Drapetomania

Being the pathological desire to seek freedom. See here. Drapetomania was coined as an explanation as to why plantation slaves kept trying to escape from the comfortable and stable environment provided to them by those better suited to run their lives. The condition was first diagnosed by Dr Samuel W. Cartwright in the 1850s.

In Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith satirically created the concept of "pathoheterodoxy", the mental illness that characterised Soviet dissidents and their failure to obey and conform. Anyone who has ever taken the ADHD checklist might wonder if Cruz Smith's idea is only satirical. (A mate of mine used to receive the Heritage Foundation newsletter Policy Review on a "Know Your Enemy" basis, in case you're wondering how I knew about that article. The checklist is at the end.)

So I'm wondering what they'll come up with to describe the Iraqis' pathological inability to lay down their arms before their liberators, their irrational insistence on resisting invasion and defending their country and their delusion that civilian deaths are the fault of the people actually dropping the bombs. "Patriophrenia", perhaps. Liberatiphobia. Local Sovereignty Disorder. Whatever it is, it appears to be widespread.

Fog

The Guardian Media section has a break-down on the litany of non-facts that have characterised reporting of the war up to this point. So far that's all the coverage has been about: discovering that what was said two days ago isn't actually true. So much for the value of "embedding".

Unlike Gulf War I, this time it's much easier to get a more comprehensive selection of viewpoints on what's happening - if you can be bothered. Apart from the "unilaterals" in Baghdad, there's Al Jazeera (if you can log on - what's that Hacker credo again? "Information wants to be Free"?), and, in any case, the Internet provides the opportunity to survey a wide range of news outlets not otherwise available in your own part of the world. This last is of particular importance in a country where most major cities have one Murdoch-owned "newspaper", pro-war because Rupert is, don't you know. Naturally also the great division in public opinion about the war (and the ludicrous imbalance in military strength between the combatants) gives space to journalists to report - it's hard to imagine Fisky datelining from the middle of an enemy country during a war all Britons supported, where there was some chance Britain would lose. Still, all this multiplicity of sources really adds up to in the end is one huge mass of grey, which leads everyone to simply pick and choose what's out there on the grounds of how much it helps them buttress their current opinion. No-one is better informed; merely better armoured against opposing views. Even I'm starting not to care what I think.

Bless Our Little Cotton Socks

This today from the Central Command Briefing transcript:

Q: (Off mike) -- Channel 9, Australia. Australia has a relatively small contingent here taking part in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Have you been impressed by their capability? (Laughter.)

GEN. RENUART: Absolutely! (Laughter.) No, actually it -- my good friend General Maurie McNairn, their senior commander here, is -- we chat daily. And I have said to him on a number of occasions how absolutely impressed -- and that really, truly, honestly I mentioned the Polish, I mentioned the U.K., and certainly the Australians and other nations who are contributing in many ways. No nation has given us a second team. We have the first team of every nation in the coalition participating and aggressively accomplishing their missions, the Australians contributing both in the air, on the ground and at sea. And I think one of the great coalition stories as we conducted operations in the gulf oil platforms in the Al Faw Peninsula was a task force that began commanded by an Australian officer afloat, transitioned to U.S. and Australian divers ashore, transitioned to U.S. military on the ground, transitioned to U.K. forces as they float in. So each nation in a fashion was involved in a very well integrated coalition effort. It's seamless. It truly is.

See - they do care.

In Case of Doubt...

Australia has two Ann Coulter wanna-bes, Miranda Devine of the Herald and Janet Albrechtsen of the Australian. Neither is as entertainingly loopy as Little Miss Get-Clinton, but if ever I find myself doubting the political philosophy I've chosen, I know I can just turn to Miranda's or Janet's latest offering and they will remind me of why I hold the Right in contempt. Today, Ms Albrechtsen surpassed herself:

LAST week a small Iraqi girl holding a basket approached coalition soldiers in a southern Iraqi village. The basket was detonated.

The young girl and five soldiers died. Some days later another small child with another basket approached a group of soldiers in the same village. Do the soldiers shoot the young child?

That is a hypothetical scenario. But real-life moral dilemmas like these arise in war. They arose in Afghanistan. They will arise in Iraq. They require spilt-second, do-or-die decisions from soldiers.

I suppose this is a cut above "Sex! - Now I've got your attention..." but - well, words fail me. If reports are true, coalition troops have been ambushed by Iraqi soldiers dressed as civilians or pretending to surrender. Naturally, the likelihood of nervous GIs taking out civvies and bona fide surrendering soldiers is increased by such underhand tactics (let's leave aside the question as to whether the Iraqis are overmuch obligated to obey the rules of war, given it's their country being illegally invaded). So here's a real-life, as-events-unfold, example of the slippery nature of combat morality that Janet could have made reference to. Instead we get this shite about boobytrapped little girls. From now on, if trigger-happy soldiers were to blow away a smiling flower-child, I hope for Janet's sake they hadn't just been reading The Australian.

The Big Man Comes Through

Thank God for Michael Moore. Yes, occasionally he can be a self-promoting tosser, but one act like last night's Oscar acceptance speech is worth a thousand missteps. He showed those effete, disinterested, Hollywood time-servers how it's done, as did the other nominees who joined him. Kudos, gentlemen and ladies, kudos.


I see that Suharto-lovin' skank-boy, Greg Sheridan of the The Australian, has attempted to use the suicide bombing that killed ABC cameraman Paul Moran as evidence of a link between Saddam and Al-Qaida. Yeah, Greg, a radical Wahhabi-Islamic Kurdish organisation receiving assistance from Iran, deep within the Northern no-fly zone and surrounded by the Kurdish autonomous region, is working with a secular dictator despised by Kurds and Iranians alike. Nice try. The Murdoch press is stepping up its "Support the war, you Saddam-appeasing commo scum!" campaign, and with only two papers (the Herald and the Canberra Times) against the war and one (the West Australian) taking a wait-and-see approach, that leaves every other print outlet in Australia talking up Operation Iraq Liberty. Well, goody, it's back to business as usual.

These People are Beyond Parody

Yesterday, I watched reams of footage of Iraqi POWs, including a roving commentary from some cretin on NBC (?) wandering about in the desert bugging some of them while they huddled on the ground under a blanket each trying to get some kip. "Look, at this guy, he's got no shoes. These rations are ours, we gave him those." They're in all the news reports, on the front pages of newspapers, their faces shown again and again on the pointlessly repetitive continuous-coverage stations, not once have I seen their features disguised.

And then we get this farce:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers saw the footage [of US POWs] and reacted with "steely anger" over the treatment of the captured soldiers, saying that videotaping prisoners was a violation of the Geneva Conventions, ABCNEWS' McWethy reported.

We'll see if Rummy bothers to pass that information along to his "embedded" media drones.

Monday Monday

Stepping out for lunch some minutes ago, I came across some children of our clientele here for an assessment interview. The kids were rough-housing in the lift area. One twelve-year old was hauling up his laughing younger brother and hanging him upside down, and I realised again how long it has been since I've been in that position, head to the ground, feet above. As you grow older the opportunities to be upside down decrease alarmingly. I will definitely set time apart tonight to catch up on being inverted, although if I had courage of my convictions I should hang upside down right now, knees bent over the top of the office partition, waving to my colleagues as my head engorges with blood.

When I was a kid, I used to spin around very fast and then flop on to the ground and watch the floor seem to rise over me in a wave - recreational mind-altering, entirely drug-free. Adults have no idea how to have fun. Down in the food court, people were hunched over their lunches, watching green-tinged combat footage on the television monitors dotted about the area. Why green? Why not red, or aqua, or plain old black and white? It's a false colour image, anyway, why not amuse yourselves?

(Incidentally, when did television broadcasts become an acceptable form of muzak? Isn't muzak supposed to be anodyne and buyer-friendly? Or is that next? "We now return you to our coverage of the war in Iraq, as performed by Sergio Mendes.")


That's my segue into the war-talk. So - we're only on day three and already the friendly fire and fragging have begun. The Herald claims in its headline that the US now fears a "hard, bloody war". That's bad news - I am now resigned to the fact that the only way this war will end soon is if the coalition forces achieve a speedy victory; and the only way the US will withdraw without victory is if the war turns into a god-awful blood-midden. Recent polls, if they're to be believed, show a decline in opposition to the war here in Australia (we peaceniks still have a plurality - 47% anti, 45% pro last I heard); while, in Britain, Tony Blair's approval ratings are also up in relation to his handling of the Iraq "crisis". And if the Greens wanted Saturday's state election to be a referendum on the war, it was a referendum they lost, to my mind. Sure, the Greens' vote tripled and the anti-war voters could have just as easily chosen Labor, technically also against the war, and they won comfortably - but it wasn't quite the conflagration I'd been banking on.

Sunday's anti-war rally wasn't a patch on February's - thirty thousand according to the ABC. I was there but even while marching I was finding it harder and harder to see the point. We know the Yanks won't withdraw unless the situation starts to fall apart; and if it falls apart Iraqi non-combatants will suffer worst. I guess this doesn't quite translate into an endorsement of continuing the war; but I grow tired of calling for the troops to come home when I know that won't happen unless things go very well, or very, very badly. The latter might put Bush & co and their lickspittle deputies back in the box, but is that worth the carnage? Maintaining opposition to the war while hoping we win quickly is as tiring on my feeble uni-directional brain as opposing the war while supporting the troops, as the more mainstream critics of the government fatuously exhort.

I can therefore partly understand the swing of opinion. Polls are bludgeon-like methods of discerning opinion, after all, requiring an off-the-rack selection of positions from the limited options presented by the pollster. "Support the war" could mean anything from "Let's get it over with before we kill more civilians" to "Americaaa, the beeauuutiful blah blah blah blah blah BLAH". And it's enervating to stand with majority opinion only to be ignored by a man who at any other time is the most craven of push-button populists. If Howard rides it out, as he undoubtedly imagines he will, and the majority end up pro-this-war-now-it's-safely-over, the natural order will have been restored, and those with Howard can pat themselves on the back for being the "silent majority" while we in the "vocal minority" can get on with the job of giving a damn when no-one else will. Everybody's happy, no danger of impact or change.

But I'll keep marching, if only for the exercise. Howard and his ilk need to be reminded that - if the war ends soon - just because he muddled through and there was no catastrophe, yet, that we know about, does not mean that he was right when he chose to take us into this madness, excused with infantile reasoning and shonky evidence, backed with flag-waving cant and fear-mongering lies. He's thrown too much away for us ever to forget we told him not to take us here.

Behold, Your Liberator!

All this bombing for freedom puts me in mind of this World War 2 poster. It depicts a skull-faced Statue of Liberty (now, apparently, a nasty French icon) spewing fire onto a city with the caption "Ecco i Liberatore!" The language of the slogan should provide a clue as to why this arresting image isn't really appropriate for use by the anti-war movement - it's from Fascist Italy. Ah well, such is life.

Here's something about the Kurds.

And the story about that flag raising:

Americans raise hackles by flying Stars and Stripes in Iraq

Nicholas Watt
Saturday March 22, 2003
The Guardian

American marines swept aside Iraqi sensibilities yesterday to raise the Stars and Stripes at the entrance to Iraq's main port of Umm Qasr.

In a move condemned by MPs as crass, the marines replaced the Iraqi flag in an attempt to recreate the iconic image of the US flag being raised over the Pacific island of Iwo Jima in the second world war.

Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, promised to pass on British concerns about the raising of the flag, which undermined allied claims that they were liberating, not conquering, Iraq.

His remarks came after Crispin Blunt, a Tory MP who served in the first Gulf war, said: "It would be singularly unfortunate if the Stars and Stripes was, for example, planted over the parliament building in Baghdad at a future stage."

Promising to raise the matter with the US authorities, Mr Hoon attempted to calm waters by saying: "It is necessary to understand how, at the end of what was a vigorous confrontation, any soldiers are likely to feel the need to demonstrate their success, which I suspect is what happened overnight."

Britain underlined its determination to respect Iraqi sovereignty by warning its troops not to wave the union flag. Addressing 1 Battalion the Irish Guards this week, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins said: "We go to liberate, not to conquer."

The Americans later replaced the Iraqi flag in Umm Qasr.

They must be worried someone might get the right idea.

PS: The US told us on Friday, Umm Qasr was totally under their control. It's now Monday, and they are still getting shot at there.

Murdoch's Militants

Front page Daily Telegraph today, headline above an Iraqi POW getting a drink from a water canteen held by a US soldier (presumably because our Iraqi friend had his hands restrained):

Capture and Compassion.

In relation to News Limited staff is the word "journalist" really accurate? Would "stenographer" not be closer to the mark?

A British expect featured on BBC World today pointed out that one of the things the third Geneva Convention says you're not supposed to do to POWs is make them the subject of "public curiosity". Well, technically the Geneva Convention also prevents you bombing water-treatment plants, so let's not get too indignant.

The story was about the US holding off on "shock and awe" so a matter of hours has showed how dumb that news-hook was. Here's the redoubtable Alan Ramsay ripping into Howard, and the Murdoch war-spruikers.

Sausage for Breakfast, with Liberals* on Toast

Did my civic duty, voted early. Lots of idiots in the queue who didn't know what electorate they were in. The polling station was shared between Coogee and Vaucluse electorates - Vaucluse is blue-ribbon Liberal* whereas Coogee is Labor-leaning but not with certainty. So only those of us in Coogee will actually cast a vote that counts. Odd to think that living on the south side of Bondi Road rather than the north makes all the difference between being someone who counts and a safe seat loser - isn't regionally-based representative democracy wonderful?

You haven't voted properly in this country until you've picked up your barbecued sausage from the school fundraisers, so I did although I'd only just had breakfast. Given that education funding was a big issue in this election (this election that nobody gives a rat's arse about, what with the war and all), I wonder what Bob Carr thinks about all the polling stations at schools including a hands-on illustration of how our educators need to scrounge for cash. Not that it would make the slightest difference - the Coalition† are toast.

* non-Aussies, FYI, the Liberal Party of Australia are the local equivalent of the British Conservatives, or the US Republicans (well, actually nobody in this country is as right-wing as the Republicans, but near enough)
† Liberals plus the National Party (rural conservatives)

War - How Very, Very Tedious

And so the betrayals start - Turkey gives the US the right to overfly their territory and a matter of minutes later Turkey sends fifteen hundred troops into Kurdish Iraq. The US says there's no quid pro quo involved; in fact, they would rather the Turks hadn't done it. Still, I won't be holding my breath waiting for the US to kick Turkey out. After decades of US military aid for Turkey's attacks on the Kurds - including incursions into northern Iraq - it would be churlish, to say the least, to start complaining now.

The Turkish government excuses the incursion as a humanitarian intervention and a defensive measure: that's called learning from the best.



Silly old me - last night I actually found myself believing that the US had decided to avoid "shock and awe" in preference for a careful land advance designed to encourage surrender of ground forces, and allow elements in the Iraqi administration to remove Saddam themselves, thus bringing the war to a speedy conclusion without significant destruction. Then I wake this morning to hear them blasting Baghdad to pieces on the breakfast radio news. That'll learn me.

Tom Brokaw was interviewing some idiot this morning (Sydney Time) who was explaining that the campaign was designed to let the Iraqi people know that they were not the enemy, nor was Iraq; the US was after Saddam. Quite how this message is conveyed by hitting Iraq's most populous city with 320 cruise missiles in one night, he failed to make clear.

Meanwhile, in Umm Qasr a US marine hauls down the Iraqi flag and sends up a Stars and Stripes in its place. No war on Iraq here, folks, and no space on that replacement flag for the forty five countries that have bravely volunteered stationery supplies and whatnot to the grand project of liberation. You'd think they'd have come up with a "Coalition of the Willing" logo by now.

I might note in passing that the Iraqi flag has, since Gulf War I, incorporated the phrase "Allahu Akbar (God is Great)" in its design (Saddam's little attempt to get some co-religionists on side, rather like Eisenhower adding "In God We Trust" to the design for the greenback), so hopefully our flag-substituting jarhead friend folded his souvenir neatly and made sure to keep it somewhere clean. I remember during one of the last few Soccer World Cups when sponsor McDonalds decided to wrap their fat-in-a-bun in a design incorporating the flags of the World Cup nations. One of them was Saudi Arabia, the flag of which incorporates a quote from the Koran. Naturally, Muslims in general and the Saudis in particular objected, so the Saudi flag was removed from the wrapping. If that sounds precious, think for a moment of how the average Christian fundy would react if paper covered with the phrase "I am the way, the truth and the light*" was used to package greasy burgers and then tossed into the trash. So let's keep the flag-desecration to a minimum, boys.



At the ADF Press briefing General Peter Cosgrove was asked by a Channel Nine reporter if a CBS report that Australian SAS dudes had discovered WMD was true. "I'm not usually going to confirm or deny those kind of reports but I will this time - No. It's a furphy." That's our Peter - it's not his job to stop American journos looking like idiots.


* Extremely belated correction: Or "life", if you prefer. Ahem.

Immiserators Love Company

We're now being told we're part of a "growing" coalition of forty nations: Poland's sending 200 soldiers, Denmark and the Netherlands are sending a frigate/submarine matched set each, and the other thirty-four have their fingers crossed or something. I feel so validated.

Crowd Me

Apparently I don't own anything purple, so there's that act of anti-war solidarity torn.

I don't know who the police think they're kidding with their "eight thousand" figure for the anti-war rally and march yesterday evening. There was no rallying point for the end of the march, just the organisers' plaintive request (plaintive even with the megaphone) that we all didn't stay in the Quay, nor use the nearest train station to get home, so Ernesto, Lardy and I decided to retrace our path along the march route on the way to a well-deserved ale. We were at least two city blocks-worth from the head of the march when we turned; moving past those still coming into the Quay, and walking at the same pace, we didn't reach the end until Chifley Square. In other words, when the head of the march had reached the middle of Alfred Street at CQ the end would have been at the corner of King and George, give or take a block. Feel free to calculate from that - my estimate: "Fuck me dead, there's a lot of people here!" The organisers said twenty thousand; the police, possibly annoyed by the splinter march that had jostled Premier Carr's car, said eight thousand; newspapers take the average and round up, if they're a pwog broadsheet, to fifteen thousand, or round down, if they're a Murdoch tabloid, to ten thousand. And they say crowd counting isn't an exact science.

The eight thousand figure and its effect on the resulting calculations meant that the Sydney rally was reported as smaller than Melbourne's. This is certainly possible, Melbournians being the serious-minded bruisers they are, god love 'em. The Melbourne police estimates were for twenty thousand; the organisers said seventy thousand. But then nobody in Melbourne did anything to annoy the police.

I suspect the best contribution the New South Welsh can make to conveying our feelings to Honest John on this issue, will be when we leave the NSW Liberal Party a broken, tattered thing in tomorrow's election. State issues be damned.

Deja Vu

This time last war, I wandered down to Pitt Street Mall. In front of the large multiscreen TV installation there (now extant*) scores of people were standing, neatly in rows, all facing the giant screen, like extras in a DEVO video, while CNN's best and brightest created news out of rumour and speculation. Earlier that day, before the bombing started, we'd been working at our desks with a transistor radio on, so we could hear the war start. A security guard from the foyer would come in every ten minutes to check for updates. When the air raid started, he rang his wife. I heard the conversation: "Hi darlin'. Yeah, love, they've commenced bombing. Yeah. No, I should be home by six."

I was reminded of this guy while watching the developing carnage of the 9/11 atrocity. We seem to have acquired this touching belief that because we can get round-the-clock video footage of history "as it happens" this somehow puts us in the loop. I don't think so - I think it just underlines our impotence.

A timely reminder of the vacuity of TV reportage, particularly in the early stages of war, can be found in Douglas Kellner's comprehensive media critique The Persian Gulf TV War. This book is out of print but the full text is accessible online, for free, here.

* Here I use extant in its "complete opposite of what the word actually means" sense. Perhaps I was trying to type "extinct".

Harmony Day

Once again reality out-satirises satire:

Gary Hardgrave MP
Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs
Media Release H27/2003 - 18 March 2003
Domestic Security Begins with National Unity

The Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Gary Hardgrave says that there has never been a more important time to promote unity and harmony within Australia.

'National security begins with domestic harmony,' Mr Hardgrave said.

'With the 5th Harmony Day coming up on Friday, I encourage all Australians to recommit to respect, goodwill and understanding among our community and say "no" to racism.

'Australians of Middle Eastern and Muslim background may have mixed feelings about events unfolding overseas and concern for the safety and welfare of family members. I urge all Australians to be understanding and offer the hand of friendship to their fellow residents, no matter what their background. It is time especially to support Muslim and Middle Eastern members of our local communities.'

As the Prime Minister said in his speech of 4 February, 2003:

'Australia is home to several hundred thousand people of Middle Eastern background. We welcomed them, some of them refugees from Saddam Hussein's brutal regime, and we appreciate their contribution to our nation. Many of them could be torn between seeing Saddam brought to account and the possible dangers facing their families back in Iraq. During this time, they will need our compassion and our support. All Australians should ensure that this is offered.'

Mr Hardgrave said he believed that the majority of Australians felt sickened by attacks on mosques and synagogues in the days following September 11 and that the public did not want conflict inside our borders.

'Australia is a vibrant democracy - we each are entitled to our views and should express them through debate not by unlawful means involving vilification, violence or vandalism.

'The Muslim community over this challenging period has done much to engage the respect and understanding of the wider community and has embraced and defended the common values and freedoms of all Australians.'

Mr Hardgrave said that this Harmony Day had grown to a record 474 community events (304 last year) involving 2,700 community organisations around Australia. Last week's launch of the first national dialogue of Muslims, Jews and Christians in Sydney, and upcoming events such as the AFL Carlton-Swans Harmony Match, Drums of the World event in Melbourne, and local community events, including mosque open days, show Australians do work well at getting to know each other.

'What is most encouraging is the increasing interest by schools and young people in Harmony Day with an increase in the product orders this year to 2,696 around half of these are from schools around the country. Australians are pulling together and do respect the cultural diversity in our community.'

Mr Hardgrave encouraged all Australians to show their commitment to each other by wearing something orange on Friday.

I'll be wearing purple.

Legal Opinions

Yesterday, Janet Albrechtsen of The Australian has followed the example of some "international lawyers" and tried to claim this war is legal. Tosh, apparently, if today's letters are any guide:

WHAT a desperate search it must have been to put together the ragbag collection of signatories to make a "legal" case for the aggression against Iraq (Opinion, 18/3). Washington fee-on-brief Republicans, superannuated politicians of a certain view, eminent professors mostly not specialised in international law, apologists for Israel, associate professors from far-flung provincial universities. Scarcely an eminent international law specialist among them.

A ragbag as threadbare as its argument. Progressive and creative development of charter-based law of armed conflict is permissible and desirable but the quantum leap argued for from self-defence against actual or imminent attack to pre-emptive attack because of an inchoate and insufficiently evidenced threat in a country a hemisphere away, is taking the world order into long-term dangerous arbitrariness.

UN Resolution 1441 itself was negotiated and approved on the expressed basis that it carried no automaticity of subsequent use of force; it was supported as a political deal that a further resolution to authorise use of armed force should follow. Grasping at 12-year-old resolutions, specific to past self-defence of Kuwait, attempting to give some colour of legitimacy to the current circumstances, is really scraping the barrel.
Lawry Herron
(Former legal adviser, Foreign Affairs Dept; legal adviser, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna)
O'Connor ACT

THE legal case for war as expressed in these pages by a group of international lawyers is deeply flawed in a number of respects.

Contrary to the lawyers' argument, Resolution 1441 was quite clearly not drafted in such a way as to legitimise the use of force, a fact admitted to the council by the US and British ambassadors to the UN and publicly endorsed by 11 of the 13 other Security Council members.

US Ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, told the council, at the time 1441 was passed, that "this resolution contains no hidden triggers or automaticity with respect to the use of force".

It is misleading, therefore, to claim that the resolution was "framed in terms that could be read to permit the use of force".

On November 8, the council was united in saying the resolution did not permit the use of force. This leaves us with resolutions 678 and 687. The lawyers were right to point out that 678 permitted states to use force to restore regional peace and security. Their interpretation of 687 is half-baked, however.

First, the resolution only demanded that Hussein formally accept the terms, which he did. Second, it explicitly stated that it is for the Security Council alone to decide whether Iraq was in breach and, crucially, what action should be taken if it was.

It is for the council to decide, not the US, British and Australian governments; 687 is perfectly clear on that point.

I agree with the lawyers that Security Council resolutions are carefully crafted. That is why it is important to look behind the headlines to the text of the resolution and the way that text was interpreted by the states that passed it. On November 8, the members of the council agreed that nothing in Resolution 1441 authorised force; 13 of the 15 members (including all five permanent members) stated as much in the council.

When 687 was passed, the council agreed that upon acceptance it would constitute a "definitive end to hostilities" (the words of Britain's then ambassador to the UN) and pointedly included a paragraph that insisted unambiguously that the Security Council alone had the right to decide on any measures necessary to implement 687. There is no resolution that permits the use of force to implement 687.
Dr Alex Bellamy
Political Science & International Studies,
University of Qld

A GROUP of lawyers writes that UN Security Council Resolution 1441 threatens Iraq with "serious consequences" if it fails to comply. May I humbly suggest they have misread the text.

Resolution 1441 recalls that the council has previously threatened Iraq with "serious consequences". In other words, Resolution 1441 threatens nothing new. So how does 1441 deal with non-compliance by Iraq? It is quite clear. In the event of non-compliance, "[the Security Council will] convene . . . in order to consider the situation and the need for full compliance . . . in order to secure international peace and security". It is in this context that it then recalls the previous threats of "serious consequences".

In other words, in Resolution 1441, the Security Council threatens to reconvene and declare war on Iraq. Which the council has not done. Draw your own conclusions.
Peter Ballard
South Plympton, SA

ALTHOUGH there has been much discussion on the legality of military action by the "coalition of the willing", and the extent to which it is justified by previous UN Security Council resolutions, there has been no attempt to link those resolutions and George Bush's ultimatum. The reason is clear: there is no relationship.

The resolutions require Iraq to rid itself of WMD. The ultimatum requires Iraq to rid itself of Hussein.

The US-led coalition agenda can only be identified as regime change rather than compliance with disarmament conditions. Military action in such circumstances cannot be justified under international law.

There is no correspondence between the international wrong identified in the Security Council resolutions and the remedy sought by the ultimatum.
Clifton Baker
Senior Lecturer in Law
University of Ballarat

I HAVE read a copy of the legal advice to the PM from public servants in the Attorney-General's Department and the Department of Foreign Affairs.

It does not read like any legal advice I have ever written - which clearly articulates the material on which it is based, the assumed facts upon which it has proceeded and then weighs up the legal arguments for and against, before giving a considered view.

This advice reads like one side of the argument, the argument in favour of the legality of war. The arguments against have been canvassed elsewhere, and I won't repeat them here. I find them compelling.

I ask the PM, has he obtained legal advice from any member of the independent Bar? If he hasn't, why not? If he has, why has he not released it?
Cameron Jackson
Kirribilli, NSW

Nevertheless, Murdoch's myrmidons will do what they can.

Mess Distraction

I was going to e-mail this to the man responsilble for "freedom fries", but the pin-head doesn't appear to have an e-mail address.


Congressman Bob Ney
Chairman, Committee on House Administration
U.S. Congress

Dear Congressman Ney

Far be it from me to prevent - even at this late stage - the United States Congress making itself a laughing stock in the eyes of the world, but I felt I should drop you a line about your recent attempt to rename an item of American cuisine (excuse the contradiction-in-terms) to bring it in line with the requirements of American diplomacy (if you have a dictionary handy, you'll find this odd word under "D".)

Undoubtedly the French are already thanking you for distancing their centuries-old culture from the over-salted potato-flavoured fat-sticks Americans previously named after them, so I won't dispute the urgent need to stop calling these crimes against nutrition "French". But what of this vacuous "freedom" appellation? Is there some reason you couldn't just call them "chips", like the rest of the English-speaking world? In Britain, confusion between packaged pre-fried potato slices and the hot rectangular variety is avoided by calling the former "crisps". Alternatively, here in Australia, we call the latter "hot chips" although usually we distinguish between the two varieties by context - not a significant intellectual exercise.

If you intend to continue with this bizarre neologism rather than with the more convenient usage mentioned above, I can only wish you luck with future renamings of non-standard poodles, open-mouthed kissing, and certain kinds of letters.

Yours faithfully
Robert Weaver

Some Pointless Invective

Dobedobedoo. You know, it wouldn't be a proper modern high-tech massacre from the sky if we didn't allow a suitable period for thumb-twiddling beforehand. Robert Fisk says the Iraqi defenders have been playing soccer. Perhaps they looked closely at what Dubya has been saying and decided the last two months were just surreal performance art.

Of course, practically speaking, the two days notice gives non-combatants (other than the 20 million or so unfortunate enough to be locals) time to "get out of the area where the bombs will be dropping", as Peter Cook so helpfully advised all those years ago. Another practical effect, however, is to demonstrate that the US don't seriously believe Iraq has WMDs. If they do so believe, two days does seem like an uncomfortably long window of opportunity to provide for Saddam to use them, thereby pre-empting the pre-emption.

Time enough to get the inspectors out, as well - don't want them hanging around when the US forces stumble across that previously elusive smoking gun. "I don't remember that being there when we searched this place on Tuesday!" As Paul F. deLespinasse recently argued, just because the US has delivered some crackpot ultimatum is no reason to break off the inspections. Kofi Annan could have said, "Well, George, these inspectors are present in Iraq under the instruction and authority of the Security Council, so it's up to the Security Council to withdraw them, so why don't you get your good self down to the Council and rustle up the numbers to bring them back, me old flow'r?" But he didn't. Safety first, I suppose.

DeLespinasse argued:

[I]t is unlikely that President Bush and his advisors would proceed with an attack, which would be a public relations nightmare as long as the inspectors are still in Iraq.

Ye-es, but given that one of the first "military targets" hit in the 2002 attack on Afghanistan (oh, sorry, "counter-attack") was a United Nations building, thus occasioning the deaths of four local UN workers engaged in mine-clearance, Kofi may have chosen wisely on the side of caution.


Been spending a lot of time on a news chat-forum arguing the toss with local war-buffs. After a while, people got bored with the tiresome facts-based arguments that talk of WMDs, UN resolutions and terrorism links necessitated and the "debate" degenerated into a ping-pong of judgement calls masquerading as moral absolutes - "Bombing people is evil." "No, Saddam is evil." "Saddam is evil but not as evil as bombing people." "No, he's more evil." "No, bombing is more evil than Saddam." "No, Saddam is more evil than bombing." "NO - bombing is more evil." "Evil is more Saddam than bombing." - well, you can see how much headway we were making.

So, let me say it - I'm prepared to accept that my position is a judgement call: whatever Saddam is doing to dissidents and other victims these days is not as bad as what's going to happen to Iraq as a whole when this war starts. Yes, the man was a genocidal loon - when he had US military and diplomatic support. The last mass killing Saddam engaged in was putting down the rebellion Bush I encouraged and then abandoned when someone in the State Department suddenly remembered why they'd been supporting Saddam in the first place - better a recrudescent dictator and a decade of sanctions than two Former Republic of Iraqs, one Kurdish, one Shi-ite and leaning towards Iran. (Although, given that Turkey went democratic to please the EU, then elected a government that doesn't know how to say "How high?" at the appropriate prompt, perhaps we'll be seeing an independent Kurdistan after all.)

Without his patrons Saddam is denuded and contained and not significantly more unpleasant than most of the other thugs we in the "West" happily tolerate, do business with and prop up. Does that mean he should stay? No. But in deciding to take him out I think it fair to weigh in the balance the cost of this "shock and awe" invasion against how much of a bastard this man is and what he might do. I think the former will be much worse and, yes, that's a judgement call. I may be wrong; I hope you're right.

That said, the "Bomb for Freedom" crowd's talk of Iraqi children throwing rose petals before the feet of grinning GIs advancing through the cheering citizenry of a liberated Baghdad does tend to give the impression that our pro-war colleagues are some kinds of empty-eyed, fudge-brained, infantile golems newly spawned from petri-dishes, fresh to the world and innocent as tadpoles, such is the vacuity that seemingly resides in them where the rest of us have some recall of events so recently occurred you would be stretching the lexicon to call them history. Not that I mean that in a bad way.

So I've taken the pledge: no more chat-forums. If I want to be patronised by functional illiterates who think it somehow courageous and tough-minded to support a war somebody else will be fighting, I can talk to my MP. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the large percentage of my posts disallowed by the moderator.

It's On

Looking at real post #1 I realised it was way too poignant. This no time for poignancy.

Noon Aussie-time that sick-joke, draft-dodging, born-with-a-silver-spoon-up-his-nose, Oh-Dad-won't-you-buy-me-my-own-baseball-team, dead-eyed automaton the American people didn't elect President gave Saddam Hussein "and his sons" ("This man tried to kill m'pa!" What is this? A Sicilian feud?) forty-eight hours to get out of Iraq, or every other Iraqi's gonna pay. And I always thought Reagan was the one who couldn't tell the difference between real life and a Hollywood movie. For this result, the world's most powerful dumbass has happily pissed away international law and the diplomatic structures that kept the second half of the Twentieth Century from looking like the first half (well, if you were European). No more pretense, we're an Empire, we do what we bloody like.

And apart from everything else, he's left the rest of us in the invidious position of hoping everything we know about what's likely to happen next is wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm going to have to spend the next month praying I'll end up looking like an idiot. Sure, it's worth it: better to be taunted by I-told-you-so's from gloating war-mongering pinheads than to watch thousands die, and the world go all to Hell. That doesn't mean I have to like it. Of course, whatever happens they'll tell us how right they were - look at the way these wingnuts extol the miracle of Afghanistan, now the Sweden of Central Asia, because we cared so much.

But George Senior's little sapling is the Seppos' leader (insert bus-sized qualifiers here) and they can hate him. I have other fish to fry. Our glorious leader John Howard has just announced that, yes, those Australian soldiers in the Gulf for the last three months aren't just there for a tan, we will be going to war. What a relief - the tension was killing me. This despite massive opposition (and, my American friends, I mean three-quarters of the population against war without UN sanction, 40% against war under any circumstances) illustrated with street protests dwarfing anything seen since the Sixties. Dubya has the support of most of his people (so CNN says, at any rate, and why would we doubt them?). Howard does not - so the coffin into which he has happily driven the last nail contains not only international law, but Australian democracy and the idea that peacefully petitioning your government has any kind of point. When the NON-peaceful protests start, I hope he remembers that.

Learning Curve

Well, I did have a sizeable post but when I tried to post it I got an Error 401 message and, of course, everything I'd typed disappeared. Simple lesson: compose on something else first.

I posted this tiresome note instead of my original post so that you could share the pain.

Hurts worse for me.

Monomania

This is a hell of a time to start a weblog. One issue, one obsession, everywhere I look. We're going to war, like it or not. So what's my opinion on that? On what - going to war or that my opinion about going to war is irrelevant? Is there a possibility of meta-anger here? "I'm angry because no-one cares that I'm angry." There's a T-shirt slogan for you.

It's like the dreams you get when you fall asleep with the radio on. You can still hear the broadcast so it becomes part of the dream. Sometimes, there's a radio in the dream, chattering away. You turn down the volume, flick the off switch, nothing happens. You pull out the plug, you tear the set apart, and the chatter doesn't stop. Nothing you do makes any difference. The sound is coming from a different world and you only think it's real. That's what this is like, except that it's our leaders who are living in a dream.

"He's dreaming now," said Tweedledee: "and what do you think he's dreaming about?"

Alice said "Nobody can guess that."

"Why, about you!" Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. "And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?... You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!... I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?"

Gosh. Only the second post and I'm already quoting children's literature. Hopefully things will improve with time.

Hello to me

A billion logorrheists cluttering up the datasphere - why should not I be among them? If my opinions count for nothing, they can at least take up server space. Or so we'll see.

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