George W Bush leg-pull still a work in progress

An editorial today in The Australian opines that the “legacy” of George W. Bush’s presidency is “still a work in progress.”

That’s right on the money, if by that expression the Oz means that it will require a herculean effort to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

The Oz kicks off with the weasely admission that Bush “will never be top of any of the lists of best presidents Americans enjoy analysing.” The same was undoubtedly said of Richard M. Nixon, whose interment was respectfully attended by three former or current presidents. Such was the rehabilitation of a man whose criminal conduct brought the very presidency into disrepute, while his country teetered on a constitutional precipice.

According to the Oz, Dubya’s enduring achievements – aside from that Americans will “enjoy analysing” his presidency in only a very qualified sense – are to “have kept his country safe and created a new Muslim democracy.”

If the absence of any successful terrorist attacks on US soil since September 2001 is anything to speak of, then it is that Dubya’s presidency was not a failure of such epic proportions as generally thought.

“A new Muslim democracy”? Time will tell on that one. Prior to the ascendancy of Saddam, the Iraqis had a functioning secular democracy, but somehow managed to blow it. And the strongman Saddam was appeased and supported obscenely by successive US administrations including up to the period after his infamous Al Anfal campaign against the Kurds. But never mind, the bloodbath of the last seven years has put it all to rights.

What is missing, however, from much of the late apologia for Dubya, including the Oz’s little effort here, is any mention of the ‘Af’ word.

Alright, I’ll say it: Afghanistan.

The Dubya Administration’s dereliction of its ‘mission’ in Afghanistan – in order to pursue its Misadventure in Mesopotamia, which even the Oz piece admits was “badly blundered” – was a mistake for which ‘we’ will be paying in blood and angst for the next decade or possibly beyond.

Disgustingly, Dubya has been hitting the chat show circuit expressing his “disgust” over the conduct of some of the troops he sent to do his bidding at Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Does the moron not remember that, by the time he and Cheney had finished dog-whistling up and down their country for the dogs of war, around 65 per cent of the US population believed Saddam’s Iraq to be responsible for the September 11 attacks?

It was, for Dubya, a cultivated and convenient misapprehension that undoubtedly was mirrored in the hapless service personnel he sent, thus making the Abu Ghraib abuses virtually inevitable.

Still and all, I will confidently predict that Dubya’s interment will be respectfully attended by at least three former or current US presidents.

If by then my mushy-grey succumbs to the scourge of dementia, I’ll at least have the consolation of not having the presence of mind to register such a grotesque spectacle.

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Crisis? What Crisis!?

With apologies to Supertramp.

KEVIN RUDD'S popularity has skyrocketed to record levels and support for federal
Labor has soared after the Government's handling of the global financial crisis,
the latest Herald/Nielsen poll finds.

The national poll, the first to
test the Government's recent reaction to the dramatic worsening of the crisis,
also finds overwhelming support for Mr Rudd's handling of the situation,
including his $10.4 billion rescue package.

Which is, one suspects, just why the Ruddster has charged about from commercial tv station to commercial radio station spruiking fear and panic over the WFC.

Setting the scene with language that clearly promotes the idea of catastrophe and impending doom the PM then intones that we should do the opposite of what that language indicates and not panic. Having spent a week or so in this mode, Rudd unveils his package of “spend till it hurts” (the taxpayer) not to parliament but to the media direct.

Used to be those national crises were dealt with within the purview of the parliament. You know oversight, debate, right of reply, etc. Open, transparent and accountability? Not on your nelly.

Extreme times coming to a TV near you...

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Give a dictator an even break

In a recent column Greg Sheridan pleads, “If only Pervez were more like Suharto.”

Sometimes the word dictator can prevent clear thinking in the Western liberal mind, as often does the word war. But, as George Orwell observed, wars have results, and different wars have different results, depending who wins.

So it is with dictators. There are more and less ruthless, bloodthirsty, legitimate and effective dictators. The quality of the dictator influences profoundly the quality of the nation.

Ooh, Sheridan has my head spinning with all this ‘realist’ talk of mach politik... but I will persevere and take the plunge with him.

Sheridan denounces Musharraf as “a weak, ineffective and foolish dictator” because, for instance, he has failed to stem the rising tide of Islamist extremism in his country. Apparently such extremism in Indonesia is not an issue for Sheridan, forgetting that it’s almost certainly an issue for the victims of the Bali bombings and their families.

By contrast, Suharto was presumably a strong, effective and astute dictator, a veritable pin-up boy of dictatorhood by Sheridan’s lights.

Suharto was a dictator and there were many bad things about his rule, especially his human rights record. But here’s the complex bit: he built a modern Indonesia that was capable of sustaining democracy.

It may not occur to Sheridan, but it may be the case that Indonesian democracy survived despite Suharto, thanks to the aspirations and dedication of millions of his countrymen.

But okay, giving the much-maligned Suharto the benefit of the doubt, surely Sheridan doesn’t need it pointed out to him that Suharto had over two decades, not to mention thousands upon thousands of bloody corpses, head-start on Musharraf.

It’s early days yet, so Musharraf may yet earn his place in Sheridan’s pantheon of benevolent despots. Give a dictator an even break!

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Certainty affirmed

“I don’t know about my future but I am certainly the Foreign Minister.”

• Alexander Downer, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs

Australians all will breathe a sigh of relief at this affirmation that Mr Downer is keeping his eye on the ball for Australia.

“We are only focusing on winning the election. That is all we are thinking about at this stage and that is a big job.”

Our taxes at work. But still, Mr Downer has his finger on the pulse of Australia’s national interest on the world stage; for instance, with regard to General/President Musharraf’s experiments with Pakistan’s democracy...

“Well, he’s certainly, by certain standards, well he’s certainly by some standards a dictator.”

Well, Mr Downer is certainly on the right track there, the right track, certainly. Of course, as with Soeharto, the unequivocal denunciations will come after the General has gone on his merry way.

According to Prime Minister John Howard, Soeharto’s Indonesia was “not a democracy in the sense we understand it.”

After the fall of Soeharto, of course, it suddenly became safe for the Howard Government to describe that particular strong man as “a dictator”.

In the case of Musharraf, the diplomatic niceties are nominally in the service of Australia’s national interest in the ‘war on terror’.

In Soeharto’s case, it was all about the war on communism... No wait, Domino Theory was pre-1990, so in the Howard Era it must have been about keeping our strong-but-unstable-neighbour-to-the-north on side, in a ‘constructive engagement’ that mutually benefited both Australian commerce and, in a round-about, trickle-down sort of way, the Indonesian people.

Well anyway, the certainty is that a pretext will always be found to selectively coddle ‘our’ preferred sons’a’bitches.

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Extremism abhorred

On Lateline last night, Pakistan’s religious affairs minister, Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq, was interviewed on the aggressive political clamp-down by the country’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf.

In a nutshell, Mr Ijaz-ul-Haq said there’s basically nothing to worry about. The suspension of the constitution and the judiciary, the mass arrests, the violent suppression of street demonstrations and all the rest of it are but a “very small phase that we have to go through.”

Fear not, for democracy and the rule of law will return “once [Musharraf] is an elected president of Pakistan.”

The actions of Musharraf’s government were necessary because “the entire law enforcing agencies were getting demoralised and the extremists were getting opportunities to, you know, exploit this demoralisation...”

Mr Ijaz-ul-Haq’s abhorrence of extremism should be well-known. When in June the UK government conferred a knighthood on Salman Rushdie, Mr Ijaz-ul-Haq was quoted as saying:

If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Muhammad, his act is justified. This is an occasion for the [world’s] 1.5 billion Muslims to look at the seriousness of this decision. If Muslims do not unite, the situation will get worse and Salman Rushdie may get a seat in the British parliament.

Mr Ijaz-ul-Haq’s abhorrence of extremism is apparently surpassed only by his abhorrence of democratic processes leading to the wrong outcomes.

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