Where Do They Get These Ideas?

Where Do They Get These Ideas?

Dang Me If Its Not From Richard Perle!

 

Values Australia provides the following information to help Australians understand some of their Australian values, especially to understand where our values come from in relation to Middle East policy (yes, we know they come from America, but where did they get them from?)

In 1996 a group calling themselves the Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, and led by Richard Perle (well known for his work for the Likud at the Project for the New American Century), produced a paper for Benjamin Netanyahu, the then-Prime Minister of Israel.

Perle, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, and known as “The Prince of Darkness” was also at the time an advisor to the Administration on Defense matters and remains a director of the Jerusalem Post. Amongst many other things.

David Wurmser is the Middle East Adviser to US Vice President Dick Cheney.

Douglas Feith was George W Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He was one of the signatories of the 1998 letter to President Clinton advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein. Feith led the controversial Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon which was set up to second-guess the CIA and other intelligence agencies and, some say, preemptively conclude that Iraq had WMD and “stove-pipe” this conclusion to the White House..

Other contributors were James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Robert Loewenberg and Meyrav Wurmser.

The paper was called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm“.

Amongst its conclusions:

“Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism

[…]

“Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon”

[…]

“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”

[…]

“Israel’s new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response.”

[All emphasis added]

Anything ring a bell?

UK’s ‘Morale Muscular’ Withdrawal

UK’s ‘Morale Muscular’ Withdrawal

“…under no circumstances should we allow ourselves to lose morale muscular and to step back from this…”  [Brendan Nelson]

 

Values Australia, in partnership with the Ministry of Mateship, notes the recent declaration by the British Government that it will shortly begin withdrawing its forces from Iraq. We understand that a lot of people will criticise the British for this and claim that they are “Cutting and Running”, not “Staying the Course” and not staying till “The Job is Done”. They will say that they are not “Standing By Their Mates”, and that their withdrawal will “Give the Terrorists Heart” and “Unleash Terrorism” on a scale unimagineable until now. They will say that withdrawal will mean utter defeat which will terminally damage the prestige and influence of the West and create instability in the Middle East.

The Australian Govermint wishes Australians, by which it means the Voting Public, to know that it will never make such accusations, and has never – and it has always been absolutely consistent in this – never made any such accusations in the past. The Australian Government has never suggested that anyone who advocates withdrawal from Iraq is on the side of the terrorists, or is playing into their hands.

On the other hand, Australia will never leave Iraq because to do so would be to cut and run, not stay the course, not stand by their mates, give the terrorists heart and unleash terrorism on a scale unimagineable until now.

For Australia (by which we mean the Labor Party) to withdraw from Iraq would be to side with the terrorists and play into their hands. An Australian withdrawal would mean utter defeat which would terminally damage the prestige and influence of the West and create instability in the Middle East.

Is that crystal clear?

Then let us make it clear. CRYSTAL!

JOHN HOWARD: Kerry I do know this, that if we are out in a year’s time it will be in circumstances of defeat. When I say we, I mean all the Coalition forces and obviously if the Americans go, then other forces will go as well. Now that would be circumstances of defeat and I know that the consequences of that for the West, its prestige, American prestige and influence in the Middle East, to spur that would give the terrorism in the Middle East, the implications it would have for the stability of other countries in the Middle East and also in our part of the world, the spur to terrorism, I think the consequences of that for Australia would be very great indeed.

[…]

I think we owe it to our greatest and strongest ally to stick by them in their hour of trial and pressure and need.

 

BRENDAN NELSON: Well, in fact what the Prime Minister is saying, that if Senator Obama or anybody else for that matter were to unilaterally and prematurely withdraw American and coalition forces from Iraq before the Iraqis can look after their own affairs, you are of course handing victory to the terrorists.

[…]

…our generation is engaged in a struggle which is going to last a long time against disparate groups of Islamic extremists throughout the world, principal amongst them being al Qaeda, and if anybody in any position of credibility were to say a particular date – in this case March and 2008 – coalition and US troops would be withdrawn, of course those terrorists are going to say, “Let us hope that that’s the policy outcome”, because that’s what these people are doing day to day in the bloodiest, cruelest, inhumane way in Iraq and it’s absolutely essential that all of us and the United States in particular prevail over that kind of outrageous and heinous behaviour.

[…]

BRENDAN NELSON: Well whatever the motives of those who are demanding that the coalition withdraw from Iraq, that is precisely what al Qaeda and the terrorists want us to do as well, Tony. And the reason why Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, formerly al-Zarqawi, and a whole variety of terrorists are so determined to see that we leave Iraq and leave so prematurely before democracy can take hold, before an Iraqi security force is trained and Iraqis have the same democratic rights and freedoms enjoyed by Americans and Australians, is because they are determined to see defeat for the United States.

 

ALEXANDER DOWNER: I don’t think it would be right for us as an ally and a friend of America’s and of Britain’s, for us just to say to them well, you can do the dirty work, you can do the tough job, we’re not going to bother, but we’d like you to help us in South East Asia with the difficult things we’re doing1.

[…]

TONY JONES: Mr Downer, here’s what the American colonel who’s in charge of training said. He said, “Another advantage is that if it’s staffed by foreign officers they don’t have to come into Iraq and become targets in order to teach.”

 

ALEXANDER DOWNER: Yeah, but most training look, to be frank with you, you can find an American colonel – not a very senior officer in America – you can find an American colonel who would say almost anything. But to be honest with you -there are thousands of American colonels…

 

And just to make it even clearer if it could possibly be, the Australian voting public needs to understand exactly what is at stake. Iraq’s democracy is at stake in this and our credibility as a result because WE elected it.

 

BRENDAN NELSON: There is most certainly a coincidence of interest, if you want to call it Tony, between the United States, Britain, Australia and almost 30 other countries that democratically elected the Iraqi Government…

Got that?

 

1Mr Downer has not made it clear exactly what help the United States and Britain have been giving us up to now in South East Asia with “the difficult things we’re doing”.

Hypocrite, Sociopath or Fool?

Hypocrite, Sociopath or Fool?

Almost Human?

In her column explaining ‘the key to understanding the Prime Minister,’ Anne Summers offers an explanation for the Groveller General’s attitude towards Iraq, terrorisim and Barack Obama. But it is just not good enough, says our investigative journalist.

“On the morning when the planes hit the twin towers and the Pentagon, the smoke from which Howard had a view from his hotel, he had an epiphany; perhaps for the first, and only, time in his life he experienced compassion for fellow humans.”

“I couldn’t get out of my mind the desperation of the people who were trapped in those buildings and the sense of loss and despair of those families.”

This could make him seem, well, almost human. Until you consider what he did then: he eagerly agreed to, barracked for and participated in – and continues to agree to, barrack for and participate in, without apology or admission of error – a visitation upon the people of Iraq (a country not associated with the events that had so upset him) a retributive storm of violence and destruction that has produced the very same “desperation of the people who were trapped in those buildings and the sense of loss and despair of those families”, except that at this stage the horror he has sanctioned and helped unleash has affected at least a hundred times as many people, almost all of them innocent civilians.

A person who becomes emotional about three thousand Americans but is sanguine about the suffering and death of how many hundred thousand Iraqis and their families and communities, suffering and death which he personally was a party to, is unbalanced at best.

A person who can happily allow these two things to co-exist peacefully in their mind is a hypocrite, a sociopath, or a fool. Or all of the above.”

 

 

Blackberry Massage Parlours

ABC reports “Relief at hand for NYC text addicts”
Apparently American hotels are offering hand massages for texters.

“Mobile phone addicts who spend hours on end sending text messages, emails or talking on their phone can now seek a ‘BlackBerry Thumb’ massage for their sore hands”

But we always knew that any decent concierge could arrange a massage with manual relief.

 

 

I am definitely unhappy about this

ABC also reported:

“Man critical after stabbing in Sydney suburb”

And so you would be!

The headline was changed later in the morning to “Man stabbed in chest during Sydney brawl”.

Oddly enough, ABC had four years earlier (19/12/2002) reported, almost identically,

“Sydney man critical after stabbing”.

The Undertaker’s Tally

The Undertaker’s Tally

 

Son of Leo Strauss

 

In his extraordinary article, The Undertaker’s Tally, Roger Morris1 chillingly, and deeply disturbingly, lifts the veil on the life, times and evil mind of the real Donald Rumsfeld.

Morris begins with Rumsfeld’s early years, his early political ambitions, his run for Congress with the aid of the subsequently infamous Jeb Magruder secretly smearing his opponent. Speaking of the later, dashed but not extinguished Presidential hopes of Rumsfeld and Cheney, Morris says

Historians will only guess at the rancor building in these two deeply ambitious, deeply disappointed figures at the president they had, George W. Bush, whom they no doubt saw as manifestly, maddeningly inferior. The Rumsfeld-Cheney recompense, at vast cost to the nation and world, would be their fierce seizure of power after September 11, 2001.

It sounds like what it looks like in hindsight; a right-wing coup which wrested effective control of the country from an incompetent, “pathologically unfit” president in order to put into effect a policy which had been brewing for years, as shown in the letter from the Project For The New American Century to President Clinton2 in 1998.

Central to understanding the duplicity of Rumsfeld is his notorious relationship with Saddam Hussein, whom Rumsfeld was secretively funding, arming and supporting in his war with Iran.

There could have been little doubt that Saddam would use the considerable aid Rumsfeld was sliding under the table, and any larger gain from a better-armed war with Iran, to further the regime’s most aggressive weapons development, and to move from a U.S.-strengthened position to tyrannize all the more savagely Iraqi Shiites and Kurds. In the event, as Washington watched, he did it all – and no one could or should have known more than Rumsfeld.
….
Rumsfeld would be faulted for his pandering 1984 diplomacy in Baghdad to appease the tyranny (the gassing of the Kurds had already begun) after a timorous, hypocritical Washington statement denouncing use of chemical weapons. The toll of the policy would be much more. Iraqi chemical weapons plants bombed in the 1991 Gulf War and releasing agents to which some 100,000 American troops were exposed, the pandemic of the infamous Gulf War Syndrome, would trace in large measure to the materiel and technology afforded by Rumsfeld’s knowing acts seven years before.

He discusses the people who were around Rumsfeld, including the Zionists and their agendas.

He opened government as never before to men who habitually, automatically assumed that U.S. and Israeli interests were identical, with no objectivity about American policy in a Middle East they scarcely understood to begin with. Their ignorance and presumption were matched only by their zeal to cluster in decisive quarters of the new Bush regime where decisions of grand strategy, of war and peace, were now shaped and predetermined.

Historians will debate, too, the obvious blurred allegiance of what some call these American “Likudniks” with their utter conformity to the belligerent ultra-Zionist mentality of the Israeli right.

And he looks at the inevitabilities of Rumsfeld’s reign.

In blindly striking out after 9/11 — a reflexive, grandly opportunistic, richly self-satisfying political act in America — without seriously understanding the politics or history of either country, he plunged the Pentagon into blundering, plundering occupations that made the nightmares of 2007 and beyond nearly inevitable.

It is an astonishing piece of investigative writing which only a Washington insider could bring off this convincingly and which is essential reading for anyone struggling to understand how the US could have got itself into the mess it is in.

Naturally the Groveller General and his bureaucrats could have had no idea of any of this. If they did they could not have gone along with it so cheerfully.

 

 

1Roger Morris served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon and resigned in protest at the invasion of Cambodia. He then worked as a legislative advisor in the U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment, and writes this Rumsfeldian history from intimate firsthand knowledge as well as extensive research. A Visiting Honors professor at the University of Washington and Research Fellow of the Green Institute, he is an award-winning historian and investigative journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and the author of books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the Clintons. More recently, he co-authored with Sally Denton The Money and the Power, a history of Las Vegas as the paradigm of national corruption. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by Knopf.

2Project For A New American Century letter to Clinton
The letter from the PNAC to President Clinton is still proudly displayed on their website.

It is dated January 26, 1998 (Australia Day, appropriately enough)
It was signed by Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey and Robert B. Zoellick.

Khalilzad is an Afghan native, a Muslim, current US Ambassador to Iraq and probable next Ambassador to the UN. Bolton was Ambassador to the UN but was not confirmed. Look up the rest. Many or most of them are in the Administration, were in it, or advise it.

Some excerpts from the letter:

The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

What the letter makes clear is that the Republican right was obsessed with attacking Iraq. All that was needed was a pretext. It is hard to interpret “our vital interests in the Gulf” as anything other than “oil”. No mention here of democracy, or freeing the enslaved Iraqi masses from tyranny.

Given the limited range of any of Iraq’s missile systems, who must the writers be suggesting could be endangered by Iraq? Well, Israel. So it appears that the writers wrongly assume that Israel is an “ally” of the USA. But this is not true. Nevertheless it is telling that those who have signed the letter assume it, or at least hope others will believe it. From their point of view it probably seems obvious.

If only they had not so arrogantly dismissed as misguided the “insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council”. They might not be in the quagmire they created.

And remember, these people are still in power and influencing – actually, dominating – world affairs. But, you know, they come across as not that bright and not that clever.

 

We’ll All Be Rooned, Said Hanrahan

We’ll All Be Rooned, Said Hanrahan

 

Hooray for the Rain! (if you got it)

In praise of the recent rain here is the most Strayan of Australian pomes;
Hanrahan versing the elements.
True Australian values.
Pure Poa Tree.

 

SAID HANRAHAN

by John O’Brien

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
In accents most forlorn,
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn.

The congregation stood about,
Coat-collars to the ears,
And talked of stock, and crops, and drought,
As it had done for years.

“It’s looking crook,” said Daniel Croke;
“Bedad, it’s cruke, me lad,
For never since the banks went broke
Has seasons been so bad.”

“It’s dry, all right,” said young O’Neil,
With which astute remark
He squatted down upon his heel
And chewed a piece of bark.

And so around the chorus ran
“It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt.”
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

“The crops are done; ye’ll have your work
To save one bag of grain;

From here way out to Back-o’-Bourke
They’re singin’ out for rain.

“They’re singin’ out for rain,” he said,
“And all the tanks are dry.
”The congregation scratched its head,
And gazed around the sky.

“There won’t be grass, in any case,
Enough to feed an ass;
There’s not a blade on Casey’s place
As I came down to Mass.”

“If rain don’t come this month,” said Dan,
And cleared his throat to speak –
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“If rain don’t come this week.”

A heavy silence seemed to steal
On all at this remark;
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed a piece of bark.

“We want an inch of rain, we do,”
O’Neil observed at last;
But Croke “maintained” we wanted two
To put the danger past.

“If we don’t get three inches, man,
Or four to break this drought,
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

In God’s good time down came the rain;
And all the afternoon
On iron roof and window-pane
It drummed a homely tune.

And through the night it pattered still,
And lightsome, gladsome elves
On dripping spout and window-sill
Kept talking to themselves.

It pelted, pelted all day long,
A-singing at its work,
Till every heart took up the song
Way out to Back-o’-Bourke.

And every creek a banker ran,
And dams filled overtop;
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“If this rain doesn’t stop.”

And stop it did, in God’s good time;
And spring came in to fold
A mantle o’er the hills sublime
Of green and pink and gold.

And days went by on dancing feet,
With harvest-hopes immense,
And laughing eyes beheld the wheat
Nid-nodding o’er the fence.

And, oh, the smiles on every face,
As happy lad and lass
Through grass knee-deep on Casey’s place
Went riding down to Mass.

While round the church in clothes genteel
Discoursed the men of mark,
And each man squatted on his heel,
And chewed his piece of bark.

“There’ll be bush-fires for sure, me man,
There will, without a doubt;
We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

Howard ‘Fundamentally Evil’~MP

Howard ‘Fundamentally Evil’~MP

 

Throwing people into the abyss

 

Aspat” occurred this week when the Groveller General broke with longstanding international convention to meddle in the domestic politics of another country, saying that if he ran Al Qaeda, he would “put a circle around March next year and pray”1 for US Democrat and Presidential Candidate, Senator Barack Obama, to win.

His comments have raised a storm both in Australia and the US.

US Senator Ron Wyden said,

“The most charitable thing you can say about Mr Howard’s comment is it’s bizarre. You know, we’ll make our own judgements in this country with respect to elections”

The Groveller General, the paint flaking off him as he visibly crumbled and deflated, appeared nonplussed by this remark, being unused to the concept of making judgments without directions from the Americans or the Indonesians.

However, a Liberal colleague unfortunately came to what he thought was his rescue.
Queensland Liberal backbencher Cameron Thompson [Member for Tony Blair2] says he is proud of Mr Howard’s statement and pulling out of Iraq would herald

“the greatest disaster since the Rwandan genocide.”

“To throw people into that kind of abyss is, I think, amoral and I think John Howard is absolutely correct when he says that Barrack Obama’s policy is not just wrong, it is I think fundamentally evil.“

Values Australia was moved by the MP’s remarks and determined to learn just how bad things would have to get in Iraq to be as bad as the Rwandan genocide, because anyone who could help to create or to support such horror and calamity must indeed be evil. Values Australia’s research produced some alarming comparative figures.

 

  RWANDA
1994
IRAQ
2006
Violent deaths 800,000 654,965
(392,979 – 942,636     95% CI)
Refugees 2,000,000 2,000,000
Internally displaced 1,000,000 1,700,000

 

Rwanda
In the Rwanda genocide it is estimated that:

up to 800,000 had been murdered, another 2 million or so had fled, and another million or so were displaced internally

Iraq
…whereas in Iraq a study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published in the prestigious and influential Lancet medical journal estimated that in 2006

655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. Or more accurately:
654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population, through the end of June 2006 [with] a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths.

In addition
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated in a report last month that there were as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, primarily in Syria and Jordan. An additional 1.7 million people are displaced within Iraq, the agency said.

So it would seem that the situation in Iraq is already at least as bad as Rwanda was during the genocide.

And, as Cameron Thompson MP’s remark suggests, anyone who aids, abets, supports, urges, fails to speak out against, but especially anyone who contributes to and participates in “throwing people into that kind of abyss” is “fundamentally evil”.

Values Australia, which has always been a staunch sycophant of whoever is in government, does not know where to look or which way to turn.

Meanwhile, the increasingly hysterical, but sadly increasingly irrelevant, Minister for overseas affairs and getting really stroppy with the Pacific blackfellas, Robin Boywonder, has done a predictable “me-too ditto”. Nothing more can be expected. In parliamentary, media and particularly international circles he is becoming known as “The Pilotless Drone”.
____________________________
1 Unnamed Liberal Party sources claimed that that wouldn’t matter because everyone knows their prayers would not be answered because they pray to the wrong imaginary friend in the sky.
2Blair encompasses Kingaroy, ex-Qld Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s old home town (not to mention Pauline Hanson territory) where – not to put too fine a point on it – they have ‘a certain turn of mind’. It’s a bit like Tamworth, only nuttier.
In his maiden speech the MP shared the unwritten code of the Australian values we all respect: “mateship, a fair go, a helping hand and a fair day’s work”. Mr Thompson surely knew enough about his government’s industrial relations agenda when he left off the now redundant words “for a fair day’s pay”.
Mr Thompson can be contacted on (02) 6277 4412 at Parliament House, (07) 3813 0088 in his electorate office or send him an electronic message.