The Battle that Saved Australia - or not

Further to today's discussion about Steve Barton and the Kokoda controversy, see these threads at Larvatus Prodeo and John Quiggin. See Barton's original Australian piece here, last night's Lateline interview here, and an older piece with some additional details here (looks like debunking the Kokoda 'myth' is an ongoing project of his).

No new Epoch in US-China relations

Cross-posted. For a different angle to the US MSM and blogosphere, see this running CHF thread.
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When not handing out propaganda at Melbourne's train stations, the Epoch Times folks keep busy heckling the Chinese president. It was shaping up as a bad day for Hu Jintao, what with being snubbed dinner at the White House and the MC announcing "the national anthem of the Republic of China." But official visits don't get much worse than being told "your days are numbered" before the world media, by an advocate of a sect your country persecutes, while standing next to the President of the United States.

Nor was it a great moment for the hosts. The Bush administration got things off on the wrong foot by not according this the status of a 'state visit', as Clinton did for Hu's predecessor. Then there was the small matter of confusing one's guests with their archenemies across the Taiwan Strait. But the ultimate gaffe was to let a Falungong practitioner not only slip security but abuse Hu for three minutes before the secret service hustled her off, leaving bureaucrats and thinktanks around the country to stress about how those inscrutable orientals will react (inside word says they're not happy).

Whoever was giving out press passes obviously didn't do their homework on the Epoch Times, a Falungong-linked paper with a prophecy fetish and a big chip on their shoulder called the Chinese Communist Party. The ET has disowned Dr Wang's actions, but the fact that she heckled Jiang Zemin in Malta five years ago should have tipped someone off. The State Department's woes didn't end there, however, with Bush and Hu later trying to hold dialogue over the chants of the Free-Tibet crowd across South Lawn. Clearly the event planners didn't watch how the Brits handled Hu's London trip last year, either.

Hu stayed all smiles, but used the occasion to teach Bush a lesson about negotiating with the Chinese that American businessmen learned long ago: expect much gilded language, but no progress unless you hand over something first. Faced with the high expectations held of this 'official' (not 'state') visit by a swathe of US lobbies, George also resorted to the fine art of using many words to say nothing, in which he is of course well practiced.

Bush said, "We would hope there would be more appreciation'' in allowing the currency to rise with market forces.

[Regarding Iran] the United States and China are in a position to ''work on tactics'' to achieve that goal, Bush said.

"We don't agree on everything but we are able to discuss our disagreements in friendship and cooperation,'' Bush told reporters.

So the bottom line is that noone's happy, least of all Hu Jintao. Having finally clawed his way to the top of the Fourth Generation leadership last year, when he eased Jiang out of the old man's last bastion in the state CMC, Hu doubtless felt entitled to 'state visit' recognition and a black-tie dinner at the White House. Instead he got a luncheon of halibut and dumplings to the strains of the Nashville Bluegrass band, after half an hour watching soldiers prance past in Continental Army uniforms.

No visiting head-of-state can have been this disappointed since the secret service ruled out Kruschev's trip to Disneyland.


Non Sequitur

I never thought I'd see an American columnist arguing the US would be better off under a parliamentary system. But then I, like Thomas Friedman, never thought I'd see a US administration determined to jump from an Iraqi frying pan into an Iranian fire.

Blogging in the End Times

The internet is a crowded place these days. Type in this blog's name wrong and you still end up somewhere: mupis.blogsopt.com. Or better, mupis.blogpsot.com, some of whose material I've extracted below. Sounds a lot like the stuff I was fed at church camps as a kid -

THE SOON COMING CLIMAX
(BIBLE PROPHECY—PROOF THE BIBLE IS TRUE AND
WE ARE NOW IN THE LATTER DAYS) and HOW TO BE SAVED
(A brief summary)

This message may be called a road sign of warning. Some may look at a sign that reads—THE BRIDGE IS OUT, and say, "Oh, someone is just trying to scare us into taking another road; let’s go on the same way." They go on and plunge to their death. The sign was not meant to scare people, but to warn them of impending danger. The sign was put there, because someone cared and didn’t want others to perish.
God wants you to know, WHEN YOU SEE THESE THINGS COME TO PASS (the prophecies from the Bible in this message), KNOW YE THAT THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS NIGH AT HAND-Lk 21:31.

• Will Russia and some Arab nations invade Israel and the U.S.A. become involved? Yes.

• Will 1/4^th of the world’s population die? Yes.

• Will there be a one-world system or global economy? Yes.

• Will diseases increase such as AIDS? Yes.

• Did you know the Bible tells us about what is happening?

Would you like to know more? Read on...

Containing Iran

Just further to the discussion in the meeting yesterday, here's one analysis of the Iran situation which pretty much sums up my position:

All the war games and simulations that I have seen have concluded that it isn't possible to disarm Iran by airstrikes. Learning perhaps from what happened to Saddam's nuclear plant at Osirak, the authorities have dispersed the program widely and put a lot of it underground. Nor can the Israelis be expected to do much by proxy: They would have to fly over Iraq this time, and it would be even more obvious than usual that they were acting as an American surrogate. Professor Edward Luttwak claims, in the Wall Street Journal, that selective strikes could still retard or degrade the program, but this, if true, would only restate the problem in a different form.
...
This means that our options are down to three: reliance on the United Nations/European Union bargaining table, a "decapitating" military strike, or Nixon goes to China. The first being demonstrably useless and somewhat humiliating, and the second being possibly futile as well as hazardous, it might be worth giving some thought to the third of these.
...
But they have a crucial vulnerability on the inside. The overwhelmingly young population—an ironic result of the mullahs' attempt to increase the birth rate after the calamitous war with Iraq—is fed up with medieval rule.
...
So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need not add that they have also given some clerics monopoly positions in various black markets; the populace already knows this.) A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.

Hitchens is something of a hawk, being strongly in favour of the Iraq invasion and frequently critical of the "anti-war" left (I put that in scare quotes because it's his contention that many peace activists are actually in favour of war, when it's done against US/Israeli). But he's not at all in favour of a military attack on Iran. I think his analysis comes from a position of some authority and it accords with other analyses I've read.

To Get Rich Is Glorious

Chris Berg, one of our guest speakers at Pub Politics a few weeks back, was on last night's Insight program defending materialism as a road to happiness. Good libertarian that he is, his cumulative minute and a half of airtime can be picked out by the keywords 'choice', 'preference' and 'capacity'. Indulge yourself - read the transcript...

The Political Objectives Test

There are all sorts of interesting online tests of your political beliefs and ideology. A friend of mine, Daniel (or "Originaluddite") has composed a new test and it's worth a try. Check it out here.

This is how it described me, and I think it's a fair assessment:

Liberal-Conservative
You scored 21 Equality, 78 Liberty, and 64 Stability!

Your commitment to both liberty and stability puts you in the hazy area that exists between the Liberal and the Conservative. You value liberty particularly in economic life and embrace private enterprise. You also recognise the value of traditional culture and institutions. Occasionally your economic and cultural positions may clash but in general you will find practical ways to reconcile them.

Anyone else care to bare their soul in the comments section?

The Prime Minister on Whom the Sun has Set

Here's a take on Smiling Tony by Scott Cresswell, who's currently doing a polsci Ph.D thesis on the EU policy of the Conservative Party.

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Few British Prime Ministers since the Great Reform Act of 1832 have dominated British politics as has Tony Blair. Blair's parliamentary majorities have been unsurpassed (in normal circumstances at least) and his personal popularity has never quite gone through the troughs that dogged that other twentieth century Titan, Margaret Thatcher. There is a quite viable argument that Blair is the most successful British prime minister of the century, predicated on the size of his majorities and the lack of rancour he has inspired. And yet, Blair's premiership is over.

Blair is, to use words that haunted the Major premiership, 'in office, but not in power'. Reports in British newspapers have him definitely gone by Christmas; autumn (spring in Australia) looks more likely. Every piece of speculation brings the date closer. The Guardian, the staunchest of Labour newspapers, has bid him gone now. He will not go of his own accord, pushed out by his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, a dour Scotsman. Indeed, since the last election (2005) Blair and Brown have been in a sort of transitional phase, the two old rivals (dating from the 1994 leadership election) in an uneasy embrace termed the 'dual premiership'. Admitting the mistake of announcing his retirement prematurely (and yet annoying a twice jilted Brown by not naming a date), even his vaunted political judgment looks to have left him. The final years of his premiership, mirroring Thatcher's in many respects, have been a failure at best, at worst a farce. The mistakes of Iraq, the suicide of weapons scientist David Kelly, and the infamous weapons dossier do not bear re-telling. They have diminished him, his standing in the country, in the party, and, I think, the most important of all, history. His errors have emboldened the Labour left, once cowed into submission, into the rediscovery of its voice and its power. Editor of the Spectator Matthew d'Ancona writes in the Telegraph, "It is not simply factional warfare - bitter as that undoubtedly is - but full-scale fragmentation. Labour's National Executive Committee and parliamentary party are flexing their muscles recklessly. Last week's industrial action by council workers showed how emboldened the unions have been by the Government's travails."

This is crucial, as the whole 'New Labour' project was the transformation of Labour from an unelectable socialist rabble (its 1983 election manifesto, a grab-bag of socialist measure, was called by a Labour MP "the longest suicide note in history" and so it proved) into a modern, professional, ruthless, and centrist party. Power was shifted from the party and its institutions to the leadership.

This point bears expanding for those unfamiliar with British politics. On election day 1992, with the polls putting Labour by up to 10 points in front, the Murdoch owned Sun newspaper printed a front page, headlined "If Kinnock wins, will the last person to leave Britain turn out the lights?" Labour lost. Not because of the Sun ("It was the Sun wot won it" arrogantly appeared on the front page the following day), but because Labour was still struggling to throw off the vestiges of Tony Benn, the Militant Tendency, and every other loony left-wing organisation that had infiltrated it since Thatcher's win in 1979. Blair exorcised all of those ghosts and made Labour electable once more. It is worth noting that in 1997, 2001, and 2005, the Sun backed Labour, not the Conservatives. (Well, allegedly, anyway. I don't know if any Sun readers bother reading past page 3.)

(There's an old joke, with variants for each country. "People who read The Times think they run the country, people who read The Financial Times own the country, people who read the Mirror don't care who runs the country, people who read the Daily Telegraph [me!] think that the country should be run by another country [America], and people who read The Guardian think that it is." It is at this point in a 'Yes, Minister' episode where Hacker enquires about the Sun readers, to which Bernard replies, "they don't care, just so long as she has big tits!" Touché.)

This newly found confidence on the left has dismayed Blair and loyal Blairites. They are, in all honesty, less comfortable with the old Labour tradition, seemingly personified by the tax-and-spend Brown, than even with Thatcherism. With his departure announced and the left poised for control, Blair has spent much time trying to shore up his legacy. The civil (public) service, the health system, and the education system have all come in for Blair's newly found zeal for addressing the stuff-ups he's spent the last ten years ignoring. Why? Because Tony Blair, the great social democrat, has discovered 'the market'. 'Market-orientated reform' has become the Blairite buzzword of the moment.

It is personified in the attempt to reform the education system. A White Paper was compiled, under the auspices of the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, a Blair loyalist. But Blair, too weak to withstand a Labour left openly flouting his leadership and for whom the measure was too radical, was forced to neuter the bill. (It was reported in last week's Spectator that rebels are confident enough even to plot in front of party whips!) Yet not even that was enough for the rebels, who voted against the bill in droves. It passed, but only with Conservative votes. Blair being forced to rely on the Conservative leader, David Cameron, a Blair in the making (and seen as Blair's true heir by some Blairites and even the man himself reportedly), to shore up his legacy is indeed rich in symbolism. With Parliament due for summer recess and the scandal of the loans for peerages affair taking whatever lustre was left, Blair will go unfulfilled. And unloved. It is one of the ironies of British politics that when Thatcher left, she organized for the succession of John Major, thinking he would be a proper heir. He was not. She had to wait for Tony Blair, who was/is closer to Thatcher than either Major was or Cameron is. (Thatcher reportedly is very fond of Blair and he has reciprocated publicly.) Blair may get his serve of irony as he waits to see whether Cameron will be his heir.

Summing up Blair's legacy is not for me, I lack the in-depth familiarity with the period to nail my trousers to any masts. But one point is, I think, illustrative, sticking with the Thatcher – Blair theme. When leaving London I was given a going away present by the hippie playwright mother of a friend of mine, a kilt of MacDonald tartan, in recognition for my numerous (and good natured, of course) jokes about Scotland and her Scottish-ness. In return, I left her a copy of Thatcher's Downing Street Years (she positively despises Tories, I am merely tolerated). Apparently, it's going to get thrown at me next time I'm in the general vicinity. Whether for better or worse, I can't see anyone throwing Blair's memoirs about (except Gordon Brown…)