A question

Was Winston too drunk to watch TV during the 80's? Because that's the only explanation I can think of for him thinking that Anita McNaught is a "foreigner"...

A manifesto for liberal internationalists

Timothy Garton Ash has what is effectively a manifesto for liberal internationalists in the Guardian today: Beyond the West. The central question is "what duty do we in the free world (the West) owe those in the unfree world?" His answer is "freedom" - primarily freedom from want and freedom from fear. As for how we should meet this obligation, he suggests practicising what we preach on free trade by ending unfair trade barriers and subsidies, increasing foreign aid and private charity, strengthening governments to avoid "failed states", promoting universal human rights, and working to undermine regimes which fail to protect them.

Lest this remind people too much of the crusading Tony Blair, there's also a healthy dose of humility thrown in there as well - both about our right to impose solutions, and our effectiveness in doing so. The aim should be to help people to "find their own path to freedom, in their own countries, in their own time and, wherever possible, peacefully", rather than knock over a country and try to free people by killing them. We should provide the tools (advice on establishing a constitution and a working government, based on our own formative experiences) and the pressure on regimes to change (by for example linking trade and investment to human rights), "but then it's up to them". This is both realistic - democracies don't grow overnight, but rely on a vast cultural infrastructure which is mostly invisible to those of us who actually live in them - and respects people's freedom to choose the form of government best suited to their particular needs.

Still busy

As you can tell from this morning's post, I'm still busy thinking about my essay. But it should be done by tonight, and normal service will resume shortly. In the meantime, check out The Grey Shade, who has some interesting things to say both about government spending and the "precautionary principle".

Sheep and trousers

People objecting to the hoax butchering of Shrek the sheep on Eating Media Lunch on the grounds that "it's animal cruelty"? Talk about not getting it!

EML's whole point was to draw attention to the dichotomy between our love of Shrek and our everyday slaughter of other members of his species. "Look! Cute fluffy animals, cute fluffy animals, cat getting stuck on a fan, cute fluffy animals, sheep being slaughtered. Lamb for dinner, anyone"?

On the one hand, saying that the sheep was the famous Shrek was an attempt to create empathy with a "trousers moment". For those who don't understand the reference, in his essay "Looking Back On The Spanish War", George Orwell describes not shooting at a man who was

half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. ... I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at 'Fascists'; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn't a 'Fascist', he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.

The media circus surrounding Shrek has caused many people to think of him as "a fellow creature". The thought of him being slaughtered and eaten upsets us (and not just on economic grounds). But if Shrek, why not other sheep?

And on the other hand, it was also saying "it's just a sheep, goddamit!" Shrek is ultimately "just a sheep", and that is what happens to sheep. So why all the fuss about him?

Either way, it was an artful skewering of common assumption, and a great example of why I like EML.

Build the other dam

The loonies are now trying to exploit the fading electricity transmission crisis to ram through the Dobson hydro scheme, saying that it will provide electricity from the "perpetually renewable and entirely free energy source provided by the high rainfall on the West Coast".

This is true. However, it's in the middle of a conservation area, and that fairly much rules it out. The whole point of a conservation area is to conserve, not to dig it up whenever it is convenient.

But more importantly, the advocates of development are trying to build the wrong dam. Dobson would flow into the West Coast's local grid - but its not the West Coast which seriously needs local generation; it's Nelson/Marlborough. And there's a planned hydro scheme which will provide that local generation, just about to start the RMA process.

Trustpower's Wairau Valley scheme is a dog technologically. It's a "mini-Aqua", a canal-diversion with multiple small power plants and next to no storage capacity, so its really missing the whole point of hydro. However, unlike Dobson, it's not in the middle of the conservation estate, and unlike Aqua, it's actually popular with the locals. Both of which mean that there are likely to be far fewer problems with actually building the thing.

So, why are National, Greypower, industry and United Future advocating so strongly for environmentally destructive development which doesn't actually serve our needs when there's a popular option which does which can be built with far less hassle just sitting there? Beats me.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

As one of his final acts in office, US viceroy Paul Bremer has excluded Moqtada Sadr and his followers from standing for elections or holding office for three years. Which means that they have absolutely no reason to lay down their guns.

Juan Cole expands nicely on that latter point:

Bremer's action in excluding the Sadrists from parliament is one final piece of stupidity to cap all the other moronic things he has done in Iraq. The whole beauty of parliamentary governance is that it can hope to draw off the energies of groups like the Sadrists. Look at how parliamentary bargaining moderated the Shiite AMAL party in Lebanon, which had a phase as a terrorist group in the 1980s but gradually outgrew it. AMAL is now a pillar of the Lebanese establishment and a big supporter of a separation of religion and state. The only hope for dealing with the Sadrists nonviolently was to entice them into civil politics, as well. Now that they have been excluded from the political process and made outlaws in the near to medium term, we may expect them to act like outlaws and to be spoilers in the new Iraq.

Hopefully the interim government will be smart enough to overturn this moronic decision. It's both a matter of standing up for the right of Iraqis to choose their own government (rather than having the Americans try to limit its scope from the beginning), and a matter of self-preservation. The Sadrists are a relatively popular and well-armed faction, and excluding their leaders from peaceful politics hands them a legitimate justification for violence.

Good news for a change

The Italians last night captured the mastermind behind the Madrid atrocity, and the Belgians rounded up a cell actively plotting terrorist attacks. And how did they do it? Not by overwhelming military force, not by invading a small country and bombing it back to the stone age, and not by torture - but by good, old-fashioned law-enforcement techniques.

If you see the fight against terrorism as part of a "war of civilisations", then nothing shows the superiority of western democracy better than this. Terrorists are criminals, and they're going to be treated as such. And in the process, we won't be creating any new Osamas (or at least, it is vastly less likely). Maybe the Americans could learn something here...?

Victory to the Iraqis

The US will get their resolution, but the Iraqi government will get to be consulted over major military operations, and can tell the Coalition to bugger off.

A victory for the Iraqis, I think - and all made possible because the international community stood up for them against their occupiers.

You can read the latest draft resolution here.

Busy

Bloggage will probably be light for the next few days, as I try and get words out of my head and onto paper for an assignment.

Shocking familiarity

A small part of the BBC's D-Day docudrama (on Prime on Sunday night) covered on the story of a British commando who was captured while scouting beach defences before the invasion. And there was a shocking moment of familiarity, when they showed him in his cell, tied naked in what the US would now call a "stress position"...

Where it leads

A story I missed a few weeks ago shows both the ultimate destination of the Bush administration's doctrine of unfettered executive power, and the unintentional humour of tyranny:

A former Russian intelligence agent who attempted to investigate possible government involvement in a series of deadly apartment bombings was sentenced Wednesday to four years in prison on a charge of revealing state secrets.

Darkly funny, but also blatant. And the rest of the article is simply scary - disappearing evidence, politicised prosecutions, and some rather convenient "coincidental" murders. All seemingly performed by an executive which thinks itself above the law.

Princeps legibus solutus est

The Pentagon just keeps on leaking. The latest is classified legal advice to Donald Rumsfeld contending that

The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the "necessity" of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or "superior orders," sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no "moral choice was in fact possible."

What's striking is the degree to which this mirrors the Nazi "defence" for Crimes Against Humanity at Nuremberg. The Fuhrer gave the orders, and the generals had "no choice" but to implement them. The Nuremberg Tribunal took a very dim view of this argument. Out of 22 defendants using it, only 3 were acquitted; 12 were hanged. All the Nuremberg defence does is tell us who else should also be in the dock.

What's also striking is that it shows us exactly how far the US has sunk. The United States was originally conceived as "a government of laws, not men". Yet now they have government lawyers arguing that

In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority

and

authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

This strikes at the very core of freedom. If the President's Men can do whatever they like, with no laws applying, then no-one is safe. There's a reason why western democracies say that the rule of law is supreme and that not even the government is immune: because immunity encourages abuse. It makes us reliant on the goodwill of the powerful, and we have sufficient knowledge of humanity's flaws to know that that is simply not enough. While law cannot by itself prevent abuses (the US's quite clear laws against torture and Crimes Against Humanity did not prevent Abu Ghraib), it can discourage them, and at least allows punishment after the fact.

It also shows the vital importance of the Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi cases, currently before the US Supreme Court. The administration's arguments in those cases rely on the same doctrine of unfettered executive power, and now we know exactly where it leads. If the Supreme Court decides for the government in the Padilla/Hamdi case, then liberty will be dead in America.

(Interestingly, during the oral hearings one of the Justices asked whether that doctrine permitted torture; the administration's response was, essentially, "our government doesn't do that sort of thing". Two days later, the photos hit the papers...)

A GE project the Greens should support

Genetically modifying crops to make petrol

While it's not a solution to our dependance on finite fossil fuels (short version: not enough land area), it's still a good idea. And the CO2 released when the fuel is burned comes from the atmosphere in the first place, so it's greenhouse-neutral into the bargain.

And OTOH we already have the technology to ferment crops into alcohol to run cars; it's a substantial contributer to Brazil's fuel supply. The problem is not lack of technology, but that it is (as yet) uneconomic to adopt it.

David Slack's book, Bullshit, Backlash and Bleeding Hearts, is due out on Tuesday.

And meanwhile I'm condemned to wade through ancient Treasury documents and stuff by Jane Kelsey...

Bishop a bigot, film at eleven

I'm struggling to find anything intersting to say about Bishop Vercoe's bigotry. Really - a Bishop said homosexuality is "unnatural". Why is that surprising?

OTOH, trying to excuse the comments as the product of "a cultural context" is fairly stupid. Sociologically, everything has a "cultural context" - even US torture at Abu Ghraib. But that simply provides understanding, not exculpation.

And on the third hand, it does provide an excuse to quote Lyndon Hood on the idea of government legislating for Biblical morality and "family values":

the further the goals of government get from the material wellbeing of its people, the closer it gets to the gas chambers. Trying to make people behave according to particular moral standards is the spiritual equivalent of making the Trains Run on Time

Better just to stop people from physically hurting one another and leave things such as family structure or sexual preference to the memetic marketplace where it belongs.

Calling a spade a spade

A report by the UN's Acting High Commissioner for Human Rights has for the first time called a spade a spade and accused the US of committing war crimes in Iraq.

The report lays the charge in relation to two areas: the "willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment" of prisoners, and the detention of family members and destruction of the homes of suspected insurgents. And it is quite mild, saying merely that "the above-described acts might be designated as war crimes by a competent tribunal".

No shit, Sherlock.

No doubt the American bloggers will be screaming at this, but the report overall seems quite fair. It emphasises the good intentions of Coalition forces, and acknowledges that the US is taking steps to prosecute those involved. It is more aimed at ensuring that such crimes never happen again, "addressing the legacy of brutal authoritarian rule", and establishing a proper human rights framework for Iraq, than with specifically calling the US to account. And there's plenty of caveats like this:

At the same time, it has to be recognized that the Iraqi people have been relieved of the massive, systematic and institutionalized violations of human rights that took place under the preceding regime, and that they now have the prospect of arranging for their own democratic governance under the rule of law and in the spirit of international human rights norms.

So, really, I don't think the US has anything to complain about.

Those who are interested can read the full report here:

Report of the High Commissioner : The Present Situation of Human Rights in Iraq [Advance unedited version]

Guess I need to make another job-ad

First, the Director of Central Intelligence.

Then, his Deputy Director of Operations.

Who's next? And do their resignations have anything to do with this?

Shouldn't I be doing something else?

As preparation for another assignment, I'm considering the ways in which Labour has retreated from the 80's and 90's "reforms" since being elected. Not economicly, but with regard to the organisation and management of the public service.

A few of the examples I can think of:

• (Re)-amalgamation: in the 80's and 90's we were very keen on single-purpose organisations, and on separating policy advice from service delivery. And so we split everything up. Labour has reversed this - recombining WINZ and the old social policy ministry into the Ministry of Social Development, reuniting Ministry of Health and the Health Funding Authority, and combining several related ministries into the Ministry of Economic Development.
• Bringing SOEs back under control: The SOE model was supposed to keep state-operated businesses at arm's-length from the government to prevent political interference. But this may have gone too far, and resulted in both a loss of capability and in SOE's acting contrary to the purpose for which they're constituted. An example of the first is the electricity industry - corporatisation has allowed long-term planning for New Zealand's energy needs to fall through the cracks, meaning that our electricity market does not guarantee security of supply or even of delivery - hence the Electricity Commission. An example of the latter is the TVNZ Charter, designed to turn TVNZ back into a state broadcaster rather than a bunch of corporate whores.
• Capacity building: It became apparent in the late 90's that the emphasis on "outputs" and "key result areas" was leading to management by checklist. This resulted in a long-term loss of capability in the public service - stuff that wasn't on the checklist simply didn't get done, and staff and units that weren't immediately and obviously useful were dumped. It also led to a "silo mentality" among managers - they looked only at their narrow function (as defined by their checklists), and anything else wasn't their job. This led to the debacle of the 1999 election, when the Department of the Courts refused to make its staff available to assist, despite it being one of their responsibilities in the past.

  Labour has made a lot of noise about "rebuilding the public service", and has thrown money at "capacity building": funding some things simply so they exist. They've also encouraged a "whole of government approach" (a fancy word for what Sesame Street called "co-operation") to ensure that messes like the 1999 election never happen again.

• Restoring the public service ethos: Once upon a time, public servants were actually public servants: anonymous politically neutral professionals who were there to serve the public rather than themselves. The "reforms" undermined that traditional public service ethic and replaced it with corporate values. Selfishness, short-term thinking and corporate excess became common. And so we got Christine Rankin, golden handshakes, and excessive "team building" exercises at exclusive hideaways.

  Labour has tried to stamp this out and restore proper public service values. They ditched Rankin, convened a "State Sector Standards board" to examine the question, directed departments and Crown Entities to end excessive management payouts, and had the State Services Commissioner lay down the law. And it seems to be working. OTOH, this sort of thing takes a generation to rebuild, whereas it takes only a few quick years to destroy.

If anybody has any other good examples, I'd love to hear them.

Risky

The Greens have decided not to stand any electorate candidates next election.

It's a risky strategy, but one that makes clear the stakes. If you want a solid Green voice in Parliament, you'll have to give them your party vote.

There's also the question of whether electorate candidates are a worthwhile expenditure of resources for a small party anyway. The Greens have only ever won one electorate seat - Coromandel - and they lost it soon afterwards (and to National, at that). Fighting locally costs money for little obvious return, and may split votes from allied candidates (though MMP complicates this). And OTOH, contesting a few well-chosen electorates may be worthwhile, and could raise the party's profile.

It's an icky problem, one that ACT has been wrestling with as well, and I guess we won't know whether the gambit pays off until election night.

The more interesting news is that the Greens may finally be accepting that they've lost on GE, and are willing to cut a deal with Labour in the future. Maybe the threat of Don Brash sharpened their minds a bit...

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