Tariq Ali’ s nostrum for Afghanistan: talks to include the “Chinese because they have investments there . . . the Pakistanis, Iranians, and the Russians.” Not, we note, the Japanese, to whom Hamad Karzai has just promised first crack at the minerals – which were discovered by the Americans.
Remind me again: why are Australians dying there?
The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.
This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. … Americans, left, right, and other, think of the “commander in chief” as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes.
Gene Healy in the June 2008 issue of Reason.com.
Right now, Obama is expected to walk out on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, extract the oil – if a vacuum cleaner can do it, so can the President – and hurl the damned stuff into outer space. (Aliens don’t vote.)
But this is only the first of three disquieting features of the current crisis. Americans ar confronted by a technological problem to which there is no immediate technological solution. This must be somebody’s fault, goddammit. Worse, the problem is oil, a substance worshipped wherever two or three SUVs are gathered together. It’s as if holy water turned into sulphuric acid.
We know what America does when foreigners threaten its oil supplies. The question now is what it will do to itself faced with this more intimate threat. Be very glad that Obama is in office. George W. would by now have annexed the Home Counties.
So is the US an “aggressive, war-mongering military machine” obsessed with spending on defence and plumping up its armed forces? Perhaps, the numbers say, not.
But you have to follow the charts quite a way down to see why. Compare this presentation with the one-line statistics in our newspapers – makes you groan.
Other highlights. The North Koreans have 24,728 people per 100,000 in what might be called the aggression business – soldiers, reservists and paramilitary. A 2008 census gave a total population of about 24 million of whom about half are children. It follows that about half the adult population are in the aggression business.
Then there’s Burma, which spends 26% of its GDP on the military.
Is it just me? The bien-pensant stuff about Afghanistan keeps reminding me of pollyanna talk during the Cold War. The Russians aren’t so bad, after all those satellite countries, they have elections, a little bit of socialism wouldn’t hurt this country by the way and it’s obvious that we couldn’t possibly agree with anything whatsoever said or done by the Americans, so, so, well anyway, let’s have another drink.
Tariq Ali has decided that the only solution to the situation in Afghanistan is for everyone to pull out. All will be arranged at a conference:
. . . the Pakistani military obviously is a key player, and has to be part of the process of withdrawal, as have the Iranians, as have the Russians, the Chinese. These are the four critical players. The Chinese because they have investments there and their money is needed to rebuild the country; the Pakistanis, Iranians, and the Russians because they need to tell their supporters in this country, “We need a national coalition government in Afghanistan for ten years, we’ll disarm you, no violence will be tolerated, we’re going to rebuild the country.” That is the only way forward. I know it seems utopian at the moment.
No Tariq, what it seems is asinine, disingenuous and menacing. ‘No violence will be tolerated’. In Afghanistan? Exactly who will police that, and how? But then, this is the guy who in the same article tells us that the tribes who drove out the British only used their rifles for sport, if the wicked West had only let well alone, women in Afghanistan would have the vote, and the Russians were good for Afghanistan because they say they were and those neo-liberals won’t put a red cent into the country. So long as he can continue to hate Americans and anyone allied with them he doesn’t give a brass fuck about, for example, the Afghanis.
In particular, about Afghani women. But perhaps the assembled Chinese, Iranians, Pakistanis and Russians will take care of them.
Abbott’s new cabinet confirms what has been obvious for some time: that the Coalition parties have forfeited their right to the term ‘liberal’. Robert Manne nailed Howard – a mendacious populist. People like Ruddock and Andrews are authoritarian reactionaries. (There are no words to describe Bronwen Bishop.) In The Age the other day a Liberal lamented the death of the party Menzies founded.
Andrew Norton (“Carlton’s only classical liberal”) gives some interesting survey figures to show that on the Australian “Right”, there is a clear statist majority.
Some of us can’t support either major party, and are tired of flinging tokens to Bob Brown. How’s about a re-formed liberal party – Turnbull at its head, Keating the grey eminence?
White Christmas in Dubai
Abu Dhabi pledged on Monday to provide $10 billion to Dubai, easing fears about an outright debt default by the smaller, struggling emirate.
Let me see, now, who is it who provides most of the subsidies for the Palestinians?
