Peter Costello may be the more moderate future leader of a Coalition government, with wider public appeal, but Tony Abbott will always be their alpha attack dog. Here's some little gems from Tony about left media group-think in Australia:

Since the election, Labor-leaning journalists have been resigning from the Latham fan club like Communist Party members after the invasion of Hungary ...

It's not odd that journalists should favour Labor when the ALP is politically ascendant. What's odd is that political journalists should support Labor even when the federal parliamentary Labor Party looks like a bunch of professional losers. If it is self-evident that an Anglo-Saxon police force can't deal with ethnic crime, or that English-speaking-only administrators can't mastermind the reconstruction of Iraq, or that a celibate priesthood can't fully grasp the stresses of family life, why isn't it equally self-evident that a left-leaning media will never really understand the workings of a conservative government or the instincts of a conservative electorate?

Read the whole thing. It's not the whole story - indeed it can be quite off-putting for some - but a winning party needs an attack dog who knows where the jugular is and goes for it! It's a morale sort of thing, if nothing else.

While I am on a roll with logging e-mail exchanges(!), I might as well record this reply that I just sent to an American friend who was asking how I think our election will go in 4 days time.

Hi Bill!

I think that it is more likely that John Howard will be returned but it will probably be very, very close.

State politics in Australia are volatile compared to the Federal level - personality issues and "parish pump" issues are much more important. In contrast, the general rule for the last 40 years federally is that governments are *not* thrown out unless they are in disarray or the economy is in deep trouble. But the Australian economy has performed incredibly well under Howard's stewardship - we survived a regional financial crisis and recessions in our major trading partners with hardly a wrinkle in 8 years of virtually continuous economic boom. Interest rates and unemployment are at 30 year lows and inflation is close to insignificant while real incomes have increased markedly. The good times are rolling for John and Jill Average Citizen.

Having said that, there is a widespread tiredness and boredom (complacency?) with the Howard Government, while the Opposition Leader, Mark Latham, is an "interesting" politician who has really shaken things up. Underlying that, though, there is this widespread suspicion that he is flaky, impetuous and likely to make ill-considered policy decisions on the run. I think that the usually cautious Howard will prevail but maybe with a reduced margin.

The funny thing is that, like George Bush, John Howard has become a disappointment to old-school fiscal conservatives. During this election campaign, he has blown billions of a very large budget surplus (mainly built from company taxes harvested from the booming economy) on crass election "give-aways" instead of retiring more government debt, delivering substantial tax cuts, investing in national productive infrastructure or paving the way for fundamental tax and welfare reforms for the future - all of which many of his natural constituency would prefer to see instead of "spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave", as the pundits put it!

So that is my take - many on the leftish of centre all the way over to far right of Australian politics are disappointed in Howard and thoroughly tired of him but won't chance Latham under the circumstances. If the economy wasn't doing so good, Howard would be out on his ear by a landslide.

Mind you, it is likely to be very close and a Latham win is perfectly possible. It is just that it would break what has proven to be a reliable pattern for the last 40 years.

It looks like the US contest is evening up - what do you reckon? Funny enough, if Howard lost in Australia, I reckon that would have implications for Bush. How's that for the tail wagging the dog for a change? I bet Tony Blair is watching nervously, too!

Ah well, now I have made my final prediction, it's only a question of waiting to see if I am proved wrong yet again!

I haven't been in the habit of logging my e-mail exchanges but this one was a good example of my spiralling descent into the rejection of all fine ideals that come my way. My correspondent sent me the news of the coming launch of "Party 25" here in Brisbane with this e-mail.

Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 5:45 PM
Subject: Invitation to launch


Dear Friends

Keith and I have been talking with friend and philosopher of design/media
and ecology, Tony Fry (Tony is an eminent and internationally recognised
writer/futurist - he has held posts all over the world - and he has written
book like 'a new design philosophy, an introduction to defuturing, has
previously run the Eco Design Foundation in Sydney and now runs Team Des
(design/education/sustainability) http://www.teamdes.com.au/ with his
partner writer Ann Marie Willis from their farm out near Ravensbourne.

They have a project, 'Party 25', which is about imagining “a political
movement to get us to the 25th century” - with the implication we won't make
it there with current eco-social practices. So its a radically new position
way beyond lib/lab/and green politics.

They are 'launching' the idea of Party25 and working to get some press
mileage around the forthcoming election. I have copied information about
the launch below. It will be 11am Wednesday 29 September at Arterial
Partners, First floor, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, 420
Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley.

You would be most welcome to come along, and please feel free to forward
this to friends who may be interested.

Best wishes, take care

Juliexx

PARTY 25





Launch of Party 25 – the party to get us to the 25th century.


Politics in Australia requires new thinking and new direction — a process
that Party 25 is starting NOW!

Party 25 has been founded very recently by a diverse group of people who all
live and work in South East Queensland.

Its spokesperson is Dr Tony Fry, a designer, philospher, farmer who has
consulted, taught and written on design and sustainability for many years.
Other founding members include: Anne-Marie Willis a writer, editor and
environmental consultant; Dr Keith Armstrong, multimedia artist and
post-doctoral fellow; Dr Julie Dean, community psychologist and university
educator; Jim Gall, award-winning architect; and Annie Edwards,
criminologist and recording artist.

· Party 25 is a breakthough project to create a politics of the
future for the future.

· Party 25 totally refuses the lack of imagination and failure of
nerve dominating this election campaign.

· Party 25 believes that millions of Australians feel that the
available choices are no choice.

· Party 25 believes that the fundamental unsustainability of our
economy and society is the biggest challenge that none of the political
parties are confronting.

· Party 25 will say what needs to be said, rather than what people
want to hear. It will create no-compromise policies that will affect
everyone’s everyday life.

MEDIA LAUNCH 11am Weds 29 September

at Arterial Partners, First floor, Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary
Arts,

420 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane.



— View a short visual presention on how Party 25 thinks about problems
and solutions

— Hear a brief talk about Party 25’s principles and platform

— Take away a document on what a Party 25 government would look like

— Take the opportunity to put questions to a panel of Party 25’s founding
members



You can also request a copy NOW of ‘Party 25: Rationale’ (3 pages)

My reply, fuelled by two thirds of a bottle of wine, was as follows:

Hi Tony!

Thanks for this - interesting, and the people involved seem to be very
idealistic. I guess you know at least some of them, so don't take my usual
bile-studded reply too personally!

It's funny, but the idea of a party pursuing "no-compromise policies that
will affect
everyone’s everyday life" makes me a wee bit uncomfortable at the thought
that it might come anywhere near actually wielding power. Still, "no
compromise policies" are generally not a good formula for achieving mass
support!

Much to Beth's disgust, I find myself becoming more and more of a
libertarian as time goes on. I am really starting to think that it isn't
such a bad idea for governments to stay out of our lives as much as
possible. I suppose that there is plenty of room to disagree on what "as
much as possible" really means, though! Rational regulation, welfare and
social services are not a problem but I am getting mighty pissed off at this
election campaign with its big spending pork-barrel (in the widest sense)
bidding wars and proliferation of ever more complex subsidies, rebates,
allowances etc. I suppose it's easy when it's not your money! ("Hey, we've
taxed your arses off for the last couple of years and have absolutely
fucking billions of your dollars stored up. Now we are going to give some
of it back to you in little complex pieces, minus major admin costs of
course, just to show you how generous we are!").

Part of the problem, I reckon, is that the bastards are encouraged by the
widely-held view that governments should "do something" and involve
themselves in any social problem or issue you care to identify. There are
so many things that governments are not particularly good at - I should
know, I do my bit for Commonwealth mediocrity 7 hours and 30 minutes
(averaged over a flex time period) every working day!

Dunno about Party 25, Tony. Maybe if I was younger and gave half a rat's
arse about what the world will be doing in the 25th Century, I might be
inspired by it. Burnt out cynical shell that I am, though, I must say that
the founders don't quite strike me as the "diverse group of people" that
they claim to be. In fact, they all seem to neatly fit one of my very
favourite stereotypes for immediately dismissing people I don't agree with.
Referring to yourself as "Dr" in public - even when it's true - gives you
automatic entry.

Party 25's wholesale commitment to the great modern shibboleth of
"sustainability" is commendable. But I can't help thinking - has human
civilisation *ever* been "sustainable" at any point in its history? I can't
think of any examples - nothing I would want to call civilisation, anyway.
Generally, we just move on to new technologies, processes and methods before
the shit really hits the fan. Except maybe on Easter Island - that was a
mistake!

Time for a refill. Beth's back on Friday. Hope to see you soon!

It was fun while it lasted. And then the other third of a bottle succumbed!

So what if the worm says Latham won the debate - feeling lucky, punk?

Posting has been very, very light indeed over recent weeks. Still I have been reasonably active via personal e-mails and dropping comments on other people's blogs. I've been thinking - maybe I should post some of that stuff here.

Anyway, here's something I dropped in response to this post by Gary Sauer-Thompson. Sort of a standard "let's do what the terrorists want" line only a bit more intelligent, in some respects. Unfortunately, it also contains all the expected lame anti-Amercianism that seems to define the left these days. These were my comments:

Hi Gary,

I was relieved to reach your final comment and discover that you do, in fact, understand what JI are trying to achieve in their own unique way. It goes a little further, in fact - they want to create a strict Islamic capliphate operating under sharia right across the Muslim population areas of South-East Asia. Indonesia is only the start but establishing a sharia state there is a necessary step.

Their basic motivation for attacks like the other day is that they want all westerners out of Indonesia and they want western influence within that country to cease. That pretty much automatically makes Australia target number one, given our location and levels of engagement and interchange.

There are other complex motivations for JI operatives on several different levels. One is the desire for a glorious matrydom while fighting for Allah. Strange as it may seem to western secularists, militant religious faith can make people see this as a great attraction.

While I agree with your point that our involvement in Iraq can only anger JI further, I think that the neocons are right in the sense that we would still be a top target without it.

Much of the discussion of "blowback" in this context is based on a false premise. The claims on the Arabic language Islamist website mentioning our involvement in Iraq are very likely *not* a genuine statement on behalf of JI who, despiste their al Qaida links, have not been known for posting in Arabic to these websites in the past. Instead, this sounds like middle eastern al Qaida associates or sympathisers seeking to exploit an opportunity created for them by their JI "brothers".

In contrast with the spurious claim in Arabic, we have something else where the link with the perpetrators is beyond doubt - the "warning" received by Indonesian police 45 minutes before the explosion. The demand was to release Abu Bakr Bashir and you must admit that the targeting of the Australian embassy in this context makes a lot more sense than retaliation for our minor role in distant Iraq. It is widely understood in Indonesia that Australia has led the international pressure to put and keep Bashir behind bars.

Were we wrong to do so? I don't think so. The man leads a murderous and fanatical organisation and justice demands that he brought to account. Were we worng for the role we played in liberating East Timor? No again. And yet - if you are honest with yourself - you must admit that these two things are going to deliver a thousand times the "blowback" that our involvement in Iraq does, regardless of what JI recruiting propagandists or their buddies in the middle east say about it.

Yes, you are right that our involvement in Iraq has been and will continue to be thrown back in our faces by Islamist terrorists as long as we stay engaged there. There is "blowback" from Iraq. But my argument is that it is nothing compared to the "blowback" from our presence and engagement in the region.

As for not "dismissing what JI says" - well, nothing should be dismissed but it sure needs to be interpreted on the basis of a clear-headed understanding. I don't think you were going as far as Brian Deegan and calling for actual "negotiations" with JI. Unfortunately for poor Brian, the tragic loss of his son appears to have quite unhinged him. JI is trying to overthrow the legitimate government of Indonesia and bypass the popular will of the Indonesians who elected it. It is a declared enemy of the state that the state itself has for too long tried to ignore, deny and appease. Not any more. Indonesia is stirring and any suggestion that Australia try to "negotiate" with this organisation in the face of the Indonesian Government and people is frankly in cloud cuckoo land, even if we regarded it as desirable.

Thankfully, most Australians would not contemplate negotiating with JI, even if it were practically feasible. I disagree with you that the JI program is rational. They are seeking something that the majority Indonesians do not want, they are seeking to achieve it by disgusting but ultimately futile and tokenistic actions of extreme violence and they are partly motivated by a fairly insane deathwish grounded in an extreme religious fantasy that is in reality a cruel hoax (don't get me started on religion!). I'm sorry, that is not rational in my book.

Thanks for the webspace and your brief attention. Sometimes I just feel like cursing when I read posts like yours - but if I am going to actually pop up on your blog, I am careful of minding my manners. Us neocons are just put together that way, I suppose!

Cheers,TFK

Tim Blair provides a neat summary of the latest piece of stupidity from Labor's "star recruit".

Peter Garrett - the man who will attract to Labor the primary votes of (some) inner city left wing trendies. Votes that would have come to Labor anyway in a compulsory preferential system. Meanwhile, what will be the toll of rural Labor and conservative "genuine working class" votes? Brilliant move, Mark!

According to the mainstream media, Iraq is just getting worse all the time. I don't buy it. Although there is plenty of terrorist violence and suffering to come, things are turning around. Strangely enough, this is a very hopeful sign.

As I have been saying for some time now, look back on where Iraq is at five years after the fall of Hussein and make your judgement then. As far as I am concerned, there is virtually no doubt that it will be a much, much better place and a foothold for genuine reform in the Arab world.

A truly great piece of polemics here from Christopher Hitchens on Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 911.

Over recent weeks, I have clarified my thinking about who is most likely to win the federal election in Australia later this year. Latham has been looking good (as a bet - not as an alternative Prime Minister!) for several months now but I am starting to think that a change of government is not on the cards.

Strangely enough, this line of thinking started to crystalise for me while I was giving a presentation to work colleagues about the unemployment rate (and other labour force indicators) over the last 25 years. Basically, Australians don't change their Federal Government unless the economy is going seriously pear-shaped and/or the government itself is in crisis and falling apart.

Thinking back over the last 40 years of our political history - in other words, while I have been paying some attention to it - a clear pattern emerges, which I first wrote about in comments dropped at Gary Sauer-Thompson's squishy-left blog (slightly amended here):

As you say, "Their [US Government figures, including President Bush] interventions can be interpreted as gross interference in our domestic politics". Yes, they could be - if you see the world in terms of Australian domestic politics. Every Australian with half a brain surely knows already that George Bush would prefer for Howard to win the next election in Australia. Nothing new here.

He'll probably get his way, too. I have watched every election in Australia closely for the last 40 years. Changes of Government never happen unless the economy is spinning out of control (1975, 1983, 1993/6) or the Government is in absolute crisis and falling apart under incompetent leadership (1972, 1975 - again). The only anomaly here is, in fact, 1993 when the economy was still reeling from the "recession we had to have" - but voters deferred Keating's punishment for three years because Hewson handled his GST policy so ineptly that Labor's scare campaign worked.

The pundits are right - "governments lose elections". These things do not apply in the present environment. Dream as much as you like or get all excited about opinion polls, Howard is going to win at the end of 2004 when voters are actually called upon to cast their ballot. Better get used to the idea of another 3 years of Liberal Party government now.

Of course, this does not mean that I believe that the election of a Latham Labor Government cannot occur later this year. Just that, if it does, a pattern established in Australian federal politics for 40 years will be broken. The more I think about it, the more likely it is that Australians will not risk the flakey Mr Latham when they have a perfectly servicable and experienced Coalition Government that is still stable and doing a good job on the economy - even if they are a little tired of it.

Interest rates, in particular, are working in the Government's favour at a time when our personal indebtedness has never been higher. Anyone over 30 with a memory will recall 17% home mortgage rates under Labor with a shudder. But that's what you get when you run big budget deficits while trying to control spiralling inflation through monetary policy, a la Paul Keating.

Bill Herbert in fine form in his final Silent America essay, "Strength":

Let me clarify this if I may. Senator Kennedy claims Abu Ghraib is simply Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers “under new management – U.S. management.” Taking him at his word – a somewhat iffy proposition right out of the gate – he apparently cannot see the difference between the humiliation and bullying of enemy combatants, which is shameful, disgusting and reprehensible, and the gleeful, mocking murder, torture and gang rape of over 300,000 innocent men, women and children -- which is something worse. So Senator, here is a helpful analogy which you may find useful: The difference is about the same as pulling over and leaving a young female secretary on the curb in the rain, which is shameful, disgusting and reprehensible, vs. leaving her trapped in the car at the bottom of a river while you look at the bubbles and ponder the political repercussions.

Some people just have a way with words, I guess!

I was amazed at the journalistic value of this article in Al-Jazeera On-line about the Nicholas Berg beheading.

The article pretty clearly illustrates the role that Al-Jazeera has taken on itself in the Middle East. Despite the western apologists who are always lauding its "fearless independence", it never seriously turns the blowtorch on the repressive dictatorships and theocracies of the Arab and Muslim world. More generally, the article is symptomatic of the disconnect from reality and the almost total lack of capacity for self-examination typical of popular media-fuelled Arab culture.

I stumbled on the Al-Jazeera article from this clever spoof page. I love the link to the original article that bears the text "Hostage's head 'probably just spontaneously fell off', experts reckon"!

Quote of the week from Lt Col John Downham, the Regimental Secretary of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment:

"This regiment has seen off Louis X1V, Napoleon, Kaiser Bill, and Hitler. We do not think that Piers Morgan is going to give us a problem."

Those Lancashire lads certainly know how to rumble.

He certainly should be if proper media attention is given to this kind of piss weak waffling, equivocation and evasion.

As usual, Mark Steyn goes for the jugular. In a funny kind of way, of course. From a vast distance, I don't see how Kerry can last if he gets enough scrutiny along these lines from enough voters.

This is the first blog entry for 5 months - a personal best. I wouldn't have bothered with this one, either, except I am on holidays and the Steyn article was so good.

as my wise old boss (Paul Munro) used to say.

The following e-mail exchange with Richard Neville was prompted by an article on his web page that (among other things) repeats the old lie that the Kurds of Halabja were not slaughtered by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1988 but rather by the Iranian military.

Despite his reflexive anti-Americanism and the fact that he believes a bunch of half-crazed shit, Neville strikes me as a basically decent man who doesn't realise that he is playing a despicable game of genocide-denial. He is an old left wing libertarian with a long history of "fighting the good fight" and is probably standing up for what he thinks is right. Unfortunately, his view of what is right is formed on the basis of clouded thinking, prejudice and incorrect information.

I am inclined to try to persuade and educate people like this by taking them along one or two small steps. The alternative is to be confrontational and abusive - in the vein of young right wing libertarian blogger, Chris Textor (one of the posts of 23 December 2003).

The potential benefit of trying to convince an "influential" left wing writer like Richard Neville that he should accept and publish a correction is the possibility that some small seeds of doubt will be sown in the minds of some of his knee-jerk readership about the factual basis and moral superiority of their position. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, as Mao would say! That is a good enough reason in itself to use honey rather than vinegar.

[Note - this e-mail exchange has been edited slightly to remove the name of my long-suffering wife (to avoid embarrassment) and our valid home e-mail address (to avoid spam)]

Hi again Richard!

If you are thinking about linking to anything about Halabja, your readers may appreciate this very good article by Leo Casey from "Dissent" magazine:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/archives/2003/su03/casey.htm

It is longish for an on-line article but a hell of a lot more digestible than the Human Rights Watch report, for instance.

Thanks again for your interest in all this. It is funny how the CIA's own propaganda can come back to bite the present US administration, isn't it?

Cheers,
Bob B.


----- Original Message -----
From: Bob Bunnett
To: Richard Neville
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: Disturbing misconception


Thanks Richard, that's very good of you. By all means add my e-mail to, or link to it from, the footnote. The only problem with attribution is that you never know the full consequences but ... publish and be damned, as I am sure your own personal history continues to urge you!

Thanks again and have a great 2004!

Cheers,
Bob Bunnett


----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Neville
To: Bob Bunnett
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 3:48 AM
Subject: Re: Disturbing misconception


Hi Bob, Thankyou for your impassioned & informative email. Because I am not an expert in his area, the best way around the situation would be for me to add your email (or parts of it, if you prefer, with or without attribution) to the footnote relating to Pelletier. Is this okay with you? Warmest, R


On 25/12/03 3:29 PM, "Bob Bunnett wrote:


Richard,

I was shocked to read on your web site that you give credence to the discredited revisionist Stephen Pelletiere and do not believe that Saddam Hussein's regime was responsible for gassing the Kurds of Halabja. Given the facts of the matter, this is a morally repugnant position akin to David Irving's holocaust denial - one that is clearly not consistent with your general moral position. I urge you to quickly reconsider the facts, withdraw this obnoxious statement and apologise for any hurt you have caused.

Halabja must be seen in the context of a much wider campaign of systematic genocide waged against the Kurds by Hussein's regime in what was known as the "Anfal". If you want to know more about this, you should read the report by Human Rights Watch available at:

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/

The Anfal campaign involved gas attacks on dozens of Kurdish towns and villages - Halabja was only the biggest - and cost the lives of at least 120,000 Kurdish civilians. HRC documents at least 40 instances of attacks using chemical weapons. There are extensive records of interview with survivors available both from HRC and from other sources.

In relation to Halabja, the facts are these. 5,000 people were slaughtered, that is true, but Halabja was a large town of 80,000 people so there were many survivors. The Kurds know very well who attacked them in wave after wave of gas attacks over a three day period. Iranian troops were in control "on the ground" over this period and it is in any case inconceivable that a "friendly fire" incident would be protracted for a whole three days.

You should be very wary of Stephen Pelletiere. He took part in a CIA "black propaganda" exercise to try to divert the world's outrage over Halabja to Iran. This took place at a time when the CIA perceived it as in US interests to stop the Ayatollahs and were providing intelligence support for the military efforts of the Iraqi regime. I don't know why Pelletiere continues to advocate this position in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary - maybe it is a matter of intellectual pride or something - but that is mere speculation.

What is beyond doubt, however, is that he is dead wrong and the position he is advocating is (to use a Bushism!) unspeakably evil and disgustingly disrespectful of the tens of thousands of innocent Kurds who died as a result of Saddam Hussein's attempted genocide. I am very disappointed to see a man such as yourself following this line without question, simply in pursuit of an agenda of criticising the toppling of Saddam Hussein by all possible means.

Please reconsider what you have done and just think briefly what it might mean to any Kurdish exile or refugee who fled the horror of Iraq should they read you throwaway comment.

Yours sincerely,
Bob Bunnett

UPDATE - It's worth noting that no correction or retraction has been added as of 3 January 2004. Tex might be right - the man might be a total shitbag with no concern for the facts and no qualms about rolling in the moral slime of genocide denial. And people like this pride themselves on the morality of their "anti-war" position!

Maybe in Neville's world the simple equation "anti-American = good" applies at all times and the ends always justify the means. Too bad about the 120,000 innocents slaughtered with genocidal intent. The memory of this outrage, which to me imposes a duty on all of us to honour and preserve, is just a tool to be manipulated at will in the service of a greater end - condemning the US administration. Why bother engaging the left in dialogue at all? Hand me that barrel of vinegar!

So, let's kick off 2004 by just dropping some e-mails into the blogosphere. This is from one that I sent to an anti-war, anti-Bush Amercian pal to let him know about some of the Iraqi bloggers I try to check out regularly:

Hi Bill,

A little while back, I remember mentioning to you the little explosion of Iraqi blogs on the net since uncensored communication (especially with the outside world) ceased to be a capital offence in Iraq!

I have only just discovered how easy it is to "export" bookmarks, so here is an interesting crop I have been checking fairly regularly. "Salam Pax" of Where is Raed is the original "Baghdad Blogger" who was operating even under Saddam's nose (clever guy!) and was made something of an international celebrity by the UK left-wing Guardian newspaper.

The rest cover quite a range of thinking, attitude and subject matter - from the sceptical, pessimistic and sometimes angry "Riverbend" of Bagdhad Burning through the more mildly suspicious Gaith (a friend of Salam's), the centrist but optimistic Zeyad of Healing Iraq, the passionate, philosophical and religious (and pro-American!) Alaa of The Mesopotamian to the gung-ho supporters of the Provisional Authority and its agenda like Omar of Iraq the Model.

There is some interesting reading among this lot. They are only a few voices among 25 million but even this small sample of passionate, computer-literate, English-speaking Iraqis is enough to remind folks like us of the diversity of views held by people there and the inadequacy of the black and white opinions held by too many outsiders.

THE MESOPOTAMIAN

Where is Raed

Healing Iraq

Baghdad Burning

G.

IRAQ THE MODEL

Iraq at a glance

Ishtar talking

Hammorabi

Nabil's Blog

Baghdadee

It might seem strange, but reading these blogs and getting some insight into what the posters and their friends are thinking gives me cause for an optimism of my own for the future of Iraq, even among the confusion of the present time. I would be interested to hear what you think about them in due course.

Salaam!
Bob B.

Now it is true that I would not stake my life on all of these bloggers being everything they claim to be - but Salam Pax turned out to be the genuine article despite my earlier misgivings. Several of them have posted heaps of digital pictures from Iraq and all of them know so much about what is happening there - that is, day to day detail - that they are all credible. Their understanding of daily life in Iraq is so good that it virtually discounts any possibility that they are not native Iraqis.

Of course, it is possible that some could be returned exiles engaging in an internet-based propaganda war but, unless and until there is good reason to believe this, the alternative explanation (ie they are fair dinkum) is preferable in each case. Several of them know and refer to each other and link between themselves frequently and they have diverging opinions on a range of matters. Sharply diverging in some cases.

All in all, it is best to accept that they provide a deep view into an Iraqi reality that is basically untouched by professional journalists and mainstream media. Fascinating reading, if you have the time - which for me is another good reason for "lazy blogging"!

While still in blogging mood, here is an excellent review in Asia Times Online of David Marr's and Marion Wilkinson's sanctimonious little propaganda-fest, Dark Victory.

Very interesting to see a cool, detached and rational view of the Tampa incident from someone outside the country, writing for a largely overseas readership. In particular, Mr Casella shows that he actually understands the issues underlying the Tampa and the wider crisis in the international asylum system that many Western nations are presently trying to address. More than can be said for Marr and Wilkinson, who are only interested in scoring partisan points at the expense of balanced truth and genuine understanding.

More lazy blogging via comments dropped at Tim Blair's site.

This time, Tim and his resident commentariat are "debating" (as only a troll-laden comments roll can debate!) a great little article by Andrew Bolt in the Herald Sun Online.

Some of the debate misses the point - Bolt is not really trying to make a serious statistical point about falling Green support, he is trying to expose the dangerous stupidity of Greens policy to his extensive readership. People like Bolt have much greater influence over the political dialogue in Australia than Tim's trolls - or supporters - could ever hope for. I just love this quote from Bolt's article:

I can see it now, Bob Brown leading the Fourth Regiment of Big Hugs into battle on their bicycles, while stoned citizens lazily cheer him from the rusted roofs of long-dead power stations.

Anyway, my "lazy blogger" contribution for today is this little diatribe, courtesy of the comments section:

PK, the sad fact is that most people who vote for the Greens don't know what they are really voting for. That is the real point of Bolt's article. It is not an attempt to argue the statistical validity of decreasing or increasing Green support - it is an attempt to strike a blow by exposing the rank silliness and other-worldliness of "green" thinking.

Those lefty critics and others side-tracked into arguing about the stats are simply missing the point.

One very interesting question is how the Greens and groups like Greenpeace manage to avoid careful scrutiny by the media as much as they do. Their public image is warm and fuzzy. People who vote Green as a protest, or as an "alternative", or, indeed, because they feel strongly about certain environmental issues, are left feeling sure that they have "done the right thing" and supported basically harmless, well-meaning folk who stand for everything that is right.

In reality, "green" thinking is pure poison. It is anti-enterprise, anti-progress, anti-technology and science, anti-freedom, anti-Western and anti-us. It is sloppy, drug-addled, "magical" thinking, dedicated to tearing down centuries of civilised development and intellectual advancement. Good on Bolt for trying to increase public exposure of this poisonous crap. We should all join him in this effort as much as we can.

Andrew Bolt's article is an excellent little piece of political polemic - make sure you read it!

Over the last few weeks I have been playing the exciting and challenging lead role in a new Australian drama called "The Man Who Couldn't Blog". Unfortunately, Georgw W Bush is about to crush my dreams just like he crushes little Iraqi babies under the tracks of his Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Via the evils of a Free Trade Agreement, what's worse!

I just dropped these comments over at Tim Blair's site. Relaying second hand comments is better than not blogging at all, I suppose.

How many times over the last few weeks have you heard some of these "protected species" Yartz types - especially film and television drama producers - claim that "Australian identity and culture is on the line" with the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement currently being negotiated?

I mean, how ponderously self-important can these deadbeats be about the peurile crap they produce? WTF have Australian movies got to do with Australian culture anyway? Say an average Australian is relatively keen on the cinema and goes to a movie every second weekend. That's about 25 movies a year. Maybe 5 of them will be Australian movies. Something tells me our culture has a firmer foundation than that - Australian movies could disappear completely and it would make no fucking difference whatsoever.

As for the fluff we produce for television, Idol or a local comedy are more likely to hit the spot for the kind of mental unwinding that is the real reason why most people watch "entertainment" television.

Austalian culture does NOT depend on the heavy-handed protection of local film and television production. It is deeply rooted in things beyond Australia anyway - Western civilisation, healthy borrowings from other cultural traditions from around the world, and our English language inheretance for a start. To the extent that we have a uniquely Australian vernacular tradition (and we do!) it is an easy-going, hedonistic, sports-loving, agnostic, egalitarian, physical and sensuous culture. It has fuck-all to do with the Yartz, if the truth be told. If anything. it gives the Yartz short shrift and tends to look upon its practitioners as unbearable wankers in the process of disappearing up their own arseholes. I bow before the wisdom of the masses on that one!

So the next time you hear a film or television "artiste" moaning on about how Australian culture will be destroyed if their crappy work ceases to be the beneficiary of a government-enforced quota, it is worth reflecting on what Australian culture really is - something we define in our workplaces and homes between ourselves every day. Just how fucking vulnerable is it, anyway? Bulletproof, I reckon.

The simple answer to those whinging bastards is "FFS make something we want to watch and we will watch it". Continue making boring and/or sanctimonius crap and, with a bit of luck, you will get the fate you deserve.

TFK

Don't expect a quick return to regular posting. The fact is, I couldn't be fucked to get off my fat arse and stir up a few ideas of my own. The limited net time I have is better spent reading the blogs of others!

A lot of the media coverage of David Kay's interim report on behalf of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) on their investigation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has come out as if the ISG found nothing. As this inteview with Mr Kay clearly shows, that is far from the truth.

Already it is crystal clear that WMD capabilities were deliberately maintained and concealed by Saddam Hussein. This is damning enough by itself but it goes much further than that. Kay refers to the massive remaining task of checking known weapons dumps - read the whole interview and get an idea of the scale of the task. Even more interesting, he refers to specific information obtained from Iraqi generals:

SNOW: There were claims before the war by Secretary of State Colin Powell that Iraq had weaponized and ready-to-use chemical weapons. He was very confident about the existence of chemical weapons. You have not yet found actual chemical weapons, correct?

KAY: Tony, it's important to stress the word "yet." We have not only Secretary Powell, we have Iraqi generals telling us that they had them. Unfortunately, they're not able to tell us where they are now. And that's why we're looking so hard.

As I darkly foreshadowed a couple of months ago (based on loose rumours supposedly of intelligence provenance that were circulating obscure corners of the internet at the time), Syria is a likely candidate for where some of Saddam's existing stocks of chemical weapons - if he did in fact still have any - were hurriedly transported:

SNOW: How about Syria? I've heard talk of convoys making their way out of Iraq into Syria in the weeks before the war. What have you heard?

KAY: We've heard the same reports. Actually, we have probably more specific evidence on that, on dates, times...

SNOW: I would suspect you know more than I do on that.

KAY: ... and routes taken. The difficulty we have is proving what was in the convoys, and that's where we're stymied right now.

If there really is anything in this, it is particularly disturbing news and I would expect some big developments early next year.

Meanwhile, most of the mainstream media says that Kay "found nothing". Even if you believe that he is a bald-faced liar doing a job for George W, he is clearly not saying that he found nothing. Are these people asleep at the wheel or something???

Or maybe just pursuing an agenda?

This caught my eye - an interesting excerpt about media coverage of Iraq immediately before the coalition attack from a recently published book.

New York Times veteran, John Burns, goes to the heart of a serious lack of journalistic integrity.

No blogging for two months virtually - I haven't had enough time on the Net away from work to even read a fraction of the material that I would like to read, let alone blog about my thoughts on it all. I won't be getting back into it for at least the next 3 months.

Not as I do. An amazing show of hypocrisy from some big wheels in the Arab League and another interesting article from Amir Taheri. I guess critics would say that it's in National Review On-Line, what do you expect? It's hard to find fault with the points he is making, however.

While on the subject of Paul Wolfowitz and his long-standing desire to topple Saddam Hussein's regime ...

Steven Den Beste, writing in OpinionJournal On-Line, encapsulates fairly neatly the deepest and most enduring reason why the US Government got involved in the recent unpleasantness in Iraq. Den Beste is a little too "gung-ho" in his tone and sounds awfully like a coach psyching up his football team again at half-time, but that is probably his purpose in writing this article. That aside, it is a crystal clear exposition of this most funadamental of all reasons driving the US administration to action. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that there were multiple reasons for American involvement in Iraq, as Daniel Drezner points out.

The determination of the Americans to achieve funadamental and lasting reform of the middle east is what I have believed to be the major driver towards military intervention in Iraq ever since George W Bush started making threatening noises about Saddam Hussein. This is also why I believed that the USA would not be diverted from its goal, UN or no UN endorsement, and regardless of how many were with it in the "Coalition of the Willing".

My own main reason for supporting military intervention was the "humanitarian" one - Saddam was such a murderous, dangerous and oppressive brute that his removal by force (and there was no other way) was clearly a good thing and should be supported. I have no respect for national sovereignty under these circumstances and am glad to see great powers like the USA doing something worthwhile with their power. I also had sufficient faith in both the US system and the American people to be confident that the US military would do everything humanly possible to keep civilian casualties, and damage to civilian infrastructure, to an absolute minimum. Events proved that this confidence was justified.

So the "humanitarian" justification was always the major one for me and the reason for my strong support. However, although I might wish the USA to get involved against any number of brutal regimes, I would never rationally expect its government to do so unless it could see that significant national interests were at stake - a point I have made several times before on this blog. So Burma's generals can breathe easy but the North Koreans better watch their step. (Not that I think the USA would launch a military attack against North Korea - but it might try to squeeze the regime out of existence and North Korea could react to that militarily.)

Den Beste's succinct exposition of what I believe to be the deepest neocon agenda in seeking "regime change" in Iraq shows how US decisionmakers saw intervention as essential to the USA's long term national interest. It is an ambitious project and I hope for their and the world's sake that it succeeds. However, I continue to believe that the toppling of Saddam Hussein was fully justified by its outcome - removing the blight of his regime from the Iraqi people. "Knee-zhair" yellowcake never entered into it, as far as I was concerned!

While on the subject of more positive assessments of Iraq ...

Journalists who want to report only negative news from Iraq can always capitalise on events like the continuing killings of American soldiers, even if only a few thousand Fedayeen among a population of 24 million are responsible. Remove the "we were right all along" agenda and a more honest and realistic assessment emerges.

In contrast, if you want someone with a vested interest in painting a truly positive picture, who better than the shadowy zionist ideologue and secret puppet-master behind the dumb Texan cowboy president himself? Except, of course, that Wolfowitz has been thoroughly consistent in his position for many years and is a fundamentally honest man. If it was a toss up between him and, say, Robert Fisk or John Pilger as to who was closer to the truth, there is simply no contest.

As I see it, every word of the briefing he gave after his return from Iraq is true, even though he continues to present the administration's case in the most positive way that he can. He is pretty well on the money, as usual.

Surprisingly, the war over Iraq drags on. While Iraq itself is being steadily rebuilt - surely the biggest news on the international scene for many years - left wing journalists and commentators are striving to create their own alternative reality by ignoring the forest and staring at splinters.

At the present time, they are involved in a concerted effort to construct the perception that their opposition to the liberation of Iraq has been vindicated by events. I have no doubt that this is mostly unconscious - lefties are often self-duped, victims of their own shallow cynicism, pet hatreds, constitutional negativity and anti-Americanism.

The case presently seems to rest on two main legs - a bit dicey at the best of times. First, that three governments deliberately lied about Saddam Hussein trying to get yellowcake from "Knee-zhair", wherever that is, and that the whole case for intervention in Iraq rested on that(!). Second, that things in Iraq are god-awfully bad and the Iraqis just want the coalition forces to leave. If you listen to Radio National, as I do, you could easily think that there was nothing else worth reporting about Iraq. Much as I still like RN, I am damn glad that I don't rely on it for news. Its leftwing bias is getting close to my pain threshold!

Let's have a bit of a look at this argument. On the first point, there are quite a few increasingly mad and strident critics who are going to have egg all over their faces before the year is out. Surely no sane person on Earth doubts that Saddam Hussein had and used large quantities of chemical weapons in the late 1980s. Certainly, those who managed to survive the Anfal genocide campaign against the Kurdish people of Iraq could set you right if you did. The UN inspectors found, before they were kicked out by the regime in 1998, that large stocks remained which had not been destroyed under UN supervision as required under the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire. Between then and Gulf War II, Saddam consistently refused to observe those cease-fire terms, as well as binding Security Council resolutions, made his people suffer under UN sanctions and ignored months of a clear build-up to war when it could still have been avoided.

The real (and much more important) questions that should be exercising the minds of the media are "what happened to Iraq's chemical weapons?" and "what capability and intentions did Saddam Hussein retain in relation to other WMDs?", not some crap about whether the coalition leaders were referring to "Knee-zhaire" forged documents alone when they made their peripheral references to the buying of uranium in Africa. The coalition investigators will have comprehensive and documented answers to the important questions before the year is out. In the meantime, it's amusing to see the carping critics encouraging each other to take more and more rope, thinking they have Bush, Blair and Howard on the run. Nothing like a good hangin' to bring Christmas cheer to your inner Texan!

Tony Parkinson, writing in The Age, manages to put this forged documents issue into some genuine perspective. He also identifies exactly where the real concerns in the public debate about Iraqi WMDs should lie. Mark Steyn adds his usual brutal humour to the mix when pondering the US scene for The Spectator.

The second main leg of the "we wuz right after all" argument is what a bloody mess Iraq is in. Well, it is a bit of a mess in places, especially Bagdhad and the Sunni Arab heartland, but it's only 3 months since a major war and the toppling of a 30 year regime by force, and it is presently enduring a violent campaign of sabotage by a relative handful of remaining pro-Saddam extremists. However, it is clear that real and substantial progress is being made. Kurdistan is thriving and can serve as an inspiration to the rest of the country. The Shia south is relatively peaceful and well down the road of reconstruction. Even in Bagdhad, where most western journalists still stay in the Palestine Hotel and talk to each other, things are definitely on the improve.

The new Governing Council - scorned and dismissed by biased critics - is very broadly based and has a high degree of popular support. It is the best vehicle possible for directing the process of building new organs of national self-determination, leading on in turn to the design of a new constitution and elections when the necessary work has been done. It should be seen for what it is - the first step in regaining national sovereignty, and a very hopeful sign indeed. These community leaders are far from American stooges - the major Shia groupings are proportionally represented and even the Communist Paty is involved, as it should be given its level of popular support and its role in opposing Saddam.

In terms of reporting the real situation in Iraq, I prefer the work of Arabic-speaking commentators who have travelled widely in the country since the war and don't have a particular anti-US barrow to push. Amir Taheri is a fine example. Writing in The New York Post, he brings an entirely new perspective on the real situation inside Iraq for anyone steeped in the leftist negativity that continues to dominate reportage in ABC coverage like "AM".

As for those pesky WMDs - I have my suspicions. There could still be significant holdings of chemical weapons on Iraqi territory but, cross my palm with silver, and I will give you some vague blurb using the words "Syria", "Bekaa Valley", "alone in the world", "come clean" and "before Christmas". And maybe, just maybe, even "UN", believe it or not! Time will tell and that is something Bush and Howard have plenty of (Blair is less secure because of the ratbags in his own ranks).

The main game is and remains the reconstruction of Iraq - sad that so many journalists think that their own petty obsessions are more interesting!

It is not getting much coverage in the media, but the gifted and impressive GM food advocate, African biotechnologist Dr Florence Wambugu, is presently in Australia for the international conference on genetics in Melbourne. Read the Globe and Mail article (first link) to get some sense of who she is and what she stands for.

Sadly, many intelligent - but not scientifically educated - people in Australia can easily fall for the destructive anti-GM myths and scare-mongering pushed by groups like Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace. Views like those of Dr Wambugu simply "do not compute" in the activists' world view. I mean, how can anything produced in the capitalist West, using (shudder) advanced technology, be a good thing? And how can the case for it be argued by a (gasp) Kenyan (double gasp) woman?

The fact is that anti-GM activists are largely blinded by their own hatred of capitalism (while enjoying all of its fruits, of course) and have a hopelessly romantic view of third world subsistence farming. The reality is that the need to spend most of your waking hours in backbreaking and time-consuming labour in small scale "organic" subsistence farming effectively prevents education and the development of a more advanced economy with better standards of living. Your natural, disease susceptible crops are only one failure away from bringing starvation to you and your family. Needless to say, this culturally authentic 'lifestyle choice" must be protected from modern farming techniques at all costs.

It is a shame that Dr Wambugu's message is not getting more exposure. All of those smart Australian non-scientists desperately need to hear the truth, rather than more eco-nazi fantasies about capitalist oppression and the moral superiority of keeping the third world in grinding poverty forever.

UPDATE: I couldn't resist logging the following excellent comments by Luis Alegria on Tim Blair's blog. Luis was commenting on this post by Tim relating to this anti-GM article in The Age. His comments were sent to the paper as a letter to the editor and I hope it gets published - it is a very succinct demolition of key elements of the anti-GM Green humbug.

Dear sirs,

In response to :
GM crops will not help feed the world
by Dr Gyorgy Scrinis

Dr. Scrinis fails to consider certain economic and social realities in his denunciation of GM crops.

First, in most troubled third-world societies there is insufficient farmland for "traditional" farming to employ more than a fraction of the rural population as it is. There are too many people for the available agricultural employment, or viable land. This is true in places like the Philippines, China, India, Bangladesh. Traditional means just will not do.

Second, in most countries in the world, including the poor third world, most of the population has left the land, or is rapidly doing so. So cheap food is a greater boon to more people than high agricultural prices.

Third, the consumers of most of this GM food to be produced by the "evil" conglomerates are those self-same poor third world people. The developed world, even the US, is a saturated and stagnant market for bulk agricultural produce.

Fourth, the GM revolution, if it succeeds, will assuredly drive down the price of food. This has been the consistent pattern of technology improvements in agriculture. There are too many players in agriculture to create some nefarious monopoly and excess profits. I doubt anyone can show where improved technology has driven prices up.

Fifth, given a stagnant market and higher yields, hence lower prices, less agricultural land will be economically viable. This land will mostly be abandoned. This has again been the typical pattern, where marginal farms return to a state of nature. In the US there has been a trend in this direction, where there has even been talk of restoring the praries with abandoned land. This should be good news to the Greens, if more land reverts to the wild. I don't see why they would not be willing to trade off GM's and pesticides for that.

Sixth, poor third-world people are very interested in luxuries when these become cheap enough to afford. If GM makes these more affordable that is a boon to the poor much more so than to the rich.

I don't think Dr. Scrinis et. al. have thought this all through.

Luis Alegria

Good luck with publication, Luis!

UPDATE #2: Here is a brilliant little take-down of the same silly anti-GM article. How do you get so much good sense into a couple of dozen paragraphs? Link courtesy of Aaron Oakley.

I just dropped a lengthy comment over at Tim Blair's site again and might as well log it here, given the minimal extra effort involved.

Tim has a good piece called Articulate Adams in which he exposes the pomposity and "smart-guy" stupidity of Australia's Lard Bard - Phillip Adams. The whole thing is in response to this pretentious piece of leftie groupthink by Adams in The Australian.

Tim's posting is followed by a lot of very good comments from some of his wide and international readership - I especially like his new Movable Type blog site for this reason. Anyway, having nothing better to do today (like going to work, for instance), I thought that I would add this wordy contibution myself:

From the Adams article (first bit not quoted by Tim):

"In the wit and wisdom of George W. we've learned that the French don't have a word for entrepreneur and are constantly reminded that God is an American. Although he'd still find it hard to find Iraq on a map, that doesn't stop George lobbing missiles on Baghdad or reducing decades of diplomacy to words you'd see stencilled on a T-shirt or stuck on a bumper sticker."

Let's just have a bit of a look at the 4 pseudo-facts about Bush to which Mr Eloquent refers.

Starting with the last, President Bush's record pretty clearly shows that he *does* have a remarkable knack for cutting through the crap of diplomatic jargon. Isn't that a good thing, Phillip? Exactly who has the parties firmly planted on a "roadmap" to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the Lard Bard and the rest of the whiny left say they care so much about? George W Bush, that's who! And why would that be? Because both parties have cottoned on to the fact that when he opens his (allegedly stupid) mouth, he damn well means what he says and is prepared to do something about it, that's why.

Next, what is this about being "constantly reminded that God is an American"? When has President Bush ever said or implied that? This is simply the Lard Bard's own highly intelligent and articulate (I would say fevered and irrational) imagination at work. In fact, the evidence points to Bush having a more sophisticated view of religion and his own religious faith than Adams or the left seem to be capable of believing. His conduct immediately following the September 11 attacks, in which he acted quickly and with genuine passion to hose down any possible backlash against Muslims in the USA, illustrates my point.

As for the factoid about having difficulty finding Iraq on a map, Susan dealt with this already in her comments above. The Lard Bard just made it up – pure and simple. Intelligent and articulate people are allowed to do that because it “ought to be true”, even if it isn’t. In fact, the whole world “ought” to be in complete accord with their lofty opinions (simple, brutish folk call them prejudices).

Finally, the canard about the French having no word for “entrepreneur”. This has become a staple of internet discussion boards but I have found it difficult to identify a reputable source. As best I can establish, President Bush might have actually said this in an aside to Tony Blair during an international meeting at which the French were whining about their economic problems (some internet sources attribute the story to UK Chancellor, Gordon Brown). If so, why is this taken as proof of Bush’s stupidity rather than as proof of his quick-wittedness and sense of humour? It is pretty clear that there would be no point to the comment otherwise. Yet not only the Lard Bard but lefties the world over have put their own special interpretation on this and shown us in the process the depth of their own stupidity and gullibility and the extent to which their ability to make sense of the world is clouded by their own prejudices.

The Bush-entrepreneur story reminds me of similar criticism of a great American and a President of the nineteenth century – Ulysses S Grant. Without wishing to labour any possible parallels, Grant was a highly intelligent man, but he was a man of action rather than of the spoken word (although a brilliant writer). He was a military man and a man of firm principle. Most of all, he was the man who knew exactly what needed to be done – and went ahead and did it, when his merit was finally recognised – to win the American Civil War for Lincoln. Yet his political opponents persisted in trying to represent him as stupid and obtuse. On a visit to Venice in his later life, he made a crack to his entourage in line with his characteristic droll humour that the city would be much improved if its canals were drained. Those who knew Grant (and those who have subsequently studied him) saw the joke for exactly what it was. Yet some idiot journalist used it as “proof” of his stupidity and his opponents seized on it in the same vein – showing only their own stupidity to subsequent generations.

Bush and Grant have this in common – their opponents are the stupid ones for “misunderestimating” them. George W Bush – the Columbo of American politics in the early 21st century!

It seems that commenting elsewhere in the blogosphere is easier than maintaining the Fat K files with any regularity, so I might be doing more of it in future.

No time to blog but this is funny - and a different perspective from the prevailing negativity we keep on hearing. Will return with some updates and the latest Donny news later.

Mark Steyn thinks that things in Iraq are not as grim as some would have us believe.

No bloody time or inclination to blog recently - sorry to anyone who might occasionally check. Just the usual with other bits of life expanding and no time to even catch up on the news, let alone blog about it.

I just dropped a comment at Tim Blair's new blog and thought that I might as well log it here as well. Especially since I had written a few weeks ago about possible duplicity on the part of the Director of Research at Bagdhad Museum, Donny George.

Anyway Tim Blair linked to Bunyip (permalinks rooted) who linked to this article in the Washington Post, which is definitely worth a read. I'll still be here when you get back.

Donny George sounds like a different man, doesn't he? Is this the same man who was stoking up the international scholarly/academic/curatorial community and the international media with grossly exaggerated accounts of American culpability? Despite the fact that he knew better all along?

Anyway, my comments on Tim's site were:

Bunyip's link to the WaPo article is interesting. Donny George has certainly changed his tune from this 30 April report in "The Scotsman":

http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/international.cfm?id=491552003

I get the impression from the WaPo that Donny doesn't want to be looked at too closely - "We're working together now", as he puts it - but he was deliberately manufacturing and feeding anti-Yank propaganda to the media when he knew better all along. Assuming both of these articles are correct, of course.

That was all that I had originally intended to post. But as soon as I actually opened Blogger, I found that a few extra comments were easy enough - even for a fat K like me. Should do it more often, I really should.

Well, in an earlier post, I seriously doubted it. It looks like I was wrong (again!). Salam is up and blogging and certainly seems to be in Bagdhad. Seen by a Guardian journalist and all.

Paul Boutin always thought so.

Is the constant flood of negative reporting from Iraq in some news media, Our ABC included, truly representative of the situation on the ground? Not really, according to Jonathon Foreman, an embedded journalist who is getting out and about in Bagdhad, as he explains in this Weekly Standard article Bad Reporting in Baghdad.

While news is trickling through daily of life in Bagdhad and elsewhere slowly recovering a degree of normality - eg some university students have been returning to their studies over the last few days - a certain breed of journalist does seem to be going to extremes to vindicate their own dire predictions and anti-war stance. The search for a new "I told you so" by some ABC and BBC correspondents, in particular, has reached almost Pilgeresque proportions at times.

Having said that, there is little doubt that serious problems remain and that the US-led interim administration is not doing as good a job as it really ought to be doing. For instance, the same Jonathon Foreman, who was so positive in the article linked to above, is clearly worried that the occupation forces could still stuff it up and exhaust the considerable reservoir of good will that many ordinary Iraqis continue to show. In this New York Post article he is especially critical of the insistence of the administering authority, the US Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid (ORHA), to use Iraqi personnel in the reconstruction effort almost exclusively.

While his criticism of their stuffing around is no doubt warranted and bears even more weight given his generally supportive view of the value of US/Coalition intervention, I am not convinced that the basic thinking behind the ORHA approach might not be best for Iraq in the longer term, even if it adds to the difficulties right now. I can't see real stability and "normality" in Badghad for several months yet and frankly would not have expected it. We really need to look back on all this in a year's time to get some perspective on how successful the reconstruction effort has been and where it is likely to go.

Unlike Jonathon, I missed the experience of sharing rations with the troops for a couple of weeks too. So from the comfort of cyber-punditry, I can say that the fact that some on-the-ground combat troops are disgruntled with the ORHA is hardly surprising to me and doesn't really mean much. Uncomfortable as it might be for the common soldier, I would hope that the OHRA is looking at the long term and has bigger fish to fry. It is just that they don't seem to be frying them nearly well enough or quickly enough at the moment!

I have just read this very clear-thinking and well-witten article by prominent American government and foreign policy academic, Robert J. Lieber.

In a small gem of dispassionate logical writing, Lieber identifies and attacks one of the more silly (and ugly) memes regarding the US administration taking hold among some leftist commentators - that American foreign policy has been "hijacked" by a small cabal of Jewish neoconservatives for their own sinister Zionist ends. Strangely enough, they share this thinking with old-style, isolationist and anti-semitic right wingers like Pat Buchanan.

Lieber's conclusion is that such thinking only leads to leftist critics missing the point entirely:

Ultimately, the neocon-conspiracy theory misinterprets as a policy coup a reasoned shift in grand strategy that the Bush administration has adopted in responding to an ominous form of external threat. Whether that strategy and its component parts prove to be as robust and effective as containment of hostile Middle Eastern states linked to terrorism remains to be seen. But to characterize it in conspiratorial terms is not only a failure to weigh policy choices on their merits, but represents a detour into the fever swamps of political demagoguery.

I agree completely with this conclusion. This goes staright to the heart of why the bizarre conspiratorial thinking that often grips the hostile "Arab street" (thanks usually to Arabic language mass media) or the delusional beliefs coming from the loonier portions of our own left wing do not concern me nearly as much as they seem to genuinely worry some others. It doesn't really matter if enemies and committed political opponents are mired in delusion and fantasy. If the contest is between reality and fantasy, reality has a habit of winning every time - even if it takes a little while!

The article is definitely worth a read. Thanks to Bargarz for the link.

It is four weeks since the liberation of Bagdhad and still the suffering continues. The suffering caused by disappointed and depressed left-wingers whining on and on, that is. They are still desperately latching on to whatever they can find to criticise the US and its allies and justify their opposition to the toppling of Saddam.

One of their favourites in recent weeks has been the "enormous casualties" involved in actually doing something active rather than just wishing Saddam would be nice. Another has been the "shameful sacking of Iraq's - nay, humankind's - civilised heritage" which the Americans negligently allowed/encouraged/assisted/carried out (select degree in accordance with anti-American bile quotient) at the Bagdhad Museum.

Well, it seems like reality might be about to catch up again. Damn, that's so inconvenient! It makes you look for new reasons to hate the USA every time.

Speccie Editor, Boris Johnson, after visiting Bagdhad and giving a sobering and realistic account of its present state of disorder and the difficulties ahead, nevertheless ends on an equally realistic upbeat note. Iraqis are free and most of them appreciate that deeply - now comes the hard work of building for the future. Amazingly, Boris reports credible evidence that total Iraqi civilian and military casualties in the Bagdhad area have only included about 150 deaths:

And since it is time to put the good news into our utilitarian scales, here is a statistic that you should be aware of, all you Fisks and Pilgers and Robin Cooks, who prophesied thousands and thousands of deaths. I went to see Qusay Ali Al-Mafraji, the head of the International Red Crescent in Baghdad. Though some name-tags have been lost, and though some districts have yet to deliver their final tally, guess how many confirmed Iraqi dead he has listed, both civilian and military, for the Baghdad area? He told me that it was 150, and he has no reason to lie.

Of course it is an appalling sacrifice of life. But if you ask me whether it was a price worth paying to remove Saddam, and a regime that killed and tortured hundreds of thousands, then I would say yes.

At the same time, it seems that the other cause celebre (straw?) that critics have so eagerly grabbed onto - the looting of the Bagdhad Museum - might not have been so bad. From the initial reports that 170,000 irreplaceable artefacts might have been stolen (because the Museum had 170,000 artefacts - always assume the worst!), it has now emerged from careful investigation that only 25 artefacts have been clearly identified as missing.

As an American investigator now assigned to the Museum so succinctly puts it:

"Twenty-five pieces is not the same as 170,000," said Colonel Bogdanos, who in civilian life is an assistant Manhattan district attorney.

Admittedly, the NYT article rightly identifies that there are significant record-keeping issues complicating the task, but it is clear that the scale of the looting was not nearly as serious as many had made out or feared. It is equally clear that there was some opportunistic looting of minor articles by ordinary Iraqis and that some of these have been returned. Many commentators have made the case that the small number of truly rare and precious items appear to have fallen victim to very purposeful thieves with expert knowledge. As Donny George (the Museum's Director of Research) said in an interview for The Art Newspaper:

DG: My theory is that there were two groups of people. Those who first entered the museum knew what they wanted and they took some very important material. We found glass cutters they had left and they did not touch gypsum replicas. The vandalism came later, but perhaps it was planned to cover up the initial looting. They smashed a lot of material. We had some very important Roman statues from Hatra - they were smashed and the heads taken away.

TAN: But was the damage caused by people looking for valuables, rather than deliberate?

DG: Yes, it was people looking for valuables, at least in the galleries and the vaults. But as for what happened in our offices, that was deliberate vandalism.

Actually, Donny's quote about the office vandalism raises some interesting questions. Other reports and analysis on the web agree with the NYT's Colonel that many ordinary Iraqis hated the Museum for its close and incestuous links to the Baathist regime, the leaders of which had done their own share of plundering during their long reign both to make some money on the side and to prop up their vainly projected image as the successors to the Kings of Assur and Babylon. At the same time, the "expert thieves" not only knew what was valuable and what they wanted, they also knew where it was and had easy access to it. Even the Information Minister (!) could see that the regime was doomed. It all adds up to a big "INSIDE JOB" to me, possibly carried out before the Americans got anywhere near Bagdhad.

I would start my investigation by very carefully checking Donny's suitcases! Particulalry since he was reportedly closely linked to the regime and seems way too eager to shift the blame to the coalition troops. He was still spouting the crap about "170,000" missing articles a matter of days ago despite obviously knowing better, as revealed in the interview linked to above. Keep watching this one!

UPDATE - It seems that some undoubted experts in the field agree that Donny George and his high-ranking Baathist-favoured colleagues at the Bagdhad Museum should not be above suspicion. Dr Martin Kramer, Editor of The Middle East Quarterly presents a better-argued case with some interesting links worth following in his weblog Sandstorm (see the entry for 1 May titled Indiana Jones or Inside Job at Iraq Museum?). Ultimately, Dr Kramer's conclusion lines up with my own suspicions fairly neatly:

If the report in the New York Times this morning is anything to go on, it may yet turn out that these archaeologists fell for a fabulous exaggeration, propagated largely by the Baath's apparatchiks at the Iraq Museum. But since we don't know yet, let's have the mother of all criminal investigations, to find out exactly what happened. No one should be above suspicion—especially the people who knew where to find the best lots, who had the keys, and who had long-standing ties with the criminals who ran the regime. Quite a few people fit that description. None of them is a U.S. Marine.

As I said, this one bears watching.

Well, becoming like Jonah Goldberg. Me, that is. Here is Jonah writing in the National Review Online on 28 April about the childish attitude of entertainment industry "stars" who expect freedom of speech to mean freedom from all criticism. Or at least no freedom for other people to withdraw their patronage, organise boycotts or react in other legal, non-violent ways to opinions and behaviour that they consider offensive.

Compare this to the following extract from an e-mail that I sent 3 days earlier on Anzac Day to an American friend who is presently travelling around Australia. He had sent me a copy of (actor) Tim Robbins' remarks to the US National Press Club about "a chill wind blowing through the land". You know, they are "crushing dissent" etc etc etc bitch bitch piss & moan.

I find Tim Robbins whining about all this to be hypocritical. So he and
Susan Sarandon are upset that the position they have so publicly taken is
copping some strong criticism? That some irate people have even gone so far
as to publicly label them as "traitors"? Too bad - that is what freedom of
speech is all about!

He and Susan have tried to use their public profile as actors to push their
own political agenda. In the USA, fortunately, they are perfectly free to
do so. Now he is crying foul because other people with the opposite
political agenda have used the same political freedoms to hit back at them,
with loud and nasty condemnation and through boycotts and similar actions.
Freedom of speech and freedom of political action does NOT mean that you are
insulated from all consequences of the stances that you actively and
publicly agitate for. It means that the secret police are not going to haul
you down to headquarters where you will become the latest "disappearance",
or that your children will not be tortured to death while you are forced to
watch - both of which occurred to dissidents in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

I don't know much about Robbins but, from what I have been reading in recent
weeks , he strikes me as an ego-driven sook whose idea of "free speech" is
the right to say whatever he pleases without anyone else having any right to
criticise, condemn or retaliate in legal ways. He seems to be genuinely
surprised that his fairly shallow public utterances and attempts to "cash
in" on his celebrity status provoked this kind of reaction from supporters
of military intervention in Iraq. This is despite effectively smearing them
as bloodthirsty brutes or hopeless dupes of some
oil/Zionist/imperial/corporate conspiracy, no matter how well-informed their
thinking is or what moral concerns they have wrestled with.

Interestingly enough, most of the Iraqi exiles and refugees in this country
seem to have supported external military action against Saddam's regime and
it is hard to imagine a better-informed group of people. In contrast, I
have heard nothing convincing from any of the many "celebrities" who have
chosen to inject themselves into the public debate on this issue. Some of
them - like Sheryl Crow - seem to have the comprehension level of a three
year old child, yet still managed to get more press coverage than Dr Baram
Salih, Prime Minister of the autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan, did in
his calls for military intervention in international forums.

My message for Tim would be that freedom of speech, and political freedom in
general, is a two-way street. If you don't like the consequences of making
yourself a controversial public political figure, maybe you would be better
off just sticking to acting after all. "If you can't stand the heat, stay
out of the kitchen", as the old saying goes.

Oh my God, this is scary! Exactly the same attitude to robust freedom of speech and political action (let 'er rip!), the same unfavourable comparisons to world's best "dissent crushing" practice in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the same condemnation of the attitudes of these precious little prima donnas as childish - it's all there!

Hmmm. Come to think of it, I felt a bit queesy after that roast pork on Sunday night. I have to nip this thing in the bud, before it goes too far!

This is an amazing discovery - left wing sneering humour that is actually funny!

Some very clever photoshoppers at whitehouse.org have had a field day designing a new generation of patriotic posters. Sure, they trot out a lot of the same old facile anti-US slogans and seem to be slave to the usual leftie groupthink, but at least they do it with style!

Great work, guys and gals. Glad you can subliminate your disappointment in constructive ways - like making us laugh with you rather than at you for a change.

I can't help wondering why high profile United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, Mary Robinson, isn't speaking out against the outrage of non-democratic and oppressive regimes conspiring to prevent UN human rights monitoring of states in which serious human rights abuses are a daily occurrence. Countries like Sudan, where the UN Human Rights Commission has just terminated its monitoring, and Zimbabwe, where the genocidal thug Mugabe is not regarded by the Commission as worthy of its attention.

Instead, Robinson seems largely to reserve her sanctimonious lecturing for liberal western democracies with generally impeccable human rights records where the rule of law is entrenched and administered by independent judges. The classic local example was her antics in condemning the Australian Government for maintaining a humanitarian system of detention for illegal arrivals, pending their assessment in a ridiculously generous system of refugee determination, in order to counter people-smuggling and the deliberate rorting of our asylum system. She has also been vocal about the United States' military detention of irregular, mostly foreign combatants captured on the field of battle in Afghanistan.

The one-sided machinations in the lead-up to the 59th session of the Commission in Geneva recently and Robinson's general pattern of behaviour show all of this UN hot air about "human rights" to be mostly in the service of other, political agendas. She is only too ready to parrot the position of lefty extremists in the world's great democracies, with their infantile self-loathing guilt trips, when there is a world full of serious human rights abuses to which she could more properly be devoting her attention.

The record of the UN Human Rights Commission in recent times is showing it to be nothing short of a complete joke. Not a particularly funny one, to be sure, but a joke all the same. The only people left who take it seriously seem to be starry-eyed internationalists in the western left wing intellectual elites. Meanwhile, the impressive roll-call of stinking and oppressive regimes with seats on the Commission see it as a useful way to justify their own conduct and a handy weapon for striking back at genuine democracies. When even liberal media likeThe Washington Post are questioning the value of UN institutions like this, it is clear that they are losing their last shreds of credibility.

However, with such a generous gravy train to ride in the UN bureaucracy, don't expect Mary Robinson to get so contrary that she might actually criticise the disgraceful, cynical and anti-"human rights" processes of the very Commission that directs her activities. It is so much easier to pick soft targets with ready-made cheer squads of internal critics, not to mention a greatly appreciative external audience of brutal dictators and thugs who just love the chance to play "holier than thou" for a change.

Thanks to David at Jumping to Conclusions for the links.

In an earlier post on Aussie thickhead "human shield", Gordon Sloane, I referred to a blog called Where is Raed? that was supposedly maintained by an Iraqi still living in Iraq. As I said at the time:

One of what must be very few native Iraqi bloggers on home soil, "Salam Pax" at Where is Raed, takes a very dim view of all this poseur nonsense. In his post of 6 March (scroll down to Human Shields Bashing #124), his contempt for these spoilt children is pretty obvious.

Salam's blog is worth checking every few days. It is very moving in a simple day-to-day way. He is an educated man, fairly "westernised" (as many educated, middle class Iraqis are) and has a remarkable ability to paint a picture of ordinary daily life in Bagdhad as seen through his eyes. He is not grossly political, preferring to tell us of his doings and thoughts in a more personal way. His criticism of the regime is muted, but it is clear that he is no fan, and the impression he leaves is of ordinary folks in Bagdhad adopting a fairly fatalistic approach, mixed with some apprehension and hope, to the events that they expect to unfold in the near future.

I must admit that I initially found it difficult to accept that Salam was posting from Iraq - after all, internet traffic between that country and the rest of the world would have been closely monitored. However, given his evocative command of detail about everyday life in a Bagdhad family, it was almost certainly true that he was an Iraqi native, while the content of his blog and his great English writing equally certainly marked him as an educated upper middle class man. Ultimately, I was prepared to accept - against my initial reluctance - that he was posting from Iraq simply because he was posting detailed accounts of contemporary events, was closely followed by a large and generally skeptical readership and had not been caught out with untruths or inconsistencies in his "reporting".

It seems increasingly likely that this last assumption might have been unwarranted. The popular US right wing intellectual blogger, Steven Den Beste, has now come forward with a persuasive circumstantial case that "Salam Pax" is a hoax. An educated upper middle class young Iraqi, to be sure, but possibly the son of a former Iraqi liason officer to the UN weapons inspection program based in New York. As Den Beste puts it:

Think there's a chance that the pseudonymous Salam Pax is actually Raed Rokan Al-Anbuge, and that his entire blog was a hoax, based on his memories of Iraq and what he was seeing on network news plus inspired guesses and a vivid imagination and maybe information gotten from friends back home? If so, it would explain why he seemed willing to take such a terrible risk, posting comments critical of the regime, and revealing information about himself to a stranger in America.

Not only do the general circumstances of the content of Where is Raed? fit this scenario well, but this real Raed's detention for overstaying his visa is a neat explanation of Salam's sudden silence. Perhaps more than anything, however, it is a clear explanation of the otherwise very cryptic name of the blog itself.

I think that Den Beste probably has it right and no doubt more information will come out at Raed's forthcoming trial. Ten out of ten for observation and deduction for the eagle-eyed Den Beste!

A lot of the political blogs and mainstream media commentators are presently serving up great examples of left-leaning anti-war writers "trying to see the cloud behind the silver lining" in the rapid collapse of Saddam's regime and the dawn of a new era in Iraq. Only a precious few seem to be engaging in any degree of re-evaluation. Others like The Sydney Morning Herald's repulsive Guy Rundle are still grasping at straws. The mere involvement of the United States seems to be enough to condemn any intervention in Rundle's eyes.

I wonder how many of the writers/commentators/pundits who made such wild, silly and way off base predictions will be admitting as much or, even better, learning something from where their own prejudices have led them? Bargarz does a great job of listing some predictions gone sour and provides links to other good sources and honour rolls of error, like the UK's The Telegraph and Andrew Sullivan's blog. Because Bargarz's permalinks are not working at the moment, you might need to find his post headed "Ship of Fools", which was his first on Friday 11 April (otherwise it should be here).

I have Bargarz to thank for bringing this pathetic piece by Carmen Lawrence, whom I once respected and favoured for a leadership role within the ALP, to my attention. Not only does she again parade the disgraceful furphy about Madeline Albright's comments on Iraqi children and sanctions, but she gullibly accepts downright silly predictions by aid agencies, based on anti-American assumptions and prejudices, of as many as 480,000 people killed as a result of military action against Saddam's regime, and 3 million indirectly suffering through malnutrition. As if this wasn't bad enough, Lawrence goes on to swallow and regurgitate some truly insane bullshit about US plans to use nuclear weapons in Iraq! As Lawrence herself puts it:

The bizarre contradiction inherent in using nuclear weapons - the ultimate "weapons of mass destruction" - for the purpose of eliminating "weapons of mass destruction" appears to have escaped the warmongers in the Bush administration.

Very well put indeed - except that it is Carmen Lawrence on whom the "bizarre contradiction" seems to be totally lost. After all, she is the one who appears to believe it. She goes on to say:

Until now, even the U.S. reserved the use of nuclear weapons for retaliation against nuclear attacks or immediate threats to national survival. This very significant and terrifying shift in U.S. policy on nuclear weapons use passed with barely a shiver in the Australian media.

Dr Lawrence, has it occurred to you that this "terrifying shift" caused "barely a shiver in the Australian media" because it is such obvious bullshit? Your reality-checking has gone seriously askew, girl! Do you really believe that the US would use nuclear weapons in this way? If you do, your anti-American prejudice has crossed the border to frank delusion, and if you don't really believe it, you are just the lying bitch that the Royal Commission always said you were. [Note the revealing use of the phrase "even the US", too. Obviously, the USA is the worst nuclear power in the world!]

Of course there are many leftish thinkers, or "liberals" as the Yanks like to call them, who have supported Saddam's removal by force from the very beginning, including a substantial number of Iraqi exiles and opposition figures. Tony Horwitz and Jim Nolan are such leftish writers identified before on this blog, as was the notable example of an address to the Council of Socialist International by the Kurdish Prime Minister, Dr Barhim Salih. Some lefty Ozbloggers like Ken Parrish (well, I reckon he's left, anyway) also fall into this category. Andrew Sullivan recently wrote about several prominent left wing supporters of the forceful liberation of Iraq and added some very well-written and wise thoughts of his own about why their stand was a true expression of liberalism.

But, sometimes, something even more hopeful can appear. Even in such unpromising places as the discussion forums on Democratic Underground.com, a good leftie can suddenly pop up (or is it wake up?) and say "this is bullshit!". To give you an idea of the calibre of DU and its usual contributors, just over a week ago they were having a smug little gloat because, as everybody "knew", the coalition campaign was going badly(!). In their typically snide "Top 10 Conservative Idiots", Don Rumsfeld comes in at number 2 with these comments:

Shortly after the war started, it became clear that it wasn't going to be nearly as easy as expected. That's bad news for everyone involved - including the fighting men and women of the US military and the citizens of Iraq. But for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the news is a particular disappointment. It seems that he and his advisors had been working under the impression that Iraq would be a "cakewalk" and all they had to do was "shock and awe" the opponent with a whole bunch of bombs, and they'd just give up without a fight. So they all low-balled the estimates of how much firepower would be necessary. While I can sort of follow the logic here, it seems to me that if you're planning a war, the absolute minimal expectation should be that your enemy is actually going to fight back. When critics wondered what happened, Rumsfeld lamely responded that he never actually used the word "cakewalk" himself, nor did anyone he knows "in the Pentagon." It turns out that a close friend of Rumsfeld, Kenneth Adelman, actually used the word. But technically Rumsfeld wasn't lying because Kenneth Adelman isn't actually "in the Pentagon" - he's a member of an outside panel that advises the Pentagon. Of course, the whole discussion of the use or non-use of a particular word is totally missing the point, which is that Rumsfeld blew it. Kinda makes you wonder if he would have pushed so hard for this war if he knew it might actually be difficult. Come to think of it, he probably would have.

Talk about egg on your face only a week later! Although Rummy didn't say it, three weeks of military action and the losses sustained is pretty much "a cakewalk" - but don't expect these turkeys to be eating any humble pie. All of their puerile sarcasm coming home to roost shows them to be the idiots lost in their own wishful thinking - as if mass casualties is anything to actually wish for! Don't expect them to acknowledge their mistake, though.

Not to be deterred by the crashing in of reality, DU forum posters are now smirking and whining around a new conspiracy theory, described by Sasha of Sasha & Andrew's Round Table as the weird fantasy that:

"the toppling of the Baghdad statue of Saddam was staged, that the Iraqis aren't REALLY happy to be liberated, that the flowers and dancing are just some sort of mass delusion or mental illness. Anything to avoid saying the truth: that a murderous tyrant's regime has been overthrown, and his victims (or those who are left, anyway) are thankful to the USA for making it happen."

It seems that all of this ugly, delusional wallowing could have had the same effect on a good liberal/leftie DU poster identified only as "Savanna" as the repulsive response of much of the Australian left to September 11 had on me. According to Sasha, he/she exploded with the following post:

I cannot believe what I am reading...

Progressive liberal democrats supporting a regime modeled after the Nazi party.

I'm a liberal democrat as well. I have Iraqi friends who were *dying* for this day to happen. Do you think that French civilians weren't killed in the liberation of Paris? Do you think that the French people thought it wasn't all worth it?

I'm a liberal democrat because I *care* about the greater good of humanity, and I care about tortured people, abused people whose human rights were trampled on for thirty five years. I've been advocating the fall of Saddam for over a decade now, and nobody listened to me! You think that just because a Republican managed to topple him makes it bad? What the heck are you all thinking?

When will you *ever* be satisfied? Reporters are telling us how columns of our troops are being greeted with flowers - not just in that small protest in the square - but all over Baghdad. I've seen footage of troops being handed flowers and cheering and waving in the streets, and all that I see here is people saying it is staged! Staged! Get your minds out of the gutter! What has happened to you all? Yes, people have died and people will die but that does not make it a bad thing! People died in the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II - would you say that all these things were staged liberations, unworthy of our histories?

Shame on you for commenting like this. You sound like Nazi or Soviet-Era Communist commentators! That is *not* what Liberal Democracy is about! Liberal Democracy should support the dancing in the streets by the *people* of Iraq!

To read that you would support another ten Saddams instead of this fills me with outrage!!! How dare you say this? You condemn people for supporting the war while they sit on couches at home, and yet you support even worse things. There are worse things than dying, sometimes, and that is to live like a slave. My Iraqi friends can tell you, and in a few days, all those stories of torture and brutality will come out.

And you sit there and deny them. It sounds as if I'm listening to people denying the death camps while the footage comes out.

Shame on you!

I support Liberal Democracy, and I SUPPORT this liberation! If you don't, you are *not* a Liberal or Progressive! You have become the antithesis of Liberalism and Progressive thinking! Grow up! A fallen dictator is a celebration for the whole world!

Shame on you for thinking otherwise!

I bow to a masterpiece of heartfelt invective! This short passage has the simple beauty, clarity and compelling power of a decent person who has passed the limits of frustration with friends and colleagues who wilfully refuse to see the truth, even when it is staring them in the face. How many of us have been there ourselves, hey? The comments on Sasha & Andrew's Round Table are worth reading, too. If scales have indeed just fallen from "Savanna's" eyes, there are clearly many who have travelled the same road before!

Well, I am finally back from Tassie just in time to catch a whole lot of middle east "experts" and pundits with egg on their faces (not that they will ever admit it) and "no war" types who seem to be seriously depressed and increasingly desperate to show us how bad and wrong actually doing anything really is.

The military campaign has gone well and quickly with minimal loss of life or damage to civilian infrastucture for an operation on such a scale. Yet still the domestic critics carp on. It's just that they have to find new things to whine about every second day. Like the fool who wrote to The Australian comparing the toppling of statues of Saddam to the destruction of the cliff-side Buddhas by the Taliban! How blinded by prejudice and stupid do you have to be to think that unique and ancient works of great cultural and archeological significance - part of the whole world's spiritual heritage and objects of deep religous veneration - are in the same league as thousands of gross monuments to self aggrandisement thrust contemptuously into the faces of an entire population systematically brutalised by an oppressive egomaniac. Monuments that hundreds of delighted Iraqis are now tearing down themselves.

Other letter writers in the same paper found something else to whinge about - what a scary world it is now and who is the USA going to attack next? Short answer - no-one in the forseeable future unless the situation radically changes. There are several problematic nation states in the world and some have regimes almost as oppressive (even if not nearly as frankly brutal) as Saddam's. However, only Saddam's regime has for 12 years consistently flouted, refused to comply with, and generally thumbed its nose at the ceasefire agreement reached after the 1991 Gulf War, which was sparked by its own naked act of aggression against a neighbouring state. There is simply no way that a rogue regime can be allowed to get away with that - the great pity is that (largely thanks to the UN) the issue was not dealt with sooner.

Still, it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is no point in arguing with such people as these letter-writers - no matter what, they will always invent the worst possible scenarios and "concerns" to fret over, will always attribute the worst possible motives to the USA and its allies and will always be informed by a general self-hatred vis-a-vis their own society and cultural traditions. Save your discussions and arguments for your friends! True to my own advice, these excepts from an e-mail exchange with a friend sum up my initial reactions on returning from a true holiday in Tassie and re-immersing myself in media coverage of Iraq. They also sum it up better than anything else I can paraphrase here. (Edited for clarity, relevance and to protect delicate sensibilities!)

From my first e-mail:

We're only back from Tassie one day and [Mrs TFK] has left me again already! To Melbourne this time.

I'm just catching up today on news of the remarkably successful military campaign in Iraq (although we caught snatches on the telly and radio while on the road). Why TF does anyone bother paying any damn attention to anything that uber-fool Robert Fisk says any more? Check this out - every bit as successful as his predictions on the Afghanistan campaign:

http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=24653

I'm getting strapped up for 24 hour blood pressure monitoring today. Too much reading about "peace protests" and harumphing, I guess. No doubt we will see you soon!

TFK

To which "Nig" replied:

Hey Knt

Good to hear you're back safe and sound.

It's been interesting today: the obvious relief and jubilation on the faces of ordinary Iraqis has been a lovely sight. I wonder what the anti-war mob make of their joy?

It must suck to have backed an oppressive regime led by a [expletive deleted] like Saddam, eh?

Nig

Which, of course, was a green light for me to unburden myself for the first time since returning from our holiday idyll and finding all the peaceniks and lefties still whining on in increasingly desperate ways:

Some whiney arseholes never know when to shut TF up. The disappointment that more Iraqis and coalition soldiers were not killed is almost palpable. I don't know how many times I saw figures like 200,000 killed or 5 million refugees. "AM" two mornings ago was incredible - Linda Mottram suggested that Iraqis had simply "learned new rhetoric" when they chanted "kill Saddam" because they now feared the coalition forces as much as they had feared Saddam. John Shoveland went on to describe a US military press briefing in a report just dripping with puerile sarcasm. These people are truly hurting, but the scenes last night of genuinely relaxed and happy Iraqis consorting with the soldiers and celebrating were too much even for AM "journalists" to deny. Despite this, a BBC commentator still managed last night to misread a placard that clearly said "Human shields go home!" as "Americans go home!". Even when the message is unambiguous, some people can contrive to see what they want to see.

A quick check of the letters pages will show you that there is always something to complain or "raise concerns" about. A week ago it was all about how stupid the US administration was for underestimating the resistance of Saddam's regime and for thinking that Iraqis would be so glad to get rid of Saddam that they would support a well-targeted military campaign by a foreign power. Now it's all about American occupation instead of (God help us) UN administration or "which country is next?" or "so where are the WMD?". Bleat, bleat, fukkin' bleat! The last thing they want to do is actually take the plain-speaking Yanks at their word - Bush & Co want to hand over administration to some semblance of a democratically-endorsed Iraqi government ASAP and get out of there - after locating and destroying the chemical weapon stockpiles.

Some Green Party turkey tried to sell me a big "No War" sticker at the Hobart markets. I pointed out that it was a bit late to call for "no war" since there had been one under way for 4 or 5 days by then. I went on to tell him that the Greens shouldn't bother with "Stop the War" stickers - it wouldn't last long enough - but should cut straight to the "Bring Back Saddam" ones! A truly satisfying encounter but I must admit that I had been well prepared for it since I had been contemplating the rapidly changing situation faced by "peace protestors" earlier that morning.

No wonder my blood pressure was 180 over 120 this afternoon! The 24 hour monitor is puffing itself up every 30 minutes at the moment and I get the bad news some time tomorrow. No flowers and all donations to the American military/industrial complex, please. Cigars don't help and I think that I am going to have to ditch them, unfortunately. Pity the knts have taken our guns off us since there are few "manly" pursuits left for me if I lose cigars! [Note to any sensitive souls who may stumble onto this site - this is actually a joke. And I don't mean that we buried our guns, either.]

See you soon,
TFK

Bugger it, blood pressure or not, I'm going out to the porch to have a cigar right now. These bastards will be the death of me, I swear. But shit happens in war.

I haven't been reading much news in the last few days while my wife and I have been attending to social obligations and preparing for a three week holiday in Tasmania, far from a computer keyboard. It's not that they don't have computers in Tassie (I think!) but more a deliberate strategy for a genuine break.

There isn't much happening in the world at the moment anyway. Iraq has been in the news a bit but I'm not sure why(!!).

I won't be posting again until after we return on 9 April. With luck, there will be a new interim government in Iraq by then and I can only hope that the casualties suffered in its liberation will have been minimal. Until then, try these top quality Ozblogs for all your blogging needs:

Professor Bunyip for intelligent, amusing and incisive blogging from a likeable curmugeon. (The good Professor appears to be in something of a blogging hiatus himself at present, more's the pity.)

The prolific Bargarz for sound analysis and good links to source material on the big issues of the day.

Tim Blair for both information and entertainment with heaps of links to the informative, interesting , funny and bizarre on the World Wide Web.

Troppo Armadillo by (mainly) Ken "Sore Balls" Parish for a painfully thorough attempt at neutrality, coupled with good sense and good "on blog" discussion.

[Update] And, of course, the very interesting Re-oriented whose author not only gives the view from a "recovering left-winger in Xianggang" but has the extremely good taste and fine judgement to link to the Fat K Files!

One day I will add some permanent links to this page - maybe I will just swipe the Professor's or Bargarz's (with prior permission, of course). Until then, these are my favourite political Ozblogs. April in Bagdhad!

I'm a reasonable man, but the ever-increasing and ever-crazier estimates of casualties in any war in Iraq that are being bandied about at present are getting right irritating. Despite my generally pacific nature, they are making me want to see the Yanks pull their fingers out and get on with it, if only to show these smartarses just how far off-beam they are.

Not that any of these pundits-with-an-agenda will retract or apologise when they are shown to be abysmally wrong by events. Reality need not get in the way of your ideological mission if you can make like Phillip "What, me anti-American?" Adams and simply make up your own casualty figures after the fact.

The latest mob to jump on the bandwagon is the "Medical Association for Prevention of War" with the truly insane prediction of "up to" 261,000 killed. Not just injured, mind, and not just 260,000. The extra thousand makes all the difference!

And in case you think the sawbones might be a tad on the conservative side, just bear in mind that this is the "best case scenario"!

Keynote speaker Dr Bob Gould says under the best-case scenario of a short war most of the predicted casualties will be civilians.

"The likely casualties of even a short war and one that would not escalate in ways that would be extremely dangerous would be somewhere in the order of 48,000 to 261,000 deaths," he said.

I don't know how the good doctors of the Medical Association for Prevention of War go about achieving their stated objective but something tells me that they are not likely to be interested in tackling "root causes" when it is the USA considering resort to a military option. As I see it, there are assumptions underlying these loopy predictions that betray a big ideologically-driven blind spot about America and Americans. They simply do not square with the reality of what the USA is and what it is trying to achieve here. I don't doubt that most of the Sawbones for Peace are good and decent people, but it seems that they have come to believe their own simplistic anti-American stereotypes.

To be honest, I find the very name of the organisation something of a problem, as if war should be "prevented" in all circumstances. It brings to mind the famous call by Dentists for Making Everbody Be Nice to Each Other in 1939: "Oh go on, let Mr Hitler have Poland. There are plenty more European countries where that one came from."

It's a pity that there is no proper Australian word to descibe people who were basically fairly "left wing" in outlook for a good part of their lives but fundamentally re-oriented their political thinking over time. Such people are easily found throughout the politically engaged and chattering classes of Australia and I am one of them. The Yankee term "neoconservative" just won't do, if only because I do not regard my thinking as "conservative" overall in any sense that the term has meaning to me. Even "left wing" and "right wing" don't make much sense these days, although I would be more inclined to label my basic political stance as "centre-right" than "conservative".

Never mind, there is one clear curse that comes along with being a neocon - you get e-mails like this from people whom you love and respect:

Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 4:17 PM

Subject: 1972-2002 Vetoes from the USA



1972-2002 Vetoes from the USA
---
Year -----Resolution Vetoed by the USA
1972 Condemns Israel for killing hundreds of people in Syria and Lebanon
in air raids.
1973 Affirms the rights of the Palestinians and calls on Israel to
withdraw from the occupied territories.
1976 Condemns Israel for attacking Lebanese civilians.
1976 Condemns Israel for building settlements in the occupied territories.
1976 Calls for self determination for the Palestinians.
1976 Affirms the rights of the Palestinians.
1978 Urges the permanent members (USA, USSR, UK, France, China) to
insure United Nations decisions on the maintenance of international
peace and security.
1978 Criticises the living conditions of the Palestinians.
1978 Condemns the Israeli human rights record in occupied territories.
1978 Calls for developed countries to increase the quantity and quality
of development assistance to underdeveloped countries.
1979 Calls for an end to all military and nuclear collaboration with the
apartheid South Africa.
1979 Strengthens the arms embargo against South Africa.
1979 Offers assistance to all the oppressed people of South Africa and
their liberation movement.
1979 Concerns negotiations on disarmament and cessation of the nuclear
arms race.
1979 Calls for the return of all inhabitants expelled by Israel.
1979 Demands that Israel desist from human rights violations.
1979 Requests a report on the living conditions of Palestinians in
occupied Arab countries.
1979 Offers assistance to the Palestinian people.
1979 Discusses sovereignty over national resources in occupied Arab
territories.
1979 Calls for protection of developing counties' exports.
1979 Calls for alternative approaches within the United Nations system
for improving the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms.
1979 Opposes support for intervention in the internal or external
affairs of states.
1979 For a United Nations Conference on Women.
1979 To include Palestinian women in the United Nations Conference on Women.
1979 Safeguards rights of developing countries in multinational trade
negotiations.
1980 Requests Israel to return displaced persons.
1980 Condemns Israeli policy regarding the living conditions of the
Palestinian people.
1980 Condemns Israeli human rights practices in occupied territories. 3
resolutions.
1980 Affirms the right of self determination for the Palestinians.
1980 Offers assistance to the oppressed people of South Africa and their
national liberation movement.
1980 Attempts to establish a New International Economic Order to promote
the growth of underdeveloped countries and international economic
co-operation.
1980 Endorses the Program of Action for Second Half of United Nations
Decade for Women.
1980 Declaration of non-use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.
1980 Emphasises that the development of nations and individuals is a
human right.
1980 Calls for the cessation of all nuclear test explosions.
1980 Calls for the implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of
Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.
1981 Promotes co-operative movements in developing countries.
1981 Affirms the right of every state to choose its economic and social
system in accord with the will of its people, without outside
interference in whatever form it takes.
1981 Condemns activities of foreign economic interests in colonial
territories.
1981 Calls for the cessation of all test explosions of nuclear weapons.
1981 Calls for action in support of measures to prevent nuclear war,
curb the arms race and promote disarmament.
1981 Urges negotiations on prohibition of chemical and biological weapons.
1981 Declares that education, work, health care, proper nourishment,
national development, etc are human rights.
1981 Condemns South Africa for attacks on neighbouring states, condemns
apartheid and attempts to strengthen sanctions. 7 resolutions.
1981 Condemns an attempted coup by South Africa on the Seychelles.
1981 Condemns Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, human rights
policies, and the bombing of Iraq. 18 resolutions.
1982 Condemns the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. 6 resolutions (1982 to 1983).
1982 Condemns the shooting of 11 Muslims at a shrine in Jerusalem by an
Israeli soldier.
1982 Calls on Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights occupied in 1967.
1982 Condemns apartheid and calls for the cessation of economic aid to
South Africa. 4 resolutions.
1982 Calls for the setting up of a World Charter for the protection of
the ecology.
1982 Sets up a United Nations conference on succession of states in
respect to state property, archives and debts.
1982 Nuclear test bans and negotiations and nuclear free outer space. 3
resolutions.
1982 Supports a new world information and communications order.
1982 Prohibition of chemical and bacteriological weapons.
1982 Development of international law.
1982 Protects against products harmful to health and the environment .
1982 Declares that education, work, health care, proper nourishment,
national development are human rights.
1982 Protects against products harmful to health and the environment.
1982 Development of the energy resources of developing countries.
1983 Resolutions about apartheid, nuclear arms, economics, and
international law. 15 resolutions.
1984 Condemns support of South Africa in its Namibian and other policies.
1984 International action to eliminate apartheid.
1984 Condemns Israel for occupying and attacking southern Lebanon.
1984 Resolutions about apartheid, nuclear arms, economics, and
international law. 18 resolutions.
1985 Condemns Israel for occupying and attacking southern Lebanon.
1985 Condemns Israel for using excessive force in the occupied territories.
1985 Resolutions about cooperation, human rights, trade and development.
3 resolutions.
1985 Measures to be taken against Nazi, Fascist and neo-Fascist activities .
1986 Calls on all governments (including the USA) to observe
international law.
1986 Imposes economic and military sanctions against South Africa.
1986 Condemns Israel for its actions against Lebanese civilians.
1986 Calls on Israel to respect Muslim holy places.
1986 Condemns Israel for sky-jacking a Libyan airliner.
1986 Resolutions about cooperation, security, human rights, trade, media
bias, the environment and development.
8 resolutions.
1987 Calls on Israel to abide by the Geneva Conventions in its treatment
of the Palestinians.
1987 Calls on Israel to stop deporting Palestinians.
1987 Condemns Israel for its actions in Lebanon. 2 resolutions.
1987 Calls on Israel to withdraw its forces from Lebanon.
1987 Cooperation between the United Nations and the League of Arab States.
1987 Calls for compliance in the International Court of Justice
concerning military and paramilitary activities against Nicaragua and a
call to end the trade embargo against Nicaragua. 2 resolutions.
1987 Measures to prevent international terrorism, study the underlying
political and economic causes of terrorism, convene a conference to
define terrorism and to differentiate it from the struggle of people
from national liberation.
1987 Resolutions concerning journalism, international debt and trade. 3
resolutions.
1987 Opposition to the build up of weapons in space.
1987 Opposition to the development of new weapons of mass destruction.
1987 Opposition to nuclear testing. 2 resolutions.
1987 Proposal to set up South Atlantic "Zone of Peace".
1988 Condemns Israeli practices against Palestinians in the occupied
territories. 5 resolutions (1988 and 1989).
1989 Condemns USA invasion of Panama.
1989 Condemns USA troops for ransacking the residence of the Nicaraguan
ambassador in Panama.
1989 Condemns USA support for the Contra army in Nicaragua.
1989 Condemns illegal USA embargo of Nicaragua.
1989 Opposing the acquisition of territory by force.
1989 Calling for a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict based on
earlier UN resolutions.
1990 To send three UN Security Council observers to the occupied
territories.
1995 Affirms that land in East Jerusalem annexed by Israel is occupied
territory.
1997 Calls on Israel to cease building settlements in East Jerusalem and
other occupied territories. 2 resolutions.
1999 Calls on the USA to end its trade embargo on Cuba. 8 resolutions
(1992 to 1999).
2001 To send unarmed monitors to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
2001 To set up the International Criminal Court.
2002 To renew the peace keeping mission in Bosnia.

You get the drift. "How can the Yanks complain over the responsible use of the veto by the moral paragons of France et al when they are just a pack of vetoin' bastards themselves. Look! In 1968, they vetoed a UNSC resolution carefully worded in such a way as to eliminate all poverty and disease, cause the races of the world to live in harmony forever and buy shoes for orphans throughout the third world. Bastards!!"

It's a fine line we walk when dealing with treasured institutions like the UN, but here is my reply:

Thank God Israel has had someone at the UN to stick up for it against the stream of one-sided anti-Jewish attacks that have been pushed through the Security Council for years. Good on the USA! It must be hard consistently doing the right thing in the face of sustained international hostility and all the "national interest" pressures to cosy up to the Arabs.

Where are all the "resolutions" condemning Palestinian/Arab aggression and terrorism against Israel? You would think from that list that Israel is always at fault rather than battling for its very survival in a sea of Arab hostility. Those stupid resolutions are the diplomatic equivalent of terrorist bombs or rockets fired from Lebanon or Gaza - they deserve to be treated with contempt.

One good thing to come from all of this is to expose the Security Council, and the UN political structures in general - for the farce that they are. At the UN "Conference Against Racism" in Durban a couple of years back, the whole shebang turned into an extended "kick the Jew" hate-fest. Robert Mugabe was cheered by the delegates for mouthing all the correct anti-Jewish, "anti-imperialist" crap. The murdering, racist, genocidal thug Mugabe, for Chrissake! The UN is a joke.

I believe it is possible that the Americans will suspend their membership of the UN at some point in the next few months, withdrawing both their support and funding for its bureaucracy and political structures. I certainly hope so. At best, it is a moribund institution and needs a damn good shake-up.

Harumph!

One thing I will say in favour of taking the neocon road, however. You get to know who your real friends are! And you make some interesting new ones along the way. In fact, you seem to be open to new people of all types and kinds like never before. I like to kid myself by saying that clear sightedness, clear thinking and a willingness to accept people on their own terms without consigning them to ideological stereotypes helps in all this. Best of all, though, is that you get in touch with the wisdom of your inner bastard! Don't fight it, feel it!

It looks like part time "human shield" - and full time self-important, ego-driven airhead - Gordon Sloane, has been voted out of the "human shields" house by their official Iraqi handler, Dr Abdul Al-Hashimi.

Gordy continues to show his deep understanding of Iraq and world affairs in general in his apparent belief that the selection of sites for "human shields" in Iraq goes through some unspecified process of United Nations "endorsement".

Mr Sloan said the group's members were spread across six sites, which he described as "UN-endorsed", but that a number of "Italian subversives" had insisted on placing themselves at a Baghdad communications facility that almost certainly would be a target.

I don't know how "subversive" these Italians are, but it just seems to me that they are truly getting into the spirit of this "human shield" thing. Now, standing up in front of the foreign media and condemning Saddam for running a regime characterised by suppression of all dissent, widespread torture and disappearances, a pervasive climate of intimidation and fear, mass murder verging on genocide and a constant stream of refugees leading to a diaspora of 4 million people - that would be "subversive". I don't expect any "human shields" to be doing that any time soon.

Actually endangering yourself is not how boy genius Gordy and many of his mates see the job of "human shield", however.

Until this week, the shield had been working from an Iraqi-prepared list of likely civilian targets, but they had been running their own detailed checks on them, to ensure they were not close to military targets and that there would be adequate facilities for shield members who might have to camp for weeks.

Safety is paramount, according to Gordy:

"Anyone who comes to join the shield now runs the risk of being sent to a site that hasn't been properly vetted for their safety."

"Properly vetted" as in "there isn't a chance in hell that the Yanks, as basically decent and ethical people, will target this site", that is. It seems that Gordy is too thick to realise that some attempt should be made to disguise the hypocritical and empty nature of the whole "human shields" effort. You wouldn't want to be anywhere near anything the Yanks are actually likely to target, would you? The question must surely arise - just WTF are you achieving there, then, except handing propaganda points to Saddam?

If not Gordy, maybe some other, slightly brighter (but still hopelessly naive) "shields" actually learnt something from all of this - a high ranking functionary of a ruthless totalitarian dictator behaves like, well, a ruthless totalitarian dictator.

"It started nice enough, but then Dr Hashimi said that he no longer recognised our committee and that in future he would deal with us only in national groups. He also ordered us not to operate as a committee any more," Mr Sloan said.

"I was effectively told that the Iraqis would decide which sites we would go to. And he accused us of forcing ourselves into leadership positions in the shield and of dictating to its members."

That's life in Iraq, I guess. One of what must be very few native Iraqi bloggers on home soil, "Salam Pax" at Where is Raed, takes a very dim view of all this poseur nonsense. In his post of 6 March (scroll down to Human Shields Bashing #124), his contempt for these spoilt children is pretty obvious.

Salam's blog is worth checking every few days. It is very moving in a simple day-to-day way. He is an educated man, fairly "westernised" (as many educated, middle class Iraqis are) and has a remarkable ability to paint a picture of ordinary daily life in Bagdhad as seen through his eyes. He is not grossly political, preferring to tell us of his doings and thoughts in a more personal way. His criticism of the regime is muted, but it is clear that he is no fan, and the impression he leaves is of ordinary folks in Bagdhad adopting a fairly fatalistic approach, mixed with some apprehension and hope, to the events that they expect to unfold in the near future.

The noblest parts of me can't help but wish him, his family and his friends (and, indeed, all ordinary Iraqis) well. I sincerely hope, along with them, that the liberation of Iraq will come swiftly, at not too great a cost in further human suffering, and will lead to something much better. At the same time, my inner bastard continues to hanker for the immediate arrest of all remaining "human shields" by the new administration and their eventual trial and conviction on charges of aiding and abetting Saddam Hussein's regime. Maybe 10 years in a Bagdhad slammer could help to cultivate an understanding of the service they are presently giving to the people of Iraq. Maybe we could start building a campaign to extradite Gordy now!

This must surely take my prize for the most smug and sanctimonious self-conceit piece of the year so far. It is an open letter to Jose Ramos Horta from a staff writer for The Age, Ray Cassin, presuming to lecture him for supporting the liberation of Iraq by force.

In the most obsequious and mealy-mouthed way, Cassin virtually accuses Jose Ramos Horta of hypocrisy. He stands especially condemned, it seems, for failing to call for the liberation of West Papua by force, and this follows the usual logic of how US action in the case of Iraq would be wrong because it won't act against brutal and oppressive regimes the world over. As I have said before, welcome to the real world in which American lives will not be put at risk unless there are pressing perceived US national interests at stake. Horta is a realist and knows this - there is no fairy force of liberators that he can summon just by wishing really, really hard. He is facing the reality of the world's only superpower shaping up to act in the case of Iraq, not somewhere else, and giving it the best support that he can.

In any case, I see Jose Ramos Horta's statements on Iraq as motivated by genuine concern for its people, who suffer every day from Hussein's oppression, rather than the fashionable "sounder than thou" concern that would leave Saddam in place indefinitely, and even try to derail the only possible vehicle of Iraq's liberation. Chances are, Horta is also motivated by the understanding that, terrible though the suffering of his people has been over the years, it has been nothing like the brutality and oppression of life every day in Saddam's toruture chamber state.

There is a brilliant take-down of Cassin's presumption by Jack Strocchi on the Australian blog site, Catallaxy Files. In the course of a comprehensive job on Cassin, there is one thing that Jack doesn't mention that goes right to my point about Horta's realism. After having finally won independence for their tiny nation and established a wary peace (most of the time) along the border with Indonesia, can anyone imagine any half-way sensible East Timorese leader publicly calling for the expulsion of Indonesian rule from West Papua, by force if necessary? That would be virtually inviting the re-invasion of a proven "nucleus of dangerous regional instability" and is something that no-one with actual responsibility for the welfare of the East Timorese would ever do.

Still, Ray would if their lives were in his hands, I am sure! Being so correct is such a terrible burden.

I couldn't beleive this article about Aussie "human shield" for Saddam, "Gordy" of Big Brother fame (apparently!). Gordy is a deep political thinker who believes that the Americans are quite happy to carpet bomb Bagdhad!

Does this guy know what "carpet bombing" means? Provided that they had at least half a brain, even the most bitter US-hating Trot would have to accept that the USA would never consider "carpet bombing" Bagdhad, let alone be "quite happy" to do it. What planet is this guy from? It's frightening!

The seriously delusional nature of some of the more well-meaning "human shields" has become more apparent over recent weeks. Several have been reported as wanting to be posted to hospitals and orphanages to "protect" the innocent patients and kiddies from the evil USA. Do these people seriously believe that the US military would deliberately target hospitals and orphanages? If they do, it just goes to show how deeply they have slipped into their own fantasy world where the only great certainty is the absolute evil of the USA. If they don't, they are just bloody show ponies, wanting to grandstand from a position where they know they will be just about as safe as it is possible to be in Bagdhad, if and when the allied strikes commence.

However, Gordy is in a league of his own when it comes to wilful ignorance. This is the man whose "favourite book" is "I don't read books" and who made it plain that he had no interest in finding out anything about Saddam Hussein before his trip to Iraq.

Perhaps the most delusional belief of all held among at least some of the "human shields", including Gordy, is their view that they are so damn precious that their presence could deter an attack on a legitimate military target. Yet my inner bastard tells me that it would be something of a bonus. I am inclined to believe that the military would take the same view.

Something to help "anti-war" protestors sleep easy at night, confident in their own moral rectitude. Disturbing material on the massacre at Halabja just to remind you that "moral equivalence" is morally bankrupt.

One of the more disturbing trends among some in the intellectual left at the present time is a form of historical revisionism which seeks to attribute the attack on Halabja to Iranian forces, or at least to argue that the people of Halabja were merely the collateral damage of warfare in which gasses were used by both sides.

The first line of argument ignores many of the facts. Halabja was a town of 70,000 to 80,000 people in 1988. Although it is likely that more than 5,000 civilians were killed, there are many surviving eyewitnesses who know perfectly well who attacked them in wave after wave of air attacks over three days. The spent Iraqi ordnance can still be found in the area. Added to that, Halabja was occupied by Iranian forces at the time - and they are hardly likely to have continued a "friendly fire" attack for three days. Gwynne Roberts covers these issues in his article on poisonous weapons contributed to The Crimes of War Project:

The battle for Halabja began on March 15, 1988, when Kurdish rebels and Iranian Revolutionary Guards, equipped with chemical warfare suits, moved into the town, driving out Iraqi units in heavy fighting. Townspeople were then stopped from fleeing Halabja and forced by the invaders to return to their homes. This tactic was to cost thousands of lives.

The chemical attack began a day later at 6:20 p.m. and continued sporadically over three days. Wave after wave of bombers—seven to eight in each wing—attacked Halabja, a town of eighty thousand, and all roads leading to the surrounding mountains. They dropped a cocktail of poison gases: mustard gas, the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and, according to a well-informed Iraqi military source, VX, the most lethal of all, which Iraq had just begun to manufacture. Clouds of gas hung over the town and the surrounding hills, blotting out the sky and contaminating the fertile plains nearby.

The townspeople had no protection and the chemicals soaked into their clothes, skin, eyes, and lungs. At least five thousand, and probably many more, died within hours. Many were poisoned in the cellars where they had sought refuge—trapped by gases that were heavier than air. It was the largest chemical attack ever launched against a civilian population.
...

Evidence of the attack still litters the hills around Halabja. Empty chemical shells with Russian markings stand upright in the plowed earth like grotesque mushrooms. Casings are still to be found stacked in local scrapyards, and even used as flowerpots by Halabjans.
...

There is little doubt that Halabja is a medical catastrophe. There is also little doubt in the minds of Halabjans who is responsible for it: Saddam Hussein.

The second, somewhat milder, revisionist line is that both sides in the Iran-Iraq War gassed the Kurds of Halabja in the course of fighting. This is not only inconsistent with the deployment of troops noted above but, on a more general front, ignores the most damning fact of all - that the Iraqi regime conducted a sustained genocidal campaign against the Kurds, known as "the Anfal", involving the use of gasses on scores of villages. As the US State Department under Bill Clinton's administration said in a formal statement issued in March 2000:

Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons attack on Halabja was not an isolated incident. It was part of a systematic campaign ordered by Saddam Hussein and led by his lieutenant, Ali Hassan al-Majid, the infamous "Chemical Ali," against Iraqi Kurdish civilians. International observers estimate Iraqi forces killed 50,000 to 100,000 people during the 1988 campaign known as "Anfal." The Iraqi regime also killed at least 5,000 Iranians with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War.

The strangest paradox in all of this is that the revisionists largely rely on an original source that could be a piece of Pentagon/CIA disinformation, partly the work of the increasingly discredited Stephen Pelletiere. All of the later sources used by the revisionists seem to point back to this material. A key argument appears to be that a cyanide-based "blood agent" was responsible for most of the Halabja fatalities and that there is "no evidence" that Iraq ever used these agents. The present Kurdish authorities agree with the former and say that the use of cyanide was confirmed in autopsies performed by Iranian doctors. However, they dismiss the latter and claim that similar blood agents were used widely by Iraq against Kurdish civilians in the Anfal, even if they were not used against Iranian troops in the Iran-Iraq War.

Gwynne Roberts, writing before the present military buildup around Iraq in the article quoted above, gives this background to the strange new credibility of old CIA/Pentagon propaganda in the eyes of new left ideological warriors:

There are growing calls in the United States, encouraged by the government, to set up a war crimes tribunal and brand Hussein a war criminal. The Halabja gas attack, and its aftermath, are crucial in the case.

There is one fly in the ointment, however. In 1990, against all the evidence, the U.S. Defense Department alleged that Iran was also responsible for the chemical attack on Halabja. An internal Pentagon study assembled what it claimed was "conclusive intelligence" that Iran was complicit in one of the worst civilian massacres in the Iran-Iraq War. This report, leaked to The Washington Post, is being used by Iraqi officials to divert the blame.

Many people are skeptical of the Pentagon evidence, not least the people of Halabja. I talked to many Halabjans during my visit who were present during the 1988 attack, and all agreed that Iraq alone was responsible. The Kurdish guerrilla armies who were allied to Iran at the time and fought in and around Halabja also concur, and that includes the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Masoud Barzani, whose current relations with the Iranians can only be described as hostile. Why would Iranian commanders whose troops were in Halabja at the time use poison gas against their own men? they ask. Their logic seems inescapable.

Yet, the allegation of Iranian complicity in Halabja—never rescinded in Washington—complicates the issue under international law. Iraq will almost certainly claim that Iran used poison gas first, and its response was in retaliation. Issued at a time when the United States supported the Iraqis both politically and materially, this piece of black propaganda has now returned to haunt the current U.S. administration.

The more I have looked into these issues, the more convinced I am that the Halabja revisionists show both the intellectual rigour and moral standing of Holocaust deniers. I recoil from the mentality that treats matters of such profound seriousness and crimes against humanity of such magnitude as just so much grist for the ideological mill. They are moral scum who are on a holy little mission of their own - to bend all the facts necessary to show that the USA is the real terrorist.

UPDATE - There is a comprehensive report by Human Rights Watch on the Anfal campaigns available on the web here.

While I am on the subject, this analysis of the effect of the "peace" marches is also worth a read.

Without further explanation at this stage, another article by Nick Cohen criticising "anti-war" feel-good action. It's actually better argued than a sign that says "NO HoWARd", believe it or not.

More on the theme of Iraqi voices in support of toppling Hussein by force, The Sydney Morning Herald mentions an e-mail from a British Iraqi student to her friends in which she expresses her bewilderment and disappointment at their support for the "no war" cause. You can read the enitre text of the letter on the 10 Downing Street web site. OK, OK - in dire times, some principles have to be set aside! Reading the letter shows that the young student concerned, Ms Rainia Kashi, might have absorbed at least some anti-American shibboleths along the way but she is passionate and very right when it comes to what she really knows. She is also right about the real task for concerned citizens - keeping the US coalition "on track" in rebuilding Iraq.

And for those who think that there is no hope for the future of Iraq, this is a very interesting speech made to the Council of Socialist International (remember what I said about principles?) by the Prime Minister of the autonomous region of Kurdistan, Dr Barhim Salih. Dr Salih makes an impassioned plea to lefties and peace-lovers the world over not to make the mistake of opposing Hussein's removal by force, which he sees as fundamentally misguided.

Even better, the lessons of Kurdistan show us all the real potential of a post-Hussein Iraq. For some reason, we rarely hear about Kurdistan in Australia. Our media fails us badly in this regard, since the reality of what has been created in Kurdistan is the clearest message of hope possible under the circumstances. In a nutshell, a large part of the Kurdish region of Iraq broke away from the control of the Hussein regime in 1991, an act made possible by the protection of the allied-enforced northern no-fly zone. Over the last 12 years, it has established secular, democratic and representative government structures supported by free politics and media and the rule of law overseen by an independent, secular judiciary (that includes female judges!). With limited resources, it has made massive strides in public health and literacy while holding off both the Iraqi Army and a force of Iraq-supported armed Islamist fundamentalists.

The truly interesting thing about this speech is that it seems to come from an old leftie. This always gives this kind of thing more credibility than if it comes from someone like Mark Steyn, who first pricked my interest in Kurdistan. Recommended reading for peace marchers!

I have come across many other Iraqi voices in the last few days - all saying much the same thing. The final one that I will log in this post is a letter to the editor of The Guardian (good on them for publishing it). Dr B Khalaf is a consultant neurologist who works at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He explains why he will be most definitely not be "marching for peace". As he says with the simple eloquence of deep knowledge and conviction:

But just ask yourselves why, out of about 500,000 Iraqis in Britain, you will not find even 1,000 of them participating tomorrow? Your anti-war campaign has become mass hysteria and you are no longer able to see things properly.

Just what the doctor ordered for the "peace" movement. Don't expect him to be listened to, however. We all know that Bush is the real terrorist.

Last month I posted an item about Labor's confusion on Iraq, which included a link to Jim Nolan's piece in Workers Online about why the left should support toppling Saddam Hussein by force.

An article of a somewhat similar nature by Tony Horwitz appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday and is also worth a read. Maybe it is even worth some serious consideration by many of the people who automatically regard war as A Bad Thing (and who doesn't, after all?). The fact remains that not acting, when we have a realistic chance, to remove Hussein as quickly and painlessly as possible would be A Very Much Worse Thing. Inaction has serious consequences, and Horwitz points to Hussein's unique record to illustrate:

As a reporter who has visited Iraq eight times and seen its torture victims in Kuwaiti morgues and London psychiatric wards, I can't dismiss Saddam - as the left often does - as just another despot the US has demonised to justify war ... I've reported on many tyrannies, including Ceausescu's Romania; none compare to Iraq. To downplay this, or to equate other nations' injustices with those of Iraq, is morally obtuse, and reminiscent of last century's apologists for Stalin, a leader Saddam greatly admires and most resembles ...

I've reported on two Gulf wars, including a 1988 visit to a corpse-laden desert where Iraq gassed Iranians. There are other nasty regimes with awful weapons, but none with Saddam's track record. In a country with the population of Australia, Saddam has caused the deaths of some 1.5 million people, half of them his own ...

Many decent people are rightly concerned about the casualties that will occur as a direct result of military intervention, but 1.5 million people includes an awful lot of photogenic kids who weren't lucky enough to star on anti-war posters. The grim calculus is simply this - there will be vastly more casualties unless Hussein's brutal regime is removed quickly, and it will not be removed without outside force.

These are the difficult decisions that face the leaders of many relatively free and lucky nations around the world today. The USA is finally ready to act - how many of us are going to continue to do our best to stop them, and what untold suffering would result for the Iraqi people if we were successful? Moral superiority for the left never before came with such a high price.

Life being what it is, I haven't had much time for even reading news this last week, let alone writing blog entries! The time that I have been able to spend on the computer at home has been mostly occupied learning simple Visual Basic programming. I need this for work so that I can automate some statistical analysis tasks in Excel. Life is so unfair! In fact, it is so unfair that I can't even find a victim support group for people like me.

Even with only a bit of reading, however, I must have come across that stupid "drums of war" cliche a half dozen times*. Why on Earth are leftie journalists so lacking in imagination?? At least I know I am not alone on that one - the entire blogosphere is a support group for ADT (advanced drum trauma).

Right wing madman, Mark Steyn, has excelled himself again - this time arguing in the Speccie for the USA to pull out of the UN. Steyn reckons that he will only support war in Iraq if it is without UN endorsement and actually makes some sense in explaning why. In a nutshell, he argues that UN involvement is what stuffed up Gulf War I and he makes some pretty telling points about the UN's increaingly farcical nature and its growing irrelevance to conditions in the 21st Century.

As usual, RWMM Steyn uses humour as his own weapon of mass destruction. His description of the UN Security Council structure as "the second world war victory parade preserved in aspic" made me cackle out loud when I read it. No doubt about it, that boy can use a joke like a pomposity-seeking missile.

On a related tack - the bastardry of Jacques Chirac - there was a great cartoon in The Age the other day. The article that it came from by Christopher Hitchens is definitely worth a read too, especially by anyone who is under the illusion that the French stand on Iraq is in any way "principled" or has been adopted for "moral" reasons.

*UPDATE - I see that Tim Blair has also fallen victim of ADT in his new weekly column for The Bulletin. Tim has such a bad case that he is actually counting and documenting "drum" references (see the end of his article for this sad spectacle). It doesn't look good. It is the sort of thing where the doctor just shakes his head without saying a word.

I am going to miss RWMM Blair's column in the Thursday Australian but there is no way that either I or my employer will be buying The Bulletin. Thankfully, it looks like the column will be online and no doubt Tim will link to it from his blog each week.

I went to see Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American the weekend before last and I will admit that I enjoyed the film very much. It was shot well, was well-written with deep and complex characterisation and contained some superb performances, particularly from Michael Caine. Needless to say, it probably had a head start given that it was based on the eponymous work of accomplished novelist Graham Greene.

However, it should be equally needless to say that it is a work of fiction and should be watched and judged accordingly. After discussion with a number of people who also enjoyed the movie, it is clear to me that many on the left of politics seem to easily forget that simple fact, possibly because the story line and the American lead role reinforce their existing prejudices.

The fact is that very few people in this camp have made any deep study of the nature and extent of US interest and activity in late colonial French Vietnam or, for that matter, have any good reason to believe that Graham Greene did so either. Despite this, my leftie friends seem willing to swallow the story line of a work of fiction as gospel fact and rather smugly assume that they "know" all about America's role as a result! Yet many of the same folk would sneer at the "stupid" fans of movies like Rambo who came away convinced that US MIAs (missing in action) are still being held in Vietnam.

So what is the difference, exactly, between The Quiet American and Rambo? In my view, it is simply that The Quiet American is a better movie in its own terms, with a strong story and complex, "believable" characters. However, there is no inherent reason to believe that it is any closer to the truth of events in Vietnam than Rambo is. If you can't "believe" what you want to believe about the Americans in Vietnam on the basis of genuine, factual research, thought and analysis, don't start turning to either of these two movies to shore up your belief system. One is no better than the other as a self-sufficient historical account.

The one thing I did not like about this movie is that I am sure Phillip Noyce wants and expects it to have exactly this effect on its audience. This the man who, in Rabbit Proof Fence, made a film with a story unrecognisable to one of its real life main protagonists. Gerard Henderson, writing recently in a number of Australian newspapers including The Age, provided a brief but excellent little analysis of where both Greene and Noyce are coming from. In particular, Henderson points out how Noyce has gone even further by excising material from Greene's work that might show the Viet Minh to be anything other than greatly loved liberators of the people from the yoke of colonial oppression.

It is hardly surprising that the American producers of this film decided not to release it immediately after the events of September 11, 2001 and that it is still reportedly not doing well in the USA. Most Yanks, apart from the grossly self-loathing kind, probably don't much want to watch some fictional yarn that tells them what a pack of bastards they are. They would feel this way at any time, let alone in that very sensitive aftermath of national mourning and outrage. And yet I was recently treated to the spectacle of an old friend telling me how "the US Government" had introduced "a whole lot of new censorship laws after September 11"! When I pointed out that this would be difficult, given that the US Constitution guaranteed freedom of speech, it was clear that he was rather hazy on the facts. Further questioning revealed that it was, in fact, a very garbled version of the news of this commercial decision by the rightful owners of The Quiet American that gave rise to this fantastic tale.

OK, so maybe not all of the lefties who watch this movie are quite this intellectually sloppy but I wouldn't mind betting that many find a cosy vindication of their views and suspend their critical faculties accordingly. As the so-called "Iraq Debate" in Australia clearly shows, we have an awful lot of very "loud Australians" who have been deafened by their own clamouring prejudices.

One of my favourite Ozbloggers, Professor Bunyip, has gone in to bat for "the Great Satan" (that's the USA, if you haven't taken the wisdom of the Ayatollahs fully on board). In this article, he makes some good points in reply to one of the most tired left-wing cliches trotted out (pardon the pun) in this sad piece by Phillip Knightly in The Diplomat.

Knightly's piece is surprisingly simple-minded - full of ugly, facile and intellectually lazy anti-Americanism, unsupported by evidence or convincing argument and bearing little relationship to reality. It has caused Professor B considerable sadness, since its author was obviously once a figure of respect. Hard to imagine of one who quotes Noam Chomsky as an authority, but there you go!

Among the tiresome think-by-numbers statements made by Knightly comes this typical specimen:

President Bush says that America is at war, but it is simply more at war than before. Since the Second World War, the US has invaded or bombed Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Cuba, Grenada, Haiti, the Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans and Afghanistan.

The Professor looks at these sins of the Great Satan with different eyes, it seems. He appears to argue that the USA has taken a closer look at the adverse results that can flow from its intervention since the nasty shock of Pinochet's subsequent behaviour in Chile. In any case, he makes this neat and very clear-sighted little reply to this old, old chestnut:

If you forget Korea -- a war Knightley misrepresents with an intentionally broad and careless stroke -- the bloody installation of the Pinochet regime in Chile is a watershed. Before that, America's Cold War adventures abroad sometimes had unfortunate consequences for human rights, as many who lived under the succession of Guatemala's butchers and tyrants can attest (even if they had to make them up.)

But after Chile, a strange thing happened. No matter where U.S. forces set foot, they left a better society.

The U.S. restored Aristide in Haiti, despite the fact that the pesky priest has continued to give his former patrons grief.

It ousted a thug (of its own creation, no less) in Panama and installed an elected legislature and president, to whom it surrendered the Panama Canal.

It rescued Grenada from a government composed of Marxist academics-turned-amateur mass murderers (keep those machetes away from Robert Manne and Scott Burchill, please). Today, the island is peaceful and -- golly gosh -- democratic as well.

In Lebanon, it mounted a flawed but basically well-intentioned effort to bring peace to Beirut, and then rapidly decamped when the murder by truck bomb of some 300 of its young men demonstrated that Syria and Iran were ill disposed to that goal.

In Libya, it launched a single flight of F-111s against the man who probably blew up a German disco full of GIs (the Syrians could have been equally responsible) and who later shredded a Pan Am jet over Scotland.

In Iraq, it led a U.N. endorsed effort to oust an invader from a neighbour's territory, and then stopped before reaching Baghdad -- just as the U.N. mandate instructed.

In Somalia, the object was to end a civil war and feed the starving. It was the reason no tanks were sent ashore, which was, in turn, the reason so many poorly protected Americans died in the Mogadishu fire fight depicted in Black Hawk Down.

The Balkans, where American troops have remained at considerable cost to the U.S. taxpayers ever since, brought an end to massacres and ethnic cleansing.

Even in El Salvador and Nicaragua, democracy flourishes and the murders have stopped.

And finally, Afghanistan, where perhaps Knightley believes that his Chomskyite chatter about a mythical pipeline negates the good that was achieved by the ouster of theocratic sociopaths and Saudi-funded scumbags.

Add it all up, and please don't stint on peppering your conclusion with a liberal dose of suspicion about U. S. motives: George Bush I's decision to leave Saddam in place was an example of geopolitical expediency, and Afghanistan became a military objective when the terrorists who were the Taleban's honoured guests organised the slaughter of thousands of New Yorkers.

But on the whole, the post-Chile era represents a pretty decent record -- one that has brought more good to the world than harm.

Here, here, I say! No doubt the Professor has earned himself a minor demoncy in a relatively temperate outer chamber of Hell as a result of this service to the GS.

Mark Steyn may be a blood thirsty, war-mongering, right wing lunatic - I am sure that he would be happy to admit as much himself - but he has a gift for delivering some serious thinking in easily digested pieces while remaining one of the most consistently funny political commentators on the web. What he says about the potential of Iraq to become the Arab world's first secular democracy hits the nail pretty much on the head.

This article is an example of classic Steyn. On the issue of the potential of the Iraqi opposition, he makes these telling points:

In most Muslim countries, as bad as the government is, its opponents are worse — that goes for Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority.... The Iraqi National Congress is a notable exception to that rule. What’s more, anyone who says you can’t create a functioning civilised society in Iraq overlooks the fact that there’s already one: beneath the Anglo-American no-fly zones, the Saddam-free Kurdish areas of Iraq have quietly created democratic political structures including multiparty legislatures and accountable executives and prime ministers; there is a free press and an independent judiciary, including female judges, and universities that teach subjects other than suicide bombing and the descent of Jews from pigs. These are imperfect statelets, but then so are Wales and Quebec and California. The important point is there are not a lot of Kurds sitting in West Midlands council flats plotting jihad. They’ve got better things to do.

Perhaps an even more telling point is the fear among neighbouring heads of state about what the birth of secular democracy in the region could mean:

When Joschka Fischer twitters hysterically (as he did this week) about ‘disastrous consequences for long-term regional stability’, he implicitly acknowledges this; he understands that creating a decentralised, secular democracy in Iraq will have a knock-on effect on its neighbours. Why this bothers him is a more perplexing matter. ‘Regional stability’ has worked out swell for the House of Saud, the Assads and the Ayatollahs, but it’s hard to see why it’s been so great for Herr Fischer and his pals. Six months or so back, I laid out in The Spec how the benefits of destabilisation might play out, from Iran to Syria. That’s what Saddam’s neighbours are terrified of. That’s why Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has cooked up another one of his laughable ‘peace plans’, one that calls for Saddam to relocate and everything else to stay the same. If that happens, it will be a catastrophic defeat for the Americans. The re-making of Iraq is meant to rattle the terror-exporting Saudis. The overthrow of Saddam would merely let them off the hook. Again.

On a related tack, here is an interesting article in Foreign Affairs by respected Arab-American academic, Fouad Ajami. He also sees coming events in Iraq as central to the cultural development of the wider Arab world. Unlike Steyn, he is an Arab - so it must be OK to say these things (I think?). In contrast, Steyn just proves again that he is a right wing madman.

Good to see that a US District Court has ruled that fat little kids have only themselves and their parents to blame.

As far as I know, Ronald McDonald hasn't been in the habit of lurking in dark alleys waiting to pounce on poor little kiddies and force-feed them Big Macs. Let's face it, these are lazy little buggers who have no self control - that's why they're fat. If they need to blame anyone, they should look no further than their loser parents, who clearly have no interest in them apart from their status as "potential gold mine from dubious litigation". Certainly not enough interest to ensure they develop healthy eating habits or get them off their fat little arses and away from their Gameboys.

Meanwhile, other healthy, active kids like an occasional trashy Maccas meal and their parents welcome a bit of a break by eating out and cheaply in a place that accepts and caters for children. Macdonalds is a success because enough people actually want that shit - believe it or not - and there is no way those people should be called upon to subsidise no-hopers who habitually cast themselves in the role of helpless victims. You've got fat kids - do something about it or learn to live with it and stop your whining!

Why anyone would eat at Maccas when the burgers are better at Hungry Jacks is way beyond me, in any case.

More policy confusion from Labor under Simon Crean. A little gem from Simon appearing in The Australian the other day caught my eye in particular - especially this reported Labor "position":

Labor's policy allows it to support a US-led invasion of Iraq without UN support only if a direct threat to Australia could be shown – such as proof Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.

Oh, great! Wait for Saddam to actually give WMD to terrorists - exactly what the US "pre-emptive" policy is purporting to avoid - but then go ahead and take "unilateral" action anyway!

Just try to deconstruct this statement a little. On the face of it, it seems to accept that passing on state-developed WMD to terrorist groups actually would present a threat to Australia. It certainly would present a threat to every Western nation, plus quite a few more as well, and Australia would be right up there with the best of them. Even more, the statement seems to acknowledge that such a thing is at least theoretically plausible. Any serious consideration of Hussein's record of aggression, gross brutality and lunacy, coupled with his seething hatred of Israel and desire for revenge on the West, makes the prospect of his lashing out in any way that he can very real indeed.

If Labor really believes these things, isn't it a little late to do something after the terrorists have their doomsday weapons? If it doesn't believe these things, WTF does it believe and what is it trying to say?

Much of the discussion about weapons inspections in the media at present misses a fundamental point. When the last lot of inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they had established as a fact that Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. The recent Iraqi declaration, required by the UN Security Council, fails to account for these known stocks. Hence Colin Powell's comments that the Hussein regime is already in breach. On the nuclear front, the weapons inspectors at the time said that they believed they had dismantled his nuclear weapons program - after taking four years to establish that he actually had such a program in the first place. Given that level of effectiveness, how confident can we be of their thoroughness on that point?

Despite the "war for oil" theories, America's actions in this issue are perfectly consistent with its new approach to dealing with potential threats post September 11. There would be much easier and less expensive ways to get access to Iraqi oil if that is what the USA really wanted. There doesn't seem to be much doubt to me that the US Government will eliminate this threat one way or another, and they will choose the easiest way available to them in terms of cost, effort and political/diplomatic spinoff. Simply because that is their perceived national interest, as ever. But they will do it - one way or another, Saddam Hussein's days are numbered.

So where does that leave the rest of us? Any serious analysis of how the present Iraqi regime operates tells us that its passing will not be mourned much in Iraq itself. Nick Cohen of The Observer has already remarked on the understandable absence of any significant involvement of Iragi refugees in "anti-war" actions in the West.

There is no point in lamenting the fact that the USA will not act in similar fashion to oust, say, the criminal regime in Burma - welcome to the real world in which American lives will not be put at risk unless there are pressing perceived US national interests at stake. Instead, the left in Australia needs to think about whether their knee-jerk anti-Americanism leads them to support the continuation of one of the most rancorous and brutal dictatorships on the face of the planet, as left wing lawyer Jim Nolan pointed out in Workers Online late last year.

And where does that leave the ALP in particular? Still staggering around gibbering incoherently while events of the world pass them by, it seems.

Have you ever asked yourself the question "Why do so many of our intellectual elite - eg academics, journalists, tertiary educated middle class people in general - seem so curiously disconnected from the society around them"? I certainly have, and more so in recent times. Too many of the intelligentsia act almost as if they have no stake in carrying forward our culture and civilisation, as if there is nothing in our traditions that is inspiring or worth preserving and defending. Moral equivalence and relativism rule the day and their position is one of constant criticism of our history, culture, society and politics - if not outright condemnation!

This fine little essay by Victor Davis Hanson in OpinionJournal seems to me to offer some insights into this vexed question. Admittedly, Hanson is examining the specific question of "anti-Americanism", particularly within American society, but his observation and thinking can easily be extended to the cultural self-loathing of a whole class of Western intellectuals in general.

The paradox is that so many of this crew are extremely priveleged in their own personal lives and could not take the Olympian views that they do without having our huge tradition of cultural, intellectual, political and technological achievement to draw upon. This is not to say that academics and other "intellectuals" do not have a vital role in providing well-justified criticism on particular issues - it is more whether social disconnection and condemnation of much of what we are and have produced more or less defines them. As Hansen puts it in comparing our present intellectual climate with the cultural fragmentation within the late (western) Roman Empire:

"The example of Rome, in short, is an apt one, but in a way unintended by critics who use passing contemporary events as occasions for venting a permanent, irrational and often visceral distrust of their own society. Their creed is really a malady, and it cries out to be confronted and exposed."

I certainly agree that this is a very strange phenomenon - indeed a "malady" - that needs to be further examined, understood and discussed by intellectuals of a more clear-eyed persuasion.

The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in the UK has proved again what geniuses they are. In an attempt to "liberate" 7,000 free range (yes, free range!) chickens from the oppression of a modern poultry farm, they caused the needless and (no doubt) rather nasty slaughter of 150 of the birds. In a move that must strain the cognitive dissonance-handling ability of even the most florid ALF fruitloop, they then went on to daub the barn walls with the ALF symbol and their slogan "no excuse for animal abuse". I don't think that they wrote it in still-warm chicken blood - only so much cognitive dissonance is possible before your head explodes.

And why didn't the chickens rise up and recognise, embrace and proclaim eternal solidarity with the struggle of their "liberators"? Why didn't they choose freedom in the big wide and dangerous world instead of panicking at the loss of their comfortable free range "oppression"? Because they were chicken, that's why!

As Patrick West puts it in Spiked On-line:

"... chicks are never going to get wise to concepts of rights, liberty, nationalism, post-structuralism or the off-side trap. Try to liberate some chickens, and they will not be seen riding motorcycles over barbed-wire fences, sneaking round cities with bogus passports and approaching other incognito fowl on street corners, muttering codewords. No, what happens is that they all go 'cluck cluck' and then trample each other to death."

The terrorist attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001 have caused a lot of once moderate leftists - like me - to turn in our pink cards forever and leave that increasingly whiny "separatist" subculture in disgust at the kind of reactions elicited from so many of its gurus.

I wonder if the same events might yet do something useful for those "left behind"? Like splittling off their most truly loony elements into a rapidly descending spiral of delusion and total irrelevance:

And you thought it was Al Qaida

As is typical of the hyperbolic ranting so characteristic of this kind of deeply paranoid, loopy left extremism, "Voxfux" seriously maintains on the basis of the crap in this article that no other conclusion but the following is possible to a rational mind:

"A thorough scientific analysis of the swirl of events, people, nations, motivations, propaganda, personalities and histories involved in this current moment in history, leads to only one conclusion - That clandestine forces aligned with George Bush Sr. are planning to attack the US population, blame it on Islamic terrorists and use the attacks as a pretext for a total clamp-down on dissent, basic civil liberties, normal democratic processes and In the confusion that will follow they will wage unchecked war and aggression against Iraq, and other nations, Islamic and otherwise, who have natural resources and particularly oil reserves that this shadowy group of petrochemical and arms industrialists are thirsting for. Their ultimate goal? The conquest of Eurasia."

The real challenge is to persevere and actually read this article in its entirety.

This is the first post to what will be an occasional weblog of links and random comments on things on the web that catch my eye, especially in the areas of politics, science and history. Things that make enough of an impression on me to log them at the time, so that I can find them again myself in future, or easily refer others to the original material along with my oh-so-witty jokes and scalpel-like analysis.

Even better than this strictly utilitarian function, it's a public blog - so I can pretend that my opinions really matter. Zif!