Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Impasse | Apr 20, 2004 11:30

Should we just burn all our history books then? The new Treaty of Waitangi website, launched yesterday, is wordy, serious and determinedly equivocal. The political response to it was predictable and a bit embarrassing.

We saw the way Treaty language has slipped in Trevor Mallard's presentation of the launch: the word "education" is now forbidden in connection with the Treaty - even though most use of this site will surely be in an educational context. It is part, rather, of an "information" campaign.

Nothing about this site seems likely to fan any kind of flame. Alternative views of key historical points are mostly dutifully canvassed, and the potentially controversial sponsorship scheme, which will offer modest sums for projects to develop and co-ordinate Treaty resources, "does not," it says " aim to change public attitudes to the Treaty, nor to promote a particular view of the Treaty's significance. The intention is to provide information and/or resources to facilitate improved understanding."

The project has even, for now, left alone the more contentious years after 1840 when the major Treaty breaches occurred. And occur they did. We can't afford to run away from history because it doesn't suit our wishes in the 21st century.

And yet, there was Don Brash wittering away about "taxpayer funded propaganda", describing the site as a waste of money (actually, given the resources involved - including six senior historians - its $80,000 development budget seems fairly modest), and laying in to "politically correct phrases" in its text (citing the somewhat unconvincing example of the intention to "facilitate improved understanding and greater public knowledge").

Yes, as he says, there is quite a bit of other information available on the Treaty, but there hasn't been anything like this: a central place for (and I don't think this characterisation is in debate) New Zealand's founding document.

Later in the day, Murray McCully muttered something about Mallard "causing offence" by forcing the Treaty down people's throats, but admitted he could not see "much in the way of political correctness [on the site] thus far".

Is this really where our nationhood debate is at? People going sniffing around everything for alleged "political correctness"? Can we not do a bit better than this? Could the National Party perhaps have had someone actually read the site over 24 hours and come up with a genuine criticism?

After all, Gordy managed it, and makes some interesting comments on its tone and approach, which he notes is "utterly orthodox". I quite like his idea of a "critical essay" section on the site, "where the few historians outside the orthodoxy could respectfully dissent."

But if you're going to do that, shouldn't you also admit the further reaches of Maori opinion on the Treaty? And if you do that, won't you be shot down in flames on account of your "political correctness"? This is the stupid impasse we've currently reached in this discussion. As I've said before, National has driven itself up an intellectual blind alley on this, and to some extent taken the rest of us with it. Bah.

Anyway, Mallard's speech is here and the Stuff story is here.

On the other hand, I do have some sympathy with Brash in his indignation over the Guardian column that likened his Orewa speech to Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" address. British commentators can sometimes draw their depictions of the colonies with blunt crayons. Readers will doubtless be familiar with my distaste for many elements of National's race campaign, but I do think it has become part of our fitful modern progress towards a national understanding, something the Guardian's Richard Adams seems to miss.

Michael Appleton pointed me to a diverting little discussion about blog culture in the Guardian's G2 section, whose guest editors for the week were Scots band Franz Ferdinand (a kind of Brit art-school Strokes). Nice idea - and they've commissioned some interesting stuff. Any chance of it happening here? Dimmer edits the Star-Times magazine section for a week? Sorry, I'm being silly aren't I?

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Back through | Apr 19, 2004 11:22

A police pipe band, footfalls locked to the spare beat of a snare, bisects a line of happy Asians, who clutch long incense sticks as they wait to pay tribute to the giant buddha whose stage fills one side of Aotea Square. On the other side, a group of expatriate Iraqis is staging a protest march down Queen Street, banners and Iraqi flags held high. They're unhappy with America, and you can't really blame them.

I saw some Iraqi teenage girls gathering before the march set off, and I was struck by how much they had the look and the body language of any teenage girls; just with headscarves.

There are rows of stalls selling special Buddha's Day food and drinks, and, in the square's northwest corner, twin queues stretch back from the entrance to Armageddon Pulp Expo, which showcases the cultures of comics, video games, fantasy and sci-fi. Ours is a city that never quite knows where its centre is, but one that, on any Sunday, just sort of happens.

We've come back to Aramgeddon after a not-entirely satisfactory experience the day before; inside was a scrum and it was hard for the kids to get their hands on anything. Today, Leo finally gets to play Halo on a big, bitchin' G5. The action is also mirrored on a big screen behind him, and he gives a running commentary to the small crowd of boys that gathers around him. The trade in information is one of the major forms of social organisation for modern boys.

Downstairs, Fiona's buying the last three issues of Dharma Punks, from Ant Sang, who has the air of one of his characters about him (ditto for Dylan Horrocks, actually). While her back is turned, John Rhys Davies and a minder pass, gently making their way through. Mr Rhys Davies places his hand on Jimmy's shoulder as he makes his way through. I point out to Jimmy what has just taken place: touched by the hand of Gimli! He's amazed, although possibly not as awestruck as the day before, when he saw Dana from Studio 2. I think he likes her …

The night before, we're at The Classic for the second Dimmer show of the weekend. The little venue is sold out: no chairs and tables, everybody dancing. Yeah, I know, we're running the ads on Public Address, and we had the guest blog, but I've been watching Shayne Carter make music for more than 20 years, and I don't think I've ever seen him more in command of what he's doing. And he's clearly pretty happy about it too.

Anika Moa has stepped up from album guest to - for this tour anyway - band member. Could she stay? Her voice and occasional guitar playing add a lot to Dimmer, filling out the sound and meshing with the supple, funky sound of the new incarnation. Bic Runga joins her for a while, and then Shayne throws all his residual rock instincts into a jet-engine version of 'Seed' (a song about fucking and trying not to come) that seems to surge and blast on for fully 20 minutes. An encore follows, it's over, and still people are clapping and cheering. Wow.

I do wonder if this could be sustained through a crappy PA system on a Thursday night in Timaru - there's no pub rock about it - but by the same token it's easy to see the whole new Dimmer show expanding, with a real horn section and a big concert stage. Dimmer has been through a variety of live incarnations, not all of them effective or in tune with the recordings, but I think Shayne has really cracked it now. He's like the veteran midfielder who just understands the game and is good enough to play it his way and enjoy himself while he's at it.

Friday night isn't so good. In fact, it's awful. We sit in the ASB stand at Eden Park watching the Blues disintegrate into a rabble. Certainly, the almost immediate loss to injury of Rockocoko and Gibson doesn't help the composure, and then Carlos is smashed in a tackle and stays down for seven long minutes. But the lack of joint purpose and commitment is staggering. The Stormers score five tries in 12 minutes and it's all over.

We leave 10 minutes before full time, along with a few thousand others. What a bloody debacle. As we walk up Sandringham Road, I call Big Gay Paul and tell him its all the fault of gay marriage, homosexual law reform and a general collapse of community institutions and standards. Those poofs have a lot to answer for. He says he'll text me later if he's up to anything.

PS: My producer Damien Lay has kindly provided a transcript of last Wednesday's radio interview with Bruce Logan of the Maxim Institute. The audio from the interview is also available online in MP3 form. My examination last week of Logan's false claim that "a whole raft of social indicators … are in freefall" in New Zealand is here.

PPS: Someone has just forwarded me an email from Maxim member Stephen D. Taylor which is doing the rounds. It's addressed to Tim Barnett MP, who Taylor said last week in a letter to the Herald should be "put down" like a rabid dog. It's headed 'A not so gentle reminder' and it reads: "The NZ Herald may have been forced into an apology Timmy, but Hell itself will freeze over before you hear one from me." I find it strange that a man who trumpets his moral leadership in the nation's newspapers should be so intent on behaving like a nasty little thug ...

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Just this once ... | Apr 16, 2004 11:49

Look closely, because I possibly will never say this again: thank you John Banks. The Westhaven waterfront debacle probably always needed a little double-dealing and subterfuge to fix it, and Banks was always likely to be your man for that.

So while private bidders were, in good faith, under the impression they had a chance of obtaining this prime public land from Ports of Auckland (which, despite being in majority public ownership, seems to have paid no heed to the public good at all), their bids were in fact, being secretly reported by Banks (who was being informed by a group of nameless businessmen in the know) to Cabinet, which was then able to trump the best private bid and obtain the land on behalf of the public. Dodgy? Probably. But effective.

The government will now sell the land, at an $8 million to $10 million loss, to Auckland City, which, if Banks has its way, will fund the deal by selling some more Auckland Airport shares. This isn't especially smart - from what I can see the dividends from retained airport shares and the revenue from the operation of the marina ought to be able to service a debt incurred in the purchase.

Righto, enough being nice about Banks. He was at his preposterous worst talking to Simon Pound on The Wire yesterday. When asked to name five things he had achieved in his mayoralty, he claimed that "we have completed the Grafton Gully motorway project". What!?

The Grafton project is, indeed, a cracker - completed ahead of schedule and exactly the kind of new roading work we should be doing. But it's got bugger-all to do with John Banks. It's part of Transit New Zealand's Central Motorway Improvement strategy, which was launched in 2000, before Banks was even mayor. If you want to thank anyone, thank Cabinet and your fellow taxpayers.

Banks has, of course, through his entire term, made a fetish of claiming credit for things he did not, in fact, have anything to do with. But no more, according to Christine Fletcher, who said when I interviewed her on Wednesday that she has "barristers and solicitors" on his campaign team who will pull up Banks every time he makes one of his forays into fantasy. Well, get onto it then …

Fletcher is certainly talking a good fight, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that either she or Bruce Hucker will have to step down before the mayoral election, or see the anti-Banks vote (a majority, according to Banks' own poll, which also had Fletcher running third) split. We'll see.

Fighting Talk's Matt Nippert has an excellent commentary on conservative bovver-boy Stephen D. Taylor and his prolific use of the Maxim Institute's online spam-the-editor service:

Editors on the letters pages take note: you're being taken for a ride. Taylor has gotten over 13,000 words of moralising rhetoric into newspapers around the country (not counting smaller community newspapers who, if anything, are more likely to print spammed mail), probably at the expense of people expressing genuine, local concerns. Taylor may have a point, but it's an underhand way of spreading it.

On that topic, a person who used to work there has taken issue with Herald editor Tim Murphy's statement yesterday that he vets readers' letters before publication: "Tim Murphy never glanced at the readers' letters received … after being typed up they were sent directly to Garth George."

And Lindsey Rea spoke to Garth George himself when she complained about the threatening "rabid dog" letter (see yesterday's post below): "He told me that it was fair comment and that if I found it offensive then I had a problem. He said he agreed with Peter Dunne's campaign against 'Pink Thinking". I have written to the Herald along those lines, but I am not holding my breath!"

So it seems that if your views align with George's you're a lucky correspondent. If not, forget it. Seriously, I think something has to be done about this silliness. This is not worthy of a major newspaper.

I'm sure that if I didn't work from home I'd end up at many more PR ligs. But their scheduling at either end of the city workers' day makes it a hard ask, even if there's a glass of wine or two in it. So to Nokia, Xbox Live and the enterprising folks at Intersect Communications, hope it went well.

Still, there'll be no missing Armageddon Pulp Expo. Armed with a family's worth of press passes (thanks Deborah!) we will be rigorously inspecting the culture tomorrow morning. I'm expecting my wallet to be prised open at some point, but you get that …

Tonight, of course, you will find me in the ASB Stand at Eden Park, watching the Blues try to overcome the Stormers and earn a crucial bonus point while they're at it. Dammit, we just might make the semi-finals after all.

And then there's tomorrow night: the Classic with Dimmer. All sold out out now, and I'm expecting my homeboy Shayne to rock the house in a strictly downtempo style. Auckland, eh? Not too foul …

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Moral thugs | Apr 15, 2004 11:44

Clearly, Garth George is back on letters duty at the Herald. Yesterday's column was led by four missives of boilerplate Maxim Institute-derived raving about PC, perversions and the threat to the family. Was there really no other opinion?

The fourth author, Stephen D. Taylor, is certainly a Maxim associate. Critic profiled him and the organisation last year. He writes a constant stream of morally outraged letters, sending each one to 76 publications at the click of a button, via the "wizard" (aren't wizards sort of occult?) on the Maxim website - including those he has never and will never read. I thought this was a bad idea when the Greens introduced it for their GE campaign, and I still do - if people want to write a letter to the editor, they should have to do it one at a time, not spam the country via a website.

But it's what Taylor actually says in his letter that is offensive and even disturbing: "I can only hope a champion will soon arise to blunt Mr [Tim] Barnett's ardour for legislative iniquity. Otherwise, as is the case with rabid dogs, he shall have to be "put down"."

Presumably Taylor has churned out so many of these things that he's simply lost his mind. But what do you think would be the response if a greenie or an anti-war protestor were to threaten a sitting MP with being "put down" like a rabid dog? And what, pray tell, is the Herald doing printing this crap? (Update: see a response from the Herald below.)

As luck would have it, Maxim Institute director Bruce Logan was a guest on my Wire show yesterday, and we had a lively 15-minute discussion on the Civil Union Bill. Logan is a capable advocate, and, in the Maxim style, fond of talking about research and incontrovertible fact. (When I felt bound to point out that my unmarried family household was as stable, loving and secure as any other that I was aware of, he briskly told me that "anecdotes" weren't useful.)

And here we arrive at what possibly annoys me most about the Maxim schtick: the relentless deployment of junk science. The organisation's magazine is called Evidence, as if to emphasis that its claims contents are irrevocable fact. In fact, as Craig Young pointed out in a sharp critique last year, they tend to be anything but.

I asked Logan whether, given the chance, he would reverse the Homosexual Law Reform and recriminalise homosexual acts. Not at all, he said: the gay community's claim that the state had no business in their bedrooms was valid - but civil unions were different.

I suspect that wasn't what he was saying at the time: back then, there were widespread and dire predictions of the corrosive effect on family and society of the bill - the same as you're hearing now.

Doreen Agassiz-Suddens went through Hansard and came up with a parade of amusing quotes and then, by popular demand, a follow-up. Although great alarum was sounded from both sides of the House, my personal favourite was from National's Invercargill MP Norm Jones:

If the Bill is passed in its present form the country will become a Mecca for thousands of homosexuals from Australia, the Continent, and America, who will jet in here. Our 16-year-olds are virgin territory. The Minister of Tourism will be able to advertise New Zealand to homosexuals throughout the world: 'Come to New Zealand for sun, for scenery, and safe sodomy.'

But then Logan seemed to infer that homosexual law reform was part of a general collapse in values that had led to an explosion in social ills such as divorce and child abuse.

Well, alright: the New Zealand divorce rate had been trending steadily upwards for 15 years by 1980, when the law was amended to transfer marriage dissolution to the Family Court and make it less onerous. It spiked in the next two years, came down quite sharply and has been basically flat at around 12 per thousand marriages since the mid-80s. (As a reference point, that's half the rate in the US, the most overtly pious country in the developed world, but 16 times the rate in Sri Lanka.)

On the other hand, if the 15-year trend up to the divorce law reform had continued (and there may have been reasons it wouldn't have), the rate would be considerably higher than it is now.

Logan also contended that couples who cohabit before marrying have a higher divorce rate than those who do not. This is true. But the difference disappears after eight years of marriage. But does this suggest that cohabitation damages marriage - as Logan contended - or that people who cohabit don't have the same serious commitment to marriage in the first place? This would seem more plausible than the idea that cohabitation has some innate, and fatally corrupting, impact.

People are people - something Maxim rarely acknowledges as it rushes around looking under the floorboards for moral rot. People decide to get married for a range of reasons - including, sometimes, a desire to shore up an already strained relationship. We've all seen it. Two people who have been living together do the wedding thing, then a year or two later it all falls apart. (A good friend of mine had to get married before he could admit he was gay - his wife was incredibly understanding about it.)

But statistics are funny things. Born-again Christians have a higher divorce rate than non-Christians. What might Maxim make of that? (Actually, it appears that, in the US anyway the problem is that born-again Christians have a lower level of education than non-Christians, and also that they marry younger - both of those being indicators for divorce.)

So it is a much more complex world than Maxim likes to pretend. Liberalisation has costs and benefits - for instance, our youth suicide rate began to soar at the same time as our economic restructuring began - but I doubt that most of us would truly wish to retreat to the New Zealand of the 1960s.

The other irksome element of the Maxim schtick - adopted wholesale by Peter Dunne - is that godless Labour liberals are "imposing their prejudices" on New Zealanders, and dragging them places they have no wish to go. In fact, in almost every instance, the law has followed society and not led it.

By the time the Property Relationships Act was amended there were more than 300,000 New Zealanders living in cohabitation, and there are yet more now as the Civil Unions Bill is prepared - what was a responsible government meant to do here: hide under the covers? On current trends, the number of New Zealanders living in sin will overtake the number regularly attending church in a couple of years. So who's out of step?

The social indicators do not show the descent into the maelstrom that Maxim would have us see. Yes, crime has risen: the overall offence rate more than doubled between 1970 and 1992, from 55 per thousand to 132. ("This rise may be due to a real change in the volume of crime in New Zealand, to changes in recording practices, or to a combination of the two," according to the Department of Statistics, which also noted that crime followed the baby boom - in other words, it was highest when most people were of crime-committing age.) It plateaued for three years and has been falling since. Sexual offences (less than 1% of overall offences) have seen no significant increase since 1994. If political correctness is tearing society's fabric, it's not really showing.

Along the way, we have also learned to abuse alcohol less, to treat family violence seriously and to become a far more open society. In 1968, the suggestion in the Evening Post that, statistically speaking, four MPs might be gay sparked an outrage and a privileges committee hearing. The Post was forced to apologise. Now, of course, members of Parliament can be who they are, and we're even seeing the public arrival of gay conservatives - perhaps the ultimate notice of arrival from the margins.

So, yes. I'll take us for who we are now, over the people Maxim would have us be, any day.

PS: A Public Address reader complained about the Taylor letter and received this response from Herald editor Tim Murphy: "The phrase concerned should not have appeared but was missed by me, when approving the letters for the day. After the "put down" line was raised with me by Gay Watch this afternoon I phoned Tim Barnett, apologised and we will run a brief apology to him on the letters page tomorrow. It was a highly unfortunate breach of our letters to the editor policy which certainly does not allow threats or abuse of this type. We are sorry that it occurred."

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Later | Apr 14, 2004 10:30

Gordon Campbell has a perceptive story on where Iraq is likely to head in the next year or two in this week's Listener, quoting Juan Cole and Riverbend. I suspect he's right to argue that doom-mongers like Tariq Ali, and optimists like George Bush, "both overrate the capacity of American power to dictate events."

A good deal of the US masterplan - especially the blank-slate economic restructuring - won't survive long after any meaningful transfer of sovereignty. The position of US forces in the long term - the bases in the desert and all that - will prove untenable. Iraqis, probably not without strife, will run things for themselves.

Things will probably be better than they were under Saddam - except perhaps for Iraq's women, who will find their western-style rights shrinking away.

Meanwhile, there's the not-insignificant issue of bloodshed and chaos to be got through now. Reports emerging from Fallujah tend to confirm the "insurgent propaganda" over the official CPA message. The Sydney Morning Herald has Flight from a town where sports fields are graveyards, Slate a disturbing account of the road to Fallujah, Rahul Mahajan has Destroying a Town in order to save it in his Empire Notes blog ("When the assault on Fallujah started, the power plant was bombed"), and Electronic Iraq is carrying an eyewitness report that is, in places, stomach-churning. Claims that around half the dead in Fallujah are women and children do not appear to be inaccurate. This thing needs to be hauled around, soon.

Meanwhile, back in the US, armchair media soldiers continue to churn out hateful swill like this: "We've forgotten the arithmetic of patriotic battle: That it's better for a hundred of them to die than for one of us to die." Read it and be speechless.

Just to get all geeky on yo' asses, there's a really interesting commentary on what Google is up to with all that brainpower it has hired in the past couple of years: an omnipresent global computing platform?

Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.

Further commentary on the commentary is here.

Opposition to the Civil Unions Bill is a necessary branding exercise, for United Future, hence the advertising campaign. Fine. But I feel bound to point out that Peter Dunne's argument against the bill (and its rather more important accompanying omnibus legislation) is nonsensical.

His key plank ("The state sanctions marriage simply because marriage invariably involves children, so there's a need to have some protections in there. I don't think the same applies with regard particularly to same-sex relationships and I think the state should butt out.") is lifted directly from Maxim Institute PR.

Marriage and parenthood can and quite frequently do exist independently of each other (or are childless couples not really married?). Dunne keeps on talking about civil unions "replacing" marriage: in fact, of course, the Marriage Act won't be touched. Marriage will remain exclusively between a man and a woman. (Lianne Dalziel discussed this quite intelligently on National Radio, before her resignation.)

David Young has contributed a very interesting thinkpiece entitled 'Uncivil Union: A conservative case for gay marriage' in this week's Listener - offline-only, unfortunately - in which he quotes the pro-gay marriage Economist: "To establish something short of real marriage for some adults would tend to undermine the notion for all … Why shouldn't everone, in time, downgrade to civil unions?"

It's a useful point, but to some extent that's already happening. A good many secure, loving family households - mine, for example - hold together nicely without a formal marriage. We have (most of) the relevant rights and, after the two civil union bills pass, all couples living "in the nature of marriage", including same-sex couples, will gain further rights (the civil unions are purely a means of recognising a relationship - they don't confer any actual rights themselves). I'm a practical chap, and civil unions seem like a practical step to me.

Anyway, we'll be debating it further from 1-2pm on The Wire on 95bFM, with the Rev Richard Randerson, Bruce Logan from the Maxim Institute (here's what he thinks) and David Herkt.

And while we're on the topic of union, I had a fabulous time acting as best man at the wedding of my dear friends Andy and Michelle Moore on Saturday. It was everything a wedding's meant to be: a declaration of enduring love and commitment before family and friends. But they'd been living together for years, and had two fine boys, before they made the decision to wed. A generation or two ago, that might have been scandalous - now it's probably not even unusual. Things change more than some people like to admit. And in an age when strangers get married as part of radio promotions, Saturday seemed pretty good to me.

Oh, and to the enterprising relative who had us up to a penthouse suite at Metropolis after the reception - top work!

PS: A had some interesting comments on both the New York Review of Books essays I linked to yesterday - I'll try and cover them tomorrow.

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Moral fog | Apr 13, 2004 10:54

After all these years, a nice early start on Fridays has been etched into my neurons, and Good Friday wasn't any different. So just before seven, I was up in a quiet house, reading about Iraq. There was something eerie about encountering this noise and chaos from the distance of the quietest day of New Zealand's year.

I was, in part, trying to work out what I thought. If you have crystalline moral clarity on this - and a few people seem to think they have - you're either deluding yourself or you're not paying attention, or you're Gordy: "Far more killing and arab humiliation is required in Iraq than has been dished out thus far. If it wasn't for the defeatist media this war would have been well won by now," he ejaculated, noting as he did so a risible column by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn who, er, went to Fallujah once.

Gordy, of course, raged for a week about the killing of four security guards in Fallujah. But they were American. Estimates of the death toll from a week's siege of Fallujah have ranged from 470 (by a group of international aid agencies) to 600 (by doctors at the local hospital). They've been digging up the local football pitch to bury their dead. About 1200 people have been injured, and thousands of families have fled with what they can carry. US forces refused to allow men of "fighting age" to leave the city of 200,000 people, so sons, husbands and fathers stayed behind to face who-knows-what.

The Boston Globe had a disturbing story, which includes this paragraph:

Ghazwan Arrawi, 30, who fled Fallujah on Friday, described five days and nights of explosions and gunfire that kept his family huddled in their house. He said five people in his neighborhood, including two of his childhood friends, were killed in blasts that hit their houses, and when he and others tried to bury them, the gravedigger was shot to death.

Can you blame anyone for regarding this as a collective punishment? But it's not enough for brave old Gordy. He's angry. I'm surprised he's not over there already, giving those ungrateful Iraqis what-for …

US command has claimed that 95 per cent of the dead in Fallujah are fighting-age males; TV pictures have focused on the bodies of women, children and the elderly, and the doctors claim most of the dead were non-combatants. Any number of stories suggest that the siege of Fallujah has been grossly counterproductive: stoking support for the insurgents rather than quelling them. Riverbend reported thus from Baghdad a few days ago:

A convoy carrying food, medication, blood and doctors left for Falloojeh yesterday, hoping to get in and help the people in there. Some people from our neighborhood were gathering bags of flour and rice to take into the town. E. and I rummaged the house from top to bottom and came up with a big sack of flour, a couple of smaller bags of rice, a few kilos of assorted dry lentil, chickpeas, etc. We were really hoping the trucks could get through to help out in the city. Unfortunately, I just spoke with an Iraqi doctor who told me that the whole convoy was denied entry... it seems that now they are trying to get the women and children out or at least the very sick and wounded.

Even Healing Iraq, whose post-Saddam blog has been approvingly quoted in the past on NZ Pundit, is sounding bleak:

A whole year has passed now and I can't help but feel that we are back at the starting point again. The sense of an impending disaster, the ominous silence, the breakdown of most governmental facilities, the absence of any police or security forces, contradicting news reports, rumours everywhere, and a complete disruption in the flow of everyday life chores. All signs indicate that it's all spiralling out of control, and any statements by CPA and US officials suggesting otherwise are blatantly absurd …

And any one who suggests that they rebelled for nationalist reasons can never be more far from reality. This is NOT a Shia rebellion or Intifada. The only case where a Shia uprising would take place is if the Grand Ayatollah Ali Taqi Al-Sistani issues a fatwah to that effect, along with the support of the other three leading Shi'ite clerics (Ayatollah Mohammed Sa'eed Al-Hakim, Ayatollah Bashir Al-Najafi, and Ayatollah Mohammed Ishaq Al-Fayyadh) who constitute the Hawza alilmiyyah of Najaf. And Sistani might lose patience any moment and do so considering the deteriorating situation. An agent of Sistani was quoted once saying "We receive so many requests each day from Iraqis asking us to issue a fatwa for Jihad against the Americans. We say no, but this No will not be forever".

On the other hand, Ghaith Abdul Ahad - Salam Pax's friend and fellow archtitect "G" - writes a moving column in the Guardian, surveying the death and despair - and deciding that it was still worth it.

Do I regret the war, especially now that things seem to be moving towards chaos here? Not at all. I still think we are much better off than under Saddam. At least now we are free to dream.

His friend Salam is less inclined to forgive US ineptitude:

I was listening to a representative of al-sadir on TV saying that the officers at police stations come to offer their help and swear allegiance. Habibi, if they don't they will get killed and their police station "liberated". Have we forgotten the threat al-Sadir issued that Iraqi security forces should not attack their revolutionary brothers, or they will have to suffer the consequences.

Dear US administration,
Welcome to the next level. Please don't act surprised and what sort of timing is that: planning to go on a huge attack on the west of Iraq and provoking a group you know very well (I pray to god you knew) that they are trouble makers.

Salam and Gaith's friend Raed also contemplated death in Fallujah, just after the ceasefire:

So, what did we achieve? What did Bush and his administration achieve? What did the Iraqi and the American people achieve?

Another destroyed town? Another example of how heavy tanks and air fighters can be used in street fighting? Another example of how mosques (the culturally sensitive places) can be bombed if "enemies" were hiding inside them? And how other mosques can be used as strategic positions for American snipers? (which is a culturally incorrect thing to do) Another example how public services such as electricity and water can be cut off and used as weapons?

Or is it just a new example of how to build a mass grave, but Bush style? Does Bush really think that he KILLED all the "bad" and "evil" people there? And can KILLING anyone solve any problem?

When Bush decided to start his "War on Terrorism", secular people (including myself) didn't feel offended at all; I mean… that was OUR war, the war in which we spent years of our lives fighting against fundamentalism and extremism in our countries. But after a couple of years, I can say that the Bush administration war was the best chance for extremists to gain more popularity and to have a louder voice in our communities.

Raed's mother, Faiza, was also angry.

Baghdad witnesses a general protest today, in both governmental and private sectors. You could hear explosions around the city most of the time today. Yesterday, bombing and shooting hardly stopped between the two sides.

People in mosques are praying for god to be with Iraqi's and to support them and give them victory against those who hurt them and kill unarmed civilians.

Some people came from Falluja as refuges, I saw many families that came to stay with their relatives here, the Americans used cluster bombs against them, and kept them with neither electricity nor water. The grave yard of the city is completely filled; they are using the football field as a grave yard temporarily. The Americans allowed women and children to leave the city, but prevented men.

And on it goes. Never mind the Islamist crazies: it's the hearts and minds of liberal, educated, West-facing Iraqis being lost here.

Also in the Guardian, David Aaronovitch, who supported the invasion, writes about visiting Iraq a year on:

If Iraq gets through the next week it may be OK. Baghdad at the moment is actually far less chaotic than Gaza. It isn't Beirut in the 70s or 80s, with private armies fighting for territory. It is, however, mostly worse than I expected a year ago. And more depressing.

But this is a people who we have (and please excuse my language here) fucked up for a long time now. We colonised them, then neglected them, then interfered out of our own interests, not theirs. We tolerated Saddam and - somewhat later - even supported him. We waged war on him, but refused to help liberate his people. Instead we hit them with sanctions which the regime (which we wrongly believed would fall) ensured caused the maximum damage to the people. We and the Russians and the French, and the UN, and the Turks and the other Arabs, permitted millions of people to die or be reduced to misery and pauperdom.

So, of all the things we have done, the invasion may be bloody appalling, but it is the least bloody appalling thing of all. And the only thing that has offered hope.

If there is a consensus, it is that, for whatever reason, coalition assumptions and actions in post-Saddam Iraq have frequently been wrong and foolish, that the pessimists about the invasion seem to have been closer to the truth than its backers were willing to acknowledge, and that the conduct of the US military has been clumsy and counterproductive. A summary withdrawal is unthinkable, yet it is entirely possible that the Americans may end up at war with the people they came to save.

Even the British are losing patience. The Sunday Telegraph had this interview with a senior British officer in Iraq:

The officer, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for "sub-humans".

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it's awful.

Of course, the press in the region has been damning. And it's this that Arabs are reading, and pictures of the dead that they're seeing on their news channels. Small wonder people are saying this:

He then looks me in the eye and firmly says, "Why are 60 innocent people in Falluja killed because 4 Americans were killed there? If the American Army wants to stay in Iraq, you must kill all of the Iraqi people!"

Then there's this sort of thing on the part of individual troops - barely reported in the West, but stoking anger in the Islamic world.

Unqualified Offerings has been dutifully agonising about the moral conundrum in a long post called Late Night Thoughts of a Defeatist, which is worth reading. At least he has the decency to acknowledge his own conflict.

Anyway, the Centre for American Progress did what appears to be an impressive fisking of Condoleezza Rice's opening statement for the 9/11 hearings. I suspect blame will ultimately be impossible to lay. We can't know whether the attacks could have been prevented, only that they weren't. Janet Jackson's Condi skit on Saturday Night Live was pretty funny though.

But Newsweek did turn up one fact that suggests that the culture of the Bush White House worked against national security:

Ashcroft never saw that Aug. 6, 2001, PDB warning of an Al Qaeda attack inside the United States. Why? Because President George W. Bush, with his penchant for secrecy, had restricted the distribution of the PDB to just seven national-security officials. The A.G. didn't make the cut. On July 12, it is true, Ashcroft had been briefed by Pickard about the rising number of Al Qaeda threats abroad. But when Ashcroft inquired, "Do you have any information indicating a threat to the continental United States?" Pickard responded no.

Hang on. So the US attorney general - whose job involves oversight and liason with the FBI - didn't get to see FBI reports warning that there were indications of a calamitous terrorist plot? Wow.

Anyway, just to change the topic - to creepy fundamentalists of another stripe - Garry Wills has a dazzlingly good take on The Passion of the Christ in the New York Review of Books, via a new book on the conservative Catholic cult The Legion of Christ. In the same issue, Steven Weinberg administers a scientific slamdunk to the Bush space plan.

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