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.”
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.
It has often been said that as Australians we have a predilection for remembering and even celebrating our failures. The ABC does a lot of remembering at these times. This year there have been a couple of segments covering an event that may eventually take over from ANZAC in our consciousness, an event that occurred 90 years ago on the third ANZAC Day.
I speak, of course, of the Australian counter-attack that took the French town of Villers-Bretonneux. This year for the first time there will be a dawn service on the actual day.
The Australian flags are hung, toy kangaroos are crammed in shop windows and now all the small French town of Villers-Bretonneux is waiting for is Anzac Day.
Up to 6,000 Australians are expected to descend on the rural town on Friday for a dawn service commemorating the 90th anniversary of its liberation by Anzac [actually Australian, I think] troops on April 25, 1918.
The rural town, in the heart of the Somme region north of Paris, holds annual memorial services for the diggers - but this year is the first time it will host a dawn service on Anzac Day itself, instead of the nearest Saturday to April 25.
Interest in nuclear weapons has faded a lot since the Cold War. These days, the possibility of nuclear confrontation between major powers isn’t treated terribly seriously, because the costs of such an exchange would be too horrible to contemplate. And, anyway, both the Russians and the US have been reducing their nuclear arsenals, right? Instead, concerns lay much more around nuclear terrorism, on the assumption that terrorists can’t be deterred by the threat of destruction.
However, amongst the small group of academics who are examining the issue, there’s a pair who are putting together some interesting, and rather disturbing conclusions. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press, two American academics, argue that in a military confrontation with China, the USA has the ability to destroy the Chinese long-range arsenal, if it strikes first. Therefore, if it came to it, an American president may be sorely tempted to try such a strike; as they argue in a recent presentation (follow the link for video), such a strike was precisely what the USA planned for against the Soviets during the 1950s, when the nuclear balance between the USA and the Soviet union was roughly analogous to the situation now.
It’s worth noting that other experts in the area (including the owner of the blog I’ve linked to, Jeffery Lewis) don’t accept Lieber and Press’s conclusions. For one thing, while a strike may well have a good chance of taking out all the missiles that could reach the US, that still leaves the Chinese with plenty that could reach Japan and Korea and the more than 50,000 American troops there - not to mention, of course the millions of Koreans and Japanese who might not be entirely happy with the US government pursuing a strategy that left their populations vulnerable to complete annihilation…
In any case, some thoroughly depressing reading and listening material on the leadup to Anzac Day.
Conservative and strongly pro-Israel Professor Bill Rubenstein has had a letter published in the April edition of Quadrant which ends with the following observation:
It might also be worth noting that all of the infamous twentieth-century genocides in the period from 1914 to 1980, from the Armenian massacres in 1915-16 through the Nazi Holocaust to Asian communism, were plainly the result of the breakdown of the European elite and governmental structure in the First World War, and the consequential rise to power of fascism and communism. It is as certain as any counterfactual can be that none of these genocides and massacres would have occurred had the European powers not gone to war in 1914.
William D. Rubinstein
(Professor of History),
University of Wales–Aberystwyth,
Penglais, UK.
Well, the question was, if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, what would our response be. And I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. And I want them to understand that, because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their society, because at whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program, in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel we would be able to totally obliterate them.
In her attempt to “muscle up” and prove her “experience” compared to Obama’s, she’s strayed very far into the bellicose posture usually found among the further reaches of GOP wingnut-dom or the Neocon thinktank and noise machine empire. Continue reading ‘Hillary to obliterate Iran, if not Obama’
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.
Absolutely nothing, answers Tony Judt, writing in the New York Review of Books.
Judt, a conservative historian, but an excellent one, looks at the way the horrors of the 20th century - rather than being viewed as stark lessons are increasingly seen as a treasure trove to be mined to construct the materials of postmodern morality plays. In an interesting twist on the American exceptionalism thesis, he makes a powerful point about the absence of war from the territory of the continental United States has led to a dangerous militarisation of society and politics, while in Europe after World War Two, the devastation total war brought both to the “winners” and the losers led to a will to conduct political affairs non-violently, and the sorts of ethical postures and institutions now derided by the angry voices of American Empire.
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.
Quietly, the process of spending billions of dollars on war toys that we’ll hopefully never use goes on. And, more than most areas of government policy, this is one where you can only really divine the philosophy behind it by looking at their actions. While it\s too early to draw any specific conclusions, here are some tidbits from around the traps.
Attention on the future of our fighter procurement rolls on, though the sophistication of the reportage in the mainstream media is limited. If you recall, in the dying days of the Howard era, Brendan Nelson signed off on the purchase of a squadron of Super Hornets. While the purchasing process was very dubious, the government decided to continue with the buy. Now, the broader question of Australia’s air combat capabilities rolls on, in parallel with the broader defence white paper.
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.
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:
One thing I hope we can do in the blogosphere is continue to follow events and places which drop off our media radar - and they very often do if there’s no news which is spectacular or relatable to the domestic scene in some way. Even elections overseas get varied coverage in the Australian media - perhaps not surprising, but definitely linked to the application of particular criteria - Andrew Bartlett looks at a number which occured in the last week. Taiwan’s poll has received more coverage than might otherwise have been the case because of the salience of the Tibetan outrages in the campaign itself.
One which did make a splash in the Australian media was the Pakistani election, discussed at this blog in a number of posts, and as it becomes clear that Yousaf Raza Gilani will be the next PM, it’s worth revisiting.
Now, I freely admit to not having a deep knowledge of Pakistani politics, but that’s what the intertubes are for. So herewith a link to an article in the New York Review of Books by William Dalrymple, a British author, historian and journalist, who’s one of the writers on the subcontinent’s affairs and history I’ve most enjoyed. What’s significant, I think, from Dalrymple’s take is the real importance of the courage of voters in rejecting the feudal constraints which previously prevented a real political choice in elections. That’s surely a sign of hope, though Dalrymple is careful to note, and describe, the continued poverty of most Pakistanis and the lack of responsiveness of their elites to their plight.
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 twothreads). 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.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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 
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