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February 28, 2007
Afghanistan: sobering
Intervention in Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is seen to be justified and it has bipartisan support, even though it is unclear why Australian troops are there; or even what NATO is trying to achieve. It is a low key war and the strategic aims are fuzzy. What sits in the background is the nation-building neo-conservative program of regime change, the ostensible purpose of which is to "drain the swamp" that supposedly nurtures the terrorist pestilence Al Qaeda who was given a home by the Taliban. Islamic fundamentalism rules.
The usual answer for NATO being in Afghanistan is the need to defend a secular liberal democracy by taking the fight to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The justification ends there. Mission creep continues in the face of a Taliban resurgence and control in the south of Afghanistan, even as we are told about the great "progress" that is being made in Afghanistan. Yet economic reconstruction—especially in some of the deprived southern provinces where there are security challenges—has hardly taken place, bin Laden seems to have become yesterdays villain in the process, and the existing government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and divided.
The gap between Western rhetoric supporting democratization and development in Muslim societies and the actual commitment that Western countries are prepared to make is large. Tariq Ali, in this article in Counterpunch suggests that all is not as it seems:
What was initially viewed by some locals as a necessary police action against al-Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks is now perceived by a growing majority in the entire region as a fully-fledged imperial occupation. The Taliban is growing and creating new alliances not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation. As the British and Russians discovered to their cost in the preceding two centuries, Afghans never liked being occupied.
The American's victory in Afghanistan is beginning to unravel, and it increasingly looks as if President Hamid Karzai is ruler of little more than the capital city of Kabul. If a growing numbers of Afghans see the NATO-led forces as an enemy similar to the Russians, then there is no way NATO can win this war, given the rising anti-American insurgencies. The solution is political, not military. Is U.S. foreign policy fueling the very Taliban insurgency that the U.S. force is there to combat?
Update: 28 February
An account by Mark Silva from the Chicago Tribune of what it is like being a journalist traveling with the Dick Cheney, the US Vice President, to Afghanistan, after he'd left Australia. It highlights the rules for the press on these trips.
I presume that the objective of NATO in Afghanistan is to establish a long-term presence in the region and that Afghanistan and Pakistan is a base used by the US to launch covert operations into Iran. Western development strategy should concentrate on two areas: helping the Kabul government establish health and education facilities, which do not directly threaten regional rulers, and using the U.S. military to repair infrastructure, beginning with roads.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:29 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
February 27, 2007
the denial machine
Four Corners ran a programme from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's The Fifth Estate entitled The Denial Machine last night. The programme:
investigates the campaign to deny the science of global warming and slow international action against it. It tracks the activities of a small group of North American scientists, some of whom previously worked for Big Tobacco and who are now receiving donations from large oil and coal interests. It also examines how key planks of the fossil fuel industry’s case were adopted by governments in the US and Canada…
It puts name and faces to those in the publicity campaign of the major coal and energy in the US--those that stand to lose out from climate change policy--- to delay any government action to address global warming, such as taxes on CO2 emissions or an emissions trading scheme.
The Canadian programme highlights the recent history of the media politics, not the science; its history because even Australia's biggest electricity and gas companies are demanding that the commonwealth government establish a national greenhouse emissions trading scheme. Their argument is that carbon is going to be priced in one way or another, and that emmissions trading is the most efficient way to deal with the pricing issue.
The Institute of Public Affairs looks to be increasingly isolated on the issue and the shift to a clean energy future for Australia.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:20 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 26, 2007
paranoia and politics
I've just re-read Richard Hofstadter's influential 1964 Harper's essay entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics about the anti-communist right in the US in the 1950s. How eeringly accurate for today.
Take these two paragraphs in the section entitled 'Emulating the Enemy' about paranoids:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.
That's Bush, Cheney and Howard and Murdock's Australian as much it is the Islamic fundamentalists. The former see it as a new kind of long lasting war that involves defending civilization from barbarism.Iraq is the central battlefield is this war. The terrorist enemy cannot be deterred or contained. Their destruction requires showing strength, using power, and cutting back on civil liberties. If the US loses the enemy comes after us. It will follow us home.
Now this paragraph:
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
That's the neo-cons---'what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.' If the patriotic conservatives, who wrap themselves in a flag and carry a cross, see themselves fighting to preserve our civilization, our very existence, then the urgency and goodness of the fight against the Islamic enemies justifies any means used to fulfill it. Including torture, the easing of checks and balances on the executive, states of emergency, reducing cities to rubble etc. If The terrorist enemy is be destroyed, then that may include a possible US strike against Iran.
Cheney's is not just a bizarre analysis. It is the paranoid style in politics that is being expressed when he talks.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:39 AM | TrackBack
February 25, 2007
forever hopeful
Well now. Howard delivered to SA on water last Friday.
He guaranteed a minimium flow in South Australia of 1850 gigalitres,with a strategic reserve kept for aside for drought conditions. So Howard ensured South Australia's water security. He also agreed that the basin should be managed by an independent commission of experts, and that there would be a review of the takover after 7 years.
That should boost his prospects for hanging onto the Liberal marginal seats in Adelaide at the next federal election.
Matt Golding
That's one issue politically put to bed. The commonwealth is in control and now needs to get on with the job. A way forward has been found and Howard can take the credit.
Now for climate change. It's connected to water as it means less rain and runoff in the southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin. Alas for Howard, he's more rhetoric than substance on this issue.
Update: 26 February
On the ecological side of the water issue it is now probably necessary to start thinking in terms of reducing water use because the inflows into the Murray-Darling system will likely be reduced in the future, and the rivers are already stressed due to the basin wide over-allocation problem. Given the notable failure of the states to address over allocation of water in the Basin, the sustainable level of extraction is what is now needed. The water is just not there. This sustainability needs to include:
maintaining river health at an acceptable level;
serious cost-benefit assessment of irrigation proposals;
extensive use of drip irrigation technology;
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
February 24, 2007
Pax Americana
The Bush administration continually talks in terms of ending tyranny and replacing it with democracy in the world of nations. Vice President, Dick Cheney, who is currently visiting Australia, is talking in terms of the war on terrorism and the unprecedented struggle between civilization and barbarism.
The US actions to achieve this goal of advancing civilization include internationally illegal, unilateralist, and preemptive attacks on other countries, accompanied by arbitrary imprisonments and the practice of torture. The US defends its pursuit of regime change and advancing civilization by making the claim that the United States possesses an exceptional status among nations that confers upon it special international responsibilities, and exceptional privileges in meeting those responsibilities.
Garland
Few other nations accept this manifest destiny claim, as they see it as a national myth of divine election and mission. Even the British realize they were fighting for the United States, not Britain, in Iraq.They are leaving a local civil war in Basra, and their departure looks like retreat.
William Pfaff in Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America in the New York of Books says that instead of the stability promised by the proponents of American military and political deployment in the form of Pax Americana we have:
The doomed and destructive war of choice in Iraq, continuing and mounting disorder in Afghanistan following another such war, war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, as well as between Hamas and Fatah, accompanied by continuing crisis in Palestine, with rumbles of new American wars of choice with Iran or Syria, and the emergence of a nuclear North Korea —all demonstrate deep international instability.
American international hegemony is considered a threat in the Middle East, where it's interventionism is seen in terms of a war against Islamic "nationalism" and as creating an creating an "arc of instability" stretching from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 23, 2007
governing the Murray-Darling Basin
There is no doubt the Murray-Darling Basin needs to be run as one basin, by an authority empowered to make some very hard decisions. Howard is right on this. However, the decision to do that, and how to do that, may not be made at this Friday's meeting since Victoria is out on a limb.
In terms of the battle over federalism and water Victoria positions itself as squeeky clean--it's doing all the right things by the environment and the problems really do lie with the other states. Victoria says that it has been leading the nation on water reform since 1999, stopping the privatisation of water authorities, implementing hundreds of projects that are safeguarding Victoria's water supplies for the next 50 years, and meeting the objectives of the National Water Initiative. It's the other states that are dragging the chain on reform. This squeeky green image underlies Victoria's response to governing the Murray-Darling Basin.
The problem with Howard's takeover plan for the governance of the Murray-Darling Basin Steve Bracks says is that:
'it appears that this national reform effort is a scrapbook affair — a paper-thin improvisation cut and pasted outside normal departmental and cabinet channels.....With so little hard detail, all we have to go on is the Prime Minister's good word. Personally, I don't believe Victorians are ready to trust the Prime Minister with total control of our state's water security in northern Victoria. To do so would risk leaving farmers, communities, the environment and our rivers literally high and dry.
Bracks is right to be concerned about on the lack of detail on such an important issue. Most of the states were less than impressed, hence their proposal for a review after 5 years. Although the Commonwealth plans to address the over-allocation problem in the MDB head on” through two major programmes for water recovery (one based on infrastructure and efficiency and the other on buying entitlements and structural adjustment), the plan is light on detail and timelines or targets for dealing with overallocation and over-use.
Paul Sinclair, director of Environment Victoria's Healthy Rivers Campaign, says that four areas need to be addressed in terms of greater detail. There needs to be timelines for returning enough water to the Murray and Darling rivers to make them healthy; real water must be returned to the Murray, the Murray and Darling must be managed in terms of water and degraded catchments; money needs to be allocated to monitoring programs to make sure government investment is improving river health.
Victoria has proposes its own governance plan, which it says is much better than Howard's. The other states are not so convinced. So is Victoria as squeeky clean as it claims? Paul Sinclair lifts the veil:
In 2003 the Victorian Government's green paper on water reform identified the Goulburn, Campaspe, Loddon, Murray, Wimmera and Snowy rivers as rivers "likely to be stressed". A scientific assessment in 2004 found that zero per cent of the Murray as it flows through the Mallee was in good condition. The Loddon has 3 per cent in good condition, the Campaspe zero per cent, and the Goulburn 26 per cent. Seventy-six per cent of our freshwater fish species are considered to be at risk of being pushed to extinction. Meanwhile, the Victorian Government allows the Barmah wetlands, one of the Murray's iconic sites, to be grazed to dust by cattle. Victoria will be well positioned to claim Commonwealth funds to fix sick rivers.Victoria continues to refuse to buy back entitlements from irrigators. Victoria is spending up to $4000 for each megalitre saved by fixing leaks in irrigation channels, while the market price is $2000. So for every megalitre saved by fixing channels, two could have been bought on the market.
Victoria, like the other states, approaches water issues in terms of protecting its irrigators first. On the Victorian side of the Murray, farmers are getting 95 per cent of the water; on the NSW side most farmers have general security licences, and this year are getting zero allocations—not one drop. Those few farmers with higher security licences are getting 48 per cent. On the South Australian section of the Murray, farmers are getting 60 per cent of their allocations. Bracks is determined to defend the Victorian situation. Victoria's interests must come first.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:39 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 22, 2007
Iraq: a changed tune
Tony Blair's presentation of the UK's Iraq troop reduction (1,600 British troops) as a modest orderly step towards the completion, as planned, of the task on which he embarked in 2003, was a cover for the defeat of a tragic policy. It's a withdrawal.
Alan Moir
The Howard Government, which has backed itself into a corner with its attacks on "cut and run", is now using the language of withdrawal. Just a couple of weeks ago it was saying that any withdrawal would be disastrous: a victory for terrorists that would threaten Australia's national security---- it was a catastrophe, would embolden terrorists, increase the bloodshed, and motivate the Islamic terrorists on our doorstep.
Once again Canberra follows the lines of the script from Washington: the UK withdrawal is a success! Juan Cole says it is otherwise:
This is a rout, there should be no mistake. The fractious Shiite militias and tribes of Iraq's South have made it impossible for the British to stay. They already left Sadr-controlled Maysan province, as well as sleepy Muthanna. They moved the British consulate to the airport because they couldn't protect it in Basra. They are taking mortar and rocket fire at their bases every night.
One account of life in Iraq. It still looks as if the surge is a desperate PR gamble that will have little more than a very short, very localized effect.
So why doesn't Washington just declare victory and leave---- it's "Mission Accomplished" etc. Oh I forgot. There' the little case Iran flexing its power in the region. We lovers of freedom and democracy cannot have that now can we?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:38 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack
February 21, 2007
doctors and self-regulation
I see that doctors in the UK may well lose their right to self-regulate (vet or police themselves) under a shake-up of their professional regulation. The General Medical Council (GMC) is likely to lose its powers of adjudication in fitness-to-practise cases and its professional elected medical majority could disappear. These responses are part of a set of reforms aimed at preventing another Harold Shipman tragedy, the medical scandal at the U.K.'s Bristol Royal Infirmary, and the ongoing professional cover ups and closed ranks. We are dealing with a history of the medical profession that is littered with mal practice and professional mis-conduct.
As Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, says in Good doctors, safer patients times are changing:
...medical regulation has traditionally been synonymous with ‘self-regulation’. Until the late 1970s, medicine occupied a privileged and relatively protected position within British society. There was a belief that bad doctors were few and far between. A view prevailed that the quality of care was difficult to define and impossible to measure. There was also a pervasive philosophy that a doctor’s performance was not the business of colleagues or management. Moreover, there was a culture in which information was neither forthcoming nor transparent to patients. In the 1980s and 1990s, high-profile cases of poor performance steadily eroded this consensus and the concept of pure self-regulation was increasingly perceived to be outmoded. Simultaneously, society had moved on. Blind deference to the professions on the part of the public had largely disappeared. Instead, the public came to see itself as the consumer of services: as such, people were entitled to expect certain standards in return for the taxpayer’s considerable investment.
Self-regulation is still the norm in Australia and it has not protected patients from harm, as the case of "Dr Death", Jayant Patel, in Queensland attests. Will the CoAG reform process lead to health professional losing their right to self-regulate?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:18 AM | TrackBack
CoAG reform agenda
Last year CoAG endorsed the Bracks Government's proposal third wave of national economic reform which included cutting red tape and human capital issues such as health and education that involved in investing in the capabilities of the Australian people. It was argued that the new national reform agenda could add 3 per cent to GDP after ten years from improved business efficiency and competitiveness, reduced red tape and increased labour force participation.
There seems to be little rush to implement the reform agenda at the moment. Though there is ongoing background work by the various working parties on the different issues, the cohesion between the states and the commonwealth appears to be fraying. You can see the fraying around the $10 billion federal administration of water, the states moving on carbon trading scheme without Canberra.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:46 AM | TrackBack
February 20, 2007
different Jewish voices
I see that The Guardian has given over a week of space for different, diverse and independent Jewish voices to express their views. These alternative diasporic Jewish expressions are a welcome break from the strident nationalist voices that fills the media flows and which make honest discussions about Israel and Palestine so very difficult to conduct of late.
There is a lot of circling the wagons by the right-wing Israel Lobby and various attempts by pro-Likud Israeli's to muzzle criticism of Zionism and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The diversity of diasporic Jewish opinion is a welcome development, since as Lenin's Tomb says:
'Israel makes a concerted effort to manufacture a Jewish consensus, and devotes hard currency to this, because the entire moral basis for its existence as a Jewish State is threatened by the perception that there are serious divisions as opposed to a few 'renegade Jews' as Elie Weisel might call them.
Richard Silverstein says, in one of the many interesting op-eds in The Guardian that things are now changing. The walls of the hawkish, conservative Israel Lobby are cracking, especially after the Alvin H. Rosenfeld paper entitled Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism published by the American Jewish Committee in the US that targeted liberal Jews for their criticisms of Zionism and Israeli Government policies.
I've looked at the Rosenfeld paper over at philosophy.com
With different Jewish voices increasingly being heard in the public sphere, we may get a better debate about the Middle East. Similar moves are happening in Australia.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Beattie's water dreaming
When Premier Beattie speaks about water he often sounds like the National Party--more dams to "droughtproof" Queensland, and modifications to the Bradfield's Depression era plan to divert northern rivers (including the Burdekin and Tully) through western rivers ( the Warrego and Thomson rivers) and into the Murray-Darling system. Neither make economic or ecological sense.
Beattie 's view is that his state's got water in north Queensland that gets poured into the sea, is wasted and that it should be used to open up additional mining and agriculture in the state's north. It's the old 1950s water development view pure and simple that is being spruiked.
Presumably there are big government subsidies involved in the development since cost estimates by the South Australian Government price water from the scheme at about $6 a kilolitre, more than five times the price of urban water and up to 30 times that being paid by most irrigators who would use most of the new water.
No doubt the water development lobby will sell the idea of the Bradfield Scheme as another Snowy Mountain style project, and then add, to ensure a public subsidy from the Commonwealth, that this scheme will divert excess flood waters from the north into the increasingly parched southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin. It's the old dream of making deserts bloom and creating an agricultural and mining paradise in inland Queensland. Beattie simply has his hand out for cash to develop water resources in the north.
The Murray-Darling Basin has become the battleground for a water war.The irrigation industry in the Basin does not pay its way, and it is dependent on, and expects, massive public investment. If Beattie wants development up north the irrigators should build the necessary infrastructure. The upgrade to the water channels to prevent leakage and e evaporation in the southern part of the basin should be funded by the irrigation industry.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:31 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
February 19, 2007
political ambition
It's a tough cartoon about Peter Garrett, the celebrity politician, but it captures the truth about political ambition, the need for celebrities to toe the ALP party line, and the necessity to reject one's history in order to do so.
Geoff Pryor
First it was a switch on US bases on Australian soil---the shift, in response to the Liberal attack that Labor is a risk to the national security, was explained as the passion of an idealistic youth. The ALP Labor announced it was in favour of giving the US permission for its new communications base whatever it actually was to be. The celebrity politician is a new phenomena and Garrett's history as a celebrity means the he leaves plenty of material for the Liberal dirt unit to mine and put into play to try and show that Labor is a national security risk.
I have to admit that I'm more interested in Professor Ian Lowe's lecture in honour of the late Rick Farley.
The lecture explores the relationships between our identity, our culture, our wellbeing and the natural values of this country are crucial to our future, and Lowe argues that the health of our communities is related to the health of landscapes:
Care for country is basic to the survival of our entire nation. That's a fundamental truth. The health of the community relies on developing economic opportunities that are culturally sensitive, socially inclusive, economically viable and sustain natural systems.Most of our decision makers still use what I call the pig-headed model, in which they see the environment as the main game, like the face of the pig, and society and environment as two minor protuberances propping up the economy. They genuinely believe that if the economy is strong, problems with society, problems with environment, can always be patched up. That's not just a wrong-headed model, but it's not working. The unprecedented economic progress of recent decades has come at some social cost and very large environmental cost. I think we need a better model
We need a better model of development because the old one has caused loss of biological diversity, degradation of inland waterways and the destruction of the productive capacity of rural land. Lowe says that:
Climate change is the most urgent challenge, not just a critical problem in its own right, but a compounding factor for other environmental issues. Loss of biodiversity was already a problem, but it's now being worsened by climate change. Losing coral reefs was already a problem, but the ones that are still in good shape are now threatened by coral bleaching. The Murray-Darling Basin which is crucial to the economic and environmental health of south-east Australia was already in crisis from over-extraction, but climate change seems certain to reduce still further the amount of water flowing down these rivers. Climate change is a difficult problem, because it's caused by our level of energy use, which in turn is responsible for our material standard of living.
The issue is one how we produce an economy that works within the boundaries and natural systems: that is the challenge.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:29 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 18, 2007
child well being
The Rowson cartoon refers to this UNICEF Report entitled Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries. It gives a picture of child well being through the consideration of six dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, family and peer relationships, subjective well-being, behaviours and lifestyles informed by the Convention on the rights of the child and relevant academic literature. Britain came out rather poorly as did the US.
Martin Rowson
Australia was not included in the study. I have no idea where Australia sits in terms of the European Nations and the US. If the economy is booming are children reaping the benefits? What we do know is that those children who live in poverty come from families where
neither parent works, and that there there would be a major differences in well-being between children living in different geographic areas.
That would indicate starting to adjust work to recognise the reality of parents' lives, and in particular poor parents, and unless we provide support for those poor parents to get into the workforce through skills development and training, then we are going to continue with a cycle of poverty that goes from one generation to another.
In addition, we would need focus on moving beyond income poverty to broader measures of social exclusion. These remarks by a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2013309,00.html">Libby Brooks in The Guardian on childhood poverty go become income poverty to social exclusion:
It's important not to cry "toxic childhood" immediately. This is not solely a consequence of junk food, computer games and the Pussycat Dolls. Many of Unicef's findings can be traced back to poverty, pure and simple. But not all of them. The report also points to significant cultural factors. British society does not value its children. Since the Victorian era, they have been segregated from society, corralled into classrooms and swept off the streets. In many ways, simply to be young is to meet the definition of social exclusion: no say in the political process, not contributing directly to the economy, criminalised for offences determined by your status rather than actions, vilified by the media.
It would appear that many children in living in poverty in Australia are being segregated from society, corralled into classrooms and swept off the streets.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:08 PM | TrackBack
February 17, 2007
national security
The Canberra Press Gallery holds that John Howard's two big trump cards are national security and the economy, and that these provide the bedrock of his support in the nation. However, these are not cast in stone, especially the former. Dripping water on national security can have some effect, since Howard's position on Iraq is whatever the Bush administration's is, and he is locked in the time warp of either being 'f'or the US or for the terrorists.'
That position is difficult to defend because it does not square with the retreat of the US in Iraq to defending Baghdad or the brutal reality on the ground in Baghdad. The hard lines around the Howard 's national security fortress are jagged, chipped, and cracked.
Two cracks that have appeared in the walls around Howard's position are the scary stories about terrorists (eg., David Hicks) aren't resonating like they used to. Similarly with Howard's debating Australia's role in Iraq and when it might end last week in Parliament. Iraq doesn't seem to have the same national security ring about it as before. What is being exposed is that it is more about supporting the alliance with the United States and less about helping the Shi'ite Iraqi Government deal with the Sunni insurgency.
Howard's either you are 'f'or the US or you are for the terrorists' looks an isolated one, when the US House of Representatives rejects President George W Bush's Iraq troop build-up, and by implication, passes a negative judgment on Bush's overall stewardship of the war in Iraq This rejection is a symbolic but politically potent challenge to Bush's unpopular war strategy. A more assertive opposition Congress increasingly places Bush (and Howard) on the defensive.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:26 AM | TrackBack
February 16, 2007
political blogging #2
Glenn Greenward, over at Unclaimed Territory has a post on political blogging that builds on this earlier post here at public opinion.The standard view in the Australian media, and amongst journalists who view bloggers as hostile competitors, is that political bloggers are foul mouthed, reckless, ignorant and wildly opinionated. These amateurs bring the commentary of professional journalists into undeserved disrepute.
Greenwald challenges the disreputable bloggers image when he says that:
The political blogosphere is driven by many factors, but the predominant one, I think, is a pervasive dissatisfaction with the dominant media and political institutions in this country. The blogosphere is essentially a reaction to that dissatisfaction -- an attempt to create an alternative venue where citizens can debate political issues and organize and inform one another without having to rely upon our country's empty media stars and the myopic, corrupt opinion-making institutions which have wrought so much damage and continue to do so.The principal value of the blogosphere is that it democratizes our political discourse almost completely.
This had the effect of getting around the media gatekeepers of the public discourse since the blogosphere enables people to say what they want, how they want, without caring if that alienates or offends a small group of Canberra Press Gallery journalists or media elites. It is part of the broad shift away from print to online publishing.
As Greenwald points out competing system that exists outside of the national political and media institutions has to be financially self-sustaining.The key issue is that have to find ways to be able to work on political advocacy and make a living at the same time. There isn't a ready made economic model to fund political advocacy. As Greenwald says:
The national corporate-backed media is a huge, sprawling, powerful network. So, too, is the multi-headed right-wing opinion-making monster composed of think tanks, subsidized magazines, and well-fed pundits. To compete with that, to battle against it, requires the building and maintaining of strong systems that are sustainable, which means, at minimum, that they are funded and financially viable.
So I can understand his shift Unclaimed Territory to Salon. it follows the trajectory of several US bloggers Kevin Drum to Washington Monthly, Andrew Sullivan to Time and Mickey Kaus to Slate ---Greenwald's first post on Salon is here.
More over at philosophy.com
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:41 AM | TrackBack
blaming Iran
The Bush administration has recently been making claims about Iranian intervention in Iraq. These claims wash through the media in Australia with little critical comment. Are journalists seeking to please the neo-con right? The New York Times---the so called liberal media--- is running these claims without critical comment, thereby acting as a publicist for the Bush Administration on this issue.
The argument is this. Defense department officials presented evidence of Iranian manufactured types of roadside bomb that were being used against US troops. There's also been evidence that the Qods force of the Iranian Republican Guards are operating in Iraq.
And it is being claimed that Qods force personnel are responsible for bringing these super road side bombs into Iraq. It is also said that these Qods force are giving weapons to the people using them against US troops. Bush says the key question is whether the leaders of the Iranian government at the highest level directly told them to do so. He implies they have.
We need to be sceptical here because the scenario of Iran fueling the Iraqi insurgency with weapons doesn't hold up. There's not much evidence to support it.
Who are the Iranians supplying these new weapons to? The Shiites who run the Iraq government? The New York Times article referred to above says Shiite militias. Isn't the Iranian government aligned with the Shiites? The claims imply that implies the Shiites have been at war with the U.S., when in fact they are controlled by parties which make up the Iraqi government.
So is it the Sunni insurgents opposing the Shiite government who are being suppled with super road side bombs weapons from Iran? Isn't the Sunni insurgency in Iraq deeply hostile to Iran, and haven't the insurgent groups repeatedly denounced the democratically elected Iraqi government as pawns of Iran.
Do the Americans actually know the differences between Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad?
It seems that the US is trying to blame everything on Iran because Washington wants to ratchet up its confrontation with Tehran as the Bush administration intensifies its preparations for a military confrontation with Iran.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:34 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
February 15, 2007
Apocalyptic views
Barack Obama challenges the view that an American withdrawal from Iraq will result in unbridled civil war and massive carnage. This view, which is peddled by John Howard, is based on what Robert Dreyfuss calls a worst-case assumption: that if America leaves quickly, the Apocalypse will follow. This, says Howard, will spread to South-East Asia and threaten Australia's national security in a substantive way. Will it?
John Spooner
It's reasonable to question when the whole context of the debate around the Iraq war has shifted towards when and how to withdraw. Only Howard and Bush and their neocon supporters are sticking to their old lines of staying the course until victory is achieved, without really saying what victory actually means these days, given that it's no longer about democracy. What they do instead is push the fear button when what is needed is a national debate on the floor of Parliament and in civil society on the American/Australian course in Iraq.
What is being suggested by Bush and Howard about the consequences of a staged withdrawal. In a post-occupation Iraq al-Qaeda or other (unnamed) Islamic extremists will seize control once America departs; or that al-Qaeda will establish a safe haven in a rump, lawless Sunnistan and use that territory as a base, much as it used Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. This hardly squares with the realities on the ground: sinccethe bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra a year ago, the sectarian map of Baghdad has been almost completely redrawn as Shiites pushed Sunnis from area after area.
The Robert Dreyfuss article in The Washington Monthly is good and well worth reading.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:33 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
February 14, 2007
public housing in SA
In days gone by there was good public housing for those on low incomes, such as the working poor, unemployed or single parents. No more. There is a now a desperate shortage with little public housing being built, and people relying on the private rental market for rental properties.
Ross Bateup
Rising prosperity means a shortage of rental properties as investors invest elsewhere for better returns and new homebuyers entering the property market. We are in our 16th year of continuous growth in the economy since the recession of the early 1990s. Keep the economy growing for long enough, unemployment comes down, house prices increase and rents continue to rise. Hence the housing affordability crisis.
The effects of the growth iareuneven. As Ross Gittens points out in the Sydney Morning Herald:
You can see it in the differing rates of unemployment around the country: 3 per cent in Western Australia and 4 per cent in Queensland, compared with 5 per cent in NSW and Victoria and getting on for 6 per cent in South Australia and Tasmania.
So there is a need for public housing and emergency housing. The common view is that markets should set house prices and rental demand.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:17 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
February 13, 2007
a bad hand?
It's about an election isn't it. The trans-Pacific stoush between John Howard and US presidential candidate Barack Obama over comments by the latter about the US withdrawing from Iraq in this speech looks to be a desperate attempt to play the wedge to keep the Iraq issue alive as an election issue. Howard' strategy with his ‘helping al-Quaida’ smear is designed to retain the core conservative support around national security at a time when Iraq is increasingly being seen as an unpopular war in Australia.
Bill Leak
But Howard looks defensive, sounds shrill and acts rattled. Howard has in effect launched a broadbrush attack against the Democratic Party, which has control of the Congress thanks to the popular vote against the Bush administration and its Iraq war a few months ago. The Democrats may very well have control of the White House in two years' time. So it's not about the Australia US Alliance--it's about an alliance with the Republicans. No doubt Howard will turn the attack onto the ALP in the near future.
I cannot see how Howard's partisan attack is about defending Australia's broader national interest. Howard has studiously avoided even the slightest hint of criticism of US foreign policy even the torture side of things. Howard's argument, that withdrawal of allied forces from Iraq by March 2008 as advocated by Senator Obama would be a victory for al-Qaeda, ignores that the insurgency is homegrown and primarily run by Sunnis, fighting to retain their power in Shi'ite Iraq and the American occupation. This quite different from the war on terror. US military officials say that it is the Shi'ite militias, particularly the Sadrist Mehdi Army that are the greatest security threat in Iraq".
Howard's other argument, that 'If America is defeated in Iraq, the consequences for the West will be catastrophic", universalizes a specific situation: a civil war in Iraq between Shiite and Sunni. Many Sunni areas in Baghdad are virtual "no go" areas in the capital that are "off-limits" for American and even Iraqi soldiers. The response to the US clear, hold, and build" stratregy in Baghdad by the guerrillas is to melt into the population and awaited new opportunities to attack the military occupation. The effect of the US strategy is demolished buildings, deserted neighborhoods, and sectarian torture on both sides.
Howard and Downer speak about destabilising and destroying Iraq in the future tense as though they are oblivious to the daily carnage from the civil war going on there.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:29 AM | TrackBack
February 12, 2007
Iran: brinkmanship?
The US war in Iraq has been a highly destabilizing disaster for the Middle East region and a major boon to Iran's power. If Iraq is a quagmire, then, as Paul Rogers argues at Open Democracy, the significant build-up of US forces in the Persian Gulf appear to have much to do with a possible crisis with Iran. The Bush administration is also ratcheting up the pressure on Iranians inside Iraq acting covertly against the US troops.
Alan Moir
I do not think that the US talks tough on Iran, but otherwise is too bogged down in Iraq to pose a danger to Tehran. At the very least it's more a case of brinkmanship by the US. But it is brinkmanship in the hot house context of Washington's neo-con war rhetoric. So we watch the next step in brinksmanship to judge how far it is going to be taken.
Israel looks isolated in the region at the moment. People in Jerusalem, who are living under a dark cloud of fear, are thinking about a war with Iran. Not if it should be started, but when and how, so as to prevent another holocaust. The reality, as Jacques Chirac, the President of France, pointed out is self-evident: if an Iranian nuclear bomb were launched at Israel, Israel would wipe Tehran from the face of the earth. The Iranian rulers are not mad and the "balance of terror" will do its job of ensuring regional stability.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:08 AM | TrackBack
February 11, 2007
that close and special relationship
Tony Blair and John Howard are increasingly lonely voices when they plead that Britain or Australia and America must remain each other's indispensable allies. The defining characteristic of both leaders has has been to get as close as he could to the American President--they became George W Bush's best friend and helped lie their countries into war in Iraq. What they or their country have got in return is not clear.
Peter Brook
So far there is no accountability for these leaders to lie us into a war of their choosing. The federal ALP is not talking about accountibility if it wins government this year. Yet Parliament can win any battle with the executive as long as it has an informed public opinion behind it.
Presumably, when both Blair and Howard leave office their successors will have to fashion a new foreign policy for Britain and Australia which recasts their relationship with America and reorient their approach to the rest of the world. Such a foreign policy will no doubt be structured around to adeclaration of greater independence from the US.
The tombstone of that special relationship is Iraq, and as the Brooking 's Institute's recent Things Fall Apart study states, Iraq now exhibits the six patterns from other civil wars: large refugee flows, the breeding ground of new terrorist groups, radicalisation of neighbouring populations, the spread of secessionism, regional economic losses, and intervention by neighbours. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and Turkey are said to be "scrambling to catch up" with rival Iran.
This is the Bush administration path toward "the gates of hell." They bought us Iraq (a jungle world of a failed state), now they are are preparing to do the same for Iran.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:32 PM | TrackBack
February 10, 2007
the shifting sands of politics
The critics of Hicks' long incarceration in Guantanamo Bay without charge of terrorism have routinely been dismissed as anti-American, civil libertarian, doomsaying, Muslim-loving leftie pacifists bent on wrecking the ANZUS alliance. No more.
Alan Moir
Unfortunately for Howard,though public opinion has little time for Hicks, there is an understanding that this issue is one of injustice and a negative judgement is being made. Hence Howard's new public face of abrupt "anger" at the Americans and his promise the other day to "harrass" them.
Of course, Howard's political response of blaming the delayed justice on the Americans, doesn't square with Howard confirming that it is him, not the Americans, blocking extradition on the grounds that Hicks' 2001 activities in Afghanistan weren't actually illegal under Australian law.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:38 AM | Comments (22) | TrackBack
February 9, 2007
the politics of water
And I thought that all the states would sign up to Howard's big water plan for the Murray-Darling Basin. The four states, which control the Murray-Darling system , were being asked to hand over control of the rivers to the Commonwealth in exchange for a huge upgrade of irrigation infrastructure and measures to address water over-allocations. But, to my suprise, it was not to be.
Bill Leak
Suprisingly, I agree: the states should not be required to surrender their constitutional powers over their rivers.The states expressed concern over inadequate financing for the plan, the lack of written guarantees of minimum water flows, and the Commonwealth's demand for a veto power over developments on flood plains.
I guess the premiers will sign eventually.That means that most of the direct benefits will flow to the many prosperous irrigators lining the banks of the rivers of the Murray-Darling Basin. That is the cost of getting the Nationals onside for a reform of the governance of the Murray-Darling Basin.
What is good about Howard's plan is the $3 billion to buy out excess allocations is some allowance for structural adjustment to finance unviable irrigators to leave the industry. What is bad about it is the big spending on upgrading irrigation infrastructure such as lining channels so there is less water loss from seepage, which will certainly deliver more water to irrigators.Why should the Government should fund it. Why isn't it all the irrigators benefiting from irrigation infrastructure spend the money to maintain and upgrade it. Why not increase the price of water delivered to irrigators as a way to change their behaviour?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:54 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
February 8, 2007
Turnbull to the rescue?
Both Ian McFarlane, the Industry Minister, and the Prime Minister are on the public record as sceptics of the connection between greenhouse emissions and climate change. The PM is currently trying to cover his tracks, backtrack and move away from his history of defending an untenable position to protect the coal industry and high energy users.
Alan Moir
I watched Malcolm Turnbull in Question Time yesterday.The Howard Government is on the ball, rising sea levels are nothing to worry about, and the ALP is simply engaged in a fear campaign (panic mongering over global warming) and were dogmatists who refused to doubt. It wasn't very plausible, even with the barrister's theatrics. But at least Turrnbull is rescuing a defensive Howard who can say little more than economy and jobs and that he will not "sacrifice" the jobs of coalminers with knee-jerk environmental policies that damage Australia's international competitiveness.
As Turnbull says the Coalition is adapting to, rather than dealing with, climate change. It needs to adapt because Howard has vetoed plan after plan on emissions trading since 1997, even though it accepted that his clean coal and nuiclear power solutions are commercially unviable without a price on carbon.
The postion Turnbull has to defend whilst saying the government is on the ball is that Australia's mining and minerals and coal-fired electricity generation industries have to be protected at all costs; since Australia contributes only 1.5 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, so only a global response will be effective; and that Australia shouldn't undertake measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions unless all other countries are locked into taking the same measures. The assumption that there is a conflict between the environment and the economy — and that Australia has no choice but to choose the economy.
Why is this unreasonable? Because it is stated that any other position is a fanatical one based on fear mongering. This is what pases for "debate" in federal Parliament. Since A global trading system is decades away.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:13 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
February 7, 2007
Adelaide & water politics
SA's water future is bleak, given the extremely low inflows, low storage levels and over-exploitation of water in the Murray-Darling river system. That presents significant problems for water management in SA next year and the next decade. SA needs to make better use of the resource it has instead of relying on others upstream to sacrifice a share of theirs, and it should lead the way in efficient water management.
So what is being done?
Atchison
There is a project to build a desalinisation plant in the Upper Spencer Gulf to supply water for Whyalla and the Eyre Peninsula, and so lessen their dependence on River Murray water. However, most of the water from the plant will be used by BHP Billiton to service the $6.5 billion expansion of the Olympic Dam mine.
What, then of Adelaide? Given the talk about waterproofing Adelaide, what is actually being done, apart from the imposition of water restrictions to reduce consumption? Well, the Rann Government does look busy in terms of its management.
It is toying with building a weir near Wellington to secure water for the city; closing Lake Bonney and other wetlands to reduce evaporation; modifying four major pumps that supply Adelaide and country towns; pump an extra 60 gigalitres of water into Mt Lofty Ranges storages to provide a buffer against water quality problems; and build new water filtration plants for 15 country towns along the Murray. However, these management actions merely use River Murray water more efficiently, when it is the reliance on the river for the city's water that is the problem.
There has been little attempt by the Rann Government to address the alternative sources of water for Adelaide. It is missing in action on this. Does Adelaide need a desalinisation plant? Apparently not, as it is would force up water prices. I would have thought the price of water is going to increase no matter what. So how much reliance should there be on recycling storm and grey water in Adelaide? When are water restrictions going to give way to better water pricing to help ensure responsible use.
If Adelaide is at risk, as Premier Rann keeps saying on the national stage, then what kind of long-term planning to find alternative water supplies is being done? Well, the water proofing Adelaide project team have spent time examining such proposals as harvesting icebergs from Antarctica, piping water from the Ord River, the Bradfield scheme for piping water from the rivers in northern Queensland and piping groundwater from the South East of South Australia. Why take this stuff seriously when we know the answer---aquifer storage and recovery of the storm water that flows from the Adelaide Hills into the sea?
Do we detect a lack of desire by the Rann state government to actually make any positive step to increasing the water supply. Is it just like the other state governments, with the exception of WA.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
political blogging
Is political blogging changing, just as its form is becoming accepted in Australia as an supplement and alternative to and critique of the national press? Some bloggers are appearing in a variety of high visibility media locations, including radio programs.
Chris Bowers at MyDD suggests that this is happening in the US. He says:
Since late 2005, I have seen a mounting array of evidence to suggest that political blogosphere traffic has reached a plateau, and that the nature of the political blogosphere is shifting away from a top-down content generation model toward a bottom-up audience generated model.
This may be happening in Australia. I don't know about the traffic. There has been a shift from the initial solo political blogger, such as John Quiggin, to group blogs, such as Club Troppo, Larvatas Prodeo and Catallaxy and the emergence of activist blogging such as Getup. Some of the group blogs have developed a community ethos around a group of commentators, and there is increasing differentiation in terms of commentary, watchdog, and information functions. "Blogging" continues to innovate beyond the original structure of a single blogger sole, mainly punditry oriented, content provider.
If it is increasingly difficult for a single individual to rise to the top anymore in national blogging and the solo-content provider model has reached a limit, then where to next?
Bowers goes on to say that:
In addition to the end of the era of the highly successful solo-blogger, I forecast that this development toward user-generated content will carry two other important ramifications for the political blogosphere. First, the already extreme gap between the political engagement of netroots activists and rank-and-file voters will grow even wider. With more people not just consuming political information online, but helping to generate it, netroots activists will continue to consolidate as a sort of "elite influential" subset within the American political system. Second, in order to remain successful, more than more political blogs will transform into full-blown professional operations that can be considered institutions unto themselves. In addition to community development, they will more frequently produce difficult, original work (beat reporting, investigative journalism, professional lobbying, national activist campaigns, original video, commissioned polls, mass email lists, etc.) that until now have been mainly the province of long-established news and political organizations. Competition from other high-end blogs will continue to raise the bar in this area, as the days of thriving on punditry alone are further confined to diaries and comments off the front-page.
I'm at a loss to see how you would finance the profesionalism required for blogs to become institutions in themselves by developing into independent news media? The costs of entry are increasing as the media market becomes more competitive. Blogging used to be a low cost means of democratizing political content generation. It isn't anymore. The work rate is pretty high to produce the content.
One suggestion is to turn local, to blog about the state in which we live, as well as keeping the national focus. This means that public opinion would supplement the media commentary in South Australia, which is pretty poor.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 6, 2007
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Iraq hearings
Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski recently appeared before the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee on February 1st in its hearings on Iraq in a Strategic Context or Iraq in the broader context of American foreign policy and strategy in the region.In his opening remarks on the 1st day Senator Joseph R. Biden talked in terms of a “disengage and contain” strategy because Bush's present strategy will not work.
Brzezinski was paired with Lt. General Brent Scowcroft, Former National Security Advisor, and he opened his statement with this:
'It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America's global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America's moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.
2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.
You don't hear that language in the Australian Parliament these days. They tend to avoid the Iraq issue even though its the elephant in the room. The ALP has no courage on the Middle east regional issue at all.
Brzezinski went on to say:
If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan
Brzezinski added:
A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD's in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the "decisive ideological struggle" of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America's involvement in World War II.
He is right. Americans and Australians were sold a false WMD story to help build political support for a White House pre-committed to an Iraq War. The political benefits of fear-mongering flowed their way. The same game is being played around Iran and its nuclear programme, with the likely scenario being that the administration plans to bomb Iran and plans to do it whether Congress likes it or not.
This simplistic and demagogic "decisive ideological struggle" narrative is what is recycled by some members of the Australian Government. No wonder few listen.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:07 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
February 5, 2007
Corporate Australia & climate change
The heat is rising in the global warming debate, which is increasingly becoming a clash between science versus capitalism. The 2007 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) report, which brings together the last six years of research on global warming, says that the real climate system is changing as fast or even faster than expected by past IPCCs. That means the ice caps are melting faster and sea levels are rising faster than previously projected.
Bruce Petty
These kind of processes are not something you can stop. We are producing a different kind of planet. The earth in 2107 is going to be different from the earth of 2007, as it will have a different climate. That's sobering. The IPCC's "best guess" for global average temperature increase during the course of this century is now three degrees. It was only last year that two degrees was considered likely to constitute a dangerous increase. That's even more sobering.
That places the Great Barrier Reef at increased risk from the warming of the ocean. Ocean warming of 1-2 degrees for more than a few weeks causes bleaching events, whilst prolonged warming makes it difficult for the reef to recover.
What we still have in Australia is a reluctance by corporate Australia to face up to the reality of climate change. Thus BlueScope is quarantined from any imposed carbon tax by the NSW government and it would be compensated if it came to the crunch and carbon was priced---at say $20 a tonne of carbion dioxide equivalwent emissions. I presume that carbon emmissions and climtae change are still seen as a Leftie issue for some strange reason. The right balance has to be struck between environment, jobs and investment. The 'right balance', presumably, is the deal Bluescope struck with the Iemma Government in NSW for its proposed Port Kembla steelworks.
Yet climate change is going to hit company profits. Few companies have begun to calculate the external environmenal cost of those emmissions, let alone have put strategies in place to reduce their emissions. They seem to have their heads in the sand, or they think that they will be protected.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:49 AM | TrackBack
February 4, 2007
Israel, Carter, apartheid
Former Israeli Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni argues that apartheid is already happening in the West Bank under Israeli rule. I quote:
Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what's right in front of our eyes. It's simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.
Yet Jimmy Carter is being criticized and called anti-Semitic and rascist by Israeli's for using the term "apartheid" in describing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in their own land. This kind of criticism avoids the key issue: Carter's argument that Israeli policy toward the Palestinian population in the West Bank is akin to South African policy toward the non-White majority during the apartheid era.
Shulamit Alo comments on this phenomenon are interesting. He says that:
The US Jewish Establishment's onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population's movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians' land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.
It would appear that liberal Jewish Americans (and liberal Jewish Australians) seem to find it emotionally difficult to accept that Israel has done terrible things to the Palestinian people.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 3, 2007
ratting on the Americans!
Things are getting worse in Iraq. President Bush is getting America deeper into the quagmire in Iraq (see the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq) with his so-called surge providing an extra 21,500 troops throughout the year. Where does Australia currently sit, given that US's creation of Iraq as a failed state? John Howard, the Prime Minister, set out the situation to John Laws this week:
So the debate three years ago was not about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it was what you did about it and the Labor Party argued we should get another United Nations resolution and we argued that the resolutions that existed at the time were enough. But anyway, we now know there were no weapons of mass destruction. We also took the decision in part because of our alliance with the United States and I have to now deal with a decision: do we rat on the Americans, do we walk out? Do we say to the Americans it's got all too hard and too difficult? And if anybody thinks that that wouldn't do damage to the alliance they're kidding themselves.
All that's left to justify Australia's partiicpation in the occupation of Iraq is the insurance policy. It's all about the alliance with the US. Australia is obliged to support Bush and Cheney as they continue create further unrest, turmoil and crises in the Middle East. Whatever happened to toppling Middle Eastern governments, occupying their societies, and trying to impose pluralistic democracy?
The word "ratting" implies that a war doesn’t really need a case.It also implies that the Howard Government approves the shift to empire with its torture of captives at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Bagram Air Base in Kabul, at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at a global network of secret CIA prisons.The new target is Iran, as the focus is being moved from the quagmire in Iraq to the Iranian "threat".
The Bush administration wants to lay the blame for the disintegration of Iraq on the meddlesome interference of Iran and Syria and avoid the scenarrio in which the U.S.-sponsored political process itself -- indeed, the new, U.S.-created Iraqi political order -- itself sows the seeds for the country's destruction. But Bush could attack Iran to his heart's content, and Iraq would still remain in civil war.
However, as Paul Rogers at Open Democracy writes:
In one sense, Iran was always the main issue for neo-conservatives: "the road to Tehran runs through Baghdad" was their mantra. Indeed there was a strong view in 2003 that the best way to deal with Iran was by installing a client administration in Iraq, secured by a substantial permanent American military presence at four large bases. Iraq would become a western bastion, with the added double benefit of reducing the significance of a somewhat unpredictable House of Saud while ensuring the Iran would know its place. In essence, regime termination to Iran's east (Afghanistan) and west (Iraq) within two years would achieve a precious strategic success: a pliant Tehran.
Rogers notes that things have has not exactly worked out like that. The reality is the hte failure to impose Pax Americana on Iraq or even Afghanistan, and it is this that has had profound consequences throughout the region.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:34 PM | TrackBack
February 2, 2007
water development--SA style
It's amazing the way water politics has worked, isn't it. BHP Billiton uses millions of litres of water a day from the Great Artesian Basin without paying for it. It is effectively mining water. Other users of the aquifer, which runs beneath NSW, Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia, are subject to a management plan for the basin, but BHP is exempt. Water is a resource to build company profits and drive the economy.
And BHP wants to extract more water---an additional 120 million litres per day---as part of BHP Billion's proposed expansion of the Olympic Dam mine. How about that?
Who is responsible for this unsustainable use of water; for a form of economic development that has a history of no consideration for the environment. The SA Government is responsible for this destruction of the commons by the mining companies. Under a 1982 agreement with the South Australian Government, BHP's Olympic Dam uranium, gold and copper mine and the neighbouring town of Roxby Downs draws 33 million litres of water a day from the basin free of charge.
John Quiggin has argued that the doesn't see the need for a Commonwealth takeover of the water sector:
I don’t see the need for this. There are plenty of problems in water policy, and plenty of mistakes have been made, but there’s plenty of blame to go around. There’s no evidence that the Commonwealth would do a better job on the Murray-Darling by itself than through the long-standing co-operative arrangements, let alone, as Hal Colebatch points out (in a piece for which the link I had is broken), that it has any business running the water sector in states like WA and Tasmania.
The SA government has done little about BHP mining water for free, despite all its rhetoric about the unsustainable use of water in the Murray-Darling Basin in the last decade. So you can see why the states have such little credibility on the governance of water issues. You can also see why it is necessary for the Commonwealth to take over the governance of water. The Rann Government in SA is far too weak, and lacks the political courage, to take on BHP over its use of water.
Something needs to be done since the Great Artesian Basin supports many mound springs within an arid region. The mound springs are natural up-wellings of water which, over millennia, deposit water-borne minerals that form into mounds. The springs are unique arid land habitats and have world class natural and cultural significance. They support rare and delicate micro flora and fauna, many species of which are endemic to a particular mound spring. Since water extraction for the mine began in a region now known as Borefield A, many of the surrounding mound spring complexes have experienced reduced flows, or have ceased flowing altogether.
A far better option is for BHPB to building a desalination plant to supply the mine’s additional water requirements.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:34 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
February 1, 2007
Sydney: climate change hot spot
We are moving into a hotter and drier climate, and it increasingly looks as if Sydney is a climate change hot spot. A repackaged CSIRO report, based on 2004 data, said that Sydney's temperatures would rise 4.8 degrees by 2070, and that only one year in 10 would be free of drought. Evaporation rates would rise by 24 per cent, bushfires would become twice as frequent and the coast would be lashed by 100-metre storm surges as sea levels rose. Increasing temperatures of 4.8 degrees by 2070 is a big rise.
Yet the NSW government has done little to address climate warming. There are more cars on the road, there are new coal mines, possibly more coal fired power stations, no subsidies to consumers to install solar power systems, and little serious planning for the sustainability of development in Sydney. The ALP right in NSW appears to lean towards clean coal technologies and is unwilling to embrace water recycling: close the ocean outfalls and recycle waste and stormwater for industry, environmental flows etc. It is unwilling to do anything about the pollution from energy production from coal-fired power stations --the greenhouse emmissions.
The Lemma government is not working on the assumption that the world is going to become warmer. It has few policies to adapt to global warming and even less that work towards arresting it.