The Great Confusicator.

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“Nothing became him so much in the Presidency as … well, nothing, really.”

I’ve just passed an hour or so watching George W. Bush giving his last press conference, a performance that leaves me almost as lost for words as the man himself. It was a strange, sad spectacle of maundering passages illuminated by the 10 watt glow of elusive lucidity; a ramble through an era bereft of sense, principle and that high grandeur associated with the office of President of The United States of America.

George began by looking around the assembled family and reciting the names of some of the illustrious White House Press Corps, nodding and smiling as among friends, but eerily reminiscent of a nine year-old struggling to remember aunts and uncles on Christmas Day. It didn’t help that he got the name of one two-term veteran wrong, and covered the error with,

“Suzanne! What’s it been now? Six years?”

Only then to recall that, indeed, ‘twas eight.

He was trying, yet again, that disarming Texan charm. Smiling, folksy, and no more successful now than in any of his previous forty-six White House Press Conferences. In an early moment, looking to get some levity in to lighten a dire proceedings he tried to deadpan one of his more famous manglings of the English language, reminding the WHPC how they had “misunderestimated me.” But he flubbed the line and was left grinning quite alone. As his whispery chuckle wheezed into silence you could almost hear the cicadas and watch the lone tumbleweed roll past the lectern. When he later described the Texas legislature as “risk-adverse” no-one groaned or stifled a snort. This is the White House Press corps, smart, savvy, sharp as razors, and completely over this grey ghost of presidents past.

His attempts to be jokey and pally grew less frequent, and his ability to connect, flawed at best in this congregation, gasped its last breath before he was half done. Never the essence of effervescence, this was a man entirely free of spit, spin or sparkle. He promised to answer all their questions, but they knew he couldn’t, and they seemed unwilling to flog the old horse through its paces again, eschewing the old spirit of Bush-baiting, bored entirely with the same tired sallies, parries and ripostes. The questions were formulaic, their interest in him long since dried up and blown away.

And so he was left to wander, to stagger in a clutter of aimless syllables from occasional thought to odd remembered fact like a drunk lurching from barstool to barstool in search of the door. He clung to a few familiar props along the way; that historians, many years from now would best assess his two terms; that he had “disappointments” rather than mistakes to recall. But here was a man who clearly did not understand government despite a long and tarnished career. A man who confused action with remedy, ideology with ideas, politics with purpose.

Disappointments.

He was not a man who listened much to criticism, he said, and did not feel that he had been damaged or swayed by it. But he was “disappointed” by Washington’s caustic tone and tenor (my words obviously).Perhaps he had forgotten the rancid bile of brutish, partisan hate-mongers, the spite and spleen of the Republican pack-jackals of the Clinton years; their savage blood-lust over the pants-down, tackle-happy dangle-fest of Bill and Monica (and Ted and Malice). Of such is a culture, a climate made.

Abu Ghraib

Abu Ghraib became a “disappointment” too, rather than an atrocity, or the moment when the mask slipped and the true nature of America’s war was exposed – brutal, cruel, arrogant and vicious, glorying in terror and the humiliation of its enemies while obfuscating responsibility for its excesses. These are the process values of Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and, in particular, Dick Cheney - a man so myopic, hate-filled and violent he took time out to shoot his lawyer in the face.

WMDs

The lack of WMDs was another “disappointment”, rather than an appalling error of process, intelligence and judgment resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. There was no self-awareness here, no willingness to reflect on the most ill-advised and disastrous war since Vietnam; squandering lives, a nation's lifeblood and the treasure and moral stature of the USA. For Bush the monstrous consequences of his folly are an irrelevance. What matters is his disappointment when reality refuses to conform to Presidential fantasy. What matters to George, as he blandly explained, is his ability to look at himself in the mirror each day and be proud of what he sees. Which feat of blind narcissism he is more than capable of.

New Orleans bound

The complete and ongoing failure of his administration to deal adequately with the aftermath of hurricane Katrina evokes the D-word yet again. He can argue the micro-detail of how many were rescued from rooftops by helicopters, but the larger picture is still a mystery to George. He can spend billions on the Iraq War, and even fund the reconstruction of Iraqi towns and villages, but when it comes to New Orleans he’s Mister Small-Government once again. Pinch the pennies and preach individual effort and boot-strap recovery, and the ship of state will right itself and move on, apparently.

And it’s true, as he reminded all still awake, that his two terms began during a recession and is ending in one,. But George draws no conclusions from this about his own fallibility, culpability or inability to respond by changing his thinking. George was always a mouthpiece for his advisors, unable to challenge their intellectual dominance he chose always to act, without critique or rebuttal, and be the doer as well as the decider.

Between the idea and the reality, Between the motion and the act, Falls the shadow.

..and so often there also fell George. Not so much a President as the Resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. To know what the Prez thought about any issue all you had to do was check his appointment book and see who was the last person to talk to him.

The daily National Security Briefings “every day except Sunday” maintained a mesmerizing hold on the President’s brain and glued his attention to the war almost to the exclusion of anything else (except tax cuts).That, plus the neo-con armchair cavalry clique around Wolfowitz and Cheney kept him so blinkered to all but military success or failure that his confidence and consequent capacity to act was largely determined by the daily battle damage reports.

Bin Laden et al will have noticed this you can be sure, for every RPG or suicide bomb lit up GWB’s barometer. A man that rattled is at the mercy of those who can rattle the cage some more. In effect every cheap thug with a pound of Semtex could determine the President’s policy. Which is no way to run a war, or a superpower.

As George worked his way around the room, name by face by name, it occurred to me that Obama will be my tenth President. I’m old enough to remember JFK. It’s strange to think I’ve seen the all-time worst. George plodded on, the questions anodyne, the answers rambling asinine. Time passed. Nothing happened. Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, New Orleans and Katrina, Axis of Evil, Iraq, WMD, Kyoto, three failed Free Trade Agreements scuppered in the Senate, Sub-Prime, Ferdie and Fannie, The GFC, Bailouts and ballyhoo, it’s been a long, glorious thrill ride.

The questions ceased; George finished. He walked off stage left, successfully negotiated the door and was last seen walking up the stairs. In silence. Applause barely flickered. The White House Press Corps has moved on and is already too busy with the new guy, Mister History. Not with George. He’s just history.

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The Logic Of The Nation State

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This has been the toughest blog I’ve ever written, not just in terms of the huge amount of research, writing and revision, but also in trying to apply rational intellect to a problem that screams (with the voices of wounded children) for outrage, anger and tears. In the end, after much deliberation, I’ve decided to post it as an honest attempt to make sense of an appalling situation. I’d ask that you read it in that spirit.

The Logic Of The Nation State

Among the harsh lessons of the Holocaust are two that are critical to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They’re probably going to be relevant for generations to come.

The first is this. When political leaders constantly repeat that they are going to destroy you, all of you, and wipe you from the face of the earth, they are serious. They may sound hysterical. They may look demented, unbalanced, even comical. Others (non-Jews usually) may say it’s merely inflammatory rhetoric to unite their followers and keep their positions of authority, but if you’re a Jew, you’d better believe it. Because no-one will rescue you when it turns out to be true. Oh, there may be well-intentioned hand-wringing and sympathy, but that won’t make a difference when you’re dead, already.

And if they happen to be religious leaders as well as political ones then it goes double. People with God on their side don’t go in for half measures. The Jewish experience is that Jew-haters mean what they say, and will not only preach genocide they’ll do it at the first opportunity. Ethnic cleansing, pogrom, ghettoes, cultural imperialism run amok, whatever you call it, it all adds up to genocide, whether by degrees or by mass-murder it’s all the same in the end.

Israel is the only state where Jews know that
the government will put their safety first.

The second lesson is this: A nation without a homeland cannot survive. No ifs, no buts, no unique status as an honoured and cherished minority, no shirt, no shoes, no service. If you don’t have a patch of land to call your own you cannot guarantee the survival of your family, your children, your children’s children. The Evian Conference of 1938 proved this conclusively. When Nazi persecution of the Jews became so obvious it couldn’t be mistaken, thirty two nations sent delegates to come up with ways to help, of which they could manage none. As Australia’s delegate famously put it, “We have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” The Jews of what was then Palestine were allowed only observer status, prevented even from speaking about the fate of their own people.

And so, out of the Shoah came Israel. No country helped Israel to become a country; many either stood in its way or actively fought it. There has never been a time since then that leaders in the region haven’t vowed to kill Jews wherever they were, called for Israel to be destroyed or launched wars to achieve that end. Israel has been surrounded by enemies from day one and that hasn’t changed in 60 years.

But once you have a nation state you are bound by its logic, chained like Samson to two pillars that support and define the nation state: Maintaining territorial integrity and state monopoly of violence.

Maintaining territorial integrity.

In April 1982 Argentina’s military regime invaded the Falkland Islands, a British possession of negligible value, under the impression that Britain was a toothless post-imperial nation without the will or capacity to respond. The invasion was intended to boost domestic popularity for Leopoldo Galtieri's murderous military dictatorship. The British were left with a stark choice. Accept the invasion and negotiate, which would confirm the ‘toothless post-imperial’ tag, or use military power to retake the islands and confirm the strength of the British nation state both at home and abroad. The bellicose Thatcher government chose the latter. 907 soldiers died, the south-Atlantic rocks were retaken, and Britain’s status as a world power determined to maintain its borders was confirmed. The heated anti-British backlash largely faded when Thatcher left office. But the image of a bare-knuckled, warlike Britannia did not.

State monopoly of violence.

However questionable the morality of wars between states may be the state’s monopoly of violence within its own borders is more complex still. A national army may inflict violence on hostile states with relatively straightforward justification, within a state control of violence is the province of law and the police. The safety of the population from random or organized violence and intimidation is the single most important factor in the internal stability of the state itself.

A state which can protect its people from the violence of the mob, the thug and organized crime is a successful state, right up to the point at which the powers of the police become an intimidating force that stifles free speech and the rights of assembly and dissent; even necessarily violent dissent. Rarely do politicians understand this, lobbied as they are by the police for ever greater powers, and pandering to the fears of the populace to stay in power.

The men who composed the American constitution understood it well, and tried to enshrine the rights of the individual to maintain his freedoms, through the force of arms if necessary. But the best intentions don’t always work out so well. 200 years later America’s gun culture is one of the world’s worst, with 30,000 dead and 60,000 injured by guns each year in a free and civilized society.

Germany’s Weimar government was so ‘liberal’ and weak that it was impotent in the face of Nazi brown-shirt battalions who ruled the streets and dished up violence against any and all who stood in their way. The Jews weren’t the first to suffer by any means. Communists, socialists, nationalists, Royalists, democrats - all were beaten into submission by a political force outside government control.

For Israel in recent years both issues are ‘hot-button’. Rather than facing invasion by a neighbouring state, a situation she has proven more than capable of defeating, Israel has been under persistent ‘pin-prick’ attacks by violent, extremist political parties and groups outside of government, but located on her self-declared borders. The Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon in 2006 was universally condemned as an extreme over-reaction to years of indiscriminate rocket attacks, kidnappings and guerilla attacks by Hezbollah on the Israeli Army. Over 1,000 civilian Lebanese died, but large parts of Hezbollah’s military force were destroyed. If the war had been between an Israeli Army and a Lebanese Army there would have been less moral condemnation given the long record of murders, kidnappings, suicide bombings and rocket attacks.

Hassan Nasrallah and Iran's President Ahmedinajad

Behaviour like this by one country to another would be considered an ongoing war and Israel’s military response would be seen as legitimate, if necessarily a terrible thing. If Hezbollah were a government it’s parallels with Nazi Germany would be clear (including both its extremist rhetoric and popular social welfare programs), and the almost hysterical, bloodthirsty rhetoric of Hassan Nasrallah, it’s leader would clearly be seen as astonishingly close to that of Adolf Hitler, even outdoing him.

Christmas Rockets from Gaza.

Hamas militants with shiny new toy

The current invasion of Gaza is clearly a direct successor to the 2006 Lebanese war. It’s timing is most certainly driven by Israel’s internal politics (elections are due next month) and hard-nosed calculation about the prospect of a new American President; attempting to do as much damage as possible to Hamas before negotiating a new ‘peace process’. The question is, is Israel counter-attacking an attacking army, or is it invading a neighbor in pursuit of a terrorist threat? People are dying no matter which definition you use. But to make some sense of it decide you must.

Palestinian or Israeli mother protects her child.

Gaza (and the West Bank) exists in its current form due to Israel’s accepting the “A nation without a homeland cannot survive” principle applies to the Palestinians too with the 1994 handover of land to the Palestinian National Authority (with the tacit understanding that it could become the government of a future free Palestinian state). It owes its shape to Israel’s Unilateral Pullout of troops and settlers (destroying Israeli homes in the process) in 2006.

Also in 2006 free elections resulted in Hamas defeating the more moderate Fatah party. Hamas, a Sunni equivalent of the Shiite Hezbollah is as bloodthirsty, anti-Semitic and nihilistic as Hezbollah, it’s slogan declaring “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of God is the loftiest of its wishes.” It has a political arm and a terrorist arm, the latter responsible for vicious attacks that have continually derailed the peace process when it seemed that a lasting peace was possible.

In 2007 Fatah, backed covertly by Israel, began open warfare with Hamas to overturn the election results. The conflict was one of the most vicious ever seen in the Middle East and ended with Fatah in control of the West Bank and Hamas in control of Gaza, from whence it’s rocket attacks on Israel have continued ad nauseam. They continue now as raison d’être and signifier of the open conflict in Gaza.

Tzipi Livni & Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (right)

The logic of the nation state clearly backs the Israeli position. In part because there is no Palestinian state with which to compare positions. Is Israel fighting a neighbour, a nation, Hamas the terrorist group, Hamas the legitimately elected government, or a renegade bunch of criminal terrorists? Logic clearly isn’t enough. The face of Tzipi Livni says no while her mouth says it must.

The Israeli Acting Prime Minister and Kadima Party (the most progressive pro-peace Israeli political party) Leader has publicly declared the Israeli position often enough, that the rockets must be stopped, that no other options are available. But her face undermines her words, and she looks more and more like a woman trapped in a tired role that just prolongs the endless cycle of violence, misery and hatred which she hopes to end.

Politics is part of the problem, how can it be part of the solution? Israeli politicians know that hawkish rhetoric backed up by the invasion increases their popularity just before the February election. When a coalition government is the most likely outcome electoral popularity may be the key to real power.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak (Labor Party) has seen his personal polling increase by as much as 10 – 14% since the invasion. To what extent do you think his willingness to shed Palestinian blood is affected by the coming election? I’d say about 10-14%. It’s certainly easier to make the case for war when it will improve your own position.

The efficiency of the Israeli military response (in the grotesque terms of body count and wholesale destruction) skews the picture too. Are the Israelis the aggressors, or more at fault, because they kill more Palestinians than vice-versa? Do we condemn Israel because it’s army is simply better at murderous violence than Hamas and their campaign of violence? Do we think that if Hamas had the weaponry of the Israelis they would be suddenly less violent, less murderous, less bloodthirsty? Is the blood of innocents worth more than the blood of soldiers? Is more blood ever going to wash away the crime of first blood?

The history and genesis of Israel also skews things. I have heard it reported that Israel should know better than to do this because of the Holocaust. Can we really hold them to a higher level of morality than we do the rest of us? Does previous victimhood demand future saintliness? Can we not accept that Jews can be just as stupid, bloody-minded and violent as the rest of us?

Hamas throws vile genocidal rhetoric at Israel along with its Qassam rockets every day. It also accuses Israel of genocidal hatred, yet it’s Israel that has given over the land which Gaza occupies, Israel that has given up territory conquered in war, Israel that has traded land for the prospect of peace. Meanwhile Hamas demands that its hair-splitting over cause, effect and right to bloody revenge be part of the solution as well as a legitimate reason for mindless violence and murderous stupidities. Palestinian children have died this last week from the rockets of Hamas. They were treated, in full view of the international press, by an Israeli hospital. Does this ugly propaganda coup mean anything?

Clearly it will require the wisdom of several Solomons to untangle the web of hatreds, miseries and tragedies still unfolding.

Barack Obama, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni in front of
a heap of spent Palestinian Qassam rockets in 2008

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The Angels Of Our Better Nature

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It’s been hard to be angry lately, harder to maintain the rage in the face of loving family, delightful spouse and children grown wise, patient and forgiving. My youngest daughter has returned home to Brisbane, managing a two hour plane ride that became an eight hour debacle caused by storms, planes that didn’t go and staff that should. She did it with persistence, determined staff management and the silently ticked off resolution of those who do what works rather than vent feelings that make things worse. I’m proud of her, and I’ll miss her in the weeks to come.

It reminded me of times past when I’ve had to think fast to produce the effect rather than the affect, the intervention rather than the emotion. The thing that angers me most, and most often, is the abuse of children. The sound of a crying child makes me crazy, and I have to do something, anything to make it stop. Over the years I’ve seen and heard children being yelled at, abused, shaken, dragged by the arm around shopping centres more often than anywhere else. And I know that ‘sticking your nose in’ is not only not appreciated, it’s asking for more trouble, more for the child with some left over for me. And over the years I’ve come up with a range of ways to deal with it.

I’ve ‘lost control’ of my shopping cart and crashed into the cart of someone berating a child, and followed up with profuse apologies and general bumbling that diverts and defuses. I’ve burst into song on occasions (usually to my spouse) to create a useful diversion. A favourite is singing “Dolmades!” at the deli counter, to the tune of the 60’s Dean Martin classic “Volare.” If you get the moment right you can usually get people to join in on the “Whoa-oh!” chorus.

I’ve bowled fresh melons or tinned peaches around the ankles of obnoxious, bullying parents, followed up with a loud, “Whoops, sorry.. ooh, there it is, don’t know how that got away from me..” in order to break up a ruckus with a kid on the short end of the stick. I wasn’t interfering, just distracting people and putting the bullying adult off their stride. It’s hard to be stroppy when canned peas are rolling dangerously around your heels and bouncing off your trolley.

I once stood in a checkout line watching a mother bully her five year old for several minutes and eventually broke in with “Never mind kid, when she’s old and helpless, and you’re all grown up you can put her in a home and spend all her money.” The child blinked back his tears and stared at me, silently. The mother shut her mouth, kept her back turned, and got out of there a.s.a.p.

But my proudest moment was about twelve years ago in a ghastly shopping centre on Sandgate Road in Albion, a dreary north Brisbane suburb. I was wandering aimlessly past a row of shops that featured a pharmacy next to a newsagent. As I looked to my right I saw, across the aisles of corn-pads, tampons and constipation relief, a large fat woman towering over a tot with tears streaming down her face.

As I watched the woman picked the child up and slapped it hard across the face. Without a moment’s thought I picked up the nearest thing to hand, which was a size twelve running shoe in a bargain bin at the pharmacy’s entrance, and threw it hard. I was quite shocked when, over several aisles and about fifteen feet, it hit the woman square in the back of the head. I instantly jumped back around the dividing wall into the newsagents shop.

I strolled out a minute or two later but the woman and the child were gone. I never got to see the look on the face of the vile baggage after her encounter with The Flying Footwear of Instant & Anonymous Karma. I like to think she turned around and saw no-one, just an empty and accusing silence that chilled her to the marrow. When I thought about it later I laughed my socks off. It was sublime. Down with the Tyranny Of Mean-Spirited Fat Cows In Overstretched Tracksuits! Strike one for The Forces Of Justice And Avenging Footwear. I hope she is haunted by it to this day. That she shudders when size twelve blue and white running shoes cross her path. That her child believes in the kindness of strangers and knows right from wrong, and right from left, all because of that moment.

Most of all I’m proud of the spontaneity of the act. That I didn’t hop from foot to foot with middle class angst, stricken with the immobility of the well-meaning but clueless. I didn’t think at all, I just was taken up in the moment, the act, the blow for the weak and powerless against the vile and sanctimonious bullies of the world. I acted in complete and spontaneous accord with the better angels of my nature. Which is a rare and precious moment in any life, but even better than that, I got away with it. A rare and wonderful thing indeed, one to be cherished and kept polished bright in the memory.

And it’s not something accorded to us all. When Muntadhar al-Zeidi had his moment of inspired anger and threw both his shoes at George W. Bush earlier this month he paid the full toll, and was jumped on and pounded flat by the local secret service thugs. Pounded so flat in fact that even the Americans were shocked. He’ll be paying for it for some time too: Beaten, tortured, imprisoned and tortured some more. Long after the great fathead in the White House is just a painful memory he’ll still be copping a hiding. While George was ducking I noticed the Iraqi Prime Minister didn’t even blink.

Al-Zeidi has become a symbol of civil disobedience and outraged, yet restrained, political action. No-one was hurt (except Muntadhar himself) but the message that American Emperor has no shoes was spread far and wide in a peaceful, almost comic act of pedestrian protest. The dimwit Bush was nonplussed and still short of an understanding that he is responsible for the deaths of 655,000 people. The hard faced Iraqi Prime Minister was unmoved by humanity, outrage or anything other than calculating politics.

That symbol has become a rallying cry for desperate Palestinians under Israeli gunships, for murderous Hamas thugs throwing rockets instead of shoes, for opportunist Ayatollahs and Muslim bigots, for all those who feel the heel of the U.S of A on their necks, and all those who like to crowd a bandwagon and hurl footwear indiscriminately. And yet I think this was never Al-Zeidi ‘s intent.

I don’t think there was any intent at all. I think that when he was confronted by the man who turned his country into a battlefield, the grinning idiot whose astonishingly self-satisfied ignorance caused the deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, who loosed the violence of Muslim sectarian hatreds and destroyed the justice system, the police, the army, the government, the health system, hospitals, sanitation, clean water, you name it he’s fucked it up so bad it will take generations to fix, the man just snapped.

For just a moment he was overwhelmed by the truth, and by the better angels of his nature, and heaved the Hush Puppies of Honourable Protest. Unlike Bruce Pardo, the calculating Californian in the Santa suit who took the good ole American way out of personal failure and gunned down, blew up, then burned down everyone he could, Muntadhar al-Zeidi just threw the Shoe of Justice, the Desert Boot of Public Accusation, the Footwear of Free Speech, the Slippers of Slapstick, the Brogues of Bush-Bashing, the Pumps of Purity, the Toe-warmers of Truth...

May God guide his feet to a place of peace.

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