Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Surly Bonds | Feb 04, 2003 09:45

In the same few days as seven astronauts died when the Columbia space shuttle broke up on re-entry, nine people died in a train accident in Sydney, 40 people died in a train crash in Zimbabwe, 15 people died in a terrorist bus bombing in Afghanistan and 46 people died in what appeared to be a terrorist bomb attack in Nigeria.

So why did the shuttle accident fill five full pages in the New Zealand Herald on Monday, while the others (with the brief exception of the Sydney crash) got world-page headlines at best? It's not because any of these sad events was, in human terms, any more or less tragic than the others. Comparison of tragedies is fruitless.

But there were reasons that the shuttle accident got a much higher profile in the news than the others: it happened on TV and over America; hence, there were compelling pictures, breaking reports, extensive back-stories on the international crew, background and analysis. It was a no-brainer for the editors of Sunday's TV news and Monday morning's papers.

A spacecraft falling from the sky is also news because it is unusual - more so than bombings and catastrophic infrastructure failures. And yet, the seven who died will have known and accepted the risks they undertook. The fact that they were still prepared to seek to extend the boundaries of human knowledge and experience is what ought to impress us. Space flight is richly aspirational; evocative of destiny and purpose. It symbolises the America everyone wants to love: boundless, ambitious, without precedent.

If the coming investigation is as important as that which followed the fall of the Challenger shuttle 17 years ago, it will be crucial. The Challenger catastrophe, it transpired, could have been prevented had a single engineer, Robert Lund, held fast to his veto on the launch. Instead, he was asked by his own management to "think like a manager," and eventually changed his mind.

Among the reasons to "think like a manager" was the shuttle programme's own budget battle with the US Congress. NASA was under pressure to show results. If the Challenger launch went ahead, President Reagan would be able to announce that arrival of the first teacher in space. It was a powerful incentive.

Instead, Reagan delivered a very different speech. And, as it happened, delivered one of the great lines in any presidential address: "We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God." Well, actually the first half of the sentence, with its confused tenses, is pretty clunky. But the second part: " …slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God," is resonant still.

As this page explains, the line was adapted from 'High Flight', a sonnet written by John Gillespie Magee, a pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War who flew in a British spitfire squadron in World War II and was killed on a training flight in 1941, aged 19. It was suggested by Reagan's speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, but the President was, it seems, already familiar with the poem.

Bush's brief speech to the nation was, inevitably, not quite so resonant, but concluded thus:

In the skies today we saw destruction and tragedy. Yet farther than we can see there is comfort and hope. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing."

The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.

May God bless the grieving families, and may God continue to bless America.

The quoted verse seems to suit the moment well enough. But the Biblical context is quite startling. Isaiah is the Old Testament prophet most loved by millennial Christians, who hold that his 66 chapters of prophecy are mostly allegories for the events of the end times, in which, of course, we are living.

Chapter 40, from which the verse is taken, is the beginning of a series of promises and predictions about redemption. Isaiah is speaking messianically, comforting the Jews with the promise that their God will come and free them from the captivity of Babylon (modern-day Iraq, more or less), and emphasising the power of the God of Israel. He goes on to predict, basically, the end of the world in the face of God's wrath, but not before a ruinous global war beginning in the Middle East. God will create "a new heavens and a new earth" for those who remain.

The weird but remarkably influential dispensational premillennialist Christian movement holds that after the seven years' tribulation, Israel will defeat its enemies in the battle of Armageddon (although two thirds of the Jews will die), and Christ will return to rule from Jerusalem for 1000 years. There will be harmony in the animal kingdom, and people will still die but they'll live longer. Good Christians will have already ascended - performing the neat trick of going to heaven without the bother of dying.

Many of these people believe a catastrophic war in Iraq is pretty much a good thing, because then Jesus will come back. This crackpot has his own radio show to help people get ready for a nuclear holocaust, although he warns that "only good English speaking Christian 'White' people should gather to Zion. Blacks should go back to Africa."

Others, clearly not quite ready for the world to end have harnessed Isaiah to rail against US policy in the Middle East (this goes along with the belief that the real Babylon is the West) or even incorporated him into tragic political verse.

A page of pre-millenniallist commentary on the "prophet of prophets" Isaiah is here. A crisp orthodox theological critique of the end-times reading of the Old Testament prophecies can be found here.

The dispensationalists - who are fanatically pro-Israel - can count the senior House Republican, Tom DeLay, and at least one other Republican Congressman in their ranks. They have a strong presence at the activist level of the Republican Party. And stories like this and this have sought, not entirely successfully, to link President Bush to the dispensationalist movement. And there's a whole page full of links to stories about the movement.

Perhaps it was just a nice, comforting verse, chosen in innocence. But Isaiah was widely invoked after the September 11 attacks, which were considered by believers to be the beginning of the tribulations. To quote him in the wake of another great calamity, while a war in old Babylon looms, seems to be to risk misunderstanding.

Bush has brought daily Bible study meetings to the White House; it's hard to believe he wouldn't know the significance of the part of the Bible he chose to air. But even if the choice was innocent or subconscious, the story of the end of the world is a strange place for a presidential mind to go for solace.

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I'd rather trust in taniwhas | Jan 30, 2003 11:23

Should a man who can't pronounce "nuclear" be allowed in charge of weapons?

The first part of George W. Bush's State of the Union speech yesterday was an incoherent grab-bag of soundbite announcements. Hydrogen cars! Woo!

One characteristic of the initiatives seemed to be that they were addressing problems his administration had created: the hydrogen cars (everything from blowing out Kyoto to kneecapping California's zero-emission laws and lopping half a billion dollars off the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency); the AIDS funding (after wrecking a UN sexual health strategy as a sop to fundamentalists at home); the money for Russian nuclear decomissioning (which only replaces the money he took away from this important task in his first budget). He might as well throw money around - he's in so much fiscal trouble it barely matters any more.

The other characteristic of the domestic announcements was pay-offs to the religious lobby: notably banning so-called "partial birth abortion" - a non-medical term used by pro-life campaigners to refer to a rare variant of the more common midterm abortion procedure, D&E.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has had it as policy since 1997 that such a ban would be "inappropriate, ill advised, and dangerous". The US Supreme Court has already struck down a similar law in Nebraska because it failed to allow any exception for the health of the mother, and because it could be used to prevent access to abortion altogether.

There was also the funnelling of hundreds of millions of dollars to proselytising religious groups under the guide of drug rehab.

The other half of the speech was, of course, devoted to the war on terror (and the cranking up of public fear) and reasons for invading Iraq. You can read about that somewhere else. The only other thing to note is that if the Republicans were scary, the Democrats were simply pathetic in response. The world's greatest democracy looks broken to me.

Neil Morrison at Auckland University got back to me yesterday, to apologise for potting me with "the Left" (no, really, it's alright) and further ponder opposition to War in Iraq:

What is curious is that there is a genuine, heartfelt and profound dislike of Bush - expressions of which are often laced with moral outrage. In contrast, reference to Saddam's sins are rather perfunctory. Nobody opposing Bush gets as outraged by North Korea. I am not alleging a double standard, as a reason that would be far too simplistic - it would be merely judgemental.

On the issue of Iraq, there seems to be two sensible positions that differ in how risk is seen. One group believes that the risk of regime change outweigh the benefits. The other the opposite. What is interesting is by what process do people decide which camp they are in? I believe that there are valid and honorable reasons for either choice. The distinction does not follow a strict Left/Right divide, as you point out.

My point being: how do people come to a particular political position on issues that are essentially about risk prediction? But when you come to think of it, that is what we do all the time - try to predict the future course of events and strategise accordingly. To play devils advocate - perhaps there is a genetic component to political disposition.

I don't know about the genetics, but he's right in many respects there. If you were to strip away the history of Bush and his people, their beliefs, their debt to Big Oil, the unnerving appeals to God and destiny - if you stripped away Bush - the case for action against Iraq becomes easier to contemplate.

But you don't. And that's a large part of the problem. An American president ought by rights to have the admiration of the world. Bush simply does not. There is now probably no country in the world, outside his own, where a majority of citizens hold him in great respect or affection. As Neil notes, there are many people, in "friendly" countries, who hate him more than Saddam. It is a queer achievement.

His domestic cheerleaders ought to stop bleating about anti-Americanism and try and take that in. Remember Clinton's sweep through the Asia-Pacific region for APEC? Can you imagine Bush ever being so hailed? An American president who presumes loudly to lead the world must take the world with him. Bush has done largely the opposite. He does not inspire. He is not impressive. He is not trusted. He is not a leader. He is a failure.

I confess, my response to Bush is quite visceral. You don't spend a career in journalism without getting some idea of when someone is lying or not credible. I looked at Bush during that speech and I thought, he's lying and I do not like him. I no more believe in the God he so readily invokes than I believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden, or in taniwhas. In fact, I'd rather believe in taniwhas. They seem less dangerous, frankly.

BTW, much as I believe in the beneficial effects of international trade, I doubt that a trade deal with America of the kind Australia is seeking would be good for New Zealand. These people are not worth negotiating with - as evidenced by this week's story on their attempt to export their own, draconian copyright laws as the price of a deal.

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Tearing up the world | Jan 29, 2003 11:41

So, what did Hans Blix's report to the UN Security Council actually mean? Depends on who you ask. Like Resolution 1441 itself, the report was a fiddle on which everyone could play their own tune.

While most news reports focused on some unexpectedly harsh language, the United Nations' own press release, Iraq cooperating but needs to do more on 'substance,' Blix tells Security Council said Blix had found Iraq to be co-operating "rather well" with inspection demands. This interpretation is the one largely being propagated in media outside the West, as this story in the Arabic News indicates.

Check out Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf on his misgivings about charging into Iraq and why Donald Rumsfeld makes him "nervous". Should America sort out the war between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon before starting a war in Iraq?

And read this interview with Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg on reporters who take their "leaks" straight from White House press handlers: "One question the press is not asking: Is there a single high military man who believes this war should happen now, that it is appropriate and [the] risks worthwhile?"

Rumsfeld was also, of course, responsible for the deranged dismissal of France and Germany as the irrelevant "old Europe". America's new orth0doxy - all the while bitching about "anti-American" and even "anti-semitic" Europeans - seems determined to tear up relationships not only in the East but across the Atlantic. These people only seem to want friends they can dominate.

The relationship between Europe and the US has gone from occasionally grumpy but perfectly functional through the Clinton era to the point of crisis in a mere two years. What the hell is going on? I found pointers to these two matching essays on Arts and Letters Daily: one on anti-Americanism in Europe, and one on anti-Europeanism in America, which rather badly undersells Europe's achievements (even though the author is British) by adopting the American obsession with geopolitical might as a yardstick.

Yes, Europe dithers: but Europe is not only bringing the former Eastern Bloc countries into a modern, secular rules-based trading community, but actually achieving modernisation at the fringe of the Islamic world - Turkey - as a price of entry to the club. Do you prefer that, or the 19th Century ideas about reproductive health that Bush's administration thinks the rest of the world should adopt?

The American NeoCons, meanwhile, get by on the palpably insane fantasy that that the citizens of Iran, seeing such a cool occupying power right next door, will rise up and roll the ayatollahs and join the club. Nothing of what we know about public opinion in the Islamic states suggests that is likely, but it is nonetheless the basis of the strategy. Yes, there, will be flag-waving and relief as the tanks roll in - but what happens when 100,000 US troops are still in Iraq six months - or five years - later? This is a country with a brutal and sophisticated secret police. Which is more likely: that they just melt away on cue, or that they start picking off American boys from the freshly-liberated rooftops? Does the word "Lebanon" mean anything?

Many of the American NeoCon rants against Europe spinelessness tend to be based on extravagant re-writings of the history around World War II and the folly of European "appeasement". Always, it is omitted that the US was quite happy with a policy of appeasement - and active trade with the Nazis - until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and forced it into the war. Never is it contemplated that the French Republic inspired that of America. It extends to lunatic opinion pieces like this one in the Chicago Sun-Times, urging the US to head off the Franco-German "power grab" for Europe. Yes, the US must head off a power grab for Europe by the, er, Europeans …

Meanwhile, the adolescent NeoCon squawker Jonah Goldberg taunts the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys (a line he didn't even make up himself but stole from The Simpsons - one of the really sad things about NeoCons is that they have no worthwhile art of their own). Mother Jones sizes it up in Hating America.

A graph showing Bush's polling since his inauguration. Many polls now have him rating around the same as Clinton was at the trough of Monicagate - and small wonder, given that he has committed his country to a decade of fiscal deficits and his economy is tanking. Fear and threat seem to be Bush's only friends.

Speaking of which, the US government has cleared the way for the use of nuclear weapons in Iraq.

I got some email from Neil Morrison at Auckland university, who made some good points about war in Iraq. But I baulked at this: Your tone of moral outrage is typical of the Left in NZ at present who believe that there is no case at all for military intervention and that those who advocate such a course are warmongers and Bush lackies.

As a consistent supporter of trade liberalisation (and, I like to think, the holder of a measured view on the World Bank and the IMF) I hardly qualify as a member of "the Left" in the sense it's meant here. I believed that there was a case for Gulf War I, and for military action in Afghanistan (although I found the virtual erasure from the record of Afghani civilian casualties extremely disturbing - did they not also die for freedom?). I actually even acknowledge that military action against Iraq may be necessary if proof is provided of active and threatening development of banned weapons. But it hasn't been.

And it's hardly just "the left" that is suspicious of US motives. Polls suggest about 80 per cent of people in Britain, the chief US ally, remain unconvinced by arguments for precipitate war. The people of the major European countries (not to mention their centre-right governments) are of the same sentiment. The leaders of the major religious faiths have all argued against war. And the world's political and business elite has made clear its suspicion in Davos this week. This from the Toronto Star's report from the World Economic Forum in Davos:

"It is the threat of war in Iraq that has exposed the deepest divide between the United States and people from many other nations. Criticism of the Bush administration has been intense.

"Some Americans here have been shocked by the depth of feeling, since there has been much less debate in the United States where, as Republican Congressman Robert Portman put it, the people support the president. Indeed, a University of Chicago professor said criticism is considered 'unpatriotic.'"

Check out how many times the P-word was tossed at Janine Garofalo as she did the rounds of TV news interviewers arguing against her government's policy. This rather sneering comment by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post seems to miss the point that, according to the publicity, being American is about being able to criticise your government without fear of being called a traitor.

Unfortunately, that's not the case amongst America's new ruling orthodoxy. These people who base their right to bear arms on the need to be ready to, if necessary, forcibly take back their country from the Feds - and who spent eight years excoriating the Clintons - are quite happy to stand by and giggle as the Feds intercept emails and raid the houses of people who have done no more than criticise their President.

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Nice city, Mayor still a fool | Jan 27, 2003 11:03

I took the kids to the new, revamped Parnell Baths yesterday. That it is now a bit different from our regular swim destination at Point Erin could be seen from a quick look around the car park: I haven't seen so many expensive vehicles in one place for a while, but, then I don't spend a lot of time over that side of town.

Inside, the drivers of the cars - thin, tanned women and their flabby men - had pitched up their spots around the pool and across the square of new turf at the west end of the complex. This struck me as another difference from Point Erin, where the blokes are in better nick and the mums look like mums. There were no games of touch or volleyball going on. There was no room.

The baths themselves still seem a bit odd for modern use, and not only because they are full of treated seawater. While the remarkably warm new kids' pool was packed with splashing, frolicking punters, the much larger main pool remains a minimum six feet deep and was thus barely being used. The kids were unimpressed.

Inevitably, John Banks was there on Saturday hailing the re-opening of the baths: "To keep the heart and soul of the city Auckland needs to keep places like this," he barked, ignoring the fact that last year he declared that the tender process on the project had been "halted", it was "hanging in the balance" and he was personally "reluctant to spend many millions of dollars upgrading Parnell Baths if the eastern corridor was running five metres away with 16-axle juggernauts hurtling down the road."

Tendering - set in motion by the previous council, after an actual vote in 1997 - had not been halted. Banks' claim was, like so much of what he has said since becoming mayor, a fantasy (or, to put it less charitably, a lie). His ability to perform a seamless about-face - he ran a visceral campaign against the Britomart transport project then turned up to hail its launch as "a great day for the Auckland mayoralty" - is remarkable.

This is also the mayor who promised to close off Queen Street from vehicle traffic at nights - he even confidently told the press that the barricades would be up within a month. That was back in October 2001. It never happened, of course.

It seems that Banks' fondness for self-aggrandising fantasy has spread to his CitRat councilors. Brian Rudman wrote a nice column about councillors Geoff Abbott and Scott Milne shamelessly claiming credit for the work of others. And, of course, doing so in pricey, ratepayer-funded promotional literature of the kind Banks swore - before he became mayor - that he was going to eradicate.

The fact is, Banks and the CitRats have achieved very little in their term. Their financial control has been notably inferior to that of the previous council. They have repeatedly been obliged to back down from unsustainable and undemocratic positions. And yet the mayor blusters on where most of us might feel shame or, at least, embarrassment.

How do you develop this kind of chutzpah? By using your power as a broadcaster to peddle unnecessary dietary supplements in whose sale you have a financial stake, of course. Of course, that all went horribly wrong and ended up in court. There's no way to burn off those troublesome feelings of shame like selling something that comes out of a bee's arse, is there?

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I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning | Jan 23, 2003 10:10

So the President of the USA says he's tired of waiting for UN weapons inspectors to finish doing their job. Saddam has been given "ample time to disarm".

But why the hurry? There is no prospect of Iraq amassing, let alone using, weapons of mass destruction while UN inspectors are crawling all over the place, is there? Why not allow a full and proper inspection to take place and then make a decision? Wouldn't that be sensible?

After all, the US spent seven years in technical non-compliance with the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. And even now, it's years behind schedule in destroying its own stockpile. Evidence was presented only a few months ago that it was conducting a chemical weapons research and development program in violation of international arms control law.

But let's not have any illusions about the Iraqi regime. Although, as this handy clickable map shows, it's far from the biggest producer of chemical and biological weapons in the Middle East (that's Syria), it stands out for its willingness to use such weapons in the past quarter-century. (For a history of the use of chemical weapons, read this timeline.) Although it offers greater freedoms to women and adherents of non-Islamic faiths than many of its Arab neighbours, its suppression of dissent, particularly amongst ethnic minorities, has been savage.

It is, of course, a matter of record that the known use by Iraq of such weapons took place during the 1980s, when it was a client state of the US. US officials not only knew Iraq was using these weapons but continued to allow American companies to supply materials for their manufacture.

A subsequent US Senate report noted that "These biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction … It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program."

A (long) list of American companies have supplied goods and services related to nuclear, chemical, biological and conventional weapons to Iraq. Such a list was part of Iraq's recent declaration to the United Nations - which was, according to news reports at the time, "edited" by US government representatives.

The December 19 issue of Berlin daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung ran a story headed 'Exclusive: The Secret List of Arms Suppliers - Saddam's Business partners', which apparently contained the passages excised by the Americans. This column from the Sydney Morning Herald offers a partial translation.

The most infamous and most awful of Saddam's deployments of WMD was, of course, their use on Kurdish villages in Northern Iraq. Perhaps thousands of Kurds died in these attacks. Of course, it is worth noting that many more innocent Iraqi Kurds have died as a result of cross-border assaults by Turkish forces, using conventional weapons, but, well, that's different. Isn't it?

When it comes to international efforts to control and eradicate chemical weapons, the US has tended to be part of the problem rather than the solution. In July 2001, years of work on devising a verification regime for the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC) was wrecked when it was unexpectedly rejected by the US.

The problem? A verification system would have required the US to submit to independent inspections just like everyone else. As recently as last November, America was still at loggerheads with nearly all of the 145 other nations trying to keep the world safe from such weapons.

And so it goes … it's easy to be facetious with this stuff - the ironies are so rich, the hypocrisy so evident, the institutional memory so shoddy. When this poll could show that two thirds of all Americans fancy themselves to have a good grasp of the issues surrounding the Iraqi crisis - but half of those polled thought Iraqi nationals were involved in the September 11 attacks (none were, of course), it's hard not to feel worried.

The current US government has not only pissed away a vast measure of international goodwill, it has eroded America's moral authority, damaged the unity of Europe (and NATO along with it), systematically undermined the UN arms control process, given power to the arm of Islamic terrorists and - bizarrely - made Saddam an object of sympathy. Thank God for the Germans and the French.

Our own government has, in keeping with its stake in a rules-based world, said we will not support an attack without a UN mandate, and even then our support would not be military. Some, like Nicky Hager in the Listener, regard that as a criminal shame - they want us to be preaching to the world, UN mandate or no.

Frankly, when you balance what good we could do against what harm might befall us (the rather poor climate for truth at present was indicated by Jim Sutton's required withdrawal of a perfectly accurate observation about American "arm-twisting" of other countries) it's hard not to conclude that it would be more prudent to keep our damn fool heads down. Nationalism, sadly, begets itself.

A finally, a word for minor Act Party functionary Reuben P Chapple, whose lead letter in the current Listener seeks to justify war on Iraq by potting the Left for its complicit support of "greater butchers than Adolf Hitler, the Communist dictators" even as it marched against "US imperialism".

What Chapple seems to miss is that he and his chums are the embarrassing Marxists of their era; ever willing to forgive and forget according to the orders of the day. None of them were demanding the invasion of Iraq six months ago (let alone condemning Iraqi atrocities before Gulf War I). But, instructions having gone out from NeoCon Central, it's suddenly the received truth. Don't you just love ideology?

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