates working to get answers as to why our loved ones were killed on the morning of 9/11 and why this nation was so very vulnerable to terrorism on that horrible day. In order to make this nation safer and to ensure that our loved ones were not killed in vain, we believe that we must learn from the tragic failures that occurred leading up to and on 9/11.

The only way we can be safe in the future is to learn from the past. The only way we can have a thorough examination of the past is with a cooperative government. Sadly, President Bush has been our biggest adversary in trying to find out what happened on 9/11. And, after voting for him in the last election, I am gravely disappointed in his behavior in fighting this commission and their noble efforts to explain why we as a nation were so vulnerable to terrorism on 9/11.

I look forward to your apology.

Many thanks,

Kristen Breitweiser.

And, as an aside, you failed to mention the following actual fact in your show: that Mayor Giuliani, Police Commissioner Kerik, Former Fire Commissioner Von-Essen, and 9/11 Widow Deena Burnett were "BOOKED" BY THE GOP to go on those shows. (See Washington Post article on Friday). I, on the other hand, was "booked" by no one other than myself. Frankly, Mr. Limbaugh, I expected better from you.

I follow her logic right up until those last five words.

March 10, 2004

Senatorial eloquence

Former leader of the Australian Democrats, Meg Lees, has a blog in case you didn't know. She has a couple of interesting posts up at the moment, one about the Senate Enquiry into Poverty in Australia and another talking about the latest poll results showing Mark Latham doing quite well. I'd link to the exact posts but her site is a bit like her relationship with the Democrats - lacking permanent links. (Sorry.) You'll just have to scroll. Still, I'm pleased to see her blogging (any other pollies getting with the program?), but a blog without permalinks is like John Howard without a wedge issue - nowhere to go.

Queer argument

Gay marriage will happen because the people who oppose it have lost the argument -- what they say just doesn't make sense, while the rights case is so compelling as to be unaswerable. Consider Australian PM, John Howard, going round in circles the other day:

LAWS: Okay. Well if you believe that people who aren’t married can bring up children satisfactorily, that doesn’t include gay couples?

PRIME MINISTER: No I don’t because the notion is of having… you need a male role model and a female role model. I think it is incredibly important that people have role models of both sexes because that’s the kind of society that they’re born into, and the way you do that is to preserve the notion of a mother and a father.

Well, "that's the sort of society they are born into" because people like you oppose allowing society to shape itself in any other way. Once the prejudices of people like you are overcome, they won't be born into "that sort of society". As I say, the logic is ciruclar and if this is the best countercase opponents can mount then it's minutes to midnight so far as gay marriage is concerned. Mr Howard and the like-minded might want to stop going in circles and join the revolution.

RELATED: This report of gay Republicans dumping Bush on the issue:

In a dramatic break with President Bush, a prominent group of gay Republicans that supported him four years ago is launching a $1 million advertising campaign today attacking the administration for trying to ban same-sex marriage.

Bush's decision to endorse a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage was "the line in the sand" for the 27-year-old group, which has never run a campaign ad, said Executive Director Patrick Guerriero. He said he had warned the White House as Bush edged toward supporting an amendment that "despite our historic loyalty to the party and the president, we would be forced to speak out if gay and lesbian families were going to be used as wedge issues in swing states."

Fool me once, indeed.

First stone

Interesting accentuate-the-positive article about Iraq in the WaPo today; worth a read. He makes the following point at the end:

But there is the risk that those who oppose the administration on the Iraq war will now inadvertently undermine the building of the peace. Whatever the answers on prewar Iraq policy, we are in Iraq now and need to stay the course, with as many allies as we can muster. There is no turning back.

You kinda like feel like saying, well der. But I guess it doesn't hurt to make the point. He might want to acknowledge the fact, however, that those who "most undermine the peace" are not those who opposed the war but those who prosecuted without proper preparation, who ignored their own team's post-invasion planning. And that bit about "as many allies as we can muster" might best be directed at those who just couldn't wait another minute before going in, not those who opposed the war precisely because we hadn't done the mustering.

March 09, 2004

Roll away the stone

There are a number of polls out at the moment, both here in the US and back home in Australia that suggest very strongly that the incumbents, prime minister John Howard and president George W. Bush, aren't doing too well at the moment.

The interpretation generally offered is that we are still a long way from the election/s and that, in both countries, the opposition parties and their respective leaders are having an unusually good run and that therefore the current polls are distorted and not to be trusted. The cool kids either ignore the findings or play them right down.

Now, while there is an element of truth in such rationalisations, it is also true that people are genuinely pissed off with a lot of stuff that both leaders and their governments are doing, most of it related to the invasion of Iraq and the "war on terror" in general. For most of the period since September 11, 2001 these leaders have "owned" the issues associated with these events, particularly national security, but there is a sense in which they might have overplayed their hands. Bush's 9/11 ads are the obvious case in point. But it is also more specific than that.

In the US, Democrat candidate, John Kerry, is chastised for "flip-flopping" on the war in Iraq---his critics say that while he voted to give the President authorisation to launch the invasion, he is now highly critical of the war and is therefore a kind of born-again Howard Dean. He is pilloried for "changing with the wind". I've seen many of Kerry's staff questioned about this on telly over the last few weeks and what none of them have said is that John Kerry's position is pretty close to that of most Americans---supportive of the war in the lead up to it, but thoroughly shocked that WMD haven't shown up as promised.

A similar thing is happening in Australia. The government runs the line that those who opposed the war would therefore have preferred Saddam to stay in power. They aim this at the opposition parties, but in fact, many Australians, perhaps most of them, opposed the war, wanted full and formal international support and, like Americans, are genuinely shocked that the WMD haven't showed up. When they hear the goverment attack the oppostion in this way, they hear themselves being attacked as well.

So while it is true that the elections are a long way off and that a lot can happen in the interim, the fact remains that the electorates in both countries are feeling that they have been played for suckers. But it seems to me that neither Bush nor Howard have really accepted this. Instead, the two leaders are comforting themselves with the idea that either people will not trust the alternatives enough to elect them, or that people ultimately accept that Saddam is best gone and that ends justify means. The former point might be true (people often elect whom they think of as the least worst) but I doubt the latter is true. People view the non-existent WMD as a completely different issue from whether Saddam is gone or not and they want an explanation.

It might be an obvious point, but I think a lot of what the current polls are showing is that both leaders are viewed as arrogantly out of touch on this point. If that's true, the only thing that will rescue them is some sort of apology or detailed explanation about what happened, and at the moment neither guy seems likely to do this. It might just end up costing both of them office.

ELSEWHERE: Oliver Willis echoes the idea that the GOP have overstepped the 9/11-is-ours thing, and is spot-on about how the families of 9/11 victims become fair game for the right once they (the families) express a view not endorsed by the GOP and their apologists.

Borging the commonwealth

Andrew over at Catallaxy is a bit perplexed about Howard's federalists credentials:

In the old days, the Liberal Party was the party of federalism, but no longer it seems. Education Minister Brendan Nelson has been pushing us in the direction of a national curriculum. Now the Prime Minister may intervene to stop the ACT introducing a bill of rights, gay marriage and gay adoption.

And right on cue, here's another one to add to the mix:

The Prime Minister is seeking advice on a Commonwealth takeover of public hospitals in what would be one of the biggest shifts in responsibilities between Canberra and the states since Federation.

John Howard has expressed his support for the transfer as a means of ending state-federal disputes which dog crisis-prone public hospitals in NSW and other states, the Herald has learned.

"We are deadly serious about this," a Government source said.

The Prime Minister was "very enthusiastic" about assuming control of the nation's entire health administration to resolve the cost-shifting, duplication and divided health care services in Australia's health system and was calling for research into the issue.

If accurate, this should put to rest finally any notion of Howard as federalist. Howard, in fact, is a control freak who wants as much as possible under his own control, whether that might be the cermonial duties of the governor general, whose role he has virtually usurped, or now, apparently, control of hospital funding. He's actually getting a bit scarey, acting like he is the only one capable of running anything - has there ever been a prime minister who has assumed so much control to himself over nearly every aspect of government? Does anyone believe this is either healthy or desireable?

Anyway, aside from what it does for Howard's federalist credentials, we can talk about it what it means as a policy too. My feeling is that there are pretty good reasons for thinking this isn't a bad idea, though I doubt it will really qualify as an election-winning "big idea" as is hinted at in the article. Beyond that, I'm guessing it might be very tempting for state governments to take up the prime ministers offer, should it materialise.

ELSEWHERE: John Quiggin endorses the plan as policy.

Nation building

If you haven't had a chance to read the new Iraqi transitional constitution, it is available here. I think anybody who declares its signing (or its content for that matter) either a good thing or a bad thing at this stage is talking through their prejudices, and a quick Google brings you up against a predictable bunch of articles talking it up and talking it down. The BBC rightly highlights the mixed reception it has had in the region, while one of the most concerning aspects has been Turkey's reaction. Ultimately, the key figure is Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Juan Cole offers some thoughts on Sistani's approach:

This is what was at the site of Sistani:
" In the name of the Most Exalted

Grand Ayatollah Sistani has already clarified his observations on the agreement of November/15th (and maintains) that any law prepared for the transitional period will not gain legitimacy except after it is endorsed by an elected national assembly. Additionally, this law places obstacles in the path of reaching a permanent constitution for the country that maintains its unity and the rights of its sons of all ethnicities and sects. 16th Muharram al-Haraam 1425"


Remember that Sistani believes that the US occupation is illegal, and that everything the Interim Governing Council does is illegitimate, on the Rousseauan grounds that it does not reflect the will of the Iraqi people (no one has been openly elected to do these things in Iraq). Moreover, this interim documents, produced by mere appointees, attempts in many ways to tie the hands of the later elected members of parliament who will fashion the final constitution. He also doesn't like giving the three Kurdish provinces a veto over the final constitution.

Anyway, have a read of the entire document and see what you think.

This isn't directly related but it's kind of interesting: I was talking to someone the other night who pointed out that the US embassy in Iraq is likely to have 2000 staff. That's about same size as the entire staff of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs.

Bush's brain drain

Do you think maybe the White House, specificaly the Bush campaign, is preparing for some bad news? Consider these two seemingly unrelated news stories. The first says that Bush himself is running his reelection campaign, or at least, making key decisions:

A restless President Bush finally jumped into the political ring last week, happy that he had a Democratic target he could attack by name and enough money to start a $60 million advertising campaign, probably the most expensive in presidential history.

At the same time, Bush campaign officials were instructed not to refer publicly to Senator John Kerry as simply a "Massachusetts liberal," because it was an imprecise label that didn't tell people much, or so the thinking went. The preferred shorthand, campaign officials were told, was "the senator from Massachusetts who has a record of weakening national defense and raising taxes."

The two actions — the extent of the initial advertising buy and the early definition of Mr. Kerry — were pivotal. More revealing, Republican officials said that both were decreed by the president himself.

"I don't think there are any major decisions coming out of the campaign that he's not making," said one Republican official close to the re-election effort who did not want to be named for fear of angering Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, who is overseeing the campaign. "For example, this media buy wasn't decided by Karl. It was decided by the president. You don't have a situation where the president is removed, as maybe his father might have been."

Then there is this one about Karl Rove's testimony to the Plame investigation:

President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter.

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

I don't really think Bush is taking charge because he is half-expecting Rove to be indicted for outing Plame, though stranger things have happened (and a fella can dream). I just think it is noteworthy that there seems to have been a shift in the division of labor in the Bush camp. Remember, Rove is known to have had complete control of campaiging in the past, in fact, over all aspects of the President's public image, including the way policy decisions are made. As Slater and More say in their book about Rove:

"His influence marks a transcendent moment in American politics: the rise of an unelected consultant to a position of unprecedented power."

...."Karl Rove matters to all Americans, many who have never even heard his name. While the president chafes at the description of Rove as 'Bush's Brain,' he can hardly deny that every policy and political decision either goes through, or comes from, the consultant."

If Rove is suddenly being sidelined, then it marks quite a shift in the internal dynamics of the Bush camp. It has also been, as opinion polls and the general "feel" of things suggest, an incredibly unsuccessful move. As to what's behind it, I conspire; you decide.

The third man

When it comes to reading the entrails of US politics, there are few better than Charlie Cook. His op-ed in the NYTimes this morning is a useful reminder about the role Ralph Nader may yet play in the 2004 Presidential election. It is also interesting to note that a disinterested observer like Cook clearly thinks Nader was the difference between Bush and Gore in 2000:

Remember that Mr. Nader, running as the Green Party nominee, cost Al Gore two states, Florida and New Hampshire, either of which would have given the vice president a victory in 2000. In Florida, which George W. Bush carried by 537 votes, Mr. Nader received nearly 100,000 votes. In New Hampshire, which Mr. Bush won by 7,211 votes, Mr. Nader pulled in more than 22,000. National exit polls by the Voter News Service showed that had Mr. Nader not run, 47 percent of his supporters would have voted for Al Gore, while only 21 percent would have voted for Mr. Bush.

Recent national polls suggest that a similar dynamic may play out this time around. While surveys that test a two-way contest between President Bush and Senator Kerry generally show the senator ahead by a few points, those that add Mr. Nader to the mix put the race at a dead heat — or they give the president a narrow edge. A national survey last week by The Associated Press and Ipsos Public Affairs showed the president garnering 46 percent, Senator Kerry 45 percent and Mr. Nader 6 percent.

That poll, which was taken only a week and a half after Mr. Nader dropped his bombshell, likely overstates the support he will carry into November. After all, the circumstances are very different from what they were in 2000. Back then, many moderates and liberals were ambivalent about the Clinton-Gore administration; what's more, George W. Bush was well-positioned as a relatively unthreatening "compassionate conservative." To the independent-minded voters on the left who fled to Mr. Nader, the choice between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore just wasn't all that stark.

Today, Mr. Bush is a far more polarizing figure, with former Nader supporters among his most vociferous detractors. My hunch is that some of the most miserable people in America are the 97,488 Floridians who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Thus it seems reasonable that, nationwide, Mr. Nader will garner just half or even a third of his support from last time.

Even so, however, he may still be able to tilt the election to the Republicans. Consider the electoral map. Barring some cataclysmic political upheaval, the Republicans have a solid hold on 23 states with 200 electoral votes; the Democrats can probably count on 11 states and the District of Columbia for 168 votes. This leaves 16 states in play — states where Mr. Nader, at least based on 2000, could shift the balance in favor of Mr. Bush.

In addition to Florida and New Hampshire, the two states that Mr. Nader handed to the Bush-Cheney ticket, think about how many others came close to going the same route. In 2000 Mr. Gore won Iowa by about 4,000 votes, with Mr. Nader receiving nearly 30,000 votes; the vice president carried Minnesota by just 58,000 votes, with Mr. Nader pulling 126,000. New Mexico had the narrowest margin in the country — Mr. Gore prevailed by just 366 votes — and Mr. Nader garnered 21,000. In Oregon, the Gore victory margin was 6,765 votes, with 77,357 Oregonians supporting Mr. Nader. In Wisconsin, Mr. Gore won by 5,700 and Mr. Nader's total was 94,000. And while the Bush margins over Mr. Gore exceeded the Nader vote in Washington, Missouri and Ohio, it wasn't by much.

The next election could be even closer in all these battlegrounds — the product of the evenly divided parties, the high degree of partisan and ideological polarization and the equally divided support of and antipathy for President Bush. Make no mistake: Mr. Nader will probably earn fewer votes than last time, but he still could make the difference.

Nader likes to run on the idea that the voters should be given more choice, and in principle this is fine. In reality, that is nothing but a rationalisation. As I've mentioned before, under the US voting system, all Nader (or any third candidate) can do is take votes from other candidates while having no chance himself of actually winning. How is that providing choice?

Blogjam

The first Blogjam is up at Web Diary. Hopefully it will send a few links around the blogosphere. This week's was just a general (and slightly rushed - my fault) introduction, but future installments will link to specific posts. If you have something, send me an email with a link to the post, a brief description, and the word Blogjam in the subject line (I originally said to put Web Diary in the subject line, but this seems more logical).

I'd be curious to hear from people (on an ongoing basis) as to whether they are getting any hits from Blogjam. My experience is that just because a big site links to you it doesn't mean you'll always get a pile of hits; it depends more on the nature of the link, an art form I am yet to understand fully or be capable of describing.

For instance, Glenn Reynolds, famous for his Instalanches, once kindly linked to some info I had about a Bali memorial service and it sent me 3 hits, which I'm pretty sure is the world record for the least number of hits ever from an Instapundit link. Of the other big sites who link here on occasion, the grandaddy of them all is certainly Eschaton. Tbogg can send a lot of hits your way as can Body and Soul. Interestingly, I get less from a Calpundit link than from other mega sites and I'm never sure why (but don't let that stop you linking, Kevin!) Incidentally, speaking of Kevin, congratulations to him for being hired by the Washington Monthly as their resident blogger. Tim Blair is also someone who can cause an influx, though I've noticed that if he says something nice or neutral about me (it does happen) I get a lot less hits than when he slams me about something. But this raises another interesting, if obvious point. If you get a big hit and it is mainly people responding to a post that slams you, almost none of those will stick around as regulars. If they come on the back of a link from the likes of Eschaton, then you tend to have a better retention rate. So new bloggers take note, I guess: if you go after hits by insulting big bloggers in the hope of getting a snarky response and therefore some hits, it would appear to be a very shortsighted strategy.

Anyway, let me know how it's going. And thanks again to Margo for publishing Blogjam.

March 08, 2004

Brotherly love

He might want a constitutional amendment to "protect" it, but it doesn't mean he'd, like, want to show up to his brother's:

Presidential brother Neil Bush -- putting aside remnants of a scandalous divorce, paternity questions and a scorned ex-wife -- married Maria Andrews Saturday night in the Memorial-area mansion of Rania and Jamal Daniel, longtime Bush family friends.

Close to 150 guests joined the newlyweds after a small family ceremony that included former President George Bush and Barbara Bush, parents of the groom. President George W. Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush did not attend.

Sacred, sacred institution.

Leadership blow

johnny_peter.jpg

Pressed after the launch of an Amnesty report, Mr Costello said he and the PM "are very good friends and colleagues".

But despite past promises, colleagues believe Mr Howard will never again offer Mr Costello the head job.


Fool me once

Those Bush ads using images from Ground Zero in New York seem to have really done the trick...for Kerry:

In the first national poll since the presidential campaign became a two-person race, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry leads President Bush, 52%-44%.

Kerry's 8-point lead with likely voters in the USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll comes after he effectively clinched the Democratic nomination on Tuesday and Bush followed with three speeches criticizing Kerry's record in the Senate and charging that the country would be less safe under his leadership.

...The poll was taken Friday through Sunday. On Thursday, Bush launched a $10.5 million wave of TV ads in 17 states.

The ads promote his leadership in "tough times" and "times of change." Even before they ran, Bush was put on the defensive by complaints from families of people who died in the Word Trade Center attacks, firefighters and Democrats that he was politicizing a national tragedy by using images of the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

More than half of those surveyed, 54%, said Bush's use of the images was inappropriate. "It was not an auspicious debut for the president," says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

Next phase of campaign is to convince us that Bush is really a cowboy. As if we didn't know.

You know, the popular wisdom about the Dean meldown after his "I have a scream" speech was that it wasn't so much the moment itself that was so bad but that it reinforced a perception that people already had of Dean as unstable, angry and a bit out there. I suspect something similar has happened with the 9/11 ads - they have simply reinforced a feeling already prevalent, namely, that Bush and the GOP have tried to appropriate that tragedy for their own political ends, including their tendency to question the patriotism of anybody who dares challenge them on national security. As I've said before, I think the ads will be quietly pulled once they twig to this fact.

Pollitics

There are new polls out (I hate talking about polls) and they are all good news for Mark Latham. At this stage of the game I think the story they are telling is that John Howard is dead in the water. Doesn't mean Mark Latham is necessarily going to beat him, but it does mean people could care less about another Howard term. Support for Howard has always been a mile wide and an inch deep, no matter what fantasies his hardcore supporters have entertained about him being popular. The only way he will the next election is by default, if Latham is unable to establish himself as a real alternative. Incumbency is Howard's best friend, just as it was for Paul Keating (and is for anyone). Put it this way, if Howard was opposition leader and Latham PM, who do you think would win an election this year? (Yeah, I know, it's an invalid comparison.)

Anyway, to think Labor went within one vote of putting Kim Beazley back at the helm.

March 07, 2004

Inside the Beltway

I must admit I had only a vague idea about the Gridiron Club, the 119-year olf Washington institution that consists of an exclusive membership of top U.S journalists who put on their annual "roast", an all-singing, sorta-dancing review where the journos (with a few ring-ins) perform a satirical show drawing on the events and personalities of the political year:

Founded in 1885, the invitation-only Gridiron Club exists solely for its annual white-tie dinner, attended by Cabinet secretaries, congressional leaders and the like. The show has been visited by every president since Benjamin Harrison, except one — Grover Cleveland.

This isn't quite right: it also exists for its Sunday show, where they have a reception followed by a reprise of the previous evening's show, minus the key political speakers. The main event, the Saturday night show, is a white-tie-and-tails affair and is the toughest ticket in town, according to all accounts. The Sunday afternoon reprise is a little less exclusive and I happened to be invited along to today's performance.

It was quite a hoot, with lots of familiar faces there to oggle for pathetic political junkies like myself. The show itself is very professionally done though half the fun is that most of the journalists who perform are, so far as singers go, pretty good journalists. They basically rearrange the lyrics to well known songs, mainly show tunes, and take a bite out of current events and political leaders.

The motto of the Gridiron Club is "singe, don't burn" but I thought two songs cut pretty close to the bone, one of which worked and one of which didn't. The one that didn't involved the journalist who outed of Valerie Plame, Robert Novak. He got dressed up as Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and did a song about how Novak had outed his wife. It wasn't really self-deprecating enough for Novak to get away with it. The audience didn't exactly groan, but the applause was pretty, um, muted.

The one that did work was a song about Tony Blair, which, to the familiar tune, was re-done as "Yankee Poodle Dandy". Like I say, it was pretty close to the bone, but it got a good laugh, and I'm sure the Brits wouldn't have been too offended.

There were lots of other good bits, but I think the guy dressed as Dick Cheney, in deerstalker cap and tweed vest, with a shotgun laid across his arm who sang, "I just shot a duck with Scalia" to the tune of "Maria" from Westside Story, was probably the best. Especially considering he performed it in front of the Vice President the night before.

Anyway, for me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things and I was really pleased to be able to see it.

And yes, there was a whole song dedicated to Howard Dean so bloggers copped it in the neck too.

March 05, 2004

One shot in the locker

If you can't run your party, you can't run the country:

HARDLINE supporters of Peter Costello are urging the Treasurer to challenge John Howard for the Liberal leadership before the federal election.

A ginger group, predominantly from Mr Costello's Melbourne business base, is telling the Treasurer he should prepare his parliamentary supporters for a leadership challenge in the partyroom unless the Prime Minister agrees to stand aside.

One influential Liberal suggested yesterday Mr Costello should be prepared to force a spill as early as May, immediately after he has brought down the federal Budget.

"It's true to say senior Liberals are now agitating - they are deeply troubled," the Liberal source said. "They don't believe Howard is going to win, they believe he should have gone last July and he should step down now."

It would be one thing for Howard to lose the election, but to not make it to the election would be quite amazing. I'll believe it hen I see it.

WHOA!!: Costello's team is really pulling out all the stops, trying to force Howard's hand:

Parliamentary Secretary and Costello backer Christopher Pyne has provided what the Labor party has been unsuccessfully demanding - a timetable for when a re-elected John Howard would step down.

Mr Pyne said Mr Howard has indicated he would retire as PM during the next term.

Mr Pyne's assertion, made on the ABC's Lateline on Friday night, goes beyond Mr Howard's stated position.

The PM has repeatedly refused to say whether he would serve a full term or give a timetable for his retirement, despite constant goading from the Opposition. In an interview with The Sunday Age published last week, Mr Howard said: "I will remain Prime Minister for as long as my party wants me to and it's in the best interests of the party that I do. I won't be giving any answer that qualifies, alters, accelerates, diminishes, dilutes, reinterprets, or any way you want to put it, that answer."

Mr Pyne's comments come after Treasurer Peter Costello last week refused to rule out a challenge to Mr Howard.

Mr Pyne said: "The Prime Minister has said . . . that at the appropriate time after the next election, assuming we win the next election, that he will hand over leadership to Peter Costello."

This strikes me as a huge play in the leadership stakes, underlining not only the fact that Costello is seriously counting the numbers, but also exploiting a key weakness in the PM's reelection strategy, namely, as mentioned on this site many times, that Howard is unlikely to serve out a second term - or, to put it in political terms, is vulnerable to the accusation. As I say, for Pyne to say this publicly is a huge play.

It is hard to imagine that Costello has the numbers, but this is the last thing Howard needs running into an election.

(More at Back Pages)

UPPING THE DATE: I notice the SMH today has this as their lede in a story on the topic:

Despairing Liberal MPs yesterday vowed to push for an orderly change-over of the prime ministership to Treasurer Peter Costello if John Howard continued to lose popular support.

Despairing Liberal MPs?? It can't be that bad, can it? Good grief.

Sting theory

I've thought about it and I really don't think you can go past Sting as the most pretentious, annoying celebrity on earth.

The disappearing 707

If you thought the evidence of Saddam's so-called WMD was exaggerated, then allow this article to remind of a bit of exaggeration that leaves the WMD overstatement for dead, namely, Saddam's ties to al Qaeda. It's worth reading the whole thing mainly for the examples it provides of where Administration officials made comments about the said link in the full knowledge that they weren't passing on all the relevant information they had.

I know you're shocked.

Anyway, the most extraordinary revelation, if that's what it is, centres on the subject of a terrorist training camp at Salman Pak outside Baghdad. Bear with me while I give a bit of background.

It so happens that I wrote a fair bit about this training camp in the lead up to the war, pointing out that on the surface it's existence was the single strongest piece of evidence we had about cooperation (as opposed to mere contact) between Saddam and the al Qaeda leadership. I was quite surprised that people weren't making more of it.

In fact, one person who made a lot of it was war blogger Professor Bunyip and it was his interest that sparked mine. Another was Rush Limbaugh who used the existence of the Salman Pak terrorist training camp as key proof of a Saddam-al Qaeda link. I wrote about that too and quoted Limbaugh:

We have this Saddam stack that documents more than you'll ever need to know about Iraq and Hussein relationships to current and modern-day terrorists and terrorism. And in particularly, in particular the things they were able to do yesterday in documenting the things defectors from Iraq have said about Salman Pak and the training center. It's about fifteen miles south of Baghdad where there is this 707 or 737 fuselage where terrorists train in the art of hijacking an airplane, taking it over and this sort of thing. And there are witnesses and the first -- the UNSCOM inspectors saw it. They've been there.

It was a couple of weeks before that, however, that I looked closely at the Salman Pak evidence. I hope you can read the whole piece. I think you'll understand my confusion as to why more wasn't made of the supposed terror camp. The conclusion I came to was that maybe the evidence wasn't credible. Which brings us back to the article I mentioned at the start of this post. Here's what they say about Salman Pak based on the latest, post-invasion revelations:

Iraqi defectors alleged that Saddam's regime was helping to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists at a site called Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The allegation made it into a September 2002 white paper that the White House issued. The U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility.

This is amazing, not least because the Department of Defence still lists on its website the closing down of the training camp as one of the major achievements of the invasion.

But it gets more interesting. What about Limbaugh's claim that UNSCOM had actually seen the training camp?

Remember, much of the evidence for Salman Pak was based on testimony of a defector codenamed Zeinab. Here's how a NewsMax article, based in part on information from British newspapers, reported the UNSCOM connection:

A few days before the Times report, the London Observer revealed that one of the defectors, a colonel with the Iraqi intelligence service, Mukhabarat, had drawn an even more direct link to 9/11.

The former Iraqi agent, codenamed Zeinab, told the paper that one of the highlights of Salman Pak's six-month curriculum was training to hijack aircraft using only knives or bare hands. Like the Sept. 11 hijackers, the students worked in groups of four or five, he explained.

Zeinab's story has since been corroborated by Charles Duelfer, the former vice chairman of UNSCOM, the U.N. weapons inspection team, which actually visited the Salman Pak camp several times.

"He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors," the Observer reported. "The Iraqis, he said, told UNSCOM it was used by police for counterterrorist training."

"Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter'," Duelfer explained. "I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq. Like, derrrrrr! I mean, what, actually, do you expect?"

It is not the fact that an UNSCOM person would be so willing to take the word of defector, nor even the fact that he said derrrrrrr that catches the attention. The interesting thing is the UNSCOM guy's name: Charles Duelfer. Mr Duelfer is, of course, the person who took over from David Kay as the head of the Iraq Survey Group, the team who are still looking for Saddam's WMD.

Now, Salman Pak did exist as a research facility and the UN inspected it in 1991 and on other occasions. But Duelfer is not reporting here on its research capabilities; he is saying instead that he saw specific evidence, matching claims made by a defector, that it was also used as terrorist training camp.

This strikes me as a bit odd, not least because I can't find any evidence on the UN site that he reported this sighting. Maybe I missed it, but presuming I didn't, wouldn't it be odd for him not to have officially mentioned it? Duelfer himself told USA Today, about a month after the Observer interview mentioned above, that he did report it:

"We always just called them the terrorist camps," says Charles Duelfer, former deputy chairman of the U.N. weapons inspection program in Iraq. "We reported them at the time, but they've obviously taken on new significance."

Again, I can find no evidence of such reporting on the UN site (if you can, let me know).

What does it all mean? Not sure, but it does raise some questions.

Ultimately, as I said at the time, it was amazing that more wasn't made of the Salman Pak "terrorist camp" given how keen the Administration was to prove a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. The only reasonable conclusion you could reach is that they considered the defector's testimony and other intelligence too weak to allow them to make a strong claim. This ties in with the most recent report (above) that the military have found no evidence of a terrorist training camp at Salman Pak.

But if that is true, then there is huge question for the head of the Iraqi survey Group to answer. What exactly did Mr Duelfer see when he claimed to see the terrorist training camp, including a 707? Without casting any aspersions at all, this is quite a question mark to have hanging over your credibility, especially when you are in charge of something as sensitive as the search for WMD in Iraq.

Maybe some nice journalist could follow this up?

Grave mistake 3

Let's do the 9/11 ads again. The thrust of those who seek to excuse the President for exploiting images of 9/11 in his advertising for re-election is that it is perfectly reasonable for him mention such a crucial moment of his presidency and that, in fact, it would be impossible not to mention it. There's some truth in this, but it doesn't really wash.

The main point is, the images are being used in an advertisement. Advertisements sell stuff, and in this case the product being flogged is George W. Bush. There is no way of separating the images of 9/11 from the intent of the ads which is purely and simply about getting Bush reelected. It is therefore perfectly reasonable to accuse him of appropriating the images for his own personal gain and perfectly reasonable for some (not all) of the families, friends and workmates of the victims to be disgusted by this appropriation. Even if you think they are wrong, you have to concede that it is a reasonable reaction. (Of course, if you read the comments to the two posts below you will see that not only do some not concede this point, they go so far as to try and smear the victim's families and friends as partisan hacks.)

Ultimately, the calculus to be made is, is it worth the risk of offending the familes and friends of those most intimately involved in the tragedy just for the sake of historical verisimilitude? That is, if the only reason, as his supporters claim, for including the images is because it just happens to be a major event of his presidency, and he isn't really trying to benefit in his re-election from associating himself with the moment (a crock in my opinion, but let's accept it for the sake of argument) is it really worth offending those who are likely to be offended?

According to some in the Bush camp, it is not only worth offending them, that was the whole idea of the ads:

Mr. Bush's aides said that they would not pull the commercials and that the battle over them could even work to their advantage by focusing new attention on what they said was the president's forceful response to the attacks and the continued threat from terrorists.

They said the controversy had been expected and was serving their aim of changing the debate from Democratic turf like health care and jobs to Mr. Bush's strongest suit, national security.

So you see, this has nothing to do with merely recording a major historical fact. It has nothing to do with Karen Hughes' rationalisation that "It's a reminder of our shared experience as a nation." These images were chosen specifically for partisan poltical purposes and specifically because they would be controversial.

Bush and his team asked themselves, will these images offend people?, and not only came to the conclusion that they would but decided that this would be a good thing:

"Are we on the Democrats' issue of health care, or are we on the Republican issue of national security?" said one Republican official with ties to the campaign. "On Wednesday we rolled out the spot -- we changed the tone fundamentally. They missed the opportunity to tell the American people what the campaign is about. This is how the president has framed the question before the American people."

If that's not spitting on the graves on those killed in 9/11 and doing it right in front of their friends and families, I don't know what is.

A gang of brutal facts

The only thing more annoying than when people from the "other side" of politics speak crap is when people ostensibly from the same side do it. A quick Google reveals Anthony O'Donnell from Northcote is a fairly regular contributor to the letters pages of The Age, but it was yesterday's contribution that I wanted to mention:

Deafening silence

It is generally agreed that the 1980s saw Saddam Hussein's most bloodthirsty crushing of domestic dissent, as well as his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds at Halabja.

Throughout that period, John Howard had a prominent parliamentary profile on the Opposition front benches. Yet despite his capacity and freedom to speak out on the parliamentary record, one searches Hansard in vain for any statement condemning Saddam's actions or offering support to his Iraqi victims. In fact, in February 1986, Howard's colleague Robert Hill actually expressed some consternation at the prospect that the Baathist regime might fall!

The only parliamentarians at that time to express their concern at Saddam's brutality were Labor backbenchers and senators from the minor parties.

It is a bit rich, then, for Howard now to accuse Labor and others of being "soft" on Saddam. Rather, it is he who should be apologising to the Iraqi people for his silence and seeming acquiescence in the face of tyranny.
Anthony O'Donnell
Northcote

The basic point, expressed in the last paragraph, is right, and I've written about it often, including yesterday. But the comments about Robert Hill and those who expressed concern about Saddam are demonstrably wrong. Keen as I was to find such incriminating evidence against Hill and his colleagues, I searched the Hansard data base, but it didn't offer much comfort. I didn't come across Hill expressing "some consternation at the prospect that the Baathist regime might fall"--which doesn't mean it isn't there, only that I didn't find it--but I did come across this statement that contradicts a key part of O'Donnell's claim about who did and didn't "express some consternation":

Message in a bottle

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