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Maori Idol | Apr 30, 2004 11:52
Could we please just cut to the chase, Tariana? Labour's rebel Maori minister has finally confirmed that she'll vote against the foreshore legislation - but still won't say whether she'll resign when she is, inevitably, relieved of her ministerial responsibilities as a consequence.
I've met Turia a couple of times, once well before she became an MP and, like others, have been impressed by the quiet strength of her personality. Mana, if you like. Which makes it all the more odd that she hasn't been able to come to a decision, or, frequently, say the same thing from one hour to the next. It doesn't bode well for her prospects in leading a proposed Maori political party.
Indeed, I wonder if the people backing the phantom party really have the fortitude to follow what will be a very hard road indeed. Willie Jackson talks a good fight, but he's been a political gadfly before. At the moment, it feels a bit like a reality TV show.
David Cohen appears to have put down his poison pen for the moment (John Pagani's Moseworth & Featherston skewered his embarrassing fit of bile about Rod Oram, highlighting Cohen's unfortunate habit of putting words in the mouths of people he doesn't like) and written a useful column on the departure of Herald columnist Barbara Sumner Burstyn - and the flurry of Herald-bashing from the left and (sort of) right that followed.
I still can't see what all the fuss is about. Freelance columnists are periodically stood down - it's what editors do - and I can see why it would have happened to Sumner Burstyn. It's not her politics; just that her column wasn't all that good. It was too often shrill and derivative (although that never seems to hold back NZ Pundit).
I disagree almost all the time with Garth George, for example, but there's no denying his ability to pursue an argument, even a mad one. On the other hand, I'm surprised that the repercussions of his selection of the letter declaring that Tim Barnett MP should be "put down" like a rabid dog appear to have extended no further than a bollocking from the editor.
George's subsequent personal comments to readers who complained about the offensive letter seem to underline the fact that he's simply not an appropriate person to be framing the debate on the Herald's editorial page. I'd be interested in Cohen's view of that.
Certainly, those present at the Civil Union Bill public meeting on Wednesday night didn't feel they were getting a fair crack from the Herald's letters editor. There were a number of stories from people who'd responded to some pseudoscientific claptrap from the Maxim Institute (often as not, leading the page) and never made print. And it's not just the Herald: The Press recently published three Maxim pieces in a single edition.
Yes, Maxim grievously annoys me. That's part of the reason I thought I'd go to the meeting, whereas I'd normally avoid political fixtures (it was largely a Rainbow Labour gig, although the young chap from Act on campus turned up, and they had a Young Nat along in Wellington). The other reason is simple: I see this as a clear-cut human rights issue.
Parliament resumes on Tuesday, and on the Thursday of the following week, the Civil Union Bill and the accompanying omnibus bill will be tabled for a first reading the next Tuesday. Both are assured passage at first reading, but the situation may get interesting after that.
The omnibus bill is a party vote, and with the Greens' support, it, will pass. But the Civil Unions Bill itself is a conscience vote. Three Labour MPs - John Tamihere, Ross Robertson and Philip Field - are wavering. Seven National MPs, including Brash, have indicated their support, and Wayne Mapp has apparently said he "personally" supports the bill, but has promised a local church group he'll vote against it. Your local MP may benefit from a letter.
There's some Act support (Franks is waiting to see the final text of the bill, which is fair enough) and there are even a couple of the New Zealand First caucus behind it. Intriguingly, conservative MPs who have gay family members seem to be far more willing to grasp the nettle. Perhaps a billet-a-poof scheme might bring the others around?
Tim Barnett spoke at the meeting, and earlier in the day did lunch with some interested people elsewhere on the political spectrum, including Business Roundtable staffer David Young and Lindsay Perigo. Perigo is apparently willing to overlook philosophical qualms about the state and pitch it. Oooh, Lindsay, it must be torture …
Barnett himself, of course, has a libertarian streak, as was evident in my interview with him on the Wednesday Wire. I'll have that transcribed and post it next week. And if it does all go well, the first civil unions - gay and straight - will be celebrated in May or June next year. In the meantime, there's news and information available at the Civil Union campaign website.
Be sure to read Rob's post about the bizarre controversy around Australia's two leading talk-radio demigods, Australia's broadcasting regulator and the Prime Minister. It certainly makes even the worst of our own radio landscape look quite good in comparison.
Speaking of Australia, it appears that the well-known domain name scammer the Domain Registry of America, has some sort of base across the Tasman now. I got a letter from them this week informing me that the registration for publicaddress.net is about to expire (in September, actually - I won't forget). As these things always are, it's framed in such a way that someone who didn't read it properly would simply pay the money - and in fact have their domain transferred to the Domain Registry of America, at two or three times the price they're currently paying. Watch out for them.
And that'll be all. I won't be venturing out into the steamy Auckland nights this weekend. My Mum's coming to stay for a few days - and you've gotta look after your Mum, right?
Birds | Apr 29, 2004 12:03
It appears that TVNZ's unexpectedly unearthed third-channel plan might not be news to some people as much as it was to the rest of us. But those people might not be all that happy about it.
TVNZ's man in Wellington, Richard Griffin, told the Weekend Herald that the motivation for the programme was Parliament's desire to have its proceedings broadcast. Oddly enough the same thing has been on Sky Television's mind: in a Dom Post column last week, Vernon Small outlined Sky's "detailed proposal for a dedicated [Parliamentary] channel [put] to the secretive Parliamentary Services Commission (Official Information Act users need not apply)." Small continued:
That came in response to Parliament's Standing Orders committee report, which recommended investigations last year into an in-house feed be "expedited" with a view to starting in 2004-05.
TVNZ has in the past expressed interest too, but there are signs that the Sky proposal is likely to get politicians' approval. This would bring all the "action", when the House is in session, free-to-air to anyone with a satellite dish.
The pay TV channel's lobbyist, Tony O'Brien, has written to all MPs outlining the proposal, which would cost Parliament about $3 million in set-up costs, including a digital archive, and annual operating fees of more than $500,000.
The ever-diligent O'Brien was presumably himself the source for Small's fascinating column. So is Sky trying to cut off a TVNZ bid by going public? Or is TVNZ just piggybacking on Sky's detailed proposal? Either way, this will get interesting - and, probably, exquisitely political.
Other elements of the TVNZ prop will be familiar to Auckland's Triangle Television, which put a detailed proposal to TVNZ, aiming to share or lease unused TVNZ satellite transponder space to (according to the copy of the Stratos prop that landed on my desktop yesterday) "provide a national free-to-air, 'best of the regionals', combined with SBS-style television channel similar to that currently offered by Triangle Television to the people of the Auckland region."
Among the advantages Triangle suggests in its plan is that it would help boost the number of "open" non-Sky satellite decoders (currently about 6000 nationwide), something TVNZ has been unable or unwilling to do, even when it had the chance to screen replays of Rugby World Cup games last year.
Triangle proposed that Stratos would provide a kind of "regional backbone" for other small broadcasters:
Stratos would also authorise other regional stations to download and terrestrially re-broadcast any programming they wished from its proposed national satellite feed, as long as the stations availing themselves of that service provide those downloads a free-to-air basis.
This would have the benefit of broadening the range of programming available to regional broadcasters and also provide a digital platform on which they could screen selected local shows.
It would also help to establish local television in smaller regional areas where programme availability or access was restricted, by providing a steady feed of supplementary programming.
Apart from the obvious - that TVNZ apparently plans not to use its idle satellite capacity but its idle UHF frequencies - there would appear to be many similarities between Stratos and the kind of channel TVNZ is proposing. Triangle could fairly claim that it has far more expertise in this kind of programming than TVNZ does.
TVNZ, on the other hand, could point out that its former digital plans called for niche, regional and community channels. Its dabbling with community television goes a long way back, and includes the award-winning LocalLink experiment under Reg Russ, which somehow got lost between strategies a few years ago.
I should note that if you go ploughing through old TVNZ reports and strategies, as I have been this week, you can find pretty much any philosophy you care to name. The 1997-98 Ord Minnett TVNZ scoping report - commissioned by Treasury to provide a case for selling the broadcaster asap ("the need to obtain a strategic equity partner for TVNZ is immediate")- is almost comically dry and, as it turns out, not very prescient.
I guess we'll eventually find out what TVNZ's current strategy is (is the long-term plan for those UHF frequencies another try at digital terrestrial broadcasting?), and how it got there and when - they declined an invitation to discuss strategy on The Wire this week. But in the meantime, our broadcaster is certainly managing to piss people off.
BTW, I understand the TiVo-like Sky Plus PVR decoders available in Britain are still nowhere on Sky New Zealand's horizon (grrrr …) but that next year we might see a move to dishes with twin LNBs (that's the arm with a knob on it that faces your dish) - presumably to allow it to deliver more channels, perhaps from a different bird.
Human traffic | Apr 28, 2004 09:20
"How did the hikoi go?" asked Fee as I watched the news. "Oh, not too bad," I said. "The traffic didn't snarl up on the bridge." Oh truly, I am an Aucklander. Our race relations hang in the balance, and I'm worried about the cars.
Oddly enough, that's also the angle of the Herald's story this morning. The march apparently shrank overnight, down to 2000 after whoever reported the breaking news yesterday saw "an estimated 5000 people gathered under looming skies on the North Shore."
I don't have a problem with the bridge being made available for protest, and I'm glad the public response has been largely good-humoured - it hasn't always been the case in the past. But I don't have a lot of time for the hikoi organisers: a lot of people seem to suddenly have always known that they owned the foreshores (which, for the umpteenth time, is not what the Court of Appeal decision said). It's like a mass attack of recovered memory syndrome.
But if I had a wish, it would be that we could reboot this whole foreshore thing and have another go, with clearer heads, better faith and centre-right parties that remember their principles about property rights. The government's solution could have been worse, but it may struggle to endure.
As I've said before, I have a bit of time for the Act Party position as enunciated by Stephen Franks - let it go to the courts, like the Treaty Tribes Coalition wants - it's just a shame it took him so bloody long to enunciate it.
Speaking of which, if I was an Act Party member, I'd certainly be looking for Franks as the Act Party leader to replace the only one they've ever had, Richard Prebble, who unexpectedly resigned yesterday. Franks occasionally wades into the populist mire, but he seems the best intellectual fit for what Act was actually meant to be. Suggestions that Muriel Newman is a contender are apparently not a joke, but probably ought to be. Prebble's announcement that his successor would be chosen by a "primary election" among its membership seems deeply political: presumably he doesn't want the caucus favourite (Hide?) to win and has moved the goalposts to avoid it. With at least four of the eight Act MPs fancying their chances it should be vastly entertaining for the rest of us.
Meanwhile - why didn't anyone think of this before? - the latest proposal to save face for Tariana Turia seems to be to have her simply not vote. Not cross the floor, not abstain, just not be there. Novel. It would be nice if she could bring herself to make a decision.
Don Brash, inevitably, was offering his example in dealing with Maori MPs who don't follow the script: sack 'em:
Unless Ms Clark takes that action, she is confirming in the most public way that under Labour there are two standards of accountability - one for Maori Ministers and another for non-Maori.
It is certainly inconceivable to suggest that Helen Clark would allow Steve Maharey to publicly campaign against the Government's welfare policy while acting as Minister.
By the same token it would be inconceivable if Helen Clark were to develop and announce a new Social Welfare policy without bothering to consult Steve Maharey - which is basically what Brash did to Georgina Te Heuheu on Maori Affairs.
There have been some interesting about-faces on coalition policy in Iraq, which haven't been very widely reported. Chiefly: the idiotic decision to ban former Ba'ath Party members from any role in the new nation (even as schoolteachers, for goodness sake) has been reversed (what next? getting the Iraqi Army back together?). Raed has a comment on that, and is onto the third part of his roadmap for saving Iraq. He's probably right, but I don't fancy his chances.
It's been a spectacularly bad week for Tony Blair, not least for the fact of a scathing open letter addressed to him by 52 former British diplomats, who slam his adoption of the White House's "doomed" Middle East policy. It appears this extraordinary letter (text here) was directly prompted by Blair's bizarre move last week in suddenly abandoning his own government's long-term policy in order to back Bush:
After all those wasted months, the international community has now been confronted with the announcement by Ariel Sharon and President Bush of new policies which are one-sided and illegal and which will cost yet more Israeli and Palestinian blood. Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land and which have been the basis for such successes as those efforts have produced.
This abandonment of principle comes at a time when, rightly or wrongly, we are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in an illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq.
The letter also includes a broadside on Iraq policy:
However much Iraqis may yearn for a democratic society, the belief that one could now be created by the coalition is naive. This is the view of virtually all independent specialists on the region, both in Britain and in America. We are glad to note that you and the President have welcomed the proposals outlined by Lakhdar Brahimi. We must be ready to provide what support he requests, and to give authority to the United Nations to work with the Iraqis themselves, including those who are now actively resisting the occupation, to clear up the mess.
The military actions of the coalition forces must be guided by political objectives and by the requirements of the Iraq theatre itself, not by criteria remote from them. It is not good enough to say that the use of force is a matter for local commanders. Heavy weapons unsuited to the task in hand, inflammatory language, the current confrontations in Najaf and Fallujah, all these have built up rather than isolated the opposition. The Iraqis killed by coalition forces probably total between ten and fifteen thousand (it is a disgrace that the coalition forces themselves appear to have no estimate), and the number killed in the last month in Fallujah alone is apparently several hundred including many civilian men, women and children. Phrases such as "We mourn each loss of life. We salute them, and their families for their bravery and their sacrifice", apparently referring only to those who have died on the coalition side, are not well judged to moderate the passions these killings arouse.
Well, yes. Unfortunately, such good judgement does not appear to be the strong suit of the people presently in charge.
I've been out and about this week; first to talk to on Monday night to members of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand about the media and terrorism (their topic, not mine, but a good chance to blather on about weblogs); then up the hill to the Governors' Gallery at the old Government House on the university campus for an exhibition opening for a bunch of cartoonists: Chris Knox, Chris Slane (whose Georgina Beyer cartoon in the week's Listener is bloody funny), Malcolm Walker, Trace Hodgson and Bromhead. Originals for sale at reasonable prices: have a look.
I'm interviewing Tim Barnett on The Wire today, (about 12.45 provisionally) and I think I might go along for a look to the Civil Unions Bill meeting in the AUSA building tonight, 7.30pm. The Rationalists will be there! But should I dress up?
Telly visions | Apr 26, 2004 10:39
So TVNZ is developing plans for a new UHF channel - probably, despite the denials, a "charter channel" of quality and niche programming. Given that the ad market is booming, and TVNZ has frequencies in hand, this might seem like a good idea - if only it didn't look like they had it in the last five minutes.
TVNZ has been holding the old Horizon Pacific frequencies and the former Max TV slot (acquired by the late Neil Roberts amid much excitement) for years. But it appears to have spent the last two and a half years negotiating with a syndicate based around Mai FM. Now suddenly, it's all off. You can't blame people for getting toey and threatening to go to the Commerce Commission.
I understand there is, in fact, now a strategy at TVNZ, and a reasonably sound one, but it's yet to show up as a clear sense of purpose at the state broadcaster, especially as Ian Fraser seems to get more distant from the factory floor with each passing week. Having to withold Bill Ralston's credit card bills from a select committee as "commercially sensitive" isn't a great look either. (I can report that Ralston and friends were at the table next to us at Prego two days before that story emerged, and the bill was split.)
Part of the problem for any current management regime at TVNZ is the need to be perpetually crawling out from under the decisions of the last crowd. Years after Roberts shuffled off his mortal coil, the organisation was still paying out its contract to screen MTV Europe on the UHF frequencies now being targeted for the new channel. A huge bid for Rugby World Cup rights still had to be honoured after the digital TV venture it was supposed to spearhead had been abandoned.
Anyway, now, after a year's development, TVNZ is out from under NZoom, with the launch of the all-new site at tvnz.co.nz. NZoom, like all the others, seemed like a good idea at the time. It even had rights to broadband content from NBCi. Unfortunately, as we all learned, big new ventures have rather better prospects when they are tightly harnessed to the old-media venture that's actually paying all the bills.
There's some interesting news about the new TVNZ site for tech-weenies. The big, baroque and relentlessly proprietary content management system Vignette Story Server has been junked in favour of a largely open-source solution, and all that dodgy Real Player video has been replaced with Flash Video that actually works, at both dial-up and (sort of) broadband speeds.
On the other hand, it's not exactly a design classic: all that bathroom green makes me feel slightly bilious. There's a little webmonger discussion on similarities with the BBCi site. Have to agree about the logo almost getting lost under those huge ad banners.
While we're on this sort of thing, I don't like the new One News campaign ("one Poland", "one Veitch", etc). Talking up your senior talent is fine, but I think spraying this weak-assed wordplay all over billboards will mystify the viewing public more than anything else.
Meanwhile, over at 3 National News, there's a new singing-and-dancing set of weather animations that I still usually struggle to actually extract useful information from. All those 3D elevations hurry by while I'm still trying to work out what time of day it is. God knows what the old folks make of it. Still, Sportzah! is working out pretty well …
Anyway, I suspect that if there's one thing the government would really like to change about TVNZ it's that bloody Colmar Brunton poll. While the TV3 poll (level pegging with National) and the NBR poll (Labour slightly ahead), seemed to show a recovery of fortune, Messrs Colmar and Brunton continue to be the harbingers of electoral doom.
In poll action elsewhere, the new PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll shows a significant proportion of the US electorate continues to display severe ass-elbow identification dissonance:
A majority of Americans (57%) continue to believe that before the war Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, including 20% who believe that Iraq was directly involved in the September 11 attacks. Forty-five percent believe that evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found. Sixty percent believe that just before the war Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction (38%) or a major program for developing them (22%).
Despite statements by Richard Clarke, David Kay, Hans Blix and others, few Americans perceive most experts as saying the contrary. Only 15% said they are hearing "experts mostly agree Iraq was not providing substantial support to al Qaeda," while 82% either said that "experts mostly agree Iraq was providing substantial support" (47%) or "experts are evenly divided on the question" (35%). Only 34% said they thought most experts believe Iraq did not have WMD, while 65% said most experts say Iraq did have them (30%) or that experts are divided on the question (35%).
A surprising number of respondents also believed that world opinion in advance of the Iraq war had been either favourable to the US action or evenly balanced.
The new Harris poll also finds a majority of Americans believe Iraq still had WMDs at the time the war started. Rush Limbaugh hails the public's wisdom on this one, but doesn't trouble himself with any speculation as to where all those weapons might have gone all of a sudden.
An Associated Press reporter has conducted more than 70 interviews in heartland America and discovered that people are anxious as hell. As they are on both coasts, it would seem, but they're blaming Bush: a New York State poll finds John Kerry nearly 20 points ahead of Bush. Support for Bush is very much on the slide in California and amongst Latinos too, but remains roughly equal to Kerry's nationwide.
The mood in California is possibly well summed by the new website www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com.
Nearly three quarters of Spaniards agree with Zapatero's decision to remove Spanish troops from Iraq.
Meanwhile, the looming electronic voting debacle gets worse with a California state panel's unanimous recommendation that 15,000 Diebold voting terminals be decertified. More leaked Diebold memos indicate that the company knowingly broke the law. Extensive discussion on Slashdot.
So … deeply divided electorate, deeply compromised voting system: it will probably end in tears. Which is unfortunate for all of us, really.
People's Voices | Apr 23, 2004 11:22
So the Blues are history, and the Kiwis will, in all probability, get a towelling in Newcastle tonight. Which leaves us with Camillia. If, having missed the top three last week, she departs NZ Idol on Sunday, it will all have gone terribly wrong.
There are some interesting demographic dimensions to the Idol vote, as demonstrated by the AC Nielsen survey published yesterday. Camillia was picked by the most respondents (36%) to win the contest - but the survey profile (all New Zealanders 15+) is not that of the Idol voting public, as the Nielsen spokesman noted:
"Michael was picked to win by 18% of people but with his popularity amongst females, especially those under 15 who are higher users of text messaging, his chance of winning improves considerably, especially as a higher proportion of females have watched the show, in particular 94% of all 15-24 year olds."
Hence - despite having sung 'Dock of the Bay' like it was a radio jingle, and his irritating performance tics, Michael finished above Camillia and, probably, everyone else on last Sunday's voting. Idolblog is, naturally, on to it - asking its readers If Michael is in the Grand Final who will you vote for?
This might get out of hand. I'm thinking that our house might even have to break out of cool, distanced media-commentator mode and actually vote in the damn thing. Scary.
Meanwhile, Paul Litterick of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists has shown a good deal of enterprise in using the Maxim Institute's email "wizard" to send 76 publications a letter regarding … the use of the email wizard. I don't have a link yet, but it begins:
This letter was sent to you using the Maxim Institute's letter writing wizard: http://www.maxim.org.nz/letter/ Your publication is one of many that can be accessed from this page.
We wouldn't normally use this sort of tool, particularly one provided by the Maxim Institute. However, we are sending this letter to demonstrate how Maxim manipulates the letter writing process.
Newspapers and magazines provide space for readers to express their opinions. This is an essential and long-established aspect of free speech, giving readers the opportunity to comment on issues in the news. Maxim has exploited this opportunity by providing its supporters with the means to send letters to many publications at once …
Top wheeze!
It appears that we may finally be in on a trade deal with the Asean bloc. The usual suspects will object, but an Asia-Pacific trading community makes good sense. Fran O'Sullivan had an interesting column yesterday on moving closer to Asia - and being harangued by a bumptious American trade hawk. As she points out, our policy independence helped us negotiate last week's trade deal with China. The People's Daily was certainly showing us the love this week.
BTW, I found that last link via a new New Zealand-based meta-news site called TeWorld.net. Is that anything like Te News?
Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, makes an intriguing and detailed argument in Fortune this week, under the heading A Conservative Case for Voting Democratic.
Stuart Marshall contacted me in search of a plug for his Our Hero's project, which is seeking private donations to take more old soldiers to the Monte Cassino anniversary. The website is here - although I can't escape the feeling that it should be "Our Heroes". On a related topic, I think the EPMU needs to pipe down about "Mondayising" Anzac Day. One of the special things about the day is that it's immovable.
It'll be a bit inconvenient this year for the owners of bars and pubs, who'll be ending their Saturday night trading at midnight. Meanwhile, establishments that can describe themselves as entertainment venues will be allowed to party on. I expect there'll be the usual trail from the clubs to the dawn ceremony on Sunday, which is sort of nice.
Tom Bennion pointed out this spatially-based music-match site. Kinda cool, although I don't think I'll be using it a lot.
Boston-based expat Johnny Wharton has a new blog called New Zullund New Unglund.
A word: you are all free, of course, to email NZ Pundit and enter Gordon's competition. But I'd ask that any communications on account of Hard News not be of an abusive nature. Let's try and stay on an elevated plane of debate.
The Wire was good again this week: I talked to James Griffin about Serial Killers (you might want to tape it on TV One while you're watching the league tonight) and Jack Vowles about Voters' Veto the new AUP book about the 2002 general election. But I decided that the best candidate for transcribing was Simon McCallum, who runs the computer game development course at Otago University and is involved with the forthcoming New Zealand game developers' conference. Damien Lay's working on that at the moment and you should be able to read it on Monday. Till then, have fun …
Grim reality | Apr 22, 2004 12:26
A couple of people have asked me who "Gordy" is - and Gordon Dryden was, understandably, concerned that people might think it was him. No. Gordy is Gordon King, aka NZ Pundit, leading local representative of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Gordy can be worth reading sometimes - when he manages to get himself off the message of the day from Neocon Central - but he seems to think about me a lot. He's even running a competition inviting parodies of a paragraph from Monday's Hard News post, which had exercised him earlier in the week. (The offending lines were: "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.")
I confess I actually couldn't see why the paragraph should have provoked such excitement. I even had to look up "terzain" and "aporia". It was purely an observation: apart from the headscarves they looked and acted just like any other teenage girls. I wasn't particularly trying to make a point, but clearly a nerve was struck. Perhaps my thoughts are more banal than I could ever understand. Or perhaps they all doth protest too much.
It seems quite popular. I can only take such a degree of enthusiasm as a compliment (they seem to read me remarkably closely), but some of the entries say a lot more about their authors than they say about me. Some seem unduly personal, even a bit nasty. (And penis jokes? Please.) I'm having a trying week, and to be honest, I could do without this. Still, I suppose if they're obsessing about me they're not out scaring children or something.
Anyway, the security situation in Iraq appears to have deteriorated still further with the grotesque attacks in Basra. Is it al-Qaeda? Who knows? The intent - if any clear one can be divined - would seem to be to further deter the locals from having anything to do with the Iraqi police, or to foment civil war, or both. Sixty eight people were killed including at least 17 children. Horrible.
But it is surely worth noting that multiple sources have put the Iraqi death toll in a week's fighting in Fallujah at 600, at least half of them women and children. There are multiple eyewitness reports of people being shot driving ambulances, digging graves and sometimes, apparently, at random. Cluster bombs appear to have been used. This interview with a temporary paramedic in Fallujah is extremely disturbing, as is this report on Electronic Iraq.
Local people have reportedly been warned to flee Fallujah or be killed - and then stopped and turned back at checkpoints a mile down the road. Families have been obliged to leave behind their 14-year-old boys. A 620-strong battalion of the new Iraqi army simply refused to fight in Fallujah (the US Army major-general in charge of training the battalion admits to "problems with a lot of security functions right now".) Another 200 Iraqi soldiers (including former Peshmerga) are apparently being held as mutineers as after refusing to enter Fallujah.
And through all this it has remained profoundly unclear what the goal of the assault actually is. Local US command has been negotiating some sort of truce at the same time as Rumsfeld has scorned the idea. Other US officials have admitted they have no idea who the perpetrators of the murder of the four security guards are, or how they might be found. It's a horrible shambles.
Certainly, most of the reports from Fallujah are coming from people who opposed the war in Iraq in the first place - for the very simple reason that the mainstream media simply hasn't been allowed near the place. Okay then, let's look at the new Village Voice story based on a leaked memo written by a US official. Now, this guy is thoroughly down with the program - he slings off at John Kerry and the UN, and speaks highly of Ahmed Chalabi - but is largely despairing of the management of the occupation, its prospects and the "corruption" of the hand-picked governing council. (Speaking of which, the UN needs to act swiftly and firmly to address evidence that senior UN officials took bribes during the oil-for-food programme.)
Is this just 20-20 hindsight? Well, some people saw it coming. I highly recommend Planning for a Self-Inflicted Wound, a paper by Prof Anthony Cordesman of the conservative Washington think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which was completed months before the war began:
A little self-honesty about our past mistakes in nation building and occupation would help; especially when we perpetuate the myth we did so splendidly in Germany and Japan. Things eventually worked out in Germany and Japan because we enforced minimum change and took advantage of existing institutions. We only adopted this approach under duress, however, and because the Cold War forced us to reverse many of our initial plans and policies. Economic recovery took five years. For the first year, people died for lack of medical attention, starved, and suffered. We could get away with because most of the world was suffering and because of the legacy of anger towards Germany and Japan coming out of the war. We cannot possibly expect such tolerance today.
Some of his fears have not been realised, but much of what he says is remarkably prescient. Ironically, his report has more to say about the present situation than almost anything written after initial combat. Read it.
The response in parts of the right, especially in the US, has been to swiftly redraw the Iraqi people as ungrateful savages, rather than fine folk who needed liberating. Steve Adams drew my attention to the website of Bob Lonsberry, whose NY Post column I noted last week. This comments column suggests his readers are even creepier than he is: "Declare marshall [sic] law and shoot everyone who leaves their home. Period … Isn't it better to throw a little nuclear bomb on a foreign country than it is to put an American soldier in his grave … etc" No shame at all, apparently.
Anyway, I suspect Gordy will respond to anything I say by energetically changing the subject. He recently spent God knows how long digging out references to Afghanistan in pre-weblog radio versions of Hard News, the last time I dwelt on Iraq; most of which, oddly enough, I'd be happy enough to stand by.
Gordy did feel bound to note that I am reportedly "a hell of a nice guy", but I'd rather he'd actually noted that I thought the US had to go into Afghanistan, I just didn't approve of the way it was done, and subsequently of the potentially disastrous diversion of resources away from Afghanistan (where the terrorists were) to Iraq (where the terrorists, at the time, were not).
And no, Afghanistan is not, as some people seem to believe, done and dusted. News stories from last week include Taliban loyalists murdering Karzai supporters in the Taliban controlled border region; Taliban killing a district police chief and his nine bodyguards; Taliban killing US troops; Taliban making credible death threats against Afghani women who dare to vote in September's elections; the warlords given a security role by the US now declining to play nice; complaints from the Afghani government to the same effect ("A lot of these warlords, before Sept. 11, did not exist or had no power. They were created by the United States after 9/11, and it is their responsibility to deal with them."); and now, weirdly, the US discussing an amnesty for most Taliban fighters, over the objections of Kabul.
And now, it appears that the US is running short of troops - a clearly dangerous situation. Tensions are growing between the US and British forces, as acknowledged in the past 24 hours by the British army's most senior officer. What next? Send boy scouts? No, apparently: some US lawmakers are contemplating a return of the military draft. Yet if Sistani decides to pull the pin in Iraq, it's over. Go home. Iran has a new best pal. What a bloody mess.
Do I have a quick fix? Of course not. But I don't own the problem. And it would be nice if some people stopped shouting slogans and acknowledged a little reality, however grim.
PS: Reports all are saying that nine of the 10 men arrested in what could have been an act of terrorist mass murder at Manchester United's Old Trafford ground are "Iraqi Kurds". Is this something new? Weren't the Kurds on our side?
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