Fiddling While It Burns: terrorism and national security at the end of history
Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did
3 Comments
Sometimes I forget just how beautifully Glenn Greenwald can describe the problems with mainstream journalism. From Salon.com:
“Media stars will spend ample time flamboyantly commemorating Cronkite’s death as though he reflects well on what they do…. In fact, within Cronkite’s actual moments of real journalism one finds the essence of journalism that today’s modern media stars not only fail to exhibit, but explicitly disclaim as their responsibility.”
It’s a pretty narrative story so I recommend reading the whole thing.
In the post-Bush world, many have been just a little too keen to move on, without reflection or reform. The fact is, everything that happened in the last 8 years was due to the failure of those who should have done something about it, from Congress to the courts to the electorate.
Painted Into a Corner
2 Comments
Things have gotten crazy with China.
Wait... what happened? Photo: AAP/ Dave Hunt, via ABC.
The Rudd government has faced criticism for its close relationship with the Chinese government from the start. Kevin Rudd’s facility with Mandarin was an important factor in making him look like a modern alternative to the Sino-phobic John Howard in the 2007 election, but in government it was clearly a double-edged sword, with the Coalition quickly implying that Labor’s loyalties might lie a little too close to Beijing. It first became an issue through Joel FitzGibbon’s foolishness, and has been potential political dynamite, particularly when it comes to state-owned Chinese companies buying Australian mines.
Look at this photo. It is a truly great photo. You can see in (Australian Foreign Minister) Stephen Smith’s eyes that he suddenly sees exactly where everything is going.
From the ABC:
Detained Rio exec accused of spying
Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith has revealed that an Australian employee of the mining giant Rio Tinto has been arrested in China on suspicion of spying.
It seems – seems - like this is some sort of fit of pique on behalf of some part of the Chinese government, a retaliation for the rejection of advances to buy a stake in Rio Tinto.
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
Last month the miner turned its back on a long-running courtship from the state-owned company Chinalco, and is presently engaged in tense iron ore price negotiations.
Barnaby Joyce certainly thinks so – from ABC Radio National’s PM program:
The Nationals leader in the Senate, Barnaby Joyce, says he believes that the failure of the state-owned Chinalco to buy an 18 per cent stake in Rio Tinto could be behind the arrest….
BARNABY JOYCE: Well we know that four of them worked for Rio. We know that they disappeared in Shanghai. We know that they’re held by an arm of the Chinese Government. The reason for them being held, we don’t know. We know that we’re failing to get proper diplomatic access to them, to Mr Stern Hu. And what we can deduct is that there’d have to be a relationship between Chinalco’s failure in its purchase of Rio and the ramifications that go beyond a state-owned enterprise all the way to the Chinese Government.
That all these state-owned enterprises and the Chinese Government itself or the Communist People’s Republic of China’s Government, is one and the same and ramifications to one is ramifications to all.
BRIGID GLANVILLE: So what makes you think there’s a link between Chinalco and its battle to buy a stake in Rio Tinto?
BARNABY JOYCE: Well I suppose I only have to look at the blog sites after the bid failed and to realise and that there was an immense well of feeling held in china. They felt that they’d been personally slighted. But of course even these personal slights are scripted via the Chinese Government and the Chinese Government I think we shouldn’t confuse with the Chinese people. But what we should acknowledge is that the direct ownership of state-owned enterprises by the Communist People’s Republic of China is part of the same plan.
All investments overseas go through a central organising authority to where they’re going to purchase overseas and that the disappearance of these four people, one of whom is an Australian citizen, if it’s nothing to do with Rio, then why can’t we get diplomatic access to them and find out exactly what’s going on.
Australia has always been caught in China’s gravity well to some extent, but the People’s Republic meteoric rise over the last decade became a crucial part of Australia’s prosperity. The choice of the Rudd government (and the more grudging choice of the Howard government) was to embrace this rather than resist it. However, now Labor is learning the disadvantages of a realist foreign policy – that is, if you abandon principle, you are no longer protected by it. When your best friend the expansionist totalitarian empire starts acting like one, no one can feel too sorry for you.
Labor is caught between a rock and a hard place. They must either try and exert some leverage to force the Rio Tinto employees’ release (which would likely fail miserably while causing an enormous and expensive international rift), or do nothing and brave the wrath of an Australian electorate who already thinks they are giving too much ground to foreigners. This incident makes it clear that, no matter how close Labor might consider their relationship with China, the Chinese government is running its own agenda, and will happily run roughshod over their allies in Australia if it suits them.
If you’ve ever had a falling dream, you know the sense of horrible inevitability as you wait for your body to hit the ground. That’s the sensation you’re seeing when you look into Stephen Smith’s eyes.
Of course, there’s always the chance that the four Rio Tinto employees were actually stealing state secrets – a possibility that Stephen Smith will be desperately hoping for right now.
Tags: Barnaby Joyce, Rio Tinto
New essay
Leave a Comment
I got my History essay back today, entitled ‘Did George W. Bush Strengthen or Weaken the American Empire?’ Hit the Essays page in the navigation bar on the right to see it.
It’s not a spectacular essay, but it should interest anyone enjoying the site, and I’ve done it now, so I may as well use it for something. Thanks for reading.
Electoral fraud in Iran
4 Comments
Extremist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has gained a second term in a rigged election in Iran.
Iranians protest the faked election result in Sydney. A woman conceals her face; Iranians worldwide still fear potential reprisals from the Iranian secret service. Photo: Salar Niknafs
Why am I so confident it was a rigged election? There are some basic signs. Ahmadinejad was unpopular, particularly overseas, and a large Persian diaspora vote in Iranian elections. His core audience are the hardcore conservatives, who vote in all the elections, so high turnouts should run against him, yet after a record turnout he won. It was no narrow win, which I might have believed – it was landslide territory. Finally, we know it is possible for a reformer to win a large proportion of votes in an Iranian election – in 1997 former Iranian President Khatami gained 70% of the vote, and in 2001 he gained 78% of the vote, with a similar profile to Mousavi’s. For Mousavi to receive less than 40% of the vote is ridiculous. Here is Juan Cole, Middle East expert and Salon.com columnist with some more technical reasoning.
What happens in Iran is of great concern to the rest of the world. The Islamic Republic underwrites and influences both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. It is believed to have a large number of sleeper agents throughout the world, providing a second-strike option in the event of a military intervention in its affairs. (The loyalty of long-term sleeper agents is questionable, but we’ll take that on face value.) It would be a wonderful thing for world progress if Iran was allowed to liberalise; it would be a wonderful thing for spirituality if the Islamic Republic realised religion should be chosen, not enforced.
It is unlikely, however, that the election of any reformer could have achieved these things. The elected government in Iran has little power – real power is in the hands of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the councils of clerics and judges. The former president Khatami came to office with enormous fanfare and hope for the future, yet after two terms had achieved nothing, resulting in the hopelessness and disillusionment which allowed the conservative rural population to elect the disastrous Ahmadinejad.
This is a tragedy. A new President Mousavi could have dealt with a new President Obama. Both nations, and the world, can only benefit from normalised relations. At the present rate of progress, Israel will attack Iran unilaterally within the year, provoking a regional conflagration that could well end in a nuclear exchange. This is a real setback on the road to Fukuyama’s world order.
What’s surprising to me is that this was allowed. I had assumed Mousavi would win, not out of any faith in the Iranian system, but because the regime understood the true value of democracy to ruling elites: as a release valve for popular ill-feeling, a way to avoid social unrest while not allowing the plebeians any real ability to change things. Look at Australia or Britain – the supposedly social democratic Labor parties have been in power on and off since the 19th century, but they in no way change the fact that those nations are ruled by a plutocracy built on inherited wealth. Democracy is not a cession of power to the people; it is a minor inconvenience that avoids major inconveniences, like revolutions and anarchy in the streets. The very nature of Iranian democracy implies an understanding of this; it seems it’s a machine more complex than the mind of its operators.
I don’t mean to sound like a revolutionary – better to be ruled and live than free and dead. The violence in the streets of Iran should be a lesson, however: let the people rule themselves – if only a little bit.
Violence in the streets of Iran. Photo: AFP - Olivier Mattan-Labei.
And remember – reform is coming eventually. Better to be a De Klerk than a Mussolini. (Content warning – dead Fascist)
UPDATE: A BBC report and footage of the street demonstrations in Tehran.
Also: I just finished a detailed research essay on the Australian print media’s coverage of refugees arriving by boat in the three months to 9 June 2009, which of course encompasses the SIEV 36 explosion off Ashmore Reef. I’m very happy with how it turned out, I’ll be deciding what to do with it over the next few weeks.
Tags: electoral fraud, Iran, mahmoud ahmadinejad, repression, rioting
Essays coming online
Leave a Comment
While studying for my Bachelor of Journalism, I’ll be focusing on conflict, strategic studies and national security as much as possible, and so from time to time will write essays relevant to Fiddling While It Burns. Once they’ve been safely assessed, I’ll put them up on the site. Essays are too long for the blog format, and don’t have enough pretty pictures to keep them engaging, so they’ll be posted as separate pages under the ‘Essays’ heading.
As I update, I’ll drop a little note on the main page. First up is a review and comparison of two research articles about news coverage of the Iraq War, a particular bugbear with me.
Feedback is always welcome, thanks for reading.
Andrew
Still here…
3 Comments
It’s been almost a month since I posted, so I thought I’d let anyone reading know I’m still alive.
The rocky part of the semester is almost over, within three weeks I’ll either have handed in all my assignments or failed. I’m still keen to keep up this blog, and it’s still getting a trickle of hits, so with a little more free time I might be able to go back to posting on a weekly basis.
I need some sort of incentive though. So if you’re enjoying the site, leave a comment. Don’t ask me why I want comments. It’s some sort of perverse validation.
North Korea has tested a second nuclear device. Graphic: ABC.
North Korea has conducted another underground nuclear test, this time with considerably more success.
From the ABC:
The United Nations Security Council has unanimously condemned North Korea over its latest nuclear test.
All 15 members of the Security Council, including North Korea’s traditional allies Russia and China, have condemned the isolated regime for detonating a powerful underground nuclear explosion yesterday.
The test was followed quickly by two missile tests and a threat of another test.
Interestingly, it seems that this is more about domestic posturing and jockeying for power among generals in anticipation of Kim Jong-Il’s eventual fall from power. I love it. Combined with all the other foreign policy driven by domestic posturing (I’m thinking specifically of Bush’s speeches that made the world hate him, deepened his problems and made Alabaman hicks cheer, or Ariel Sharon kicking off the second intifada trying to score macho-points), I’m moving closer to a theory that all actions in international relations are driven by the need to impress the terminally stupid.
(It still needs work.)
Also, since the last time I posted, the conventional military resistance of the Tamil Tigers has collapsed, and their legendary leader, Velupillai Prabakharan, has been killed.
Velupillai’s death came as a surprise to me, as I had tipped that he would have cut out weeks ago in the waves of escaping refugees. I guess he was a little too recognisable, after a few decades of terrorising South Asia.
The military defeat itself, however, was pretty much inevitable from the moment the Tigers decided to make the conflict conventional. Nationalist separatist rebels never, ever win by force of arms.
The most interesting part of the whole tragedy, however, is how the violence has rippled out through multicultural societies. Violence between ethnic Tamils and Sinhalese has broken out in Australia and around the world. Protests have turned violent, and retaliations have been particularly nasty. It’s a fascinating consequence of globalisation, this idea that there would be communities all over the world, who identify so strongly with an ethnicity or nationality that they are willing to kill each other over events thousands of kilometres away. It’s the last remnants of the poison of nationalism in the veins of a global society, like a bad hangover.
David Kilcullen and Hugh White
Leave a Comment
By spending a few hours in the car over the Easter holiday, I managed to catch a couple of Radio National programs, and was once more blown away by the quality and depth of journalism this national treasure provides. Two programs, the Late Night Live story on retired Australian Army Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, Ph.D., and the “White on White” program on Life Matters, reinvigorated my faith in Australian foreign policy journalism.
It’s my own fault, of course. I’m a newsprint guy. I love newswriting, and I either get my news from a hardcopy paper or online, but in Australia the very best news source is the ABC.
Both of these programs, available for download are very much worth a read. David Kilcullen, who I came away with an enormous intellectual crush on, was one of the architects of the “surge”, which was actually a reformation of the Iraq War using modern counterinsurgency tactics, which due to the political appointment of incompetents previously had not yet occurred. Kilcullen speaks from a depth of both thought and experience, with a genuine understanding of the cultural complexities which have been so important to both the Afghanistan and Iraq theatres of engagement. He believes in war only when necessary, but also believes that war, once engaged, should be conducted as something which can be done well by experts – exactly the opposite of a neoconservative.
Anyway, I don’t want to get stuck on what was wrong with the Iraq War – that’s a thesis in itself, or a thousand theses.
White on White is a significant piece of journalism. There is far too little consideration of strategic foreign policy in Australian media. Australia will spend $24 billion this year on defence, yet very few Australians have even a shallow level of understanding of our spending priorities. Hugh White has drawn to common attention something that I discussed at the end of a post a few weeks ago – Australia is at a critical strategic juncture. As Asian economies grow and increase their defence spending, and particularly as China reaches comparable levels of influence with the US, there are only two logical moves for Australia in terms of defence spending: either radically expand spending, to, as White advocates, double submarine numbers and increase our order of the (probable white elephant) Joint Strike Fighter, or accept a slide into strategic irrelevance.
Hugh White, as a strategic studies specialist, of course leans towards the former option; think-tank types are a little like Warhammer 40 000 nerds – they want bigger armies to move around on their tabletops. The difference is, for the sake of intellectual rigour, they need to get real governments to buy real versions of their miniatures before they can get the miniatures for themselves.
I, of course, would push for the latter, for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t think there’s any way Australia could keep up – in population terms, we are less than 1/12th the size of Indonesia, and 1/60th the size of China. That means to maintain parity with Indonesia while its GDP grew at 1% per year, Australia would need to raise its defence spend by 12% per year; while to keep pace with China growing at 1% per year, Australia’s defence spend would have to double every eighteen months. It’s simply impossible. As difficult as it is for post-colonial majority white nations to accept, if it ever comes to all-out war our fate is beyond our control.
Still, I was incredibly impressed at the existence of either of these programs. Funnily enough, I spent over an hour listening to the fate of quality journalism being lamented on Radio National some weeks ago, simply because for-profit newspapers may be on their way out. I’m now conclusively convinced, however, that the capitalist media model only ever provided quality journalism by accident, whereas non-profit models such as the ABC, BBC, or the Guardian have worked incredibly well.
So, things look good for the way our area of interest will be reported in future.
Tags: counterinsurgency, David Kilcullen, Iraq War, politics, quality journalism
Since when do we argue over whether torture is wrong?
1 Comment
Note: this was originally posted as “Just Briefly…”, before being expanded.
I know I’m hitting the Tom Tomorrow comics pretty hard lately, but as I said to my sponsor, just one more and then I’ll give it up for real.
On a separate but related note, never, ever Google “comic” and “torture” together. Even with SafeSearch on.
From Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh:
Friday April 24, 2009 13:05 EDTI can’t believe it’s not torture, redux!
I was tempted to write to Clark Hoyt, the admired public editor for the New York Times, after reading Friday morning’s convoluted piece, “Obama Resisting Push for Interrogation Panel.” It contains this remarkable weasel-wording:
“Although a full-scale independent inquiry now appears unlikely anytime soon, the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding and other techniques that critics say crossed the line into torture could still be examined by a variety of Congressional panels in addition to the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
Why was the issue framed that way, as though the question of whether waterboarding is torture, and torture is illegal, is still a matter of debate? And will it ever be New York Times style to flat-out say that?
I want to strongly recommend Salon’s coverage of the Bush administration’s torture programs. Salon made history by pushing the Abu Ghraib story when the New York Times wasn’t too fussed about it; they continued to be strongly critical of the Bush administration while other news sources stuck to the spurious model of objectivity where journalists repeat uncritically whatever the government says; they give a home to the angry but rigorous writing of Glenn Greenwald; and they’ve pioneered a new journalism where the audience are treated with respect and offered the chance to view primary sources.
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld introduced systematic torture to the CIA and American military. They did it despite strong evidence that it was ineffective, and they did it in such a way that many innocent men were caught up in their net, and killed. In 1974 the New York Times and the Washington Post were willing to go hard on Nixon, but only Salon truly held Bush to account.
For ANZAC day, here’s something to think about: torture gave us bad intelligence, increased the risk to our troops, and made us the villains. And if the mainstream media and the political elite they have allowed to co-opt them get their way, the perpetrators will get away with it. Lest we forget.
UPDATE:
Here is a little review of how this debate continues to fail to evolve in conservative circles.
Tags: abu ghraib, bagram air base, guantanamo bay, torture
