>> [From an interview on Australian Broadcasting with former UN Chief
>> Weapons Inspector Australian Richard Butler by ABC's Terry Lane]
>
>> Let me just say that I'm sick to death of
>> the lies that we're being told about this by the Prime Minister of
>> Australia. I heard him again this morning on a national television
>> interview, and it was shocking, it was astonishing to hear him
>> duck and weave, including by the way, say that in answer to a
>> question about the possible deaths of Iraqi women and children, that
>> something broadly like, 'Well, you know, that was unfortunate but it
>> was their fault that Saddam Hussein was their president, and that's
>> how it goes.'
A lot of people were surprised that Butler showed up at the Sydney peace rally and is now spouting this sort of rhetoric. I certainly didn't expect him to come out this strongly against the war. But if you cared to listen to Butler speak, rather than soundbites of Butler speaking, you would hear something very different from the web of propaganda he himself spun. Around september last year he was interviewed on ABC radio and said that the greatest impediment to disarming Iraq was the fact Israel was not being disarmed, about that time he claimed the US had no moral basis to outline a case for disarmament while it continued to proliferate weapons and research new ways of whacking people in bulk.
As to the fierce anti-Howard attack, it doesn't take a genius to see that Howard has placed all his geopolitical eggs in the American basket at the same time that the US has become, well, solipsistic. There are a lot of people around here nervous at the prospect of relying on US assesments of threats to Australia, as well as at the unknown cost of continuing to please our Imperial guarantor indefinitely. A lot of the noise has been coming from the defence forces and defence analysts, who are a bit shaky about moving from the neurotic notion of continental defence to the psychotic notion of forward deployment. That change of stance is very expensive and likely to leave Australia even more dependent on Uncle Sam for merely neurotic defence needs.
Thiago
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