The legal justification for America’s military presence in Iraq is UN resolution 1770, which expires in August. Negotiations for a “Status of Forces Agreement”, which would provide continuing legitimacy to the US presence, have hit a major snag with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki insisting that any timetable contain a timetable for American withdrawal. There’s some good analysis from Juan Cole, who observes:
McCain increasingly looks like he is stuck in 2007 with regard to Iraq policy, and Obama looks more and more like the man of the future.
Crooks and Liars notes that John McCain was asked about what would occur in the eventuality of an Iraqi request for a withdrawal in 2004:
Question: “What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there?”
McCain’s Answer: “Well, if that scenario evolves than I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because — if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.”
McCain, of course, has been hammering Obama for supporting a phased withdrawal, which is precisely what Al-Maliki is calling for.
A few years ago, most of us were appalled by the infamous photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Seeing those photos again in Errol Morris’s exceptional documentary Standard Operating Procedure lets us know that time has rightly done nothing to diminish our negative reactions to those images.
However, Morris’s film seeks to give us the picture behind those pictures.
Continue reading ‘Standard Operating Procedure’
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Yeah, you might have noticed already. I’m in a Truthiness mood tonight, as Stephen Colbert might say. Remember all the loud denunciations I copped from Harry Clarke, Tim Blair et al et al etc. - all the feminists of total convenience - for not denouncing the female genital mutilation loudly enough? Coz it’s all about teh Islam and threats to Western Civ, etc., and that mob are all on the side of women’s rights, and that manly man of steel John Howard is taking us to war to free Afghani women from burqas. And George W. Bush is going to hunt those Al-Qaeda evildoers down. (And Islam is not a race, and some of my best friends… oops, hang on?) While Laura and Condi look after the oppressed women. Or something… Oh yeah, it isn’t 2003 any more… Remember that word fistula - you might not have read that on teh Blair blog - being a word of three syllables and all. And in Latin.
But I talked about it at the time. Now that Pamela Bone is dead (and God rest her soul, may she be blessed with eternal rest, and may perpetual light shine upon her), where are the voices with the loud condemn? What’s with that Australian crusade for women’s rights in benighted Islamic Middle Eastern countries? After all, we - Dolly Downer and John Howard and Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and Planet Janet told us so - are all (post?) feminists now. It’s on the citizenship test, dude - and dudette a la 50s pinup style no doubt. (Ps - don’t use that politically correct, activist judge f-word though…)
Well, never mind. Here’s a post from The Global Sociology Blog for the benefit of anyone who wanted to continue highlighting the horrors perpetrated on women in the developing world even if there’s not a convenient culture wars damn the left angle in it. (And that’s not to say that women in the developed world don’t still cop a lot - but there’s something to celebrate about a very large majority of Australians agreeing - at least in theory when asked by pollsters - that women have rights over their own choices and bodies - even if that masks continued gender inequality in oh, so many ways…).
You can donate to Medicins San Frontieres here.
And you might be interested in the fact that rape has finally been recognised by the UN as a war crime, something I wrote about last year, but something the keyboard warriors seem to… well, gloss over is far too kind. Because the fact that women are overwhelmingly the victims of war seems to be recognised neither by the pro-war Right nor the “humanitarian intervention” so-called Left. Continue reading ‘Now that Pamela Bone is dead…’
There’s been some comment here on a previous thread about why Australia’s withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq has stimulated so little debate - either in the media or in the blogosphere. My comment on why that might be so is here, and I’d add that the rather narrow concept of the political in Australian public discourse tends to mean that issues which are “politically neutralised” are quickly forgotten. That’s most unfortunate - because going to war on the basis of specious legal justifications and distortions and lies about intelligence is hardly a trivial matter. We owe it to ourselves as a nation to ensure this never occurs again, and the risk of it occurring again is surely heightened by a failure to remember.
I want to highlight in this post two exceptions to the rule of silence. First, in the blogosphere, Gandhi has written a comprehensive post analysing the week’s news and developments, highlighting the attempts of some in legal and activist circles to bring John Howard’s actions before the notice of the International Criminal Court, a move supported by Democrats leader Lyn Allison. Similar action in the United Kingdom was the subject of much publicity and debate, but there’s been little reporting of the substance of the brief prepared or its justification in this country. It’s important to remember that John Howard - I suspect on legal advice - ruled out “regime change”, human rights abuses or democratic goals as sufficient conditions for the Iraq War in a speech to the National Press Club on 14 March 2003. According to Howard at the time, only Saddam’s purported possession of weapons of mass destruction constituted an appropriate ground for the decision to go to war. All his later bloviating, by his own standards, was just political piffle.
It may well be that Howard had advice that the only legal justification for war was the resolutions of the UN Security Council regarding weapons inspections. That was certainly the advice given to the British government, as we know after a series of inquiries in the UK. I’m no lawyer, but it might well be that this figleaf provides sufficient legal cover for Howard to escape any culpability for his actions. It may also be that the subsequent UN recognition of the occupation of Iraq would provide some sort of retrospective immunity. Nevertheless, given the enormous importance of clarifying the legal basis or otherwise for wars of pre-emption, it seems to me eminently desirable that such an argument - an argument based on international law - be tested in an international tribunal.
That takes us to the issue of intelligence, because as we now know, Saddam Hussein had ended his WMD program in the 1990s. Continue reading ‘Australia’s War is over II’
As the architect of Australia’s participation in the Iraq War professes to be “baffled” at our withdrawal, and as his arguments for going to war are systematically demolished, a picture doing the rounds of the intertubes speaks a thousand words.
[Via an anonymous correspondent]
Meanwhile, the faith-based community the White House comments. [Via gandhi in comments]
Australian combat troops are being withdrawn from Iraq. Some Liberal MPs are still running the cut and pasted “cut and run” line. Others are decrying the withdrawal as a “diversion” from the all important issue of petrol prices. Apparently oblivious to the fact that the Iraq War might have something to do with… petrol prices.
One thing that’s puzzled me for a long time is how Australia has been able to continue to deploy soldiers to all manner of risky spots without significant casualties. Did our diggers have some kind of movie-style good-guy bullet repulsion field?
Apparently not, according to a pair of army officers writing in the Army Journal. Two separate articles reveal that in Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor and the Solomons, that any actual “offensive manoeuvers” - that is, actual warfighting, has been virtually the exclusive province of the tiny number of SAS troops - that is, the super-elite “Special Forces”. This is in contrast to our American, British, and Canadian partners, where regular infantry troops have done much of the offensive fighting(there simply aren’t enough special forces to do everything). They’ve been effective, but have suffered far more casualties as a consequence.
The complaints of Australian troops about being left out and leaving the burdens to their allies are understandable. But, particularly when it comes to Iraq, I’d prefer them to feel cowardly and come home in one piece, rather than die or be maimed in glorious battle. But - assuming that these army officers (and my understanding of their articles) are basically accurate - it does raise some questions about our diplomatic posturing, particularly when it comes to Afghanistan. Our posturing about Europeans not putting their troops in harm’s way looks a bit hypocritical, given that only the SAS, who make up a very small fraction of our total deployment, appear to be really doing so. Force protection (as I understand it and very much in a nutshell, standing guard while people do stuff) is of course hardly risk-free, but much, much safer than offensive roles. And does the fact that we’re not prepared to actually risk our infantry in combat suggest that our generals think that they’re not up to the job?
The response of the Chief of the Army can be read in this ABC article; notice that he doesn’t disagree with the basic assertions of the officers.
One of the old canards we’ve had a look at here before is the (typically) generationalist argument that if the kidz aren’t marching in the streets, then politics must have disappeared from contemporary culture. Here, culture is a key term because “68 thought” (to Anglicise a useful if ill-intentioned phrase from conservative French philosophers - representatives of what Dominique Lecourt calls the “mediocracy”) exploded the links between politics and culture, yet arguably dissolved itself into culture. That’s a more complex story than I have time to tell here, but I wanted to have a look at some of the afterlives of the protests against the War on Iraq that happened all across the world on February 15 2003.
It’s often argued that the protests failed to “stop the war”, and thus were fruitless. This, of course, is a rather odd criterion by which to judge them, because I’m unaware of any protests which have actually succeeded in stopping wars… So the second argument we’re normally confronted with is that the protests failed to translate into an ongoing movement. That might again be the wrong yardstick - in that the “peace movement” of the 60s had its conditions of possibility in its antecedents in the anti-nuclear struggles of the Cold War era. Possibly quite wrongly, disarmament and nuclear proliferation are no longer perceived as subjects for mobilisation because 1989 and 1991 dissolved the fear of nuclear holocaust in our social imaginary, a fear sort of displaced onto “terrorism” but largely now absent.
I think you could make an argument, though, that the anti-War concerns of 2003 translated into powerful sources of electoral change - in a number of countries - Spain, Australia being two that spring immediately to mind and now America and Britain, where the bellicose regimes of Bush and Blair/Brown are now in their final stages of dissolution for reasons closely linked to the Iraq War. It would be very interesting to map the influence in all this of what we might call Open Source Protest, and here I’m not just thinking of GetUp!, MoveOn.Org and the “netroots” but the more explicitly cultural aspects of anti-war sentiment.
Continue reading ‘Open Source Protest’
You remember “Banner-gate”: the controversy over the White House’s shifting explanations for the now-infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that President Bush stood before in his carefully plotted photo-op exactly five years ago tomorrow.
Knowing what’s coming, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said today, “President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission. And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year.”
It’s the anniversary of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” photo-op.
Continue reading ‘Not so pithy’
The Cowboys and Indians language of evildoers and other Manichean simplicities beloved of George W. Bush once upon a time might have been compared to the moral verities of comic book super heroes. Except that the most interesting of the classic comics were always the ones where ethical decisions were taken in a gray zone, or where “good” and “evil” weren’t so clearcut and easily distinguishable. It’s interesting to observe that in a country where as even a recent report from the National Defence University observes, the media supinely served up a diet of propaganda, spin and lies, a lot of the truth telling is in the form of graphic novels.
There’s an absolutely fascinating article on this - sharp social satire in graphic novel form - in Print magazine.
Popular culture doing the work of critique the media doesn’t do.
Continue reading ‘It’s a comic book world’
I’m teaching later this arvo, so I don’t have time to do any analysis, but I thought people might like a discussion starter on the Petraeus report to Congress on the progress of teh Surge. I do think recent events have only reinforced the validity of this conclusion:
The fate of the surge (and Omaar makes the point that larger numbers of troops have been in Iraq before) essentially rests not on anything the US does, but on the willingness of al-Sadr and his troops (and his grassroots) to maintain a ceasefire - basically for their own reasons. That’s all of a piece with the fundamental illusion that still grips what passes for discussion of the war in America - the denial that what America does, or doesn’t do (short of getting out altogether) really is one of the least important factors driving the changing nature of the situation in Iraq.
… And you can get a sense of that from this excerpt from TomDispatch:
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who emerged triumphant from an Iraqi government assault on his Mahdi Army militia in Basra (and Baghdad) has called for a “million-strong” march in Baghdad tomorrow to mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. The demonstration just happens to fall on one of the days that General David Petraeus is to report to Congress on post-surge “progress” in Iraq. This is unlikely to be pure happenstance.
Whatever’s happening in Washington today might not have all that much to do with whatever’s happening in Iraq today. It’s likely to have more to do with how Iraqi events are spun through a frame which is heavily coloured by the American presidential election, and Bush’s desire for a “legacy”. And the Iraqi actors understand that only too well.
… is already taking shape. 298 days to go.
The Pakistani election is a significant milestone, with a changed approach being signalled to the US envoys who visited there this week and to Bush himself:
Yesterday the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said he warned President George Bush in a phone conversation that he would prioritise talking as well as shooting in the battle against Islamist extremism. “He said that a comprehensive approach is required in this regard, specially combining a political approach with development,” a statement said.
Although his remarks about Pakistan itself weren’t helpful, Barack Obama actually signalled something with his “talk to your foes” thing (bluntly rejected by Hillary in her tough pose). Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, who was a strong supporter of the Iraq war back in the day, has drawn parallels between the back channel Blair sought to create with the IRA Army Council and the necessity of eventually engaging even Al-Qaeda itself. Not everyone would go that far, by any means, but there’s an increasing recognition that there should be a recognition that not all Islamists are the same, and that the running sore which has fundamentally distorted both foreign policy and exacerbated the mess in the Middle East is the lack of a Palestinian state. Our own Gareth Evans in an op/ed yesterday suggests engaging Hamas.
Of course, opportunities could be lost, and former Israeli official Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation, in an astute piece of analysis, warns that even a Democratic presidency could slide into neo-conservatism with a liberal veneer. Levy has some suggestions, which would have appeared radical only a few years ago, but now appear feasible:
Continue reading ‘The world post-Bush’
It’s a bit weird in a way that if you bought the dead tree edition of The Australian today, almost the entire review section or whatever it’s called was devoted to the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War (the topic of earlier discussion here on two threads). Weird because as far as Australian domestic political debate goes, the Iraq War is off the radar - as Foreign Minister Stephen Smith observed in Question Time on Thursday, Brendan Nelson has claimed that John Howard would have pulled Australian troops out this year, and all the rhetoric about “a great victory for the terrorists” from the Coalition disappeared on November 25 2007. Since, with the exception of revelations (interestingly timed) about Saddam Hussein’s regime’s plot to assassinate Martin Indyk (about which Indyk himself appears unconcerned, and which if you read the fine print, appear to be about low level flunkies rather than Saddam and his acolytes) and the killing of an Australian aid worker in the Kurdish region of Iraq in 1993. there’s no actual news, you’ve got to wonder what all this ideological posturing is in aid of.
But we get a reprint of Christopher Hitchens’ article from Slate, and the usual raving and name dropping from Greg Sheridan, and even Geoff Elliott’s article which is quite critical of the current US stance gets christened by a subbie with the headline “Noble fight to depose a monstrous dictator”.
Continue reading ‘The terrorists are were coming to get us!’
Five years ago today, the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq.
Some depressing reading material:
- the civilian death toll in Iraq
- the catastrophe was forseen and inevitable
- Inside Iraq, a blog
- five years of lies
- how to destroy a country in five years
- an anti-war Arab opera.
Please add any more in comments.
I think I’ve figured out why Planet Janet is seeming increasingly irrelevant. Consider (as Paul Kelly would say) her latest column:
The leftist glitterati is justifiably upset about Mamet’s rejection of progressive beliefs.
Hundreds of words piled on top of each other about playwright David Mamet converting to Milton Friedman-ism or something. Earth to Planet: Couldn’t give a toss. Had never heard of Mamet. Don’t care what his political beliefs were or are. Don’t think a crusty old bloke’s move to the right proves some eternal truths about teh left or teh luvvies.
Aside from Planet, I don’t think anyone else in Australia has written a word about Mamet’s conversion experience.
Let me let you into the secret. Continue reading ‘Planet Janet located in the midAtlantic somewhere’
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