War and the Media Again
I came across this interesting article today on MediaLens which is a "media watch" sort of thing.Below is an excerpt. You can read the full article here.

Anyway, the website looks fairly interesting. They have a "what people say about us section" with comments on the site from both the "Left" and the "Right" here.

Not sure if they are a bit too left - I'm reserving my judgement.

Some other "look at the media" sites that are good are:
Media Channel
Media Guardian

The snippet:

Army Of Mothers

On January 29 the front page of the Daily Mirror carried a full-page picture of Tony Blair with dripping red fingers and palms. The title in large letters: 'Blood On His Hands'. On pages 4 and 5, John Pilger's article, 'Bloody Cowards', was illustrated with a large picture of three Iraqi soldiers burned to death during the last Gulf War - arms were incinerated to stumps, skulls ended abruptly above teeth bared in agony, skin was brittle and blackened like carbonised rubber.

We could not help reflecting on the agony these men must have suffered as they burned. And we could not help reflecting that each of them had been someone's son, brother, father, partner. Two of the Media Lens team are parents and we know very well that long days and nights had been spent fretting over these men as children. All had been cherished, adored, painstakingly clothed, washed, taught to walk and speak. With all the nonsense that is talked about war, with all the casual depictions of violence as entertainment in our wretched media, we forget that whole lives of love and hope are centred around these human beings - only for them to be incinerated to nothing by erudite, smiling men in smart suits telling lies.

We can dismiss this as sentimental if we like, or we can accept it as a human reality that is all but impermissible in our famously tough media - a media that always has the stomach for a fight, but rarely for evidence of the consequences. We sometimes wonder that the warriors of this world are not brought to their knees by an outraged Army of Mothers demanding that sons born in such pain and difficulty should be killed so easily.

In his article, Pilger recalled some of his own experiences of war and death in Vietnam:

"I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.

"They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the 'long box' pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a 'box' was presumed destroyed.

"When I reached a village within the 'box', the street had been replaced by a crater.

"I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast. The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited." (Daily Mirror, January 29, 2003)

What on earth does it say about the culture we are living in - about the insidious effects of high-paid corporate compromise - that Pilger is virtually alone in writing like this now, with pictures like this now, in the face of a war of such utterly transparent cynicism?

By contrast - and with the unholy trinity of greed, lies and violence looming around the people of Iraq, to the horror of the entire world - Timothy Garton Ash is able to write: "In defence of the fence - Colin Powell did not convince me. But nor does the peace movement." (The Guardian, February 6, 2003). Garton Ash continues:

"But on Iraq, I would still like to defend a position of tortured liberal ambivalence."

There is nothing tortured about it - media fortunes have long been made by mastering the 'liberal' art of appearing to care while doing nothing to oppose those who clearly do not give a damn. This is what earns the nod from the powers that be. It's the same nod that lets the cruise missiles fly, and that has the skins of children "folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh". It is a shocking truth but there +is+ a causal link between 'tortured liberals' like Garton Ash and horror of this kind - it's why senior commentators are paid so much for doing so little.

In similar vein, on the BBC's Newsnight programme, Oxbridge journalists like Jeremy Paxman laugh and joke with an assortment of white, establishment grandees about the ironies and 'realities' of diplomacy and realpolitik. As American journalist Dennis Hans notes, when it comes to foreign policy, "It's a White, White, White, White Media World."

Children in Detention Links


Per my previous posts, here are some informative links regarding Australia's policy of keeping refugee children in detention.

Firstly, another report on the child suing the government. From Yahoo news (from AFP I believe)

Refugee Websites


Children Out Of Detention (chilout.org)

REFUGEE ACTION COMMITTEE


Oxfam Community Aid Abroad Campaign.
- See links to Other Sites also

Media Release from refugee Council


Amnesty International (Australia) Refugee fact sheet


News Items


"Detention of children challenged - June 20, 2003



Australian government attacks court for ordering detained children released



Released child detainees reunited with mother - Challenge



Outrage over plan to fight child detention ruling

Quote:
The Family Court ruled yesterday that it had the power to order the release of children in detention, declaring indefinite detention illegal.

Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, says he would be willing to fight the ruling on the indefinite detention of children as far as the High Court.

--Phil Ruddock - what a prick.


Howard a 'hypocrite' over detainee's children

Detainee wants childhood back
I have been so busy at work the past few weeks that I havn't had time for adding anything to this.

Australia is a pretty good place to live, however the current right wing red-neck government is a bit lacking in the "show the love" department. To be expected of course from a government led by George Bush's best mate Johnny Howard.

Today, The Australian ran a story about a young refugee boy who is now suing the government for child abuse - that is, accusing the government of abusing him by keeping him in detention.

Read the full story here:

Australia's treatment of refugees, and the keeping of children in detention is shocking, but it tends to be an old story these days.

I'll try and find some more good info on this.

Phillip Ruddock the then immigration minister is a bit of a shocker.

Media Censorship
Media Censorship That Doesn't Speak Its Name
by Joihn Pilger
New Statesman
September 26, 2003

Reducing journalism to a branch of corporate and government public relations is the hidden agenda of the media deregulators, in Britain and America.

The Australian novelist Richard Flanagan was recently asked by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to read a favourite piece of fiction on national radio and explain his reasons for the choice.

"I was unsure what fiction to read to you this morning," he said. "If we take the work of our most successful spinner of fictions in recent times, [Prime Minister] John Howard, I could have read from the varied and splendid tall tales he and his fellow storytellers have concocted..." He listed Howard's most famous fictions: that desperate refugees trying to reach Australia had wilfully thrown their children overboard, and that faraway Australia was endangered by Iraq's "weapons of hysterical distraction", as he put it.

He followed this with Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Joyce's Ulysses, "because in our time of lies and hate it seems appropriate to be reminded of the beauty of saying yes to the chaos of truth..." This was duly recorded; but when the programme was broadcast, the entire preface about Howard was missing. Flanagan accused the ABC of rank censorship. No, was the response; they just didn't want "anything political". This was followed, he wrote, by "a moment of high comedy: would I, the producer asked, be interested in coming on a programme to discuss disillusionment in contemporary Australia?"

In a society that once prided itself on its laconic sense of irony, there was not a hint of it, just a managerial silence. "All around me," Flanagan later wrote, "I see avenues for expression closing, an odd collusion of an ever-more cowed media and the way in which the powerful seek to dictate what is and what isn't read and heard."

He may well be speaking for the rest of us. The censorship in Australia that he describes is especially virulent because Australia is a small media pond inhabited by large sharks: a microcosm of what the British might expect if the current assault on free journalism is not challenged. The leader of this assault is, of course, Rupert Murdoch, whose dominance in the land of his birth is now symptomatic of his worldwide grip. Of 12 daily newspapers in the capital cities, Murdoch controls seven. Of the ten Sunday newspapers, Murdoch has seven. In Adelaide, he has a complete monopoly. He owns everything, including all the printing presses. It is almost impossible to escape his augmented team of Pravdas.

Like all his newspapers, they follow the path paved with his "interests" and his extremism. They echo Murdoch's description of Bush and Blair as "heroes" of the Iraq invasion, and his dismissal of the blood they spilt. For good measure, his tabloid the Herald Sun invented an al-Qaeda terrorist training camp near Melbourne; and all his papers promote John Howard's parrot-like obsequiousness to Bush, just as they laud Howard's racist campaign against a few thousand asylum-seekers who are locked away in outback concentration camps.

Murdochism, disguised or not, is standard throughout the media he does not control. The Melbourne Age, once a great liberal newspaper whose journalists produced a pioneering charter of editorial independence, is often just another purveyor of what Orwell called "smelly little orthodoxies", wrapped in lifestyle supplements. Flickering beacons are the visionary Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), which was set up to serve Australia's multi-ethnic society, and the eternally battered ABC.

The ABC is different from the BBC, its model, in one crucial respect. It has no licence fee and must rely on government handouts. In Australia, political intimidation of the national broadcaster makes Downing Street's campaign against the BBC seem almost genteel. Howard's minister for communications, a far-right dullard called Richard Alston, recently demanded that the ABC reply to 68 counts of "anti-Americanism". What the government wants is no less than an oath of loyalty to the foreign power to which it has surrendered sovereignty.

Charges of "left-wing bias", familiar in Britain and just as ridiculous, drone out of both the Murdoch and non-Murdoch press. A Sydney Morning Herald commentator, a local echo of the far right's "monitoring" of the media in America, has attacked the ABC for years. With no guarantee of financial independence, the ABC has bent to the pressure; the censorship experienced by Richard Flanagan is not unusual. More seriously, current affairs investigations that might be construed as "left wing" are not commissioned. As one well-known journalist told me: "We have a state of fear. If you're a dissenter, you're out."

The despair felt by many Australians about this, and the cosmetic democracy in Canberra that it reflects, expresses itself in huge turnouts at public meetings. More than 34,000 attended the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, where, said the director, "anything political" and "any session that allowed people to express a view" was a sell-out.

The global model for censorship by omission in free societies is America, which constitutionally has the freest press in the world. In Washington, Charles Lewis, the former CBS 60 Minutes producer who runs the Centre for Public Integrity, told me: "Under Bush, the silence among journalists is worse than in the 1950s. Murdoch is the most influential media mogul in America; he sets the standard, and there is no public discussion about it. Why do 70 per cent of the American public believe Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of 9/11? Because the media's constant echoing of the government guarantees it. Without the complicity of journalists, Bush would never have attacked Iraq."

Harnessing journalism and reducing it to the "spokesman's spokesman", a branch of corporate and government public relations, is the hidden agenda of the new media deregulators. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission (run by Colin Powell's son) is finally to deregulate television so that Murdoch's Fox Channel and four other conglomerates control 90 per cent of the terrestrial and cable audience. That is the spectre in Britain, with a Blairite placeman now overseeing public service broadcasting in the new commercial deregulator, Oftel, which has a remit to follow the American "market" path. The next step is to end the licence fee and diminish the BBC to a version of its Australian prodigy. That is Blair's agenda.

The genesis for this - and for the current Blair/Murdoch campaign against the BBC's independence - can be traced back to 1995, when Murdoch flew the Blairs first class to Hayman Island, off the Queensland coast. In the tropical sunshine and standing at the blue News Corp lectern, the future British prime minister waxed lyrical about his "new moral purpose in politics" and pledged himself to hand over the media to the "enterprise" of those like his host, who applauded him warmly.

The next day, satire died again when Murdoch's Sun commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose and he speaks our language on morality and family life."

Terrorism, the US, the UN, and Kofi Annan
A number of good articles this week since the Attack on the UN in Iraq, and the UN General assembly meeting.

UN chief hits US on first strikes
By Caroline Overington
New York correspondent
New York
September 24, 2003

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has attacked American foreign policy, questioning the resort to first strikes and warning that the use of military force against terrorist groups could encourage more terrorism.

Speaking just hours before President George Bush was due to address the UN General Assembly, Mr Annan lashed out at Mr Bush's "pre-emptive" attack on Iraq, warning that a policy of first strikes could lead to a lawless world in which nations attacked one another "with or without justification".

Although he did not mention the United States by name, Mr Annan told a terrorism conference in New York that any nation that believed that military action alone could solve the problem of terrorism was deluded.

He added that the fact that "a few wicked men or women" committed murder in its name did not make a cause any less just. "Nor does it relieve us of the obligation to deal with legitimate grievance," he said.

Mr Annan said terrorism would be defeated only "if we act to solve the political disputes and longstanding conflicts" which generated support for it.

"Accordingly, there needs to be more on the horizon than simply winning a war against terrorism. There must be the promise of a better and fairer world, and a concrete plan to get there."

Mr Annan said that nations that launched military action against terrorists needed to "respect the limits which international humanitarian law places on the use of force... Terrorist groups may actually be sustained when... governments cross the line and commit outrages themselves, whether it is... indiscriminate bombardment of cities, the torture of prisoners, targeted assassinations, or accepting the death of innocent civilians as collateral damage".

"These acts are not only illegal and unjustifiable. They may also be exploited by terrorists to gain followers, and to generate cycles of violence in which they thrive," Mr Annan said.

President Bush was expected to ask the United Nations to share the burden of occupying and rebuilding Iraq, a year after saying the world body risked becoming irrelevant. Mr Bush returns to the 191-member assembly, which he berated for its failure to back the US-led war on Iraq. American officials said were no plans to apologise for the situation there, nor for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.

On the eve of debate, Mr Bush, whose job approval ratings have been knocked in part by mounting US casualties in Iraq, denied things were not going well. "I don't think they're going badly. I mean, obviously I think they're going badly for the soldiers who lost their lives, and I weep for that person and their family. But no, I think we're making good progress."

But the release of a UN report warning of chronic malnutrition in Iraq, demands by countries asked to send peacekeepers, and a stark warning from Mr Annan only served to underline how far he had to go.

In an unusually blunt speech to be delivered just before Mr Bush's address, Mr Annan warned that unilateral military action without UN authority risked returning the world to the law of the jungle. "We have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded."

- with Reuters

This story was found at: The Age

Related: Annan Challenges U.S. Doctrine of Preventive Action


US has lost the lesson of history
By Bruce Grant
September 23, 2003

Now that the second anniversary of the terrorist attack on the US has passed, the world is taking stock. A conclusion difficult to resist is that the US has been on the wrong track with its military campaign against terrorism.

There is substantial literature on terrorism, with a clear message. Except where the state is a sponsor, and often even then, terrorism is a weapon of the weak. Its strategy is to unbalance its stronger opponent. Its tactic is not to fight but to scare.

The literature on counter-terrorism also has a message. Deny terrorists oxygen. Don't give them publicity.

Declaring war, turning a weak opponent into a fearsome enemy, runs contrary to the lesson of history. Even with advances in technology, especially in weapons of mass destruction, the core of terrorism is unchanged. It avoids confrontation, relying on dramatic effect. Today's terrorism has no hinterland, just cells and elusive leaders. Putting military forces on a war footing, throwing budgets dangerously into deficit, hampering trade and commerce, tampering with long-established legal rights, turning fugitive terrorists into ghostly celebrities is counter-productive.

The present US-led campaign needs a new direction, so that it is not a war but a broadly based form of containment. Its basis should be civil, not military, necessarily enforced at times but in the full knowledge that, like crime, terrorism will always be with us.

What creates a terrorist is a subject too big for a newspaper article to tackle, but it can be said that terrorists exist not because they are inherently bad people but because they are powerless to right some wrong they wish, however improbably, to correct.

Terrorism is a clumsy weapon, reached for in desperation. It antagonises the public and galvanises the powerful. It is rarely successful in achieving its objective. The notion of war, with its contingent outcomes of defeat and victory, is misleading. Terrorists cannot win, but they can wear a society down, fray its spirit.

The highly regarded speech of President Bush to Congress nine days after the attack expressed a view of the world understandably simplified by American grief and anger.

Questions were swept aside by politicians, analysts, commentators and a media trapped in the excitement of action and the dumbing down of patriotism. Now the complexity (not to mention the cost) of the war on terror is becoming real. The Bush people, quick to stamp on what they saw as crackpot idealism, are learning that there can be crackpot realism, too.

The exercise in Iraq always suffered from suspicion of a hidden agenda. The links between September 11 and Saddam Hussein's regime were, at most, tenuous. They were stronger with Saudi Arabia. Even accepting Washington's reasons at face value, admirers of the US, like this writer, have had to accept that they mirror a flaw in America's attitude to the world.

Americans share with the terrorists a high sensitivity to the existence of evil. The terrorists see evil in the expression of American power. Americans see evil in the tyranny of bad government over good people. Although the designated axis of evil - Iraq, Iran and North Korea - combine three vastly different forms of tyranny - a dictatorship, an Islamic autocracy and a communist regime - the core of the evil is the same. The people are not "free" and must be "liberated".

It is a powerful idea. For politicians, not just American, it is almost irresistible. The dreary business of massaging the constituencies, listening to all the public - and private - voices, keeping an eye on the numbers, calibrating the national interest, dodging the snipers in the opinion pages and smiling for the media are replaced by a single stance and a single message, with a pedestal underfoot.

It resonates with the public for a time, but it happens not to be the right statecraft to counter terrorism.

It is useful to contrast the responses to September 11, 2001, and October 12, 2002, when two icons of Kuta beach culture, Paddy's Bar and the Sari Club, were demolished. The American response has been to go to war on all fronts, but especially militarily. The Indonesian - and Australian - response to October 12 has been civil, especially legal. The Indonesian police, with assistance from Australia, have brought to a court in Bali those they suspect of having carried out the bombings, and the trials are continuing.

This is not kill-or-be-killed frontier justice, as it has been in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the crimes of those sought are deemed already to be established beyond reasonable doubt. The men accused of the Bali bombing are being subjected to the normal procedures of Indonesian law.

An alternative strategy is appealing to Mr Bush and his associates as the day of electoral reckoning approaches and the problems mount.

It is difficult for them to acknowledge that the UN rather than the US could be the midwife of liberated Iraq, on the Timor model, but this is the beginning of wisdom. The US has developed lately a suspicion amounting at times to paranoia about the UN, but it used to be good at getting the numbers in New York. It worked the UN system more successfully than the Russians during the Cold War.

The US stands head and shoulders above all other powers. The UN is not a rival state. It is not even an organisation or institution. It is a global system, still evolving, with a half century of valuable experience. It is the driving force behind the development recently of international criminal and humanitarian law.

No nation, even the most powerful, can run a rapidly globalising world. The UN, slow and cumbersome as it can be, nevertheless confers legitimacy on efforts to establish international law and order.

Bruce Grant, a former ambassador and academic, was joint author with Gareth Evans of Australia's Foreign Relations. His latest book is A Furious Hunger: America and the 21st Century.

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/22/1064082925371.html

US farmers are doing very well, thank you, and feeding al-Qaeda
Well, I know I said that I wouldn't put in anything about wprld trade, but I enjoyed this article and I want to keep it, so I post it here for posterity.

US farmers are doing very well, thank you, and feeding al-Qaeda

September 26, 2003

The US war on terrorism suffered a huge blow last week - not in Baghdad or Kabul, but on the beaches of Cancun, the site of the latest world trade talks.

The talks fell apart largely because the US, the European Union and Japan refused to give up the lavish subsidies they bestow on their farmers, making the prices of their cotton and agriculture so cheap that developing countries can't compete.

This is a disaster because exporting food and textiles is the only way for most developing countries to grow.

The Economist quoted a World Bank study that said a Cancun agreement, reducing tariffs and agri-subsidies, could have raised global income by $US500 billion ($735 billion) a year by 2015 - more than 60 per cent of which would go to poor countries and pull 144 million people out of poverty.

Sure, poverty doesn't cause terrorism - no one is killing for a rise. But poverty is great for the terrorism business because it creates humiliation and stifled aspirations, and forces many people to leave their traditional farms to join the alienated poor in the cities - all conditions that spawn terrorists.

I would bet any amount of money, though, that when it came to deciding the Bush team's position at Cancun, no thought was given to its effect on the war on terrorism.

Wouldn't it have been wise for the US to take the initiative at Cancun, and offer to reduce its farm subsidies and textile tariffs, so some of the poorest countries, such as Pakistan and Egypt, could raise their standards of living and sense of dignity, and also become better customers for US goods?

Yes, but that would be bad politics. It would mean asking US farmers to sacrifice the ridiculous subsidies they get from their federal government ($3 billion a year for 25,000 cotton farmers) that make it impossible for foreign farmers to sell there.

And one thing we know about this Bush war on terrorism: sacrifice is only for army reservists and full-time soldiers. For the rest, it's guns and butter.

"If the sons of American janitors can go die in Iraq to keep us safe," says Robert Wright, author of Nonzero, a book on global interdependence, "then American cotton farmers, whose average net worth is nearly $1 million, can give up their subsidies to keep us safe. "

The US and Europe, argues Clyde Prestowitz, the trade expert and author of Rogue Nation, should actually shrink their farm subsidies, even if developing countries don't immediately reciprocate.

If only the Bush team connected the dots, it would see what a nutty war on terrorism it is fighting, explains Prestowitz. Here, he says, is the Bush war on terrorism: preach free trade, but don't deliver on it, so Pakistani farmers become more impoverished. Then ask Congress to give a tax break for any American who wants to buy a petrol-guzzling Humvee for business use and ask Congress to resist any efforts to make Detroit decrease fuel consumption in new cars.

All this means more US oil imports from Saudi Arabia.

So then the Saudis have more dollars to give to their Wahhabi fundamentalist evangelists, who spend it by building religious schools in Pakistan. The Pakistani farmer the US has put out of business with its farm subsidies then sends his sons to the Wahhabi school because it is tuition-free and offers a hot lunch. His sons grow up getting only a Koranic education, so they are totally unprepared for modernity, but they are taught one thing: that America is the source of all their troubles. One of the farmer's sons joins al-Qaeda and is killed in Afghanistan by US Special Forces, and we think we're winning the war on terrorism.

The New York Times

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/25/1064083124513.html

News this week.
The big news this week has been that failure of the WTO talks at Cancun. There have been so many good articles on this, that I won't bother republishing what is every where. My opinion: I think it is time we let the third world join the rest of us and allow them to trade in agriculture. The WTO has been very successful in blocking 3rd world nations from trading with developed nations for years.
See this for a starter:
And the winner is . . . Western arrogance
http://theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/15/1063478122033.html

THIS article: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1041663,00.html
describes how Bush has formalised the corrupt (in my opinion)of corporate political fund raising.

Quote:
"Big money contributors have always existed in the US, but Bush has institutionalised them. Those who raise $100,000 are dubbed Pioneers. Double that and you're a Ranger. Bush has created a nationwide web of elite fund-raisers dedicated to pouring unprecedented amounts of cash into the coffers. And it looks as if the Democrats simply cannot compete."

Lastly, the feature article of the week - this article was printed in "The Age".

America's hegemony dream becomes nightmare
September 17, 2003

If events in Iraq continue on their present trajectory, the window of opportunity that neo-conservatives in Washington seized after the September 11 attacks will soon close.

The two-year window - which enabled Washington and its loyal allies to invade two countries and dispatch both governments (Afghanistan, Iraq), reconfigure US strategic doctrine from deterrence to pre-emption, ratchet up pressure on "rogue states" and "evil" regimes (Iran, North Korea, Syria), and declare war on terrorism - is closing for two reasons.

First, on the ground in occupied Iraq, Washington is slowly realising the limits of its power. For all its technological sophistication and military superiority, the Bush Administration is learning a painful lesson about the historical fate of colonialists in the Middle East.

Second, with opinion polls turning and George Bush putting his mind to the campaign for the presidential election in November next year, it is highly unlikely he will risk opening a new front in the "war against terrorism".

Things have not gone according to plan for the neo-cons and their colleagues.

In Afghanistan, the Government of Hamid Karzai struggles to extend its power beyond the fringes of the capital Kabul, while warlords, the Taliban and the poppy growers resume their nefarious activities. Donors who pledged billions for rebuilding the state have reneged or gone missing, Washington has lost interest and been distracted by Iraq, while Karzai himself needs US bodyguards to forestall his assassination by political rivals.

In Iraq, the pretext for the attack by the "coalition of the willing" has collapsed. Washington, London and Canberra claimed and/or implied an Iraq-al-Qaeda link where none existed, but have now apparently created such a link as a consequence of their invasion and occupation: their lies have become a self-fulfilling reality. According to prewar intelligence, the threat from al-Qaeda "would be heightened by military action against Iraq".

The weapons of mass destruction that we were told Saddam had stockpiled, could use against the West at short notice or might pass on to Islamic terrorists, have disappeared. Despite claims by Blair, Bush and Howard, they were almost certainly destroyed by 1997. According to a British parliamentary committee, the risk of a transfer of WMD to al-Qaeda was only likely if the regime suddenly collapsed: precisely what was engineered.

One effect of the war has been to encourage nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea, which now understand that only nuclear weapons will deter a US attack. Hardly the desired result.

Few will shed tears about Saddam's demise. However, the invasion of Iraq removed a secular government in the Arab world that had brutally suppressed Islamists, much to the West's delight. Paving the way for a possible future Islamic state in Iraq seems an odd strategy for those who regard themselves as being at war with Islamic extremists.

No one is talking about the democratisation of Iraq with a straight face any more, although Washington remains in denial about the nature of resistance to its occupation. Blaming terrorist infiltrators from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, or Saddamite "dead-enders", for the continuing bombings and attacks is a direct consequence of America's inability to understand why its presence in Iraq is unwelcome.

One of the fringe benefits of the war against Iraq was to be the installation of a pro-Israeli government in a key Arab state. We were also promised that Saddam's removal would help solve the Israel-Palestine dispute.

The former is still possible, but only likely if a Pentagon satrap such as Ahmed Chalabi is installed in power. If anything, the Israel-Palestinian dispute has degenerated since Saddam's removal from power, despite the best efforts of propagandists to conflate Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonialism with the "war against terrorism".

As the war approached, trans-Atlantic friendships were burned, NATO was sidelined, Turkey refused to be bribed into supporting the war, and Russia, Germany and France were driven closer together by a common opposition to Washington's unilateralism. The US is significantly more unpopular around the world than it was 12 months ago, especially in Pakistan, Indonesia, South Korea and the Arab world.

And the financial cost of its promiscuous intervention? A deficit in 2004 estimated at $US7.3 trillion ($A10.9 trillion).

The neo-cons and their political masters attacked the UN for not following orders, so it became a "behemoth", "meaningless and weak", and without "credibility". Now the same people are asking the same organisation, which they claimed was "irrelevant", to bail them out of trouble in Iraq because no other state is prepared to send in occupying troops under the present arrangements. It's a humiliating U-turn.

Military victories create, rather than solve, political problems. What must have seemed like a gift to the global ambitions of the neo-conservatives in Washington two years ago has now been reduced to a striking paradox: the United States has never been more powerful around the world, but Americans have never felt less secure.

Scott Burchill lectures in international relations at Deakin University.

Email: burchill@deakin.edu.au

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625030945.html

War drums beating in the age of terror

"The Age" has a special today to commemorate the 11/9 attacks. One article that took my interest was from Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky is a political activist, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and author, most recently, of Middle East Illusions, 9-11 and Power and Terror.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/10/1063191454655.html

War drums beating in the age of terror

September 11, 2003

Amid the aftershocks of suicide bombings in Baghdad, Jerusalem and Najaf, and countless other horrors since September 11, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror", the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others. However, two years on, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.

On September 11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club." For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.

Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of US power - how it has reacted and what course it might take. Within a year, Afghanistan was under attack. Those who accept elementary moral standards have some work to do to show that the US and Britain were justified in bombing Afghans to compel them to turn over people suspected of criminal atrocities, the official reason given when the bombings began.

Then in September 2002 the most powerful state in history announced a new National Security Strategy, asserting that it would maintain global hegemony permanently. Any challenge would be blocked by force, the dimension in which the US reigns supreme.

At the same time, the war drums began to beat to mobilise the population for an invasion of Iraq. And the campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections which would determine whether the Administration would be able to carry out its radical international and domestic agenda.

The final days of 2002, foreign policy specialist Michael Krepon wrote, were "the most dangerous since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis", which Arthur Schlesinger described as "the most dangerous moment in human history." Krepon's concern was nuclear proliferation in "Iran, Iraq, North Korea and the Indian subcontinent", an "unstable nuclear proliferation belt stretching from Pyongyang to Baghdad". Bush Administration initiatives last year and this year have only increased the threats in and near this unstable belt.

The National Security Strategy declared that the US - alone - has the right to carry out "preventive war": preventive, not pre-emptive, using military force to eliminate a perceived threat, even if invented or imagined. Preventive war is simply the "supreme crime" condemned at Nuremberg.

From early September last year, the Administration issued grim warnings about the danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the US, with broad hints that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda and involved in the September 11 attacks. The propaganda assault helped enable the Administration to gain some support from a frightened population for the planned invasion of a country known to be virtually defenceless, and a valuable prize at the heart of the world's major energy system.

Last May, after the putative end of the war in Iraq, George Bush declared on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that he had won a "victory in the war on terror (by having) removed an ally of al-Qaeda." But September 11, 2003, arrives with no credible evidence for the alleged link between Saddam and his bitter enemy Osama bin Laden. And the only known link between the victory and terrorism is that the invasion of Iraq seems to have increased al-Qaeda recruitment and the threat of terrorism.

The Wall Street Journal recognised that Bush's carefully staged Abraham Lincoln extravaganza marked "the beginning of his 2004 re-election campaign", which the White House hoped would "be built as much as possible around national security themes". If the Administration lets domestic issues prevail, it is in deep trouble. Meanwhile bin Laden remains at large. And the source of the post-September 11 anthrax terror is unknown - an even more striking failure, given that the source is assumed to be domestic. The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are still missing, too.

For the second anniversary and beyond, we basically have two choices. We can march forward with confidence that the global enforcer will drive evil from the world, much as the president's speech writers declare, plagiarising ancient epics and children's tales. Or we can subject the doctrines of the proclaimed grand new era to scrutiny, drawing rational conclusions, perhaps gaining some sense of the emerging reality.

The wars that are contemplated in the war on terror are to go on for a long time. "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland," Bush announced last year. That's fair enough. Potential threats are limitless. And there is strong reason to believe that they are becoming more severe as a result of Administration lawlessness and violence.

We should also be able to appreciate recent comments on the matter by Ami Ayalon, the 1996-2000 head of Shin Bet, Israel's general security service, who observed that "those who want victory" against terrorism without addressing underlying grievances "want an unending war". The observation generalises in obvious ways.

The world has good reason to watch what is happening in Washington with fear and trepidation. The people who are best placed to relieve those fears, and to lead the way to a more hopeful and constructive future, are the people of the US, who can shape the future.

For your children's sake, start behaving badly
By Liz Porter
September 7, 2003

As a parent, I'm particularly intrigued by the theme of the new Australian film The Rage in Placid Lake, in which a young man brought up to be "different" by dippy new-age parents "rebels" against them by becoming "normal" - as a besuited insurance man, no less. It's not the rebellion that surprises me, but rather his parents' initial success in indoctrinating him.

Plenty of parents believe they can insulate their pre-teen and teenaged children from aspects of modern society that they find undesirable or reprehensible. Some do it by moving interstate or to the country. Others merely attempt to throw up a kind of moral cordon sanitaire around their homes, requiring all who enter to leave their bad language at the door. Their fear, clearly, is that their children will hear another adult using the "f" word or making reference to indecent or salacious activities - and immediately imitate them.

I have on, several occasions, been "shushed" by one of these anxious parents, as, half-way through some dodgy anecdote, I have dropped the kind of phrase you wouldn't use over afternoon tea at a nunnery. I've also heard them shush others who dropped the "f" word.

Now, I understand that they don't want their children to swear. Who does? Four-letter words sound particularly bad in youthful mouths. And when children start swearing young, there's always the worry that their vocabulary will never expand past expletives. I also understand the advisability of keeping four-letter words away from the under-nines, who are still young enough to parrot their elders.

But is censorship the right way to go, once children are old enough to understand the words their parents don't want to hear them using?

The shushers of this world, like all parents who try to behave perfectly in front of their offspring, might be forgetting one very important thing: the need for pre-teen and teenaged children to mark out their own territory, and believe they are acting entirely differently from their parents. And what would any kid say when she wants to act "differently" in a house where any word stronger than "bother" earns an instant frown? (Hint: the answer begins with "f").

Most of us - and especially those of us who did a bit of rebelling in our own youth - don't want our kids to rebel. Or, at least, not too much. That's why strict schools with lots of arbitrary rules can be so useful. Kids harmlessly expend lots of energy subverting decrees about hat-wearing and sock-grooming. After that, their parents hope, they might have none left for truly anti-social mutiny.

If our kids do rebel against us, we hope they'll be still emulating our good qualities and only rebelling against our faults. How interesting that, in real life, it can so often happen the other way round.

Think of all the high-achieving parents with low-achieving kids. And vice-versa. Contemplate the parents you know who swear like troopers - and their grown-up children, whom you never hear blaspheme. Consider the disorganised, forgetful parents whose children keep track of all their own school arrangements and dental appointments. Because they have to. And remember all the kids (and the sports stars) who don't know how to pack a bag or telephone-book a ticket because Mum (or their manager) always takes care of it.

I occasionally think of a drug-addicted woman I once knew who would regularly sleep in and forget to take her young son to school. The child loved school and hated being late. I know his life could have turned out very differently, but this boy grew up to be a conservative, reliable high achiever - the very opposite of his feckless parents.

Sometimes I wonder whether there might be an argument in suggesting to parents that they "colonise" certain areas of bad behaviour (unpunctuality? swearing? untidiness? soft drug use?) - merely in the hope of manipulating their offspring into classifying such behaviour as "parental" and hence, by definition, too uncool to emulate.

Like most parents of pre-teen children, I particularly dread the onset of the years when marijuana might begin to sound interesting. How could I keep my child on the straight and narrow for ever? Would it work if she started coming home from school to find her mother slumped in a beanbag with a packet of Tim Tams, rolling great fat joints and playing Nirvana at peak volume. I wonder.

eporter@theage.com.au

This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/06/1062549060220.html

How many Americans will die for oil?
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/08/03/1059849273357.html

August 4 2003

George Bush has given oil companies carte blanche in Iraq. This will lead to disaster, writes Kenneth Davidson.

Is Iraq's oil good enough reason for one or two of America's 148,000 occupying forces to die in Iraq each day over the next four years?

The answer is probably no, if the growth of dissident military communities such as the "Bring Them Home Now!" lobby is any indication.

Resentment among the troops, and their families, about their being stuck in Iraq after the war has not been helped by the failure of the Bush Administration to come up with weapons of mass destruction, and President George Bush's response to reports that attacks on occupying troops were increasing ("bring 'em on").

But what would the occupying forces and their families make of Bush's executive order 13303, promulgated without fanfare in May, which gives sweeping powers to US oil companies operating in Iraq while granting immunity to them for the consequences of any of their actions in exploiting the oil.

In a report last month for the US Democratic legal think tank Government Accountability Project (GAP), the legal director, Tom Devine, said that in terms of legal liability, 13303 "cancels the concept of corporate accountability and abandons the rule of law . . . (It) is a blank cheque for corporate anarchy. Its sweeping, unqualified language places the industry above domestic and international law for anything related to commerce in Iraqi oil."

The immunity is unconstrained. The opening sentence decrees that "any judicial process" is "null and void". Section 1 (b) shields the value "of any nature whatsoever" if it is "related to" the "sale or marketing of . . . all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products" or "interests".

According to Devine: "That means all corporate activities with roots or any connection to Iraqi oil. It covers everything from extraction through transportation, advertising, manufacture, customer service, corporate records and payment of taxes. It covers compliance with contractual obligations involving Iraq that industry enters into with the US Government in postwar Iraq. The scope can be further expanded to virtually all oil-related commerce, by blending Iraqi oil with domestic supplies for any commercial transaction."

The executive order applies to US "persons" (including corporations or other organisations) who "come into possession or control" of anything relevant to Iraqi oil or oil products. Devine comments: "Translated from the legalese, this is a licence for corporations to loot Iraq and its citizens."

The order is built on UN Security Council resolution 1483, which ended sanctions against Iraq and led to the establishment of the Development Fund for Iraq - into which the $1.7 billion of Iraqi money from the UN Oil-for-Food program and all proceeds from future sales of Iraqi oil and gas will be placed.

The development fund is controlled by Paul Bremer, who is in charge of the US occupation of Iraq, and it will be overseen by a board that includes representatives of the UN, the World Bank and the IMF.

Critics of the development fund point out that the money from past and future Iraqi oil sales deposited in the fund will be used to leverage US public and private loans to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure and to develop Iraq's huge oil reserves.

According to Devine, executive order 13303 violates UN resolution 1483 rather than implementing it.

While the UN resolution granted limited immunity for oil-related reconstruction activities, it made clear these immunities did not extend beyond "the initial purchaser" for misconduct beyond "privileges and immunities enjoyed by the United Nations" and for "any legal proceedings in which recourse to such proceeds or obligations is necessary to satisfy liability for damages assessed in connection with an ecological accident, including an oil spill, that occurs after the date of the is resolution".

The companies, which will be operating on seed capital provided by Iraqi oil and the US taxpayer, will have had cancelled their civil and criminal liability abroad and domestically, as well as their normal liability for spending of US taxpayers' money.

According to Devine: "Under the executive order there is no accountability to the taxpayers for taxpayer-supported spending by . . . firms with US contracts . . . It cancels liability for civil fraud in government contracts under the False Claims Act, the most effective anti-fraud statute. In short, the order is a blank cheque for pork-barrel spending."

It is also a recipe for intensified conflict between the occupiers and the occupied.

The question is, for how long will US troops be prepared to risk death for Bush's Texas oil mates?

Kenneth Davidson is a staff columnist.

Email: kdlv@ozemail.com.au