ABC, SBS, Radio National.

If citizens are denied the ability or right to scrutinise decisions made by governments and their consequences (for example a failed military adventure) then that nation ceases to be a democracy.

The Bush administration, unlike the Olmert administration, seeks to deny the legitimacy of the people’s right to know by smearing efforts to discoverthe truth as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”.

I believe Mark’s underlying point to be that administrations that act like Bush’s run the risk of joining the non-democratic club of nations.

He’s got a point, you know.

Why such an artificial selection? In these matters authoritarian countries affect the occurrence of war as much as the democracies do.

This is THE problem with your argument. You want to judge Arab states by a different standard. This is wrong.

No - it’s not a problem with my argument in the slightest. I am interested in comparing the reaction of democracies to war. Therefore I am not under any obligation to make any comparison with states that are not democracies. To suggest otherwise is not to point to a logical or argumentative flaw, but rather to make a polemical political point - as if one can’t be critical of a democracy without criticising non democracies. That really makes no sense, except as a flawed debating point.

1. A lot of people with arms control expertise did not take it to be implausible. Iraq was a closed society, and was throwing obstacles in the way of inspectors, and had a vast CBW infrastructure in the past, so it genuinely came as a surprise when nothing turned up. It’s easy to be wise now with 20:20 hindsight.

Western leaders considerably overstated the reliability of their intelligence, and made dubious claims about Saddam’s likelihood to use any weapons he might have. Still, the complete absence of WMD was a genuine surprise, not least to many of Iraq’s leaders:

“When it came to WMD, Saddam attempted to convince one audience that they were gone while simultaneously convincing another that Iraq still had them. … many within Iraq’s ruling circle never stopped believing that the weapons still existed.”
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060501faessay85301-p10/kevin-woods-james-lacey-williamson-murray/saddam-s-delusions-the-view-from-the-inside.html

2. Nope, the Murdoch press reported on it too. And undoubtedly Fairfax as well.
The Australian 03/03/2003: “Uncle Sam spies on UN delegations” … “The leaked memorandum, dated January 31, makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York.”

(Incidently, there’s much intelligence gathering on diplomats at the UN, and not just by the US and UK. Basically, everyone does it to everyone else, or at least tries to.)

4. Oh, just about every article on the subject in the Fairfax media, and the occasional article in the Murdoch press too.

The screaming about Iraq war started long before the invasion and NYT published more anti-war than pro-war material. The same with SMH. Both can be lies of course, no problem with that.

Not true. Australia’s mainstream media swallowed wholesale a bunch of patent untruths.

1. The fairytale of WMD’s and the risk of ‘imminent attack’, which even Labour politicians believed in, was always implausible - Iraq was in economic ruin, surrounded by no-fly zones, and its navy and airforce had already been destroyed by the US before the war officially began.

2. The US were desperate to manufacture a war. When it looked as though things might go to a security council vote, several non-permanent members of the council were believed to have had their diplomats personal correspondence bugged, for blackmail purposes. In Australia, on ABC reproted this.

3. Links between Saddam and bin Laden were always fanciful, and without any evidential support whatsoever. Again, it took years before this link was openly challenged in the media. Australian media habitually mentioned Iraq and terrorism in the same breath.

4. I would wager that many around the world would see the Iraq war as a more or less imperialist exercise - where is this particular ‘anti-war’ view represented in Australian or US media?

This is THE problem with your argument. You want to judge Arab states by a different standard. This is wrong.

The screaming about Iraq war started long before the invasion and NYT published more anti-war than pro-war material. The same with SMH. Both can be lies of course, no problem with that.

However the point about sacrifices is a sound one. Since abolishion of the draft these issues slip from the top of the agenda. But only up to a certain body count. Iraq has probably decided the outcome of the mid-term election and the current state of the debate in the US is hardly one-sided. If anything it is the administration that is on the defensive.

… societies where governments routinely lie, deny, and obstruct any such probing, at the very least, when they’re not denouncing it as treasonous and “giving comfort to the enemyâ€?.

Like Arab states, you mean?

Oh, no. You mean the US, of course … where there simply hasn’t been a word written criticising the Iraq war since it began.

Ah, well. Maybe in 30 years time, once the Bush dictatorship is well and truly history, we might see the first volume offering some timid criticisms of the war.

Indeed, while the Israelis who were actually at risk from the Lebanon war wanted it to end, the crazed (and safe) neoconservative warmongers in the U.S. were furious when the war ended. And — needless to say — they ran around accusing everyone responsible for the war’s end of appeasement and cowardice and all of their other inane war-cheering platitudes that have driven this country so tragically off-course.

And didn’t we read many examples of that fury on this very blog. [Cue thinking music to allow conjuring up of memories of your own favourite RWDB Keyboard Kommando.]

Only people who have adolescent views of war — only people for whom war is a distant, cartoon concept and not a reality, the primary purpose of which is to endow themselves with personal sensations of strength, power and purpose in the most risk-free manner possible — have the luxury of indulging such fantasies.

Yep that just about covers your common or rumpus room cum command bunker Australian Wingnut as wall.

I don’t endorse every jot and tittle of Greenwald’s argument, but I think the broader point is well worth making.