Dubya and Denial

I've been reading Bob Woodward's State of Denial recently and have been impressed by its account of what has actually been going on iinside the US government throughout the Iraq war. The book clarifies a few things. Certainly, Don Rumsfeld comes out looking bad. Many others do not. Bush himself comes out of it surprisingly well. It is plain that he and those around him were idealists, not knaves. They wanted to remove an odious tyrant from power, set Iraq free and then step back. This was an admirable goal. The problem has been the incoherent manner in which the goal has been pursued.

Manifest weaknesses in the inter-agency process - i.e. the capacity of different parts of the US Government to coordinate policy and take coherent action - appalled me even before the war started. I was a student of these matters back in the 1980s and perhaps I should have opposed the war simply on the prudential grounds that these weaknesses would stuff up the war effort. I didn't. I believed in the cause of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, because I saw him as the vicious enemy of all decent Iraqis and of everything I personally stand for. But, of course, the problem was not deciding whether it was a good thing to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The problem was, how will order to ensured in Iraq once he is overthrown?

It is now clear that the only way to have ensured such order was to have a far larger occupation force to begin with and to have quickly rallied the defeated Iraqi army as a national army, removing only the most diehard Baathist officers. Neither of these things was done. Woodward's account of the matter makes breathtakingly clear who was resppnsible and what they said and did. The openness of so many senior people to discussing all this in the midst of the war is truly remarkable. Yet what also emerges clearly from Woodward's account is that even those most responsible for the failure to take these measures (Rumsfeld and Bremer) did what they did in good faith.

Rumsfeld thought Iraqi freedom would be best served by keeping the invasion force as small as possible, toppling the tyrant, then leaving Iraq to the Iraqis. Bremer thought that demobilizing the Iraqi army and starting again would ensure a national army, not a Sunni and Baathist one. They were vigorously advised otherwise and nonetheless chose to proceed. Bush, for his part, permitted all this without exerting adequate leadership. That, too, is painfully clear from Woodward's account of events in 2003 through early 2005.

Now Bush has decided, contrary to the advice of the Iraq Survey Group, to send 20,000 more troops into Iraq, to try to restore order and make possible a US withdrawal from the country under reasonable circumstances. The speech he gave on the subject did him credit, in my opinion. Whatever one thinks of the decision to invade Iraq, responsibility must now be taken for the situation as it is. The key question is, will 20,000 troops be sufficient. I suspect John McCain was correct in stating that the US needs to be more decisive than that. We shall see, over the next six months.

Amir Taheri and the Middle East

It can be exceptionally difficult to get a handle on what is really happening in a theatre of war. These past few days, we have had widespread press coverage of the reported statement by senior US military commanders, Peter Pace and John Abizaid, that Iraq could slide into civil war unless the sectarian violence in the country is checked. There is a general perception that, in fact, things are going from bad to worse in Iraq. Indeed, so pervasive is that impression that it is difficult not to buy into it.

Yet, in the June edition of the venerable current affairs magazine Commentary, Amir Taheri, a highly experienced Iranian journalist, author of ten books on the Middle East and veteran of decades of close observation of Iraqi affairs, has a long essay headed 'The Real Iraq- No Quagmire'. What immediate judgments do we make in circumstances such as this? I can imagine some readers scoffing, 'Commentary? That right-wing rag?! Who'd believe anything that appeared there?' Or thinking, 'Whoever this guy Taheri is, he's simply got to be either deluded or lying. The evidence for Iraq being a quagmire is overwhelming. He's clearly just in denial.'

I don't share either of those judgments. I think Taheri's essay is an impressive piece of work and it is genuinely troubling that there can be such stark disagreement concerning the 'facts on the ground'. What haunts me is the idea that the undeniable nastiness of much of what is happening in Iraq, combined with the relentless anti-Americanism of many commentators across a good deal of the ideological spectrum these days, is combining to undermine a difficult but important campaign to buttress order in Iraq and make it the coping stone of a new Middle East.

This was driven home to me by an article in The Australian this morning by the same Amir Taheri, in which he argued that the war in Iraq is simply one theatre in an ideological struggle between the liberal West and Islamists who are determined to overthrow what they see as a decadent civilization and replace it with theocratic reaction inspired by The Koran. All the talk of a ceasefire in Lebanon, he argues, means little in what is "an existential conflict" in which the other side is playing for keeps, while we remain deeply confused, irresolute and divided. Withdrawal from Iraq would constitute a strategic defeat in this conflict - especially if it occurred due to an erroneous judgment that we had failed there.

This brings me back to Taheri's essay in Commentary. He opens his piece by remarking: 'Spending time in the United States after a tour of Iraq can be a disorienting experience these days. Within hours of arriving here, as I can attest from a recent visit, one is confronted with an image of Iraq that is unrecognizable...It would be hard indeed for the average interested citizen to find out on his own just how grossly this image distorts the realities of present-day Iraq.' Let that sink in: Taheri is not saying that the conventional wisdom is contestable, or that there is still some faint hope that things will turn around; he is saying that the conventional wisdom, propagated through our mass media (and more sedulously so by media such as al-Jazeera) is a gross distortion of the realities in Iraq.

His argument is impressively systematic. He uses five indices to assess how things stand in Iraq: the question of refugees; the flow of Muslim pilgrims; the state of the economy; the condition of business enterprises; and the character of mass communication. These are indices he has observed for 40 years in Iraq and by each of them, he argues, Iraq is looking very good. When things have been really bad in the past, people have fled Iraq in droves; but since 2003 1.2 million exiles have returned and refugee camps on the borders have shut down. This is simply not what would happen if things really were spiralling out of control, he reasons.

In the 1990s, the flow of pilgrims into Iraq virtually ground to a halt. Since 2003, it has turned into a flood, with thousands of Iraqi clerics returning from exile and millions of pilgrims visiting the country's religious shrines, "making them the most visited spots in the entire Muslim world, ahead of Mecca and Medina." Moreover, he remarks, the Muslim seminaries in Iraq are not controlled by the government, as they are in Iran, and are, therefore, producing a variety of forms of scholarship which is good for the Islamic world as a whole.

The economy is thriving, with the new dinar appreciating against major regional currencies and even against the US dollar. It is now treated as a safe and sound medium of exchange. Is this what one would expect in a country sliding into civil war and falling apart at the seams? It is not. Indeed, Taheri tells us, the Iraqi economy has been doing "better than any other in the region". Not that that would be hard, as the Arab states around it and Iran are in general so poorly run that they are doing very badly. Still, he indicates that GDP growth has been spectacular, inflation has come down sharply, unemployment, while still very high, has been halved in the past two years; and Iraq has begun to export foodtsuffs to surrounding countries, something it has not been able to do since the 1950s.

Finally, Iraq has become the one place in the Arab world where freedom of expression actually exists and there is a flourishing independent media. Millions of Iraqis have voted in successive elections and, argues Taheri, those who assert that one cannot impose democracy on a country by force entirely miss the point. "Operation Iraqi Freedom was not an attempt to impose democracy by force. Rather, it was an effort to use force to remove impediments to democratization...without the use of force to remove the Baathist regime, the people of Iraq would not have had the opportunity even to contemplate a democratic future."

The anti-American insurgency is one of fascists and terrorists, not one of freedom fighters resisting an oppressive foreign rule. Should it be deferred to in the name of liberal principles and decency? Not at all. Should we choose to withdraw from this theatre of operations, no such principles will win the day; nor will they be extended to us by those who are setting off car bombs and slaughtering thousands of their fellow Iraqis in an effort to spark civil war and abort democratization. Moreover, the Muslim radicals around the world who rage against the United States and indiscriminately attack the West will see such a withdrawal as proof positive that they can destroy us by sheer force of will. That would be a dark day for all of us and we should by no manner of means bring it upon ourselves.

Taheri might be in error, but it is not obvious that he is. What is clear is that, if he is right then we have a very big stake in seeing things through in Iraq. But if he is wrong, we have an even bigger stake in the outcome there - and we should view the unfolding of that outcome with grave disquiet, because it would bode ill indeed for everything we cherish. That, at least, is how things look from where I sit, far from the car bombs and remote from the exercise of any political or military responsibility.

Bjorn Lomborg and a Better World

Earlier this year, I was commissioned to write a report, for a group called Australia 21, on Threats to Australia's Future Security and Prosperity. The draft was completed a few weeks ago and awaits revision. In the lead-up to setting about its revision, I've been reading the newly published reflections out of Copenhagen Consensus: a little book edited by Bjorn Lomborg (of The Skeptical Environmentalist fame) called How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place (Cambridge University Press, 2006). It prompts a few thoughts.

The background to this book is that Lomborg and his colleagues brought together an impressive group of economists to discuss the challenges facing the world and got an expert panel of the world's more distinguished economists, including four Nobel laureates, to then rank the top 10 challenges, having regard to what our priorities should be in allocating resources to address them. The top 10 (before priorities were set) were as follows: climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts and arms proliferation, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and access to clean water, subsidies and trade barriers.

The panel of economic experts who set the priorities were Jagdish Bhagwati, Robert Fogel, Bruno Frey, Justin Yifu Lin, Douglass North, Thomas Schelling, Vernon Smith and Nancy Stokey. Rather to my fascination, they ranked climate change right at the bottom of their list of priorities and, while ranking communicable diseases right at the top, identified AIDS, not a potential avian flu pandemic, as the chief target. Having only recently read Jim Hansen's essay in The New York Review on the dire threat of climate change, unless drastic steps are taken within this decade, I found this thought-provoking.

What was all the more thought-provoking was reading the two short presentations in the book on climate change. The first was by William Cline of the Center for Global Development and the Institute for International Economics. He summarized modelling work that assumed climate change and explored economic costs and benefits of possible policy responses to it. The odd thing was, he projected out 300 years and wrote of tax policies being coordinated globally across that span of time and of scenarios in which global temperatures might increase by anything from 2.5 to 15 degrees Celsius in that time frame.

It struck me that all this was surreal. We can't get agreement on voluntary reduction targets looking ahead a decade or two. How are global carbon taxes to be implemented and sustained for the next three centuries? Besides, unless I have fundamentally misunderstood the climate science, the threshold for truly catastrophic global climate change is a rise in global temperatures of more than 3 degrees Celsius, say 5 degress. To write of 10 or 15 degree rises as if these could simply be factored into economic discounting models on an arithemtic basis seems to imply a serious failure to grasp the implications of such enormous atmospheric changes.

The second paper, by Robert Mendelsohn and the late Alan Manne, did not, however, take issue with him on either of these grounds. Rather, it argued that, overall, the benefits of climate change are likely to outweigh the costs, until the warming exceeds 2.5 degress and "even then the net damage would be far smaller than originally thought." They criticized his paper for making unduly pessimistic assumptions and for recommending what they regard as draconian carbon taxes to head off climate change. I was left wondering whether any of them had reckoned in earnest with either the science or the costs.

This is only a first reaction to reading these brief papers, but I would note that, if a panel of leading economists is so far at odds with itself after considering the matter at some length, then clearly we have a major challenge ahead of us in taking any kind of coordinated action on the matter. Either, therefore, we shall find that, collectively, we have an intractable tragedy of the commons, or, despite our inability to act on a coordinated basis, the invisible hand of multitudinous micro-economic decisions will steer us, unwittingly, out of danger. I fear the first and struggle, with the best will in the world, to hold with confidence to the second of these conclusions.

David and Goliath

Mechanicalbee suggests that the parallel with Hitler is not especially applicable, given that Israel has nuclear weapons and the backing of the United States; and that a better analogy would be South Africa and its neighbours during the apartheid era. Granted Israel is not, in present circumstances, a Warsaw ghetto threatened by enemies with the upper hand; the 'Never again!' cry is an avowal that this appalling set of circumstnaces will not be allowed to arise again. Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have declared that that is precisely their intention. As for South Africa as a parallel, that might be more reasonable if Israel was a state similar to the apartheid one (which is clearly is not), or had a non-Jewish majority pushing for enfranchisement (which it clearly does not).

The challenge Israel faced with Hezbollah was one that no-one else was prepared to help it tackle effectively and which was getting steadily worse. The Lebanese government neither could nor would act to disarm Hezbollah; Syria and Iran were actively arming and inciting it. It was building up the means for a serious and sustained terrorist struggle with Israel and regularly provoking it. What was to be done? In the case of South Africa, we might have sympathised with the ANC, but there is no ground for sympathy with Hezbollah, which is a proscribed terrorist organization with avowed genocidal aims. The debate, therefore, might be over means and ends, but it should not be over where our sympathies lie. They should lie with Israel. It may appear to be Goliath to Hezbollah's David, but it is the hero in the piece.

I do not wish, however, to turn this blog into a site pre-occupied with arguing about the intractable problems of the Middle East. Mostly, I shall simply express responses to the events of the day and these responses will not always be 'arguments' or positions that I expect to defend. I might revise them from day to day. In any case, I intend to move from subject to subject and not to get bogged down in prolonged exchanges about things which cannot, in the nature of the case, be sorted out by these means. I think of a blog, in this sense, as a kind of on-line diary.

Abraham Rabinovich, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in Jerusalem last year, has a piece in The Australian this morning, in which he says that Israel appears to be achieving its chief objective in the current phase of the conflict, which is to clear Hezbollah out of the border area and, above all, to re-establish its eroded deterrent capability, by showing that it will hit back hard against relentless and implacable enemies. Daniel Pipes argues that it will have to go further if this situation is to be sustained: it will have to hold Syria accountable for cutting the supply lines on which Hezbollah depends. The stage is set for a tough and tense few weeks as the logic of this situation is worked out.

What I would very much like to do is take the time to read more than ever on the roots of all this, rather than simply react to events and dig in on preconceived lines. But there are many other things to think about and the course of events is relentless. It's worth bearing this in mind when we feel critical of the decisions of statesmen and generals. They have to make decisions about this on an ongoing basis, under grave uncertainty in an unforgiving environment. Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz are faced with excruciating dilemmas right now. They have my sympathy and I hope they chart a course through this that serves Israel well without doing more hurt to innocent parties than is absolutely unavoidable - and as much hurt to Hezbollah as possible.

Ordinary Death and Dignity

The war in the Middle East will not end soon and many people are dying. This morning, though, I want to reflect on death much closer to home. More precisely, I want to share a very personal reflection on the troubling and vexed issue of euthanasia.

Last week, a great aunt of mine, whom I have know all my life and for whom I have always felt warm affection, suffered a massive and disabling stroke. She had said for years that her greatest fear was of suffering just such a stroke and being stranded in a broken down state between life and death. She has a very fine son-in-law who is an accomplished veterinary surgeon and, having noted the very gentle way he put terminally ill animals to sleep, she used say that, if she suffered a bad stroke, he could just give her a Snickers bar and one of those injections and she'd be very grateful.

On Sunday morning, lying in a state of deteriorating paralysis in hospital, she remarked, with some difficulty, due to impaired speech, "I think it's time for the Snickers bar!" I have wanted to go to visit her, but she has given emphatic instructions that she does not want to see anyone other than immediate family. That immediate family, which is very small, is now faced with the Snickers decision. But what should be done? Our medical and ethical tradition recoils from doing for human beings what we routinely do for animals, though there are occasions when we feel we have no other choice. What about cases such as this?

I don't have a cut and dried answer. However, I have long shared my aunt's belief that we surely have the right - and would want to exercise it - of saying 'Enough!' when things reach a certain pass, such as she is now in, at the age of 83. A good friend in Sydney found herself confronting these questions some years ago, when her mother, a wonderful, spirited woman, was dying slowly and painfully of multiple sclerosis. My friend, a very fine woman herself, helped her mother in a decision to end the agony, by the 'passive' means of not eating and not persisting with life support. But the strain on her own health was almost too much.

I have long believed that I have the right to end my own life at a time and in a manner of my own choosing, although I have doubts about the lives of others in almost all circumstances. The question is, do have a right, perhaps even a duty, to enable others to end their own lives at a time and in a manner of their own choosing? Those who say that only 'God' can choose the time and manner of our deaths place a considerable burden on their God and must forever confront the accusation on His behalf that, if He is doing the choosing, He is both cruel and arbitrary.

I think, rather, that we must choose, but we must do so with as much moral responsibility as we can - and the issue is genuinely complex. For me, apart from personal challenges such as the present one, there are classic reference points that keep me thinking: St Augustine remarking that the Stoics and Epicureans wanted the freedom to commit suicide and seeing this as an objection to their view of life; Gibbon taking the opposite view and seeing classical freedom and dignity as having been abridged by Augustine's theological fatalism; and Hector Berlioz writing a letter (which I'll try to find and share) about the lingering death of a sister from cancer and the wretched refusal of priests and doctors alike to put an end to her suffering.

It is time, I now think, to give this matter some systematic thought.

Israel and Its Enemies

This is a new blog and I'm going to explore the blogosphere a little before settling into any agenda or style of my own. But I'm prompted to open with a few personal observations regarding the current crisis in the Middle East and see how they land.

I attended a rally last night, in a Jewish synagogue in Melbourne, and found the occasion both moving and engaging. It was a large and old synagogue; old by Australian standards, that is. It was built a century or more ago, in Melbourne's golden era. It was packed to the proverbial rafters by Melbourne's Jewish community. This was part of a series of such rallies being held across the country to express concern about the state of affairs in which Israel finds itself.

The whole scene reminded me of that climactic scene in the 1982 film The Chosen, in which Maximilian Schell - a German actor playing a liberal rabbi in post-war Brooklyn - addresses a similar gathering and declares: "What we need from the United Nations now is not moral sympathy, but arms; and we need them now, so that what happened in Europe just a few years ago will never happen again. Never again! Never again!"

Hirsh Goodman, a seasoned Israeli journalist, gave the keynote address. He has long been an advocate of Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and maximum restraint in its war against its enemies; but last night he was unequivocal in stating that Israel now faces genocidal enemies who recognize no restraints and have as their avowed goal the elimination of the state of Israel and the extirmination of the Jewish people.

He was referring not only to Hezbollah and Hamas, but to the regime in Iran - and he was not quoting anyone out of context. He is right, I think. The state of Israel is confronted by relentless enemies in an existential struggle and there is no room for compromise with these enemies. This is a struggle between a liberal democracy and a fascist dictatorship, he declared. He is surely correct. And there is genuine cause to repeat the rallying cry 'Never again!'

This morning's headlines were about the awful incident in Qana - dozens of civilians, including three dozen children - killed when an Israeli rocket demolished a building in a village from which civilians had been warned by the Israeli forces to flee, because it was being used by Hezbollah to fire hundreds of rockets into Israel. These civilian casualties raise agonizing issues to do with the prosecution of war and I'm sure the reaction of many people to the reports from Qana has been to recoil in horror.

Yet I find myself thinking that the blame lies with Hezbollah and with Iran. They sought and provoked this war; they embedded terrorist militias within civilian populations; they flagrantly disregard the laws of war and then cry foul when Israel smites them, killing innocents in the process. I find that my outrage is directed not at Israel, but at its enemies. I believe Hezbollah must be uprooted and destroyed. I believe that Iran must be thwarted and Israel supported.

Outside the synagogue last night, I was handed a pamphlet by Zionist activists who believe that Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 was a "mad" thing to do and that we should all champion the cause of Eretz Israel. I find it hard to agree with that. I do not recognize any religious claim in Palestine, as a 'Holy Land', whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, only secular needs and practicalities. The greatest of those needs and practicalities is for a viable Palestinian state to be able to co-exist with a free and unthreatened Israel.

Nonetheless, Israel's withdrawal from both Lebanon and Gaza was seen by its enemies as a sign of weakness and a retreat in the face of violence; from which they (Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) drew the conclusion that more violence would force Israel to retreat further and further until, at last, it collapsed. This must not happen. As things stand, it is far from happening; but, let there be no mistake, it is the avowed agenda of these parties and if they are not decisively checked on this occasion they will seek to shift the balance of power more and more in their own favor.

There is room for intelligent debate about strategy and tactics here, but I think there is little room for 'evenhandedness'. Hezbollah does not have a legitimate cause and is not seeking negotiable ends. It is the genocidal and terrorist arm of a theocratic regime in Tehran that seeks to do to Israel in our time what Hitler sought to do to Europe's and the world's Jews in the 1930s and 40s. We must stand with Israel unequivocally in this struggle. I, at least, feel no doubt on that score.

Enough for this first post.


Paul