Concocting a 'just' war
Sydney Morning Herald February 22 2003
By Mike Carlton
Subtly, ever so gradually, the war has changed. First it was the war on terrorism. Then, when it became so embarrassingly apparent that Osama bin Laden had vanished into thin air, it became the war to disarm Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction.
Now, as the global protests mount, the spinmeisters are concocting a just war to liberate the Iraqi people and lead them to the broad, sunlit uplands of Western-style democracy. This will make more acceptable the rain of death to be unleashed upon Baghdad in the next few weeks.
The chief proponent of this new, liberationist line is the insufferably sanctimonious Tony Blair, who rolled it out at a rally in Glasgow last weekend. All teeth and hairdo, Blair patronised the million and more of his compatriots so deluded as to march to London's Hyde Park to demonstrate for peace.
"If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for," he smarmed. "If there are 1 million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started."
Such humbug. Blair conveniently neglected to mention that thousands of Saddam's victims were undoubtedly killed with the help of British military materiel.
Britain's Campaign Against the Arms Trade reports that in 1986, Iraq's director of armaments and supplies, Major-General M. Ibrahim Hammadi, and the director of military computer applications, Major General Qahtan al Azzawi, were welcome guests at the British Army's military equipment exhibition at Aldershot.
Britain sold Saddam battlefield radar and missile firing systems, 300 military Land Rovers, high-tech lathes for turning artillery shells, hardware for use in chemical plants and, believe it or not, tens of thousands of desert uniforms. This profitable trade continued to the eve of the Gulf War in 1990 and, as a judicial inquiry later revealed, Cabinet ministers lied through their teeth about it to the House of Commons.
Britain remains the second largest arms dealer after the US, selling to some of the world's nastiest regimes. Blair is a flaming hypocrite.
HOW unkind of Miranda Devine to remind us on Thursday, in her own words, "that George Bush talks like a Texan, has slightly crossed eyes, can stumble into incoherence when a microphone is thrust in front of him, talks about God, and therefore is a dangerous moron".
This sort of ad hominem rudeness is not helpful, Miranda, although I admit I worry that the notional commander-in-chief of the world's greatest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction pronounces nuclear as nookular.
But as everyone knows, Dubya is only the front man. After the Nixon catastrophe the Republican Party redefined its approach to the presidency, choosing Ronald Reagan as a telegenic talking head to host the show while the tough got going in the shape of Caspar Weinberger, George Schulz and James Baker. George W. Bush has a similar totemic gig: pitching the first ball of the Major League season, lighting the White House Christmas tree, cheering up conventions of realtors in Minneapolis and so on, while a camarilla of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice et al calls the shots.
Of them all, Rice is the scariest. Chevron Oil named a supertanker after her. Dripping with Ivy League degrees in international relations, an accomplished classical pianist, speaking elegant French, monumentally self-assured, Condy knows everything and nothing. It is utterly beyond her comprehension that the citizens of Baghdad might not welcome a cruise missile arriving in the upstairs bedroom as the instrument of their liberation.
THE state election campaign has been such a crashing bore that I greeted Pauline Hanson's return to public life with all the joy of those devout pilgrims worshipping their fence post in Coogee. After spending the past fortnight strenuously denying any intention to re-enter politics, Hallelujah, she's back.
There is something so infinitely loopy about the woman, something so utterly disjunctive between her view of the world and the way it actually is that I find her a source of endless entertainment. More than ever she is a caricaturists' and columnists' delight: the Chesty Bond jaw, the mouth like a CD-ROM slot, the querulous voice with the lilting cadence of a Whipper Snipper, the mangled syntax, the pig-ignorance.
And, O frabjous day, she intends making her home at lovely Sylvania Waters, that glittering oasis of Domayne home-making, Bing Lee electronics, travertine en suites and lime green Porsche Boxsters made globally famous by Noelene Donaher in the eponymous BBC-TV doco.
But people can be so cruel. "The impression is that Sylvania Waters is where the socially inept ones live after they have made a few bucks," sneered the Hon David Oldfield, MLC, once Pauline's most intimate adviser but now a foe.
How I hope they do get to sit together in the NSW Legislative Council. The election guru Anthony Green tells me there is a fair chance this will happen: the ludicrous, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey system of electing the upper house means Hanson needs only about 80,000 votes and a deft exchange of preferences to get across the line. She would then be there for eight years, until 2011, if you please.
Unless, of course, a court in Queensland finds her guilty of electoral fraud later this year. In the meantime there are the intricacies of NSW political life to master, like the names of the Police Commissioner and the Transport Minister, that sort of thing.
"I don't claim to know everything, I'm from Queensland," she quavered to a circling pack of reptiles on Thursday. "But Bob Carr's got some real opposition now."
I eagerly await the next episode, which will be Hanson's amusing media cheerleaders trumpeting, yet again, that this irredeemably stupid woman is the authentic voice of
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http://smh.com.au/text/articles/2003/02/21/1045638485783.htm
In spin city, the crows are stoned and the mobs are bleatin'. M-a-a-a-t-e!
Sydney Morning Herald February 22 2003
Between John, Keith, Warney and Pauline, there's little about that's fair dinkum, writes Richard Glover.
Has anyone else noticed how the Prime Minister increasingly sounds like a John Williamson song - his speech littered with "true blues", "fair dinkums", "mates" and "mobs"? Criticised for parroting American views, he's at least making his policies sound as if they are distinctively Australian.
Iraq must get "fair dinkum". "Mate, the game is up." "Throwing a few morsels at a quarter to midnight is not fair dinkum."
You half expect Howard to turn up in a bush hat, with dangling corks, a blue singlet and a can of Foster's in his hand. "Stone the crows," the Australian Prime Minister will tell the nation in a televised speech. "That Saddam's got kangaroos loose in the top paddock. Us mob reckon he's pretty ordinary. Me and me china-plate are out to get him." He'll then pick up a guitar and launch into a rendition of Cootamundra Wattle.
Certainly, it was the week of spin, and not just on the part of the Prime Minister.
Across town, Keith Richards, of the Rolling Stones, was attempting some spin of his own - explaining that drugs are really quite safe, just look at him. Trouble was, we did. The story was printed next to a photo of Richards, his face more thoroughly lined than Chris Cuffe's pockets. After the age of 40, people say, every Mars Bar goes straight onto your hips, but here was proof that each ounce of cocaine goes straight onto the face. Maybe that's why they call them lines.
The man needs a better spin doctor. Next time he should chuck a Warney. "I never meant to take any drugs at all. It was me mum; she made me do it."
Warne, of course, was busy with spin of his own. While the PM was sounding like an ocker lair, the original ocker lair was cleaning up his act. Warne has hired a team of spin doctors, and suddenly there are pictures everywhere of him and his mum, him and his kids.
According to Warne, it's simply impossible to say no to his mum, especially if she wants you to take some medication. Hearing him talk, it's surprising the Australian Navy is yet to hire her services. Fly Warney's mum out to HMAS Kanimbla and the anthrax revolt would be instantly crushed: "You'll take your medication," she'd say, "and you'll take it now."
Certainly Warne has been keen for us to understand the degree to which he is still at his mum's beck and call. It can't be long before it emerges that she fixed Shane up with that Indian bookmaker, dialled the number for the sex calls in England, and advised him to go the verbal biff with the camera kid.
Indeed, it seems the Sigmund Freud archives now want Warney's papers, since no one since the great man himself has managed to blame so much on a single mother.
Between the PM's warbling about fair dinkum mates and Warney singing mournfully about his mum, it's felt like a week spent living inside a particularly dire country song. All it needed was a bit of patriotic drum-banging.
Cue Peter Lindsay, the Liberal backbencher from Townsville, who did his bit by claiming that soldiers in Townsville were being abused as warmongers by local peace activists.
Lindsay, his voice tough and resolute, said he was standing shoulder to shoulder with our fighting men and women against this scourge. If people had a problem with the Government's policy, they should knock on his door rather than take it out on the individual fighting men and women.
And who would not agree? Who would not applaud?
Lindsay got national coverage. The only problem was that he couldn't quite identify where these attacks had happened. Or when. Or to whom. Or in what number. Somewhat later, the Defence Force chief, General Peter Cosgrove, was asked, and suggested there may have been one minor incident. The local commander, Brigadier David Morrison, was more specific. He said there had been one "really small, insignificant incident".
It was classic spin - a way of creating a negative vibe about the 500,000 who marched at the weekend, smearing them with the suggestion that peace activists are against our soldiers as individuals, rather than against their predeployment.
Maybe that's why, despite everything, it was hard not to feel some delight at the return of Pauline Hanson. After a week of spinners and dissemblers, there she was cheerfully admitting she knew nothing about NSW politics and had no apparent policies, but would still like the voters to give her about $100,000 a year for eight years with a life pension to follow. Just for being Pauline.
In spin city, it was a rare moment of glorious clarity.
richardglover at ozemail.com.au