Recent Posts...
Page 15 of 265
Archive
Love and war | Jun 27, 2003 14:30
Oh, for goodness sake. It's Bill Ralston already. It looked today - again - as if TVNZ might finally announce the worst-kept secret of the century - that Ralston is its new head of news and current affairs.
But, no, it was another false alarm. With Ralston off air at Radio Pacific and no longer reviewing TV in the Sunday News (in itself, something of a mercy), it's hard to see quite what the hold-up is. A hitch with the disengagement from Pacific? NZPundit has awarded Murray McCully the "scoop", but, frankly, up here in Auckland we're over it.
If we all grappled a bit with the Prostitution Reform Bill this week, we can at least feel smug about being somewhat further up the social evolutionary chain than the State of Texas, which was dragged out of the dark ages yesterday by the US Supreme Court.
The court's majority finding that the Texas law forbidding sodomy (defined as either oral sex or anal intercourse) between two consenting people of the same sex is the death knell for similar laws in several other US states (sodomylaws.org has a handy map of them, along with the texts of the court's decisions). I can never quite understand how some people in America can bray endlessly about "liberty" but still believe that some retard state assembly should be able to order police to go sniffing under sheets to tell people how to have sex.
For your weekend amusement, morons.org has rounded up conservative reactions to the court's landmark decision.
The most extraordinary - and chilling - response, of course, came from Justice Antonin Scalia, whose minority opinion claimed the court had been co-opted by the "so-called homosexual agenda". He's lofty company, however: George W. Bush himself has more than once agreed that homosexual intercourse should be a criminal offence, as "a symbolic gesture of traditional values." To be fair to Bush, he has never suggesting actually enforcing the law.
I wasn't the only one to suggest that we weren't seeing the real, dirty face of war during the conflict in Iraq. Embedded reporters would conduct chirpy interviews with GI from where missiles and bombs were dispatched, but almost never where they landed.
So anyone who was chirpy about the ease of the coalition victory in April should read this extremely disturbing story from the London Evening Standard, based on interviews with US troops still - much to their distress - in Iraq. It suggests what this "soft" war was actually like:
Their attitude to these dangers is summed up by Specialist (Corporal) Michael Richardson, 22. "There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger. It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn't a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren't."
. . .
He held out his hand as if firing a gun and clucked his tongue twice. He said: "Once you'd reached the objective, and once you'd shot them and you're moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn't want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you're fighting, and you're so terrified, you can't really convey the feeling, but you don't want them to live."
. . .
Sgt Meadows said men under his command had been seeking help for severe depression: "They've already seen psychiatrists and the chain of command has got letters back saying 'these men need to be taken out of this situation'. But nothing's happened." Cpl Richardson added: "Some soldiers don't even f****** sleep at night. They sit up all f****** night long doing s*** to keep themselves busy - to keep their minds off this f****** stuff. It's the only way they can handle it. It's not so far from being crazy but it's their way of coping. There's one guy trying to build a little pool out the back, pointless stuff but it keeps him busy."Sgt Meadows said: "For me, it's like snap-shot photos. Like pictures of maggots on tongues, babies with their heads on the ground, men with their heads halfway off and their eyes wide open and mouths wide open. I see it every day, every single day. The smells and the torsos burning, the entire route up to Baghdad, from 20 March to 7 April, nothing but burned bodies."
Those soldiers can't go home because the war is, of course, not actually over. The Guardian has assembled a chain of events in the massacre of six British troops this week. Although the New Zealand soldiers in Iraq will be engaged in reconstruction work, and not the house searches that seem to be causing all the trouble, they seem to be going to a very dangerous place.
Meanwhile, the ideologues at the think-tank Project for the New American Century, have assumed the posture - head firmly up ass - common to all intellectual bigots for whom reality fails to match their expectations. The most recent report on their Iraq page is still Bad Reporting in Baghdad, which ran more than six weeks ago in the Weekly Standard.
In it, reporter Jonathan Foreman slams his media colleagues for failing to portray the "extravagant expressions of gratitude that accompany every encounter" between US troops and ordinary Iraqis, and for falsely depicting Baghdadis as angry about the breakdown of law and order. Curiously enough, the PNACers didn't carry Foreman's next story only six days later, in which he quoted US troops who feared that "their successors here will face an intifada in the summer if power, water, medicine, gasoline and food don't start reaching Iraqi civilians."
Hey guess what? Fonterra's new CEO-that-no-one-had-heard-of, Peter Ferrier, isn't just a sugar expert. He knows about
water heaters too.
Craig Ranapia from NZPundit has been in touch to ask if I could correct the "misleading impression" that he supports the invasion of Iran: "Shitty theocratic loons are shitty theocratic loons, but Iran isn't Iraq." He points to his post offering links to multiple options for open letters to leaders and opportunities to express support for the Iranian students.
A pile of surface mail copies of the debut issue of a new American magazine, Radar, has turned up at Magazzino and, for all I know, a few other places. It's under 10 bucks and it's a sort of liberal pop-culture magazine - a bit like the late, lamented Spy mag, but with its tongue not so far in its cheek (it has, for example, a fascinating inside story on human shields in Iraq). The best magazine premiere I've read in ages. Its website is here.
Drama and democracy | Jun 26, 2003 12:35
We should have more conscience votes. The perception that our elected representatives were actually testing their own beliefs last night - and that the outcome was not the usual foregone conclusion - was bracing.
So, yes, Tim Barnett's Prostitution Reform Bill will become law, after considerable drama: an extraordinary speech from Georgina Beyer, with which she brought not only herself to tears, and crucial changes of mind from Act's Heather Roy, who voted for the bill, and Labour's Ashraf Choudhary, who abstained, leaving the vote at 60 for and 59 against.
We now get to see whether this moral rethink will play out more like the Homosexual Law Reform Bill - which was quite strongly opposed at the time, but is almost universally accepted as humane and sensible - or the loosening of gambling laws, which has created a new class of social victim. I expect, and hope, it will be the former.
The drama over Barnett's bill has helped shield the government from embarrassment over what looks certain to be a backdown on its all-too-hasty promise to change the law to keep the foreshore and seabed in public hands - and out of reach of Maori claimants.
Dizzy with pragmatism, Labour jumped at the chance to outflank National by promising to change the law. Hey, it worked a treat with the oil and gas reserves didn't it? But there's a very significant difference between a decision from the Court of Appeal and a recommendation from the Waitangi Tribunal. Governments that change the law overnight to get around court decisions they don't like aren't serving democracy well. We all tut-tutted over Tonga didn't we?
I'm as concerned about access to our shorelines as the next New Zealander, but there is a right way of doing this and it's not the way the government has thus far tried to do it.
Meanwhile, NZPundit is getting behind a letter-writing campaign urging our government to support efforts to achieve democratic reforms in Iran. This is a good thing, although the claim that Iran has "a government directed by the same type of Islamic fanaticism that directed the Taliban in Afghanistan" is fatuous. Iran is an emerging democracy, and the scene of a wrist-wrestle between the old mullahs and younger reformers.
It seems to be at a delicate stage, and, frankly, repeated invasion threats do not seem at all helpful. Anybody who thinks that an "external intervention" in Iran would be anything other than a complete and utter bloody disaster - 20 times worse than the current mess in Iraq - is smoking crack. Unfortunately, that appears to be the conclusion of a Washington Post poll which found that "most Americans would support the United States taking military action to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."
Yes, Iran's nuclear ambitions need to be addressed. But threatening to invade would seem quite obviously to be counterproductive. This is, remember, a country that has actually suffered attacks with "weapons of mass destruction". Then it was declared part of an apparently arbitrary "Axis of Evil" by the most powerful military nation in the world, which then proceeded to invade its neighbour and fellow Axis member. Quite how paranoid do we want to make these people?
Another unhelpful intervention: the lunatics who have been setting fire to themselves all over Europe lately are members of Mujahideen-e Khalq, a fringe "Islamist Marxist" group that, according to reports like this one and this one (particularly interesting) is being supported by the US government. Really people, don't you think it's time to back the fuck off?
Mujahideen-e Khalq appears to have negligible public support amongst the Iranian public, who are not stupid. I've asked a colleague of mine who has actually been to Iran recently - she snuck in - to write something for Public Address, and hopefully we'll publish that next week.
On a similar tip, I've been talking to the people at Amnesty International and we've agreed that Public Address will be getting in behind Amnesty's New Zealand appeal week, August 5-11. Details to be confirmed, but watch this space …
The Late Debate | Jun 25, 2003 11:40
Sometimes, it takes a showdown to make us think about an issue - and this certainly appears to be one of those time. As the vote behind Tim Barnett's Prostitution reform Bill teeters, suddenly we're having the debate.
That's good. I'm listening to Linda Clark interview Jan Jordan of Victoria University, the author of Working Girls, which records the thoughts of New Zealand sex workers, and Dr Richard Randerson, the Anglican archbishop of Auckland. They disagree: Jordan thinks the current law must be changed along the lines proposed in Barnett's bill, Randerson thinks that would be a diaster. They both claim the best interests of women. Welcome to the argument.
Like almost everyone else, I sat out the debate until a few days ago, when it became clear the vote on Barnett's bill was going to be tighter than anyone had thought - in part because of well-organised lobbying from the Maxim Institute and others.
To say that this is a polarised debate is putting it mildly. On the one hand, you have classical feminists (among them Sandra Coney, who was involved along with Barnett in a thoroughly abysmal piece of television conducted by Pam Corkery last night) who hold that prostitution is, in every case, sexual assault or even rape. Extensive arguments to this effect can be found on the Prostitution Research website, often in fairly doctrinaire language. Among other things, they point out that entry into prostitution is often associated with previous sexual abuse.
On the other hand, there are lobbies like the Prostitutes Education Network, through which active sex workers argue strongly for decriminalisation and regulation of the sex trade. The alt.sex.prostitution FAQ provides a similar viewpoint.
The Herald today finds a similarly emphatic view in favour of law change amongst active prostitutes it spoke to in Auckland. The story is worth reading.
It's not necessary to believe in a "happy hooker" stereotype to be uncomfortable with any doctrine that regards these women as always, and in all cases, victims, if only because they clearly do not see themselves that way. It would be insane to equate it with sexual abuse, but there's something about the idea of middle-class, university-educated women trying to nullify the views of other women that, in itself, suggests an exercise of unequal power.
Just to further complicate the argument, here's Wellington Independent Rape Crisis proposing A feminist argument in favour of decriminalising Prostitution in Aotearoa. The YWCA is also in favour of the bill.
I also found it surprisingly difficult to get clear information on the impact, good or ill, of similar measures to Barnett's in other jurisdictions. Grim statistics on the trade in child sex in developing countries are disturbing, but not terribly useful in working out what might happen in New Zealand.
While the Green MPs in New Zealand have backed Barnett's bill as a group, the Swedish Greens were strongly behind their government's move to change the balance of the law and criminalise clients rather than sex workers. The European HIV prevention group Europap (HIV/AIDS groups tend to be strongly in favour of decriminalisation) considered the Swedish solution in a report:
The first visible effect of the Swedish legislation was an immediate tenfold decrease in the numbers of women working visibly on the streets in cities such as Stockholm and Gothenburg, from about 20-30 women per night to 1-3. According to reports, numbers are slowly increasing again but they have not reached the previous levels
This reduction in numbers is unlikely to reflect a move out of sex work altogether. It is more probable that both workers and customers have chosen less visible ways of making contact, so that the policy has led to a re-organisation of the sex industry. It is interesting to note that the numbers of male clients attending the KAST project, a project which offers advice, support and counselling to the buyers of sexual services, have not changed over the last year.
In Sweden, during the first nine months since the new legislation was introduced, three clients were found guilty and fined. The women involved in these cases have not had to appear in court and have had their anonymity preserved. The introduction of the new law and the prosecution of the clients have elicited intense media interest both from within Sweden and around the world. Indeed, at one point immediately after the law came into effect, the streets were apparently the focus of frantic activity but from photographers and the media rather than sex workers and their clients.
The suggestion is that not much has really changed, apart from the obvious and welcome fact that women aren't being harassed by police or dragged through the courts. Whether they are safer is less clear.
Another report, from Australia - again, one which focused on HIV/AIDS prevention - found this:
Legalising prostitution makes the legal segment of the commercial sex market easier to reach and regulate, but it tends to raise prices for the regulated sexual services, giving rise to a lower-cost parallel market of unregulated sex workers who are harder to reach. When prostitution was officially regulated in Melbourne, Australia, the number of brothels declined by two-thirds; the price of sex in brothels rose; and the number of lower-priced "streetwalkers" increased.
So the effect of decriminalisation may be more complex than its backers admit. Yet a series of reports have concluded that blind-eye systems like our current one are bad for women. The City of San Francisco task force on prostitution concluded:
" … concluded that prostitution is not a monolithic institution. Although the majority of sex workers are women, it encompasses people of all genders working in the pornographic media industry, live theater, massage parlors, bordellos and through print advertising, as well as the street workers most commonly envisioned when the word "prostitution" is mentioned. Because it is such a varied industry, the City's responses must vary as well.
The Task Force discovered that the complaints levelled against prostitution really apply only to a fraction of the total industry and that those legitimate concerns are not being met by efficient and effective solutions. Yet not only are current responses ineffective, they are also harmful. They marginalize and victimize prostitutes, making it more difficult for those who want out to get out of the industry and more difficult for those who remain in prostitution to claim their civil and human rights.
On the other hand, a rebuttal entitled Legalized Prostitution Is Legalized Sexual Assault takes a very different view.
While various sources available through the Prostitution Information Network highlight the fact that Nevada - where a handful of counties have legalised prostitution - endures the fourth-highest incidence of rape in the US, other reports, such as this one, blame the level of crime in general in the state on accompanying liberal gambling laws:
The New Jersey Casino Control Commission report of 1989 states, "The conclusion appears inescapable that casino gambling is-a magnet for street criminals." It was also reported that the advent of casino gambling has been accompanied by a "disturbing increase" of assault, rape, prostitution, and drug dealing.
PENet's statistics page suggests another wrinkle to the debate:
Percentages of male and female prostitutes varies from city to city. Estimates in some larger cities suggest 20-30% of prostitutes are male; for example In San Francisco, it has been estimated that 25% of the female prostitutes are transgender.
So are men who wind up in the sex trade, for whatever reason, and under whatever declared gender, oppressed by prostitution in the same way as their female counterparts?
Some reports addressing prostitution at an international level unhesitatingly equate it with slavery. Others highlight the fact that women fare worst, and are more often subject to violence and abuse, in some countries where laws against the sex trade are most heavily enforced. This essay, Redefining Prostitution as Sex Work on the International Agenda, makes a reasonable job of looking at various national approaches and trying to untangle the issues.
But the more you step away from certainties, the more difficult and complex the argument seems to become. It is difficult, for example, to see a multiple sclerosis victim who visits a brothel - perhaps with discreet financial help from a support organisation - as a rapist and an abuser. The idea of an abuse victim ending up in a "job" involving, in Coney's words, "multiple acts of penetration" every day is distasteful. But - quite seriously - are hand jobs different? At what point does a massage become a "relief massage"?
It may be that Barnett has overplayed his hand here, by seeking, as Stephen Franks is suggesting, to not only decriminalise prostitution but make it respectable. But if his bill fails tonight, it will only take until the next time the police come visiting a parlour and the manager rushes to hide the condoms that everyone knows are there for it to become clear that the issue has not gone away merely because the bill has been dismissed.
Moral imperatives | Jun 24, 2003 11:24
I have some sympathy with MPs who are wavering on their support for Tim Barnett's bill to legalise and regulate prostitution - but not much. MPs have had the chance to scrutinise the arguments more closely than the rest of us - that any of them should be feeling ill-informed by now is puzzling.
Yet, as The Listener's excellent coverage of the issue this week makes clear, it's not easy. There are conflicting moral imperatives in play here. Feminists disagree, and the Greens (who look more like good libertarians than the populist pipsqueaks in the Act party these days) are, among other things, citing the interests of those whose disabilities would otherwise deprive them of any sexual contact in their lives.
Few people want, apparently, to adopt the Swedish solution, which criminalises the clients of prostitutes, rather than sex workers themselves, and not even the opponents of the bill want to tighten enforcement on women who sell sexual services, who they regard as victims rather than criminals.
Yet persisting with the current wink-and-a-nod approach means that women will continue to work in the industry - but will also continue to be denied basic civil and employment rights and will continue to be vulnerable to pimps, clients and occasionally police. The idea that if we all hold our noses and think good thoughts one day prostitution will just go away is fanciful.
Hardly anyone wants legalised brothels to become a growth industry, but, however distasteful legitimising the industry might be, it is the least worst option.
There were a couple of email responses to last week's Hard News verdict on Act's parliamentary funding dodge: one abusive and one indignant. The former was truly pathetic (having had sad emails from both looney right-wingers and deranged greenies at various times, I would have to say that the looney right-wingers are much, much sadder) and the latter, apparently from someone currently working as an electorate agent, was marked not-for-publication, which was unfortunate, but I'll take up one point in it: the description of staff employed under the dodge as "Wellington electorate agents".
Listen up: these people weren't employed as "Wellington electorate agents" (given that Act doesn't have electorate MPs in Wellington or anywhere else, it's hard to see how they could be) but as the electorate agents of list MPs.
The public expectation - and certainly mine - would seem to be that list MPs would have electorate offices where they actually campaigned. Muriel Newman certainly spends enough energy claiming to represent the people of Northland - why would she have had an "electoral office" in her leader's spare bedroom in Wellington? The fact is that where members of Parliament do have a local shopfront, people do walk in and ask for help. Is that what Act was trying to avoid?
Why not ask Rodney Hide - who, apart from Donna Awatere-Huata, was the only Act MP to insist on using the funding to run a genuine electorate office? He didn't seem very impressed with the scheme when the Herald asked him to comment earlier this year.
I also talked to a former Act staffer who worked, in Parliament, under the dodge. He didn't regard it as an out-and-out scam, but all involved were apparently quite aware that what they were doing would be at risk from any scrutiny. Among other things, he had "electorate agent" employment contracts with five or six different Act MPs, for odd blocks like 2.5 or 5 hours per week. Hmmm.
Latest excuse from the top: looters ate my weapons of mass destruction.
A claim that the New York Times - which is probably feeling a bit weary at the moment - soft-pedalled on its recent revelations about the basis of pre-war weapons claims from the White House. A feistier paper might, indeed, have made a bit more of the fact that in his big address to the United Nations, Colin Powell's account of an intercepted conversation between Iraqi officials "departed significantly" from the State Department's official translation.
The Washington Post had this story on the difference between claims made Bush's in address to the American people last October - regarding links between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda - and what was actually said in a still-classified national intelligence report.
Why on earth are the American media virtually ignoring the September 11 inquiry hearings?
Conservative columnist (there isn't any other kind at townhall.com) John Leo is becoming uneasy at the marginalisation of protest - and free speech along with it - in today's America.
Spinsanity has a typically adept essay on Bush's developing talent for "making statements that are factually true but misleading, while escaping criticism for doing so from the press corps."
Any sensible New Zealand rugby fan's delight at the All Blacks' 55-3 demolition of Wales on Saturday night will be tempered, just as was any despair at the previous weekend's narrow loss to England. Wales are pretty woeful - although the fact that the All Blacks basically held their pattern till the end had to be pleasing. I'd much rather see them start slowly and finish relentlessly, as they did, than go silly as soon as they get four tries up.
My online rugby buddy Tracey Nelson did a video analysis of the Welsh game, focusing on the number of times each player to the ball up into a tackle that resulted in a ruck or maul, and how many times each one was among the first three players at the breakdown. Her conclusions are fascinating. Among them, that Chris Jack played like the Eveready Bunny - he was in the first three to the breakdown no fewer than 48 times in the match, only one fewer than opensider Marty Holah. Carl Hoeft, amazingly, came in third.
There's little tempering of anything in the English press, however, in the wake of England's comprehensive victory over the Wallabies. Far be it from me to suggest that the Australians - who were actually troubled by Wales for stretches of last week's game - aren't really too much cop right now.
The Herald has a roundup of the various triumphalist tracts ("Is this the greatest British team of all time, and in all sports?"), as did the Daily Mirror.
But, as ever, the former public schoolboys in the rugby press are too busy composing dramatic hymns of blood and thunder to bother much with the actual details of a game. England were able to run in three tries against Australia because they comprehensively dominated territory and possession. They should really have scored three more, such was their advantage.
Against an All Black team playing at full strength for the first time in about nine months, England were on the wrong side of most of the statistics, infringed constantly and cynically - have you ever seen two test players sin-binned for professional fouls at the same time? - and were basically lucky to have been handed the game through a poor goalkicking performance. They deserved both wins - if for no other reason than that they could kick their goals - and Martin Johnson is probably the best forward and certainly the best captain in the international game, but really, chaps, keep it in your pants and we'll see you at the World Cup …
Dodgernomics | Jun 19, 2003 10:06
Richard Prebble and Ken Shirley can claim to have been vindicated as many times as they like: the Act Party's little dodge with electoral offices was an abuse of taxpayers' trust.
A group of party researchers and press secretaries were nominally based in a spare bedroom at a Wellington house owned by Prebble's family trust (which even collected rent) - allowing Act to claim for their salaries under funding provided for electorate offices. That is, offices away from Parliament and accessible to the members of the public Act is supposed to represent.
Reality: the "electorate agents" worked as Parliamentary staff. Meanwhile, Act claimed another lot of taxpayers' money actually designated for Parliamentary staff, giving it a double-dip advantage of about $100,000.
The Auditor-General has stayed his hand with the observation that the rules on this were somewhat unclear: but Prebble and Rodney Hide didn't seem to think that was an excuse in the case of Marion Hobbs' and Phillida Bunkle's claiming of housing allowances, which looks somewhat less calculated (especially in Hobbs' case) than this particular dodge. As the Herald noted in an editorial back in March, "one way or another, it is becoming increasingly rocky inside the Act glasshouse."
It could actually have been even worse: Act's leadership is probably lucky that the Auditor-General declined to interview the former staff involved, who were "nervous" about the propriety of what they were doing.
Nice columns in the Herald this week from Brian Rudman (on yet another unfortunate data loss in John Banks' brain) and Tapu Misa, who says what needs to be said about the way Pacific Islanders are exploited and abused by their "leaders" in the church.
The Memory Hole has a lovely page of family photographs under the snappy title Senior US Officials Cosy up to Dictator Who Boils People Alive. Yes, everyone's favourite psychopathic Central Asian leader President Islam Kari of Uzbekistan, is shown smiling, shaking hands and sharing tips with George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul O'Neill and General Tommy Franks. Jeez - maybe we should send Denis Dutton over to sort things out?
British military officials are starting to get mouthy over the shambolic American-led reconstruction operation in Iraq.
The BBC has released the results of a poll conducted for its programme What The World Thinks of America. Nobody else likes George, it seems …
There's a nice roundup of the lies and flimsy rumours churned out by Fox News over the war season.
In protest-just-a-bit-too-much rants like this one and this one, US conservatives and their media chums have been crying foul over the "liberal media's" misreporting of the looting of the National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad. Two things need to be pointed out here. The first is that the original reporting was hardly a liberal media plot: Fox News carried the same stories at the same time. The second is that although the damage is not as bad as initially feared at the museum, it is still pretty bad. And in other parts of Iraq it is simply a disaster.
British archaeologist Eleanor Robson provides a commentary in The Guardian. And Hard News veteran Adam Bogacki sent me a link to The 2003 Iraq War & Archaeology site, whose owner is compiling news stories on heritage losses, keeping a total of losses from the museum (his guess is 12,817 pieces missing and 24,896 damaged) and listing archaeological sites looted since the US victory: currently 20.
Philosophy in a bad week | Jun 17, 2003 14:40
I'm philosophical. Clearly, losing to England is never good, but what we saw wasn't all bad either.
England had universally been expected to dominate the All Blacks up front, but that didn't happen. Our all-new lineout tactic - picking tall guys! - proved extremely effective. Most of the game was played in England's territory, we created several try-scoring chances and England didn't really create any. The first-game-of-the-season midfield combination was woeful and Umaga had possibly his worst game in a black jersey.
But the game at test level is about taking opportunities, which England did, to the tune of four penalty goals and a droppie from Jonny Wilkinson. Carlos Spencer, on the other hand, missed four from seven shots at goal, any one of which would have been the difference between losing and winning.
There was a degree of bad luck. Justin Marshall couldn't unload to a three-man overlap on the English line because his right hamstring went, and he couldn't prop off it to pass to his left. Rodney So'oialo did score that try so far as I could see. And if he didn't, then it was surely a penalty try - the players who prevented him scoring had not retired, and had they obeyed the laws of the game and left him alone, he would, without a shadow of a doubt, have scored a try under the posts. On the other hand, Doug Howlett's try shouldn't have been awarded, because he was at least a metre offside from the kick. That pretty much sums up the standard of refereeing.
If anything's irreversible about the All Black performance, I fear it might be leadership. When England (quite rightly) had two players sin-binned for repeated infringements, captain Martin Johnson stepped up and inspired by example. Reuben Thorne didn't seem to have that in him.
The worst thing about losing to the English is, of course, that they are even worse winners than they are losers, and that's saying something. From Steven Jones' snotty triumphalism in his Sunday Star Times guest column (sneering at the "hapless" All Black forwards) to Clive Woodward's whingeing about the independent judiciary's decision on Ali Williams (look - players who try and impede the ball at the bottom of a test match ruck do so at their own risk), there was a real lack of grace.
England were also, of course, somewhat cynical, slowing the game down whenever they could, and repeatedly feigning injury in the second half, with play being further held up when as many as six officials (of the 15 on the tour!) swarmed onto the field. They showed experience. But they remind me of the 1991 All Black side, similarly accomplished, which went to the World Cup, as arrogant as you like, and got seriously undone. Watch this space.
It's been a hell of a week already, with work piling up and difficult decisions to make - hence the lack of the usual array of links in this post. I'm feeling a bit battered. But I was cheered up today by visiting Dawn Raid Entertainment's HQ in South Auckland, to interview Mareko about his excellent new album, which features an array of American hip-hop stars, and talk to them about their business for another story I'm doing. Did you know that Dawn Raid turned over $1.3 million last year?
After hearing all the indignant noises about the government's rescue plan for TranzRail, I'm still convinced the government is basically doing the right thing. In getting the tracks back, it will finally free itself of the onerous ramifications of National's hopeless privatisation. As Alastair Thompson pointed out on The Wire on 95bFM today, the existing "use it or lose" it clause was useless. If TranzRail faced any threat on its monopoly, it could simply hint that it would just pull up the tracks on any route it lost.
I'm less impressed with Helen Clark's claim that Parekura Horomia had been "bullied" over the Te Mangai Paho debacle. He's a Minister of the Crown and, in more ways than one, a big boy. A minister who was really on top of his portfolio would have to worry less about bad information from officials and - as Clark herself did recently - would show extreme dispatch in getting back to the House and correcting his statements. Horomia just doesn't seem to take this stuff seriously enough. John Tamihere is quietly manoeuvring himself into position and, for all the consternation that an urban Maori would cause in the job, there is something immensely appealing about the prospect of a Maori Affairs minister who speaks in proper sentences.
As desperate as ever | Jun 13, 2003 12:03
It's not so much that ratepayers' money will be spent on the launch of Auckland's new Britomart transport terminal. Or even that the original launch budget has blown out five-fold to $100,000 - although half that would surely do. It's our mayor's plan to be the star of proceedings that makes me spew.
As the Herald reported yesterday, John Banks is planning to lead a procession down Queen Street, sitting, along with his wife, in a horse-drawn carriage.
We ought to celebrate the opening of a major new public space. The Australians - who do public space so well - certainly would. If Britomart was in Sydney it would doubtless be just about sent into orbit by the fireworks display. But the lavish festival here isn't really about that. It is about two things: John Banks' desperate need for attention. And John Banks' amazing ability to claim credit for things he tried, and failed, to stop happening in the first place. Remember the Parnell Baths restoration?
Banks has been railing against Britomart since 1999, when he made racist comments about the original developer, Jihong Lu. Back then, of course, he was actually right about the project.
The original Britomart scheme - as devised, in a secretive and seriously flawed process, by Banks' current buddies in Citizens and Ratepayers - was an absolute nightmare. It anointed a developer who later appeared not to have the money he claimed to have, and it exposed ratepayers to what ought to have been Lu's risk in a manner that can only be described as reckless.
The old CitRat plan failed an independent review, which described it as "sparse in technical detail" and "confusing, uncertain and in some cases contradictory". But the real cracker was Peter Cross, who created the project as the council's property development manager, evangelised it as a council consultant - and then, when he'd secured council approval, went and worked for the developers. This 1997 Hard News captures the flavour of the times quite nicely. Jeez, I was salty back then wasn't I?
It was Christine Fletcher and the City Vision councillors who got Britomart back on track, with a less grandiose scheme that cost ratepayers more up front, but didn't threaten to send the city finances down a black hole if the developer got it wrong - which, it appears, he already had.
Banks opposed that scheme, the one that will open in a month, all the way along. He repeatedly shunned it as a "temple" and he campaigned to divert resources into roads rather than public transport. In the week after his election he described the previous council's approval of the first construction contract as " a constitutional outrage and the epitome of arrogance that this lame-duck outfit signed that huge burden on to the backs of the ratepayers and future generations."
And now, of course, he will be at the front of the parade, smiling and waving. Along with him, smiling and waving, will be his deputy mayor, David Hay, who voted against the construction contract under Fletcher.
Grrrrr.
Anyway, one thing that gives cause for optimism about the new Iraq: the amazing flowering of new newspapers after decades without a free press. The US authorities appear now to be considering exactly how free they want the press to be - "incitement" is out, apparently. But free expression poses the same problems as democracy: it tends to be indivisible.
On the Media has a nice little interview with Slate's Peter Maas, who hired an excellent interpreter in Baghdad without knowing until later that his man was the wonderful Salam Pax.
So anyway, the UK press is frothing over tomorrow's big test match against the All Blacks. They really do seem to pull it out of their asses, though. Chris Hewett in the Independent wrote after the England second-string XV beat New Zealand Maori this week that " The sense of shock is tangible," among New Zealanders. Not round here it wasn't, mate. That was the worst Maori lineup in years - they needed a dry night to have any show and, of course, it pissed down in New Plymouth.
But it will be crisp and fine in Welly tomorrow night, and, on that basis, I'd back the All Blacks to win, although overcoming England's precise, rhythmic game won't be in any way easy. We have two real lineout locks, a great opensider, a pretty good front row and, of course, a backline that, given the chance, can tear up any defence. Within the first few minutes, expect Carlos to unleash a soaring up-and-under to wobble around in the treacherous air of the stadium. It will be chased by the fastest rugby players in New Zealand. And it will be game on.
Just different | Jun 11, 2003 10:43
A letter below in response to yesterday's post. No, I don't think Americans are "the worst people in the world" - and I had misgivings about using the quote for fear of that misunderstanding. But it was a compelling illustration of the trouble brewing in Iraq.
And, for that matter, elsewhere. The Pew survey, both in its compelling illustration of the collapse of international opinion about the US in the past year, and its illustration of how different America is from the rest of the West, is probably the most interesting thing I've read all year.
I don't hate America. How could I, when I type this into an American computer, and send it across a network that is the greatest expression of American intellectual vitality in my lifetime? I have friends in America too.
But every time I visit the US I am both thrilled by it and unnerved by the feeling that social mobility has broken down.
There is, of course, empirical evidence for that feeling. The Economic Policy Institute's The State of Working America seems to demonstrate that the American underclass - the bottom 20 per cent of the population - is trapped, far more so than in Europe. One of the stories Americans tell about themselves - from a log cabin to the White House - is no longer true.
Yet, the Pew survey (along with many others) indicates that Americans care far less than citizens of other Western countries about that. Their view (like the American fervour for religion, it is shared in poor and developing countries) is that it is more important that they are personally left free to excel and prosper. And they deeply, deeply believe they will. Read this:
The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a [tax] plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.
You might take this as evidence of grand delusion; a handy myth, even, for the maintenance of economic serfdom. After all, 19 per cent of people cannot, by definition, be in the top one per cent, no matter how much they think they are, and how much they think they will reap a tax cut that they won't. Yet the original New York Times column in which the paragraph appeared - was hailing it as a vivid illustration of American "optimism", as was this conservative forum where the original Times piece is pasted in. America is different. It is fed by its myths. The question is whether it is in danger of being consumed by them.
Anyway, the letter:
Kia Ora Mr Brown,
I am an Expat Kiwi living in Canada and working throughout the Pacific Northwest. My work and the travel associated, has allowed me to observe the great US Paradox; Bible belt piety dancing and shaking in the aisles, while huddled in the rear pews lie the homeless masses (and I mean masses) the very busy sex workers, and the drug addicts.
I have been in countless I-5 towns where you see the same thing over and over again. People trying to sell you stolen goods in bowling alley parking lots, and the same people heading for church every sunday to shake and roll with Jesus. Now, I am not saying all this to somehow exemplify how 'bad' Americans behave... It is more a matter of how confused the people really are. When you have a President with the moral fervor of a TV Preacher (and half the charisma) all over the television and on that same television you have such socio/psychological wonders as "the fifth wheel" (compelling I admit, like watching a car wreck) on every other channel it must be very hard to draw moral lines in the sand.
Perhaps easier to let others do it for you... or perhaps just easier to yell "kill arabs" (I have seen it!) to help yourself feel better and maybe less confused.... the answer for this poor muddled populace appears to be; think as little as possible and use patriotic frenzy (that is generally every bit as scary to watch as any middle eastern militant muslim march) to drown out reason and/or confusion. Believe me, driving through a small town that has at least three sets of stars and stripes hanging from every house is eerie and unsettling to say the least.
I must add that my co workers in the states have taught me a thing or two about 'American bashing'. It is wrong. It simply perpetuates the very thing despised in the American mindset, the 'lack of understanding'.... Try and understand these people and this country.
From where I sit, you sir, generally do a good job. You are sometimes a little rough but this is the nature of your column and you tend to have the humility on occasion to admit your over zealousness.
Just try to remember, and perhaps remind your readers, that the great sweeping majority of Americans are living tough lives. The tiny Minority of Americans control the wealth, this much is obvious as you move around the country.
Thank you for your time.
If you wish to reply then feel free to do so, I have greatly enjoyed your Blogs and they help a homesick boy keep in touch with the pulse of his beloved nation.
Kia Kaha
Shayne Stuchbery
"The worst people in the world" | Jun 10, 2003 11:55
My friend Claire tires quickly these days, so after ogling the cookware at Kirkcaldies, we decided a sit-down at Wellington's Belgian bar, Leuven, would be good. Not long after we arrived, a guy called Dave introduced himself and bought us both drinks, which was very decent of him.
Dave had a mate with him, who had just come back from Baghdad, where he had been in, shall we say, an official capacity. Naturally, we asked him about that. He spoke warmly of the Iraqis, and said he admired their attitude towards the rights of women. Most of the students in the country's universities, he said, were women.
So what about the WMDs? Were they going to find any? What did he reckon about the trailers?
"Nah," he said. "These people had 10 years of sanctions. They couldn't even keep their traffic lights working."
And the security situation? Did he feel in danger?
"The main danger to me was to my liver," he shrugged, then paused for a moment. "And the Americans. They're tragic … the worst people in the world."
No, I am not making this up. United Nations staff, who had been on the ground with the oil-for-food programme, were well-regarded, he said. The US troops were not.
In that light, it is clearly some mercy that the New Zealand Army engineers to be posted to Iraq on reconstruction duty will be attached to British, and not American, command. The British seem to have a much greater talent for establishing a rapport with the local people, and history suggests that the Kiwis will too.
But this is not the UN mission with which our government clearly hoped to associate any military personnel. And it is clear the US government didn't want to hear from New Zealand the words "it has to be the UN" again. (Apparently the angry drunks in the US administration have stopped trying to call us out and flopped back onto the couch to tell us they love us again. Careful they don't vomit on the carpet next, though …)
At the same time, this isn't the total flip-flop Bill English (what does he believe anyway?) was honking away about on the news last night. This mission was foreshadowed just over a month ago, before that idiotic business with the embassy, when Helen Clark visited Tony Blair. She was expected to brief the Cabinet on it then. Given that we are only sending engineers and not the peacekeepers (sorry, "stablisation forces") predicted in the Herald scoop, it actually seems a more cautious commitment than had been predicted. The deployment to Afghanistan - which will likely be the more dangerous mission - has, as John Armstrong notes today, been under preparation for months.
By the way, The Economist has published New Zealander Conrad Heine's interesting interview with Helen Clark, conducted during her British visit. She really is better value when she's not fire-fighting …
The Times' Bronwen Maddox - one of the brainier British commentators - dissects the potential problems with the wonky Blair government dossiers on Iraq's WMDs.
Salam Pax is pointing to another Baghdad blogger, who doesn't spell as well but has a lively story of house-to-house searches.
Very good news: most of the treasures of the National Museum of Baghdad were actually hidden before they could be looted, and almost all the most important pieces are safe. Not so good news: the ancient treasures of Afghanistan - the ones that weren't destroyed by the Taliban - continue to be systematically looted. Slightly better news - the embattled Afghani leadership has organised an antiques roadshow to try and buy some of the treasures back.
I feel like I undersold the latest Pew Global Attitudes Project report when I linked to news stories on it last week. The stories didn't tell the half of it, and the report is wide-ranging and fascinating. Particular points of interest: international opinions of the US have plummeted in the past year, as has international support for the war on terror, and the extreme suspicion of the US noted a year ago in the Middle East has spread to countries like Indonesia. Also, support for global trade, the WTO and the IMF is strongest amongst citizens of the developing countries that anti-globalisation protestors insist are hurt by them. And this ancillary report indicates that Americans have a fervour for religion only found elsewhere in failed economies and those struggling with modernity. (The new report suggests a similar pattern as regards acceptance of homosexuality and perceptions of morality in general.)
After I recommended Ha'aretz as a useful source of news on the Middle East peace proposals last week, Linda Shewan directed me to this very interesting story that indicates that the paper's Internet presence is spun towards Western liberal visitors - the print version for domestic consumption is rather a different beast.
And finally, a funny cartoon about weapons of mass destruction.
Democracy at Ease | Jun 09, 2003 12:08
It so happened that I had a few hours to kill in Wellington between appointments. My anticipated lunch date hadn't happened, and it was a bit late to go chasing up another one. But Wellington is a good place to be distracted.
The present crop of exhibitions at the City Gallery includes a small selection of works by Peter Robinson on the physical nature of things, called 'Divine Comedy', and 'Real Fiction', a retrospective collection of monochrome street scenes by the Wellington photographer Peter Black, which is wonderful. (I was surprised that none of my fairly clued-in Wellington friends had heard of Black.)
I looked at new cookware (of which the Wellington CBD has quite a lot) and old books. The thing about the second-hand bookshops of Cuba Street and its environs is that they contain books that, quite possibly, nobody in Auckland thought to buy in the first place. The New Zealand political shelf at The Ferret Bookshop was particularly good.
I leafed through 1987's The magic square: what every New Zealander should know about Rogernomics and the alternatives, by Wolfgang Rosenberg, with an introduction by Jim Anderton. It preached a lot of terrifying tosh about import substitution and seemed to regard export trade as a dangerous affectation. Perhaps all economists are wrong; some are just more wrong than others.
Eventually I, plumped for R.M. Dalziel's The Origins of New Zealand Diplomacy, published in 1975 by Victoria University Press, and based on the author's doctoral thesis at the same university. Very Wellington.
But the real prize was a curious little book called Democracy at Ease: A New Zealand Profile (Pall Mall Press, 1957), by the British Liberal Party activist David Goldblatt. Goldblatt was sent to New Zealand to convalesce from a heart attack in the 1950s and became fascinated by our "insufficiently understood Dominion".
Goldblatt finds us a blithe people; kind, prosperous, fond of machines, frequently devoid of theory. Ours is "a land in which the practice of neighbourliness is most strongly developed":
'Struggle for existence' is a phrase strange to ear and experience. No one need look askance at his neighbour, and there is enough without undue effort or any competition. Want barely exists: a carefree, light-hearted prosperity is to be found everywhere.
He says that, after leaving the privations and inequality of industrial Britain, New Zealand's settlers found a place so bountiful that they soon learned that if they banded together at key times there would be enough for everyone:
The fight for life, the sense that one must go to the wall so that others might survive, was alien to experience. The harvest was overflowing and there was no need to covet anything that was one's neighbours.
Goldblatt proposes that New Zealand's national sense of "mutual help and sharing as a clan" drove the creation of a pioneering welfare state that placed it "high, almost highest, among the advanced countries in terms of the life and security of its people", but also allowed laws in other areas that amounted to "the complete control of the individual by the government". He admires our education system and our newspapers, despairs of our tariffs and barriers, and is underwhelmed by our leaders.
Interestingly - after conversations with Walter Nash and WB Sutch, among others - he bought in to the prevailing myths of the time regarding Maori: they were a likeable, if feckless, people who had whiled away their 500 years on the land fishing and eating, in clans that had little need to bother each other. The colonists had been accepted, and the Treaty honoured, even if "incidents there were and uprisings not without minor massacres". Wars and land seizures were for another generation to recall.
Although he prefers Wellington, as the only place where "there is opportunity for conversation in terms of the abstract", he is taken with a clandestine European-style restaurant in Auckland, where waiters wait and bottles of wine are hidden under tables: Elsewhere, it was "the plain fare and even plainer fetch and carry of the normal feeding machine of this country" and shops catering "in the same pedestrian fashion for a people never fastidious - the same again is the order of the day."
It took us quite a while to shuck "the same dull sandwiches" that Goldblatt found wherever he went, to recover from ethnic amnesia, to dispel a sense of order that had become oppressive and to embrace a national awareness that, in Sid Holland's New Zealand, was still marginal.
Of the country, he predicts that one day:
Its tempo will heighten and the general atmosphere will become less bucolic and acquire an added tenseness. New Zealand must be tempered in the fires of the conflicts of ideas and personal self-expression to gain that influence in life which the quality of its people and the gentle charm of its nature and topography have a right to demand.
Yet he wonders in his conclusion "what hardships and what misfortunes" would need to fall on this happy people to create the "divine discontent" out of which change would spring. It would be interesting to revive Goldblatt and see what he made of our furious few years in the mid-1980s, where so much of what he discusses did actually come to pass. He would, I suspect, recognise that that "move from the easy going into maybe the more Spartan" was not only provoked by hardship but brought hardships of its own.
Cracking the ton | Jun 05, 2003 13:45
Public Address passed 100,000 visits for the year on Monday. That's very pleasing, but not entirely surprising. There is a right way of doing things on the Internet and we have tried to do it.
It helps that we have largely avoided questions of finance by (with a few exceptions) investing only our time and bandwidth in the project - and correspondingly have not sought to earn any revenue from Public Address. Friction-free capitalism tends to operate most happily without actual money being involved.
Nonetheless, we have quite quickly attracted a commercially relevant audience, and it would be nice to start bringing in a little bit to pay the bills, and to justify spending some time developing new ideas. No, we're not about to charge admission - that would be stupid - but we intend at some point to carry some discreet and suitable advertising.
Our best month so far was April, with 30,000 visits from about 13,000 unique visitors (war was very good for us), and last month we logged 25,000 visits from more than 10,000 unique visitors, which seems to be our level at the moment. The chief driver for visits is the good old Hard News mailing list (which will at some point become the Public Address mailing list), which has nearly 6000 addresses from New Zealand and many other countries. I'm sure that all of those numbers could be increased with a little extra attention.
Trouble is, after more than 10 years of writing about the Internet and working on websites, I have no idea how to value what we've got. We figure on tile-style advertising, or (small) banners somewhere on the pages. Can anyone out there offer any ballpark advice? And, of course, if you would like to reach the Public Address audience in a commercial context, you can get hold of me via the feedback link above too.
But none of us are here blogging for the money, although most of us aren't averse to a little fame. It's fun, and personally rewarding. I've got no regrets about moving Hard News from its radio/email format to the weblog. I realised early on that I had lost the unrivalled directness of sending plain text to people's email inboxes, but I think I get a lot more out of the weblog format. Oddly enough, I'm writing far more than I was when Hard News was a radio feature, but I can arrange my creative time much better this way. It still feels like issues pick me more than I pick issues.
So thanks to you all for being out there (you can take that how you like). We all love getting email from readers - and I hereby tender my stock apology to all those people I don't quite get to reply to. I devote so much mental energy to developing and sharing opinions - it's in large part how I make my money - that sometimes it's hard to pop out another for a personal email.
Anyway, I'll be away in Wellington for the next few days, and I may or may not post from there. In the meantime, I suggest you keep track of the ever-so-slightly-promising Middle East peace process via the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, that you read the transcript of Tom Frewen's truly excellent Mediawatch commentary on the PM and the trade deal that wasn't, and that somebody in charge reads the results of this week's Pew survey of global opinion:
"But in most countries, opinions of the US are markedly lower than they were a year ago," the Pew survey said.
"The war has widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the [US] war on terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era, the UN and the North Atlantic alliance."
In other words, how to lose friends and alienate people. Nobody is going to save the world this way...
Dutton again | Jun 03, 2003 11:08
Neil Morrison feels that it was "beneath" me to have described Denis Dutton's most recent column in the Herald as an "embarrassing brain fart".
"Dutton makes a reasonable argument - if you disagree argue your case."
Well, I thought Alexander Gillespie's rebuttal in the Herald was quite sound, especially in its reiteration of history, which often gets a mangling in Dutton's spooky Year Zero arguments.
But, all right - and at the cost of time which would normally be spent on paying work - I was dismissive of Dutton's column for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it is highly derivative - its main arguments, and the extravagant lip service paid to democracy, are a paraphrasing of both the National Security Strategy of the United States, and the Project for the New American Century, within which the original ideas were developed. If you've read this stuff, you've read Dutton's column.
As usual, Dutton - his own glibness notwithstanding - dismisses anyone who might disagree with him (especially if they be a New Zealander) as guilty of "intellectual laziness". But it is he who is being disingenuous when he declares that the National Security Strategy of the United States "resulted" last September from the emergent fear of terrorist mass-murder. He knows very well that its core idea - a self-interested America acting unilaterally as, in Colin Powell's words, "the biggest bully on the block", has been in development for more than 10 years.
Professed ultra-realist lobbies like PNAC tend, ironically, to ignore realities that don't suit them. The few postings on the PNAC website regarding post-war Iraq are pretty much exercises in denial. And Dutton's admiring characterisation of the NSSUS is, similarly, devoid of real-world complexity:
It is both a strategic document and a ringing declaration of principles: freedom and democracy for the whole of humanity not merely as an abstract philosophical ideal, but as an operational goal of American policy, indeed, as a security requirement of the US.
But what happens when radical Islamic parties, with sympathies and perhaps even direct links to terrorist groups, win popular elections? It happened in Algeria, and the West stood by when that country's military annulled an election to prevent the formation of an Islamic government. Would the US now take action to defend the democratic rights of even those it considers "evil"? That's far from clear.
The problem with the vision of democracy being marketed by Dutton and company is not just that it is highly selective - vile but strategically important regimes in the former Soviet republics continue to be rewarded and encouraged by the White House - but that it stops short of the democracy of nations.
"The US is determined to win the war against terrorists, even at the cost of disapproval from Europe or small countries such as New Zealand," he declares. So don't expect a vote because you won't get one.
And it's quite rational to have misgivings about the democratic standard being wrenched away from everyone else by a country where the democratic system is in such obvious need of reform. It is more than 10 years since a US presidential or congressional election attracted more than half of the voting age population. In New Zealand (and in Turkey for that matter) the equivalent figure is typically around 80 per cent.
The circumstances of the 2000 presidential election would have raised eyebrows had they been transplanted to a developing country: the candidate who won the popular vote lost; the pivotal state poll was overseen by the winning candidate's brother as governor and a secretary of state who was involved with his campaign team. The first journalist to declare a result was the winning candidate's cousin and one of the judges who confirmed the result was appointed by the candidate's father. The way in which many electors were struck from the state roll, or had their votes disallowed, was questionable. The best gloss that can be put on it is that it was quite a shambles.
The electorate in which the rest of the world is asked to place its trust seems not only estranged from democracy, but remarkably poorly informed. The January Knight-Ridder poll was, to put it bluntly, shocking. Asked how many of the September 11 hijackers had been Iraqis, fewer than one in five Americans were able to state the correct answer: none of the hijackers were Iraqis (nonetheless, two thirds of those polled were, at that time, against unilateral action by the US against Iraq). This is the signal event in recent American history; the one on which the war on terror and the new foreign policy is predicated. The thing that every American ought to have known about. But the people in this poll - and there were others like it - do not appear to have had a clue.
There are other problems with the American democracy: it seems increasingly incapable of reflecting the great and grand plurality of the nation. It is riven with vested interests. And, as Seymour Hersch reports in the New Yorker, real power seems to be vested in unelected appointees of the executive. So spare us the hectoring …
During the Cold War the US was forced to support autocratic regimes if they were allied against the Soviets. There is no reason to continue that strategy: the US is now set on an ideal of the world as a community of democracies.
How lovely. Even leaving aside the question of quite how the US was "forced" to aid the overthrow of a democratically-elected government in Chile or turn a blind eye to slaughter in Indonesia, Dutton and the PNAC types seem quite immune to the idea of perverse or unwelcome consequences.
The Cold War was pursued with all of the moral certainty - more, even - than is currently being marshalled behind the new, imperial vision. But the people the US chose to back against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan became, in some cases, the terrorists that threaten it now. With the recent news that the US is proposing to back an "Islamist-Marxist" group to destabilise the regime in Iran (where hardline clerics have failed to follow the PNAC script and, instead of embracing democracy in the wake of Saddam's fall, cracked down on reformers) might that story not be played out again?
And by merely invoking the word "terror", do the Russians then get a free hand in Chechnya (where, remember, as many people were recently killed in attacks as in Riyadh and Casablanca put together) and the Indonesians in Aceh?
Dutton paints a rosy view of post-war Iraq, where "grateful" Iraqis "dance in jubilation". How are we to square this with this story, quoting two shocked New Zealand-resident Iraqis, just back from a visit to Baghdad:
"It's miserable. The infrastructure is in ruins and the city in chaos, but without security, no one can go back to work to rebuild the city."
Thieves and armed criminal gangs were terrorising ordinary Iraqis and "unfortunately the invasion forces are doing little to stop them".
Many women, who were a "substantial part of the workforce", were afraid to leave their homes due to the number of rapes on the streets, he said.
Three of his sisters and several of his brothers had stopped going to work because they did not feel safe.
"We witnessed two car-jackings, and saw looting and bodies lying in the street. We saw children playing with unexploded munitions. Unfortunately we couldn't stop them in every case."
During their three-week stay in the city, the pair visited hospitals, oil refineries, drug stores and the Health Ministry.
Ironically, in such an oil-rich nation, fuel shortages had brought the whole city to a grinding halt, Mr Karhiy said.
"There is no petrol for cars, so even people who want to go to jobs can't get there. There's no LPG for cooking.
"About 80 per cent of Baghdad, a city of 5 million people, only gets six hours of electricity a day. I don't know what the situation is like in the rest of the country."
The people were "hurt in their spirit" more than in physical suffering, which they were used to under 13 years of United Nations sanctions.
"People feel defeated; Baghdad is burning, everywhere you see demolished buildings, but the people are hurt in their spirit. We didn't see anyone celebrating like on television.
"The irony is about half the people we met - and we met a lot of people - wished for the old government back. People are angry and frustrated with the occupying forces for failing to do anything to make life better."
Perhaps the currently dangerously unstable nation will come right; perhaps a government can be anointed that is acceptable to the majority of its people. Or maybe we won't be so lucky. At present, it seems very hard to justify the blithe certainties of Dutton and his ideological allies, not only in Iraq, but in the wider war on terror.
As the Time magazine story put it in the wake of the attacks in Riyadh and Casablanca - a week after Bush declared al-Qaeda to be "on the run":
And so a comforting mirage - the idea that the swift, successful end of the war in Iraq had somehow made the world safer from terrorism - shimmered and vanished.
And yet, Dutton remains supremely confident:
Dire predictions of a Middle East conflagration caused by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have not come true. The so-called Arab street has been stunned and in some quarters is quietly respectful of the Americans following the Iraq attack.
How are we to reconcile that analysis from a lofty vantage point in Christchurch, with this reportage from the European edition of Time magazine?
The Arab street is rumbling. For weeks, protesters across the Middle East burned Israeli and American flags and brandished banners in support of the Palestinians. Satellite channels broadcast reports on Palestinian suffering, as well as talk shows on which guests vent their rage. But the Arabs are not only shooting off their mouths. From bases in southern Lebanon, Hizballah and Palestinian guerrillas stepped up rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli targets. A band of Egyptian teenagers even tried to sneak into Israel, saying they wanted to join the battle.
My vision of democracy is less lofty, more prosaic than Dutton's. Mostly, I don't want my elected representatives to lie to me, and I expect accountability. I can think of no good reason why Donald Rumsfeld's disgraceful failure of disclosure - he chaired a congressional panel examining the potential threat of North Korea's nuclear programme without revealing that he was a director of the Swiss company supplying the reactors - is not already a scandal. I like to think that it would have been so in a Westminster democracy.
And then there is the question of the weapons. It is clear now, if it wasn't before, that the truth regarding any global threat posed by Iraq was manipulated by both the US and British governments. According to the Guardian, it has now emerged that even Powell and the British foreign secretary Jack Straw didn't entirely believe what they were saying before the war.
Time characterised the apparent misuse of weapons intelligence thus this week:
But if the Bush team overreached, one nagging question is, Why? A defense expert who has spent 20 years watching Republicans argue about foreign policy from the inside believes the hard-liners' agenda isn't about Iraq or even oil. It's simply that the most zealous defenders of America's role in the world are congenitally disposed to overreact to every threat - which leads them to read too much into the intelligence. "They came in with a world view, and they looked for things to fit into it," says Lawrence Korb, who served in the Reagan Pentagon and now works at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you hadn't had 9/11, they would be doing the same things to China."
Indeed, Dutton's own descent into neocon paranoia is particularly interesting. Not so long ago, he was hailing "the gradual growth of a prosperous middle class in China and in India" as the greatest unreported story of our time: "They place an important value on social stability. Countries with prosperous middle classes are less likely to declare war on one another: they have too much to lose. In the modern world, war is a pastime for losers and ideologues; the middle classes tend to be neither … the emerging middle class of Asia will change the human face of the world."
By last month, in another hectoring Herald column, he was flailing Helen Clark's characterisation of the regional security situation (made not long after his own, apparently very similar, original comments about Asia) as "truly repellent", and placing us "at the edge of what is becoming an explosively unstable region. China might go completely to pieces in the next 20 years."
Well, which is it, Denis? And is war still "a pastime for losers and ideologues"?
None of this is to say that Saddam was not an ogre, that millennial terrorists do not pose a grave threat, or that no element of the US policy has borne or will bear fruit - the belated pressure being applied to Israel for a Middle East settlement could yet procure a victory for peace (although, as with almost everything in this argument, there is a very great deal yet to be seen), just that the combination of a blind sense of mission and woefully haphazard execution that has been on display the past two years poses a considerable risk. You can attack Amnesty International all you like, but its recent conclusion that the US-led war on terror has helped make the world's people "more insecure today than at any time since the end of the Cold War" should give pause for thought.
I'm with Eric Schlosser when he says "My own views tend towards a suspicion of all absolute theories and a strong belief in thought that knows its limits." And these people, frankly, do not know their limits. At all.
Page 15 of 265
Archive