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.
You might remember that the government recently gave Gareth Evans a new job - to lead a commission on nuclear disarmament. In that context, I happened to pick up (for the trans-Pacific plane ride) little Quarterly Essay-style book on nuclear disarmament by Hans Blix, the man who spent 2002-3 being conspicuously and inconveniently correct on the topic of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
In 2005-06, Blix headed a commission, supported by the Swedish Parliament, whose final report provides the most recent comprehensive summary of the issues surrounding nuclear disarmament. Given one of the commissioners was none other than Gareth himself, it would be reasonable to expect that the content reflects the general tenor of his own thinking on the topic (and, incidentally, raises the question of what else this new commission will add). It’s quite accessible and well-written, so if you’re interested in the question I’d recommend you download the report - or at least the executive summary - and have a look.
Continue reading ‘Disarmament, the Hans Blix way’
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I’ve been reading Jerry F. Hough’s Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment on and off over the weekend, after it arrived from Amazon on Friday. I’d been wanting to have a read for a while - after I saw this review. Part of what Hough - a long time Sovietologist and comparative politics scholar - is trying to do is to expose some of the myths that we tend to create about past political patterns and partisan alignments - based on our present understanding of voter motivation and party image. He makes the point - not in itself an unusual one but rarely developed to its full analytical potential - that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively swapped ideological sides several times, though his analysis of the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian mythos of the Democratic Party suggests that the Donkeys were never actually to the left of the GOP before FDR. It’s also highly relevant to note that Adlai Stevenson was the first “New Democrat” - adopting a “suburban strategy” that effectively turned its back on the New Deal’s economic agenda, and that JFK, although his ideas on foreign policy were quite distinct from Adlai’s, shared his economic conservatism and was effectively a do-nothing President in the domestic policy field. The fact that “left” and “right” or “liberal” and conservative” have shifted ground from the New Deal party system to a cultural focus, and that McGovernite cultural liberalism was a big part of that shift, obscures for instance the truth that Richard Nixon was arguably a moderate liberal domestically, while McGovern’s economics had more in common with Goldwater than Johnson.
Hough’s also fascinating on the contingency of racial and national identity, and although some of his own commitments are shaped by a relatively conservative developmentalist political science ideology of modernisation, his injection of a long historical perspective and a sociological toolkit into political analysis of the American scene is a very valuable contribution. Changing Party Coalitions was written in 2005, but his discussion of the dynamics of the recent “Red State-Blue State Alignment” is quite prescient - and very useful for thinking about what Barack Obama’s biggest political challenge might be, and why Hillary Clinton was able to do well as a very unlikely standard bearer of the white working class.
Continue reading ‘Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy’
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…’
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I’ve often said that the best source for public opinion research around is the Australian Election Study. Some preliminary data has been released [link to pdf] by researchers Ian McAllister and Juliet Clark, presented in graphical form. The purpose of the paper is to enable assessments of changes in public opinion over time, with some of the questions forming a time series going back to 1969. I’ve only had a cursory look at the data, but one thing I wanted to focus on was the data from the 2007 election, particularly as it relates to issue importance and party advantage on particular issues. Basically, this is much better quality data than anything you’d get from Newspoll.
A detailed analysis isn’t possible in the absence of the raw data which would enable regressions and cross-tabs, but there are some interesting patterns in the data that are presented. The first point to make, one that’s made in the current political context ably by Possum Comitatus, is that leadership is much less important to voting intention than is usually claimed in the media. Since there have been long term declines in partisanship and therefore more votes up for grabs in any particular electoral cycle, the whole concept of party “ownership” of issues becomes much more important - hence all the attention focused last year on “economic management”. I’ve previously pointed out that the question in Newspoll on that measure was actually the wrong one - at least insofar as 2007 goes - because Labor polling found that “economic management for working families” was much more important, and it’s there that their advantage lay (as the opposition now knows well, because that’s where all their attack is focused). In this context, it’s also very significant to observe the finding that a majority of voters don’t believe anything the government does has much impact on the economy - what we might term the “globalisation effect” - something very poorly understood by political commentators, I’d suggest.
Last year, industrial relations jumped from 2% of respondents nominating it as the most important economic issue in 2004 to 16% and top position. Labor enjoyed a big advantage over the Coalition - 52 to 32, intriguingly reversing a Coalition lead (when the issue was much less important) in 2004 of 37 to 27. Continue reading ‘Issues and the 2007 election’
[Via Crooks & Liars] The US Supreme Court has ruled in a 5-4 decision that detainees in Guantanamo Bay have the right of habeas corpus and can challenge their detention in civil courts.
The decision is here [pdf].
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.
I had a quick read last night of Susan Faludi’s rather stunning new book The Terror Dream: Fear and fantasy in post-9/11 America. Faludi, perhaps best known as the author of Backlash, has written a cultural history of post s11 America, a diagnosis of the temper of the times as refracted through the myths the attack on America both revived and inspired.
It’s a little odd that one of the writers at Daily Kos took aim at the book because “every trend perceived is filtered through a gender disempowerment lens” - a “criticism” which I think really does an injustice to Faludi’s aims. It’s not that she’s taking some sort of circumscribed look at gender politics post-s11 (which in itself would be a worthy project) but rather that her point is that a myth overdetermined by gendered perceptions was cranked up to explain and narrativise what was (wrongly in her view) seen as being an unprecedented series of events on September 11 2001.
Faludi, in some of the most interesting chapters of the book, traces the origins of national myths of violation and aggressive response to the shifting frontier which characterised not just the “Wild West” but also the nation’s colonial beginnings - where “attacks” by Native Americans were perceived as both unpredictable and inexplicable - and interpreted as an existential threat which could only be met by overpowering force.
The arrest and prosecution of our antagonists seemed to be only part of our concern. We were also enlisted in a symbolic war at home, a war to repair and restore our national myth of invincibility. Our retreat to the fifties reached beyond movie tropes and the era’s odd mix of national insecurity and domestic containment. It reaches back beyond the fifties themselves. For this particular reaction to 9/11—our fixation on saving little girls and restoring an invincible manhood—is not so anomalous. It belongs to a long-standing American pattern of response to threat, a response that we’ve been perfecting since our original wilderness experience.
Continue reading ‘Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream‘
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’
I don’t recall much about Anzac Day from my primary school years, and for a number of reasons my high school recollections of Anzac Day are very much coloured by having read Alan Seymour’s play “One Day of the Year” in Grade Eight in 1980 - a play which captured a range of ambiguous reactions to this commemoration. The themes are well summed up in this review by Stephen Dunne of a 2003 performance in Sydney:
Central to Alan Seymour’s modern Australian classic is the paradoxical nature of Anzac Day. We chose as our venerated, inescapable symbol of military remembrance a campaign that was both a tactical fiasco and a defeat.
In the 1980s, the ritual of Anzac Day appeared to be on its last legs. At least in Brisbane, the public commemorations were ill attended, and such commentary as was about often consisted of discussions about whether it had a future, mixed with reflections at Australians’ lack of bombastic patriotism and what I think was a central theme - the immense suffering produced by war. Interviews with old diggers often highlighted this - and while there was also a sense that war had been inescapable, there was also a definite belief that other modes of solving humanity’s problems were much to be preferred. Vietnam Vets, on the whole, were at that time still largely unintegrated in the day.
Indeed, some of the last surviving Anzacs were to have their moment in the spotlight in the 90s, when the official script had generally changed, and appeared out of synch with a revived nationalism - some refused to march, and some would say nothing other than their experience of war had been of its futility. Many resisted becoming symbols of a national spirit, preferring to remember their own personal stories and the meanings the experience of war had for them, their mates and their families.
Continue reading ‘Anzac Day (links post)’
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