Howard the Duck
Thus it is 1 October 2003 as I sit and start these ramblings. It allows me to observe that today is the first day of water restrictions in Sydney, brought about by the low levels of the city's dams in the wake of a two-year drought. As I look out my window, I see rain clouds as Hughie (the local personification of the weather deity responsible for precipitation) has decided to send down rain to mark the occasion. I think they call that irony.
I'm not going to bore you with another rant about the evils of the Prime Miniature. I say some things in passing in the latest rant on Iraq and merely note that, since last we talked, Howard has lied about Manildra, meeting with Dick Honan and the whole ethanol business - trying to get out of his troubles by hairsplitting on how an answer that clearly misled Parliament came to be given; he dished dirt on Andrew Wilkie (see below); he defended Wilson Tuckey when the latter misused his position and lied to Parliament; he promoted Philip Ruddock who is accused of having issued residency visas in very questionable circumstances; he continued to 'save Medicare' to the point where it is just about ruined; by withholding money from hospitals, schools, universities and the needy his government has racked up a surplus which will be used as electoral bribes/tax-cuts; and managed to carry on the business of government for another two months without being told anything about anything.
Perhaps it is apposite to look closely at the results of a study in the US by four psychologists as to the pathology of conservatism. Their conclusion: conservatism, which they reckoned 'preached a return to an idealised past, and condoned inequality', is a set of neuroses rooted in 'fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity'. The authors looked at the psyche of George W Bush and he's a textbook case: he has a preference for moral certainty and has frequently expressed dislike of nuance. "This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes". One psychologist argued that the aversion to shades of grey and the need for closure could explain why the US Administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's WMD. Perhaps the explanation for Howard is in his psychology - the poor man is a victim of a nasty pathology.
Iraq and ruin
How much did the Australian government know and when? The latest input into this debate has been the revelation that the Australian intelligence agencies received advice formulated by the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee in early February to the effect that the terrorist threat would increase if military action were launched against Saddam Hussein. Now this conclusion directly contradicted the assertions being made by the three wise monkeys, who argued that the attack on Iraq was aimed at furthering the war on terrorism and would lessen the chances of further terrorist attacks. The JIC report said not only that al Qaeda and its associates were the great terrorist threat and that military action against Iraq would heighten the threat, it also argued that there was no evidence that Saddam wanted to use chemical or biological weapons in terrorist attacks or planned to pass them along to al Qaeda. However, the JIC noted that in the event of regime collapse in Iraq there was greater likelihood that such weapons would be transferred. So any attack would not only not achieve its stated objectives, it would be proportionately counter-productive to those very objectives. The question raised by the revelation of the existence of the JIC advice is: which Australian intelligence agencies knew of the JIC advice and to what extent did they incorporate it in their own advice to the Australian government? We trust our government to take important decisions, like the decision to declare war, based on consideration of the best available advice. In early 2003, the government was either uninformed on these issues or chose to ignore the advice. Whichever is the case, it's bad.
And the JIC advice meshes very closely with what Andrew Wilkie says are the conclusions which ONA came to but which were for political reasons not communicated strongly enough to the Prime Minister. Wilkie resigned from ONA on principle and, as a result, has been the subject of some very nasty personal attacks from Howard and his minions. Most worrying is that someone in government or the senior bureaucracy leaked a copy of Wilkie's earlier confidential report on Iraq to Andrew Bolt, the reactionary columnist for Melbourne's Herald Sun. Bolt then used this material in an attempt to drop a bucket on Wilkie. (This is at one with what's also happened in the US and the UK. In the UK, the bucket-dropping led to the tragic suicide of David Kelly; in the US, someone in the White House or the VP's office named to several reporters an undercover CIA operative whose husband had written an intelligence briefing that contradicted the Bushies' accepted wisdom.) The leaking of 'eyes-only' intelligence is very much against the law - this government has introduced legislation that makes punishments for such actions far more severe. The Federal Police are investigating the matter. (However, by the end of September, no AFP officer had spoken to Wilkie, one of the likely sources of the leak and, surely, a 'person of interest' to the investigation. Given the likely seniority of the leaker in the government, I wonder if they'll find anything. John Howard gave press interviews in early March, one of which was used by Time magazine. In that article he was quoted as saying that the reason for the concern with Iraq was the possibility of it possessing weapons of mass destruction. He deliberately and specifically denied that the coalition was interested in regime change. That would not be the reason for any attack on Iraq, he said then. Now, having failed to find any evidence of WMD, and even having trouble finding evidence of any weapons programs, he blandly asserts that the reason for the attack was to liberate Iraq from the clutches of an evil regime. Was he lying then? Or is he lying now? There was a saying in the 1960s: George Washington couldn't tell a lie; Richard Nixon couldn't tell the truth; Lyndon Johnson couldn't tell the difference. I'm beginning to think that John Howard cannot tell the difference.
First written: October 2003
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