Public Address - Hard News (Home)

So spare me the hectoring | Apr 30, 2003 14:21

I'm sure I've read more confused, angry, paranoid tracts in the New Zealand Herald than Denis Dutton's effort yesterday, but I can't presently remember when.

Dutton opens with his favourite conceit, casting himself as the keen-minded sceptic in a room full of feeble-minded Kiwi liberals discussing, in this case, the Australian government's actions during the Tampa refugee crisis:

A memorable moment came when I challenged the group to explain what they would do with the stream of refugees were New Zealand situated west of Australia, instead of east. What would we do if the boats were coming to us first?

The possibility had never occurred to anyone present. Like our geographic isolation, our moral superiority to the Australians was simply a given.

As anyone with an appreciation of regional politics going back further than five minutes would know, the problem of seaborne asylum-seekers is hardly a new one in the Asia-Pacific region. And not all Australian leaders have dealt with the problem as Howard did - indeed, in the 1970s, Malcolm Fraser bucked public sentiment to follow what he regarded as a humanitarian imperative to help the Vietnamese families who made for Australia in their leaky boats.

No one should envy Australia in its exposure to this problem. But Australia's flow of refugees and economic migrants is dwarfed by that of many European countries, including those which, like New Zealand, have not signed up to the new American beliefs on foreign policy that Dutton seems to think are the only acceptable response to the problem.

The fact is that Australia was and is a signatory to an international refugee convention under which it has clear obligations. Its own humanitarian programme allows for an annual tally of 4000 "onshore applicants" - people, like the Tampa's cargo, who arrive on Australian soil and seek asylum. Australia is not bound to accept these people, but it is expected to treat them humanely. The policy of interning families in isolated, privately-managed detention camps, where, according to reliable reports, social order was allowed to break down with hideous results, was not humane.

New Zealand's official response, as I recall it, was not censurious. We took 140 of the Tampa refugees and integrated them into our society in what appears to have been an admirable process.

Dutton then goes on to link our "bargain-basement moralism" with the "smugness" of our past and present leaders.

Helen Clark suggested that Al Gore would not have invaded Iraq and that the war was obviously "not going to plan". Both of these false statements were made on a day when Americans and Britons were dying fighting for the security of the Western world and the freedom of Iraqis from a ruthless dictator.

As regards the first of these "false statements" (Clark responded to a specific interview question about whether American foreign policy was explicitly tied to the current leadership with the words "it's a bit hard, for example, to see an Al Gore Presidency having delivered this"), Dutton can, I suppose, be forgiven for not having caught up with Gore's unequivocal statement that, no, he would not have invaded Iraq.

The second was impolitic, but, at the time it was made, perfectly true. Basra was refusing to fall and US Lt General William Wallace was telling the press that "the enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against."

Dutton then moves on to Clark's "truly repellent" suggestion that John Howard's government was willing to send young Australians to their deaths in pursuit of a trade deal with the US. Which wasn't of course, what she said. She said that New Zealand wouldn't "trade the lives of young New Zealanders, for a war it doesn't believe in, to secure some material advantage." Again, check the papers: at the time, some members of the New Zealand Parliament were shouting that New Zealand's failure to sign up for war would lose us a trade deal. (Some Australian commentators are now openly gloating that our failure to sign up for Iraq has lost us the deal.)

Such a suggestion, says Dutton, is "as contemptible as suggesting that the Americans are in Iraq for the oil". I guess he could tell that to Richard V. Allen, the member of the US Defense Policy Council, who told Kim Hill that the war was necessary "to protect the sanctity of oil supplies." To any sensible observer, there are a variety of motives behind the US move on Iraq but Dutton seems to regard the suggestion that any of them might be less than benign as a form of thoughtcrime.

And then there's this:

Consider the situation: Australia is geographically large but underpopulated, with long, hard-to-secure borders, at the edge of what is becoming an explosively unstable region. China might go completely to pieces in the next 20 years. Muslim fanatics are blowing up churches in the Philippines. North Korea now boasts of nuclear weapons and, while starving its own people, threatens both South Korea and Japan.

Most ominously, there is Australia's near neighbour, Indonesia, with 233 million inhabitants, 88 per cent of whom are Muslim. It controls a huge standing army but has vast internal problems, in the rebellious Irian Jaya, for example. The mass killing of young Australians in Bali could be a foretaste of what might become endemic terrorism. Worse, an invasion of western Australia is possible.

Scary. It's difficult to see why Dutton feels the need to emphasise that an "ominous" 88 per cent of Indonesians are Muslims, unless it is to imply that Muslims are per se dangerous or potential terrorists and invaders. And liberals are supposed to be paranoid?

He doesn't say whether, say, India, should assume the right to deal unilaterally with the nuclear-armed Muslims on its borders. Frankly, treating the whole of Asia as a threat demanding a pre-emptive response is just stupid. Our future lies with Asia, and its ongoing integration into the global economic and social structures.

In the face of these deep uncertainties, Australia has decided to throw in its lot with the most powerful country the planet has ever seen. Both Australia and the United States are brash, spirited nations, natural allies in democratic politics, Anglo-Saxon heritage and lively temperament. These buoyant, optimistic peoples love freedom and will fight to protect it.

Yet according to opinion polls, the "buoyant, optimistic" Australians opposed the war in nearly as great a number as their sulky- soft-headed cousins across the Tasman (the same was true of public opinion in almost every member of the "coalition of the willing"). That they have, after the fact, swung in behind Howard - as the British did behind Blair, who also enjoys the luxury of weak political opposition - is hardly surprising, but that's not what Dutton is claiming.

Dutton's glossy brochure for the New American Century presents US policy as considered, consistent, clear and unified. In reality, of course, this is not the case.

We know that the US State Department and the Pentagon are effectively at war with each other, that the CIA is leaking documents to support its own case. Career diplomats have resigned. Newt Gingrich has come out of the woodwork to demand a purge against the State Department. Richard Perle and, now, Donald Rumsfeld, have been guilty of extraordinary failures to disclose conflicts of interest related directly to the new foreign policy. It's a circus, and a potentially dangerous one.

And yet, New Zealand is, by Dutton's lights, a pathetic international failure because it has declined to abandon foreign policy principles it has pursued for decades in favour of a policy unabashedly based on narrow American self-interest. His slurring, as an American, of New Zealand is particularly unpleasant given our contribution of troops in Afghanistan, our long record of contributing to US intelligence, and our participation in naval surveillance for terrorist activity. None of this, it appears, accords us the privilege of saying no when we believe it.

The Americans, in case no one has noticed, have begun a long-term war against terrorists, mainly Islamo-fascists, and their potential helpers among rogue states capable of producing enriched uranium or other devices and materials for mass murder. The ultimate aim is to make sure that no one ever sails into New York Harbour with a nuclear bomb packed into a shipping container.

And to this end, odious central Asian regimes are groomed as "allies", sovereign governments are explicitly threatened at the rate of two or three a week (the Czech Republic, France, Belgium, Iran and Malaysia in the past seven days by my count), international institutions and treaties are undermined and domestic civil rights are progressively suspended by laws of a kind America has simply never seen before.

So spare me the hectoring, and the admonition to look up to America as a paragon of democracy. Christ, at least under our system the outfit that gets the most votes actually wins.

If any nation showed a commitment to democracy on the road to war, it was Britain, where Blair and his inner circle put their political careers on the line by allowing a Commons debate and vote on Britain's participation (the unelected Rumsfeld's comment on this was a pearler: "they have a government that deals with a parliament in their way, a distinctive way"). It was what democracies are supposed to do. Meanwhile, US Congressmen were too busy renaming French fries.

Digg this Scoopit!

Remembering the Internet | Apr 29, 2003 10:27

Well, they missed the 20th anniversary of TCP/IP in January, but somebody has remembered to hold a talkfest to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the original graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic.

Mosaic was my first hands-on experience of the Internet, at a one-day course in 1993 at Auckland University, where they also taught us a bunch of other stuff that nobody needs to know now.

Not long after, I got my shell account at Iconz, Auckland's first commercial ISP, under the work-it-out-for-yourself customer support system that prevailed at the time (how you were supposed to divine that you typed "pine" at the shell prompt to get your email, I'll never know). The Wood brothers, who went on to found Ihug, actually set up my account.

Later in 1994, I upgraded to a Slip account, and thus was able to Web browse. Really slowly. It looked like this. Just like the web browser that you're reading this with now, it had back, forward, reload and home buttons. Truly, that was a killer UI.

Before long, word got round that the key people behind Mosaic had gone commercial. Marc Andreessen himself sent out a message announcing the availability of beta 0.9 of Mosaic Netscape "a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more." It was faster, it was cooler and you were pretty much an old-stick-in-the-mud if you didn't download and use it henceforth. I'll stop before we get to the browser wars …

Apple Computer has scored its customary big story placement for its new digital music service, the iTunes Music Store - this time it's an enthusiastic rave in Fortune. Like the iPod, the music service isn't so much a revolutionary change as a better (and way cooler) implementation of what some other people are doing. The big five record companies have signed up, and the store has tracks - US99 cent downloads - from Dylan, Eminem, Massive, QOTSA, etc, that haven't been available online before.

So now you can get 'Fly Like an Eagle' without having to buy the Steve Miller Band's turgid Greatest Hits album. This will cause some grief in the industry - will volume in single-track sales cover the lost income from obligatory album purchases? - but it was surely inevitable. Playlists are where it's at these days.

I always do everything Steve says, so I downloaded iTunes 4 and QuickTime 6.2 to enable the service, even though it's not available outside the US (they only accept US credit cards and seem to use geolocation on top of that) and probably won't be for months. Anyway, the store is swamped with traffic and spewing out error messages right now. But iTunes 4 now supports encoding in AAC (Advanced Audio Coding - the audio component of MPEG 4, as supported by QuickTime and perverted by Windows Media) and I'm seriously considering trashing most of my MP3s and going AAC all round.

I'll do some more war-blogging tomorrow, but before you leave Fortune, check out this little number about Donald Rumsfeld's role on the board of the Swiss company that in early 2000 won the contract to supply North Korea with a couple of light-water nuclear reactors. These reactors can be used to produce weapons-grade fissile material.

Even as he was railing that the diplomatic deal with North Korea which led to the reactor opportunity "does not end its nuclear menace; it merely postpones the reckoning, with no assurance that we will know how much bomb-capable material North Korea has," Rumsfeld never revealed that he was an active director of the company that, according to Fortune, "had an inside track" on the $US4 billion project.

Even when he chaired a 1998 Congressional panel to examine classified data on the potential nuclear threat from North Korea, Rumsfeld told no one about his commercial involvement with the reactor projects. And get this:

In his final days in office, Clinton had been preparing a bold deal in which North Korea would give up its missile and nuclear programs in return for aid and normalized relations. But President Bush was skeptical of Pyongyang's intentions and called for a policy review in March 2001. Two months later the DOE, after consulting with Rumsfeld's Pentagon, renewed the authorization to send nuclear technology to North Korea. Groundbreaking ceremonies attended by Westinghouse and North Korean officials were held Sept. 14, 2001--three days after the worst terror attack on U.S. soil.

Now, read Seymour Hersch's Richard Perle story in the New Yorker - after which Perle, who was plainly guilty of a failure to disclose interests nearly as startling as Rumsfeld's, called Hersch a "terrorist" then quietly resigned from the chairmanship of the Defense Policy Board - and then tell me you trust these people and you want them running the world. A democracy that cannot call this kind of thing to account really has some serious problems.

Digg this Scoopit!

Paranoid | Apr 28, 2003 12:18

Neil Morrison is "sad" to see me "wasting time on conspiracy theories" - to wit, the suggestion that the highly symbolic toppling of Saddam's statue in Firdus Square had the whiff of stage-management.

There are, he says, "two obvious questions about the supposed photos of the Chalabi supporter [see the post below]: are they the same man and where exactly was the single close-up photo taken?

"Stay with the paranoid Indymedia stuff if you want. But don't be surprised when the much despised neocons gain even greater influence by staying closer to reality. Argument based on reality was the traditional advantage of liberals on issues such as the real effect of drug laws on people's health and personal freedom. Arguments based on conspiracy theory and moral outrage used to be the domain of conservatives, but times have changed."

Alright, then. Paranoid conspiracy theory or reasonable observation?

Neil is right to the extent that, while there are frequent references (mostly in the alternative press) to the small crowd in Firdus Square containing associates of Chalabi, there is - beyond the picture - no conclusive proof of such that I have been able to find. But this Canadian site does have the original picture (as distinct from the one in the Indymedia montage) of the man in the Square, which it appears to credit to Reuters.

It also notes this BBC story, quoting soldiers on the scene as saying the US flag initially draped over Saddam's head was the one flying over the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The Daily Telegraph reported the same thing, and the debate since appears to have been largely about whether or not the flag was retrieved from the rubble of the Pentagon or was flying on another part of the building at the time of the attacks. That it was shipped over from the US and delivered to Firdus Square for the event does not appear to be in doubt.

Three days beforehand, the US government - presumably it went on the Pentagon's bill, rather than the State Department's - flew Ahmed Chalabi and dozens of his people into Nasiriyah, along with their very own new US-funded (new uniforms and everything) militia, the Free Iraqi Forces. Sometime shortly after that, Chalabi's people were also in Baghdad. Presumably they didn't walk there. It's not really much of a stretch to believe that they might have been chauffeured into Firdus Square to make up the numbers.

The toppling of the statue by a US armoured vehicle looks now like an insightful exercise in media management. It was presumably not a coincidence that it was that particular statue, right in front of the international media's base at the Palestine Hotel - even though there were other, bigger statues in the city - that was chosen.

The scene outside the square, which was defended with US tanks, was a little more complicated. The crew from Deutsche Welle was one of relatively few in the area to turn around and walk into the side streets, where they found Iraqis who were as angry as they were elated. There was fighting in progress and, according to Abu Dhabi TV, Saddam staged his last, bizarre public walkabout in another part of town on the same day.

John Lee Anderson's beautifully-written diary of the liberation days for the New Yorker is really worth reading for a sense of the atmosphere. Interestingly - and like a number of other print journalists - he is almost dismissive of the statue event:

By the time we got back to the hotel, the marines had arrived, and the approach to the street was blocked by armoured personnel carriers. We got out of the car and walked toward them. A man who was standing in a crowd gathered at the side of the road called out to ask us if we were Americans, and when we said yes the whole group began cheering and applauding us, clapping their hands as if they were at a performance in a theatre. Not long afterward, in the traffic circle in front of the hotel, a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by soldiers in an armored personnel carrier.

Television in particular needs visual symbolism and spectacle, and the US networks, which went live from the square for a good two hours, got what they needed. And, in a way, so did we, the punters. People were looking for a tipping point, an end of sorts, and they got it. But the Brandenburg Gate, it most certainly was not.

It is also worth noting that while they were securing Firdus Square for freedom, the US Marines weren't doing another thing: keeping public order. The only power base remotely capable of that appears to be the mosques. The Americans would do well to engage with, rather than ignore, Islamic political moderates, as this column from the Observer points out.

Anyway, big ups to Bruce Springsteen. I am no great fan of the man's music, but I can only respect his courage in standing up for the Dixie Chicks at what is clearly a difficult time for free speech in America. The statement on his website reads, in part:

The Dixie Chicks have taken a big hit lately for exercising their basic right to express themselves. To me, they're terrific American artists expressing American values by using their American right to free speech. For them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and even entire radio networks, for speaking out is un-American.

The pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics goes against everything that this country is about - namely freedom. Right now, we are supposedly fighting to create freedom in Iraq, at the same time that some are trying to intimidate and punish people for using that same freedom here at home.

I don't know what happens next, but I do want to add my voice to those who think that the Dixie Chicks are getting a raw deal, and an un-American one to boot. I send them my support.

The Nation also has a story on the chilling of dissent in America.

But Helen Clark can relax a bit. Yet another sovereign leader has fallen afoul of the USA's twitchy, vindictive approach to foreign policy. Membership of the "coalition of the willing" before the war does not, apparently entitle the Czech president Vaclav Klaus to have an opinion on Iraq. The Washington Times has a story based on this interview with the US ambassador to the Czech Republic.

"Meanwhile, back in the real world," says Neil Morrison "28 independent journalists are imprisoned in Cuba."

Indeed they have been, in the twilight of a sad and bankrupt regime. But "better than Cuba" is hardly an aspiration or a recommendation. Especially not when, in another part of Cuba, at Guantanamo Bay, 600 people, including children, are being held without charge, access to legal counsel or their families, or even the basic rights of POWs. At least some of them are claimed by their families to be innocent, but the White House has declared that they have no rights and can be held indefinitely. The children are being interrogated.

And meanwhile in the home of the free, thousands of people - including US citizens - are being held without charge. It took court action by civil rights groups (yeah, those pansy, paranoid liberals again) to force the US government to release their names so their families knew where they were. Many of these people - like Mike Hawash - are not even suspects. Read this column from the Seattle Times:

In 1942, they came for the Japanese Americans and herded them into concentration camps in the desert. They lost three years of their lives and many of their possessions. Their offense was improper ancestral heritage.

In the '50s, they came for left-wing professors, labor organizers and bohemians, dragged them in front of cameras and microphones. They lost, in many cases, jobs and careers. Their offense was having radical thoughts.

On March 20, they came for Maher (Mike) Hawash, an Oregon software engineer, an American citizen of Palestinian ancestry. Federal agents seized him in the Intel parking lot, and a second team, with assault rifles and bulletproof vests, searched his home occupied by his wife and three terrified children.

Hawash's offense? No one knows, for no charge has been filed.

He was whisked away to a federal prison in Sheridan, Ore., which authorities will not confirm. He had a secret bail hearing, was put into solitary confinement and as of last weekend had not been questioned by federal authorities.

Now tell me whose side you'd rather be on.

Digg this Scoopit!

Let Freedom Ring | Apr 24, 2003 12:42

Information Clearing House is the latest dissenting website to cop hack attacks from some self-styled friends of freedom, American-style. I can see why some people would consider the Clearing House a threat: it's very good at what it does.

Some of what appears there is a bit wild-eyed - this story about the US command's alleged deal with Iraq's Republican Guard might be wholly or partly true (Al-Jazeera heard similar rumours immediately after Baghdad fell), or it might be a nice way to ease the pain of Arab shame at military defeat.

Most of the stories, however, are simply mainstream reports that, for whatever reason, don't get the currency they deserve. Like, for example this report citing The Australian newspaper's scoop on the Pentagon's blueprint for bombing the Yongbyon nuclear reactor in North Korea. Or this observation that the Bush White House has allowed the hugely important investigation into the 9/11 attacks a budget of $US3 million - while Ken Starr spent $US47 million on ultimately pointless probes into Clinton's dealings over Whitewater and Lewinsky. You could be forgiven for thinking they're keeping this thing on a very short leash.

There's also this useful section-by-section analysis of the thoroughly scary - and quite un-American - Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, also known as the PATRIOT Act II.

But probably the best thing the Clearing House has carried of late is an amazing story in pictures of the much-covered toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad. The same "Baghdad resident" shown in wire pictures enthusiastically giving the V-for-victory sign to US troops on April 9 also appears in a picture of the Pentagon favourite Ahmed Chabali and his supporters after they had been flown into Nasiriyah on April 6. Only in Nasiriyah, he was dressed as a member of Chalabi's US-funded militia, the Free Iraqi Forces. Presumably, he was later flown into Baghdad for the big day. How many of the hundred-odd others dancing over the statue were also shipped in for the cameras? The taking of Baghdad appears to have been a brilliantly-managed media event. Are you feeling a little duped yet?

That story hasn't had a lot of play, unsurprisingly. But there has been much comment over The News We Kept To Ourselves, an op-ed column in the New York Times by CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan. Jordan revealed that he had kept secret his certain knowledge that some of CNN's local staff in Baghdad were beaten and tortured by the regime. He did so, he said, because to have blown the whistle would have cost the lives of those staff. Others have taken the view that CNN was more concerned about continued access to Baghdad. Jordan talked about the reactions to his confession on CNN itself. Time and The New York Times also tried to sift through the ethical issues. Me? I'm frankly not sure whether the right thing was done.

Meanwhile, as Iraq's Shia masses enjoyed the freedom to travel to Karbala, created extraordinary political momentum and threatened America with the spectacular own-goal of a new Islamic state, Chalabi - already convicted of massive financial corruption in Jordan and Lebanon - is facing a new bank scandal in Switzerland. He's in good company with the deeply suspect Richard Perle then, but does the White House really still seriously regard him as a viable leader of the country where he hasn't lived for 30 years?

Anyway, back to the drug debate - and medical marijuana. It's worth highlighting a little of the hypocrisy at play here. Peter Dunne is on record as defending the right of pub owners to milk the vulnerable of their money through pokie machines so that the public can have "a flutter" - but he's happy to deprive very ill people of relief from pain and nausea because … well, you decide.

This double standard is quite widespread. Remember Guy Leonard Smith, the delightful chap who owns both Pokies Bar in Otahuhu and the addiction treatment facility Capri Health Services - which makes money by treating some of Leonard's own victims?

Well, last time I checked, the director of clinical services at Capri was Tom Claunch, the ubiquitous zero-tolerance-for-drugs rent-a-quote, US publisher of Tom Scott's risible and dreadfully-researched Great Brain Robbery and founder of the International Institute for Addiction Studies (a fancy name for a PO Box in Hanmer). You have to wonder how some people sleep at night.

Green Cross has more local background on medical marijuana. Oh, and here's the Euphoria website. Oooh. Tight t-shirts a-go-go. Who would want to be associated with that kind of branding?

Digg this Scoopit!

The thin end of the wedge | Apr 22, 2003 10:44

It is heartening to see Labour's Steve Chadwick, the chair of the health select committee, making positive noises about authorising medical use of marijuana - and depressing to hear United Future's Peter Dunne describing it as the "thin end of the wedge" towards softer drug laws.

If the debate proceeds any further, we will doubtless endure liberal use of that other empty cliche in the war on drugs: that allowing medical use of marijuana would "send the wrong message" to young people.

Right. Just like the administration of morphine and pethidine for acute pain relief sends the "wrong message" about heroin abuse. Perhaps Peter Dunne should be invited to expand on his stupidity by blaming sufferers of narcolepsy - who are prescribed amphetamines - for the P epidemic. It would make about as much sense.

Listen up: the case for medical marijuana to ease some forms of chronic pain and disablement, including that experienced in multiple sclerosis, and to curb nausea associated with chemotherapy and HIV drugs, is beyond doubt. Those using it say it works better and produces fewer side-effects than legal medicines. It lets them live their lives. To continue to make those people criminals is simply inhumane. And not, one might add, very Christian.

Ironically, the debate has arisen again just as British research suggests an interesting future for the active ingredients in cannabis in protecting the brain against the effects of ageing. Will Dunne and God's other little helpers stand in the way of its use to treat Alzheimer's too?

Recreational use, of course, will continue whatever the law is. As the University of Auckland Alcohol and Public Health Research Unit drug use surveys have shown ever since they were first conducted, the law barely registers in New Zealanders' decision to use, or not use, pot.

Certainly a couple of thousand New Zealanders weren't too concerned about Mr Plod at Sly & Robbie's Auckland concert on Saturday night. The atmosphere at the rhythm twins' show was distinctly irie. The show itself was a mixture of the sublime and the frustrating. The band followed its booming rhythm section into mad, headlong jams - occasionally they'd get it wrong and just start into something else, or mess up the vocalists by coming back on the wrong beat. Freaky. Michael Rose sang beautifully, but spent way too much time getting the crowd to sing back to him. Didn't he realise New Zealanders aren't really very good at that sort of thing? Best moment: after they'd blown up the PA system, then spent 20 minutes jamming around while the amps were replaced, Robbie Shakespeare's bass came thundering back through the front-of-house like a hundred tons of niceness. Everybody threw their hands in the air and screamed. Well, I did anyway.

Mindful of the demands of several hours' standing up and dancing, I purchased and consumed a legal drug. Euphoria is a locally-made "dance pill" that, according to the label, contains the synthetic equivalent of black pepper extract. This presumably means the active ingredient is some form of piperine, which is found naturally in members of the pepper family in quite high concentrations. It is related to the active compounds in kava and betel nuts, and has found some popularity in dietary supplements to improve absorption of nutrients and combat the effects of ageing. It is also, more distantly, related to the piperazines, a group of chemicals including BZP, the main ingredient in the Exodus dance pills.

Unlike Exodus, Euphoria doesn't appear to produce stomach upsets (BZP is caustic), hangovers or headaches. Indeed, it seems to generate a mild, agreeable facsimile of the clubbing vibe - wakefulness, elevated mood, small rushes - without much in the way of adverse effects. [UPDATE: Apparently, the Euphoria helpline says Euphoria does contain BZP, but not the other piperazine found in Exodus, TFMPP. If so, (a) it would appear to be a better formulation, and (b) it's stretching it quite a bit calling it an "equivalent" to black pepper extract - piperazines don't occur naturally.]

I can't personally say I'd take it all the time, but the authorities would be well advised not to overreact to the growing legal high market. Assuming that it is highly unlikely that the whole nature of contemporary urban nightlife can be changed by official edict, it would be sensible to allow punters to purchase relatively safe stimulants from legitimate retail outlets and thus stay away from the genuine criminal, chemical and psychological menace of methamphetamine. (A similar argument might usefully be applied to cannabis, but let's leave that for the moment …)

Anyway, more American bullying of international institutions over another addictive substance - sugar. The sugar industry in the US is trying to blackmail the World Health Organisation by demanding that the US Congress end its funding contribution unless the WHO scraps its new guidelines on healthy eating. The industry wants the WHO to declare that up to a quarter of a healthy diet can consist of sugar. Yes, really. And the bought-and-paid-for dullards who crowd America's democracy will probably go for it.

Dangerous Christian cult alert: six members of the US Congress live in a million-dollar Capitol Hill townhouse that is subsidised by the secretive religious organisation known as The Fellowship.

Jeffrey Sharlett's amazing inside story on The Fellowship - which gains the trust and support of senior politicians and businesspeople by pandering to their vanity, much as the Scientologists do with Hollywood stars - originally printed in the March issue of Harper's magazine, is now available online. This is absolutely required reading.

Digg this Scoopit!

Benevolence | Apr 15, 2003 09:45

David Cohen has sent me the text of John Lloyd's final essay for the New Statesman, in which Lloyd explains why he is resigning as a columnist for the magazine he once edited: because the left, blinded by its revulsion for American imperialism, has "made a fundamental mistake" in opposing the forcible overthrow of an odious regime in Iraq.

Lloyd doesn't say whether he believes US motives are entirely benign, but he is in no doubt that in defending sovereignty in the name of anti-imperialism, opponents of war undermine their claim to champion the oppressed. These arguments are always a bit easier to make after the fact of course - if he was so sure of his argument, why didn't he resign last year? But I absolutely agree with this passage:

The left's programme now should be to argue in favour of committing resources to those multilateral agencies that work, and to seek agreement from those forces everywhere in the world that are committed to democratic (or at least more responsive) government and to an observation of human and civil rights. The aim, as the US political scientist Michael Walzer has put it, should be a "strong international system, organised and designed to defeat aggression, to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, to control weapons of mass destruction and to guarantee the physical security of all the world's peoples".

I would be happy to see a code which made full access to the international community contingent on human rights standards. Perhaps in the very end this might embrace a military response, but I would prefer the inducement of the ability to belong to an economic club - something, perhaps, like the European Union does. (It was interesting to see Hungary vote overwhelmingly - albeit on a low turnout - to join "old Europe" in the EU over the weekend. Other part-time members of the "coalition of the willing" are likely to follow, and Tony Blair wants to take Britain into the European single currency. Why? Because it's a better model than the bullying bilateral deals the US wants to do now.)

But it must be non-arbitrary and it must be consistent, and in the brave new world thus far outlined by the White House, there's precious little of that. In 2000, the UN human rights rapporteur on torture concluded his two-week fact-finding mission in Uzbekistan with the declaration that torture is "systematic" in the country's prisons and detention camps. The story contains this quote from exiled Uzbek author Safar Bekjo:

"In the first detention center, the detainee is beaten, verbally humiliated, punched, hung upside down, given electric-shock treatment, forced to wear a gas mask, and then made to inhale chemical gases. If a detainee doesn't sign the necessary document, a false confession fabricated by interrogators, then different torture methods are used. This includes cutting off fingernails, punching needles under people's nails, putting sticks or other objects into the anus, and raping women. These are mass-scale, special torture techniques. Authorities don't mind if the general public knows about this torture. It keeps them in constant terror."

Reads remarkably like the kind of torture-porn pro-war advocates have been tossing around since they settled on human rights as the most reliable rationale for war in Iraq, doesn't it? Yet this story was published at the same time that the US began describing Uzbekistan as an "ally" and moved its troops there.

Since then, Uzbekistan has mysteriously disappeared from the US State Department's latest register of countries that deny religious freedom, along with other US-friendly states, according to Human Rights Watch.

And next month - story courtesy of some dreadful lefty at the New Statesman - Clare Short, the British Secretary of State for International Development, is due to chair the annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in ... Uzbekistan!

The US has also been happy to look the other way elsewhere in Central Asia too - notably in Turkmenistan, where the megalomaniac Stalinist dictator Saparmurat Niazov has renamed the months of the year and days of the week for himself and his family and appears to regard his powers as roughly equivalent to those of God. Why is this being tolerated? As former US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Thomas Woodrow explained in this short but startling essay in February: oil.

To rejoice in the relief of the Iraqi people from a brutal dictatorship is one thing. To believe that the US action was motivated solely by a benevolent desire for democracy in the world is just stupid.

In the circumstances, it's understandable that The Left might have become a little confused about motivations and morality. Can you remind me why we're invading Syria next? I seem to have forgotten.

Digg this Scoopit!

At least they saved the oil wells | Apr 14, 2003 09:57

The transcript of Donald Rumsfeld's April 11 press conference has already been removed from the Washington File, the US federal government's public archive. "The Washington File article you're looking for is no longer on the system," it says when you visit.

It's easy to understand why. His jocular, dismissive comments, including the observation that "freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," were both fateful and ludicrous. (The New York Times has a partial transcript and some video.)

In our free democracies, none of us is free to "make mistakes and commit crimes" like looting shops, hospitals and universities. We enjoy the rule of law, and, if we don't enjoy it, there are officers with a duty to enforce it.

But what has happened this past week in the museums of Baghdad and Mosul is much worse than any mere smash-and-grab raid for office chairs or luxury light fittings. The collections in those museums are not just the soul of the Iraqis, they are a human heritage: among them, the first written texts from the first cities. I've looked at the handful of very old cuneiform tablets in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, and, even where they are just inventory notes or accounts, there is something powerful about them. They are the first time we wrote anything down.

As Robert Fisk put it:

They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them down on to the concrete.

Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history – only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation.

In all cases, coalition troops stood back and let it happen - they had no orders to do otherwise. Could this have been avoided?

Absolutely. Antiquities experts quite clearly warned of the danger of this happening as the US war rhetoric was stepped up last year. Ironically, less than a year ago, Saddam's government embarked on a major heritage project - the recreation of the famous seventh century BC library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal - with the British Museum. Unesco was set to help.

The situation at Mosul might not be quite so bad. After talks with the British Museum, the management of the museum there moved some of the most precious antiquities. There has been systematic theft and, presumably, supply to the West in the northern Iraqi territories protected by US and British forces since the 1991 war.

But the museum directors were mostly fearing US bombs, not looting at the hands of their own. So what should we make of the fact that some Iraqis appear to have been willing to cut our their own cultural hearts? To an extent, Rumsfeld is right - the urge to strike back and to take back from the regime must have been powerful in the first hours of freedom. But the gutting of public institutions does not suggest any great faith in prospects for a collective state: ideally, they should have believed this was all theirs anyway, but they didn't. They just grabbed what they could get.

In the end, this is the responsibility of the Americans. They chose this path, they made light of the risks. They were specifically asked to ensure the security of the two main museum sites. And they didn't. It's tempting to conclude that they just didn't care. But hey, at least they saved the oil wells.

Digg this Scoopit!