Iran and war.

Earlier I wrote:

A thoughtful piece in the New York Times has set out in detail how the US intervention has given Iraq as a gift to Iran, with Iran now consolidating its road to the Mediterranean via Syria. How good or bad that may be for the wider world is another matter, the point first is that intervention in Iraq, at one time the single greatest error of strategic judgment in Australia’s history, shuffles forward to assume the same status for the US, putting Vietnam in the shade, the latter now a problem that has kinda solved itself in a way the Middle East can’t.

But now today the Washington Post reports that Trump, with resistance from most of his security advisors, wants conflict with Iran. There is doubtless a psychological problem for Trump in that the president is obliged every 90 days to report to congress on whether Iran is complying with the 2016 nuclear deal. 

Apart from its substantial control of Iraq, a country of almost 40 million people, Iran itself has a population of 80 million (one Germany) and territory equal to one Germany plus one France plus two x UK. And, um, it has porous borders with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.... oh and also with Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey. 

Who can count the numbers of wars in this wide expanse, children? Who can imagine the current and potential number of non-state violent actors. 

I can list the two interventions in which the US has been successful since the Second World War:

• Grenada, population 91,000
• Panama, population small too and just a US-installed president to abduct.

Those links will provide detail of the phenomenal order of battle of US forces for such small targets. Rather than divide the population of Grenada into the population (and territory) of Iran, consider that this whole US order of battle absolutely hasn't been able to win in Iraq or Afghanistan. 

Oh, I've not mentioned North Korea. Population one Australia, adjoining South Korea, population 2 x Australia, South Korea's GDP = Australia's GDP.

The old Chinese image for the problem of the US strategic posture in the 1970s still fits: "ten fleas under ten thumbs." The difference between the 1970s and 2017 is that now many more nations and non-national actors see the emperor's lack of clothes. Trump and Kim Jong-il both have to act frenzied to sustain their domestic support.

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In these troubled times, ructions – or loss of grip on common sense – in the ruling Australian conservative government have led to the keys to national security being handed to Dr Goebbels's dog. 

Alison Broinowski put it more elegantly at John Menadue's blog. And more alarmingly. 

Mexico, Barbara Tuchman and Iraq

The Conversation today had a disappointingly shallow account of Mexican democracy by a founder of the Sydney Democracy Institute.

I offered a long comment, in the course of which I mentioned the late Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. Which seems less read than it should be. As also people have probably stopped reading her book on the origins of WW1 (with the lack of other than military options) which purportedly Kennedy asked his National Security Council members to read, before they were confronted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the need to reject military advice. Which is something the current US National Security Advisor McMaster thought inappropriate in his Dereliction of Duty.

Anyway, the article at The Conversation is here and this is a little bit of it. Iraq is entitled to a place in the headline above from my last line.

From a mural at the Secretariat of Public Education, Mexico City
my photo 2015
"True Civilisation with be the harmony of men with the earth
and men between themselves."
I think this is attributable to Emiliano Zapata.

Ordinary people have a sense of history far more than average Australians, history of, as you suggest, interwoven nations of ancient peoples. But not for nothing did Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly include the way the Aztecs yielded to the Conquistadors as among the great and strange moments when nations have acted against their national interests, as when the popes lost half the church to beautify Rome, King George lost North America over a petty issue of democracy … and Australia seems to have lost half its brain wandering into Iraq.

Here's a page that seems popular at my 2015 Mexico blog.

what's really happening in South Korea and dealings with the North

I am now placing here something of mine published a couple of weeks ago at John Menadue's blog. Just to keep my record in one place. I had called my piece "Moon over Trump... and over Whitlam,' but John Menadue, perhaps because such a big part of the Whitlam years, gave it a new title... or perhaps I was just being too poetic. But I find this title a bit grating.

DENNIS ARGALL. Ignore Trump’s tweets about North Korea ; the diplomacy is being handled by adults

Posted on 6 July 2017 by John Menadue

Since his election in May South Korea’s President Mon Jae-in has developed a productive relationship with US President Trump, particularly on the difficult issue of both countries’ dealings with North Korea. Regrettably Australian and other mainstream media is reporting Trump’s rants, intended for his domestic support base, rather than the positive outcomes from those summit meetings.

While someone from Lowy gravely (and absurdly) suggested on the ABC News on 4 July that the DPRK (North Korea) now had an ICBM that could be launched at Darwin, around the same time, the South Korean newsagency Yonhap reported that South Korean President Moon Jae-in had told David Cameron in Seoul that he hoped North Korea would not go past a ‘point of no return’ and Yonhap further reported;

“The policy to seek the resumption of dialogue while maintaining maximum pressure remains unchanged,” a Cheong Wa Dae [the president’s office] official told reporters, while asking not to be identified.

Regrettably Australian and other mainstream media is still doing what Trump wants, reporting Trump rants, intended for his domestic support base, rather than what is agreed out of summit meetings.

South Korean officials, media and business leaders who had been in Washington with Moon on 29-30 June were apprehensive about delay in release of the agreed joint statement. They knew that Trump White House staff deliberately delayed release of such statements (for days in the case of Saudi Arabia) and they did not want the outcome of the visit to be as  ranted by Trump at a joint press conference.

After seven hours, the joint statement emerged — intact and it is important to read carefully.

Down in the middle of the statement is this critical paragraph:

President Trump supported the ROK’s leading role in fostering an environment for peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula.

and

President Trump expressed support for President Moon’s aspiration to restart inter-Korean dialogue on issues, including humanitarian affairs.

This too shows strength in the ROK’s getting back sovereignty and command of issues on the peninsula:

The two leaders decided to continue the Alliance’s work to expeditiously enable the conditions-based transfer of wartime operational control [OPCON] of ROK forces.

“Continue” covers the to and fro on this transfer issues, postponed by the previous administration. The statement is a recognition of ROK sovereignty.

There is also a large amount of conventional expression of support for the alliance. Conventional except in that there were apprehensions Moon might be a radical and Trump might be a bit… Trump. All of the statements out of Washington indicate good rapport between the two and real trust of Moon by Trump. Trump accepted an invitation to visit Seoul this year.

Moon’s comment to Cameron on 4 July needs to be seen in that context: he does not want to be trampled, to lose what he has gained, by trampling of elephants before and behind. Also, in my view, the DPRK’s missile launch is part of a hurried approach to ‘negotiation from strength’. But who will assess it rationally?

Moon’s visit to Washington was preceded by a carefully-orchestrated academic and media conference at which some forward looking views on inter-Korean relations were presented by one of his advisors, who could then say “oh, I’m just an academic”. Moon took with him to Washington a great contingent of business leaders, to whom – people who would have never wanted Moon elected – he said in Washington that he was sorry that this was their first meeting since he took office, but hey, we’re here together now. He announced Korean investments in the US and other warming goodies. The Joint Statement does not say, though Trump said, that the Free Trade Agreement would be re-negotiated.

The presidential election results were declared on 9 May just before 9am. Moon Jae-in was inaugurated at 4pm. On 10 May he abolished the ‘official’ history texts his predecessor had demanded for schools, and he reversed the ban on commemoration of the Gwangju Massacre in May 1980 and the ban on singing the march of that uprising. On 18 May he want to Gwangju for the anniversary, taking with him heads of political parties, to hold hands, weep and sing (all but one of them sang). In the ROK current history this compares with Tiananmen. The ROK has turned a corner, China has not.

Instead of meeting with business leaders he went to see workers at the international airport on 11 May and said he wanted to see the 10,000 of them who were casual employees made permanent during his term of office. The airport corporation promptly said this would happen before the end of 2017.

Instead of meeting promptly with business leaders Moon began an assembly of office holders to take on the chaebols, the handful of conglomerates (Hyundai, Samsung, etc) that dominate the Korean economy. Instead of falling in with habits, he appointed a woman as foreign minister, who had not been through the foreign ministry system but had a history in charge of human rights at the UN and as head of the transition team of the new UN Secretary General. He gave charge of veterans affairs to a woman, the first female South Korean helicopter pilot, and gave the job ministerial status.

Instead of meeting with business leaders he visited classrooms and talked with children. At the end of a month he shocked the nation where no one takes a day off from work, declaring he would take a public service day off … and went with his wife to their house in the country for a day.

And so it has gone. He has a popularity rating over 80%.

In May at the request of a Korean political science journal I wrote a paper in part drawing comparatively on the history of the Whitlam Government and problems it faced as a reform government. Moon has in two months shown the world, with smiles, how to reform, make friends and secure control of difficult issues. But who is watching? All eyes are on the shrieking roller-coaster. 

Copy of my paper if you write here.  

(These are good sources: Yonhap News Agency and the more radical Hankyoreh.)

The chaotic state of play here and abroad, with minor decent exceptions.

As submitted to John Menadue's blog yesterday (image added here):

Both domestic and international affairs are in a state of nastiness and chaos. Ironically Trump’s presence is creating a new love-in between the alliance chiefs in the US and Australia and popular support for them. All in the face of the disaster that is US policy in many places.

With tiny candles of hope on hills: at the UN with the nuclear weapons ban treaty and in South Korea, where people who really understand threat are defiantly being decent.

Two very recent issues here in Australia:

·      The assorted musings on whether WA Greens candidate Mr Steele-John will take up the seat in the Senate vacated by Scott Ludlam, with Michelle Grattan, sympathetic to his personal dilemma as a young person with disabilities,  noting Katharine Murphy’s essay observation that “the environment parliamentarians work in is a pressure cooker, the tone of national affairs is reflexively hostile, trolling and takedowns set the tone of the day, and protagonists are being rewarded for their efficiency at treachery rather than the substance of their contributions”. Which seems an adequate description also of the seething state of folly in international relations;

·      The arrival of Australia as not before, as a frequent news item in Washington for example just now as Julie Bishop comes to the fore, seen as an icon of decency among women in response to the trumpian slur delivered to the Macrons and in her commitment to the US alliance in troubled times… a burgeoning, fear-manipulated cling-to for Australian minds. Who would have imagined that trumpery would strengthen the alliance. We have been infested of course, by the stay-the-course heavies of the US establishment led by VP Pence, Senator McCain, intelligence chief Jim Clapper and the neo-kissingerist pawn-playing real-world-avoidant Jake Sullivan who might have held the keys of too many things under Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile in the US, former presidents George W Bush and W Clinton at one event and Vice President Pence at another event have spoken of the importance of humility in leadership.

How cute. There is nothing such, no humility, never has been, in US world leadership, not now, not with them in office. US leadership is, of course, not working, though as the saying might go ‘you can tell that to Julie Bishop’, the Pencian grey nemesis of the Australian right.

A thoughtful piece inthe New York Times has set out in detail how the US intervention has given Iraq as a gift to Iran, with Iran now consolidating its road to the Mediterranean via Syria. How good or bad that may be for the wider world is another matter, the point first is that intervention in Iraq, at one time the single greatest error of strategic judgment in Australia’s history, shuffles forward to assume the same status for the US, putting Vietnam in the shade, the latter now a problem that has kinda solved itself in a way the Middle East can’t.

Perhaps the most poisonous news of the week is of the UAE’s role in hacking government web sites in Qatar, broadcasting lies and precipitating the current divide among Gulf emirates … and between the President and Secretary of State of the US. A matter brought on by Trump’s folie de grandeur in Saudi Arabia, now made the more sickening by his boasting to a Christian conference in the US that he’d made very clear to them he wasn’t going to Saudi, betcha bottom brain cell, unless they wrote the cheque, bought the weapons package. Can none of these people see beyond their own mirrors?

There is scant evidence of either humility or vision in international affairs. There has been a majorescalation in the civilian body count in US operations in the Middle East sinceTrump (and Mattis) took over.

From a story in The Atlantic in praise of Moon Jae-in

But far away, beneath the vision of the Big Strategists, the new Moon Jae-in administration in South Korea, with its weird sense of decent purpose in a crazy world, has proposed military talks at Panmunjom to discuss with the North “stopping all hostile activities that raise military tension.” This doubtless will get wider public attention when the DPRK issues a likely initial raspberry.

The necessary steps for the Korean question are akin to what is needed as regards the new UN treaty banning nuclear weapons. Someone commented on that treaty at the New York Times today:

“Unrealistic. Unenforceable. Unproductive.
“If they wanted to create a new norm against using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, they would have needed buy-in by the major powers.”

To which I responded:

“Silence does not lead to new norms. Submission and silence in the face of bullying does not stop bullies. Alliance of opponents to bullying is the only way to start. Bullies are not prompt to join such alliances. But such alliances are a beginning. And important.”

on recognition of civil war and genocide in Australia

This is a link to a Menadue blog entry by Henry Reynolds, regarding recent releases of more information about wars between European settlers and indigenous people in Australia.

Reynolds concludes:

With the overthrow of Terra-Nullius everything changed. Once there was such a powerful, authoritative recognition of indigenous property rights and by implication Aboriginal and Islander sovereignty, frontier conflict took on a totally different aspect. It was inescapably about the ownership and control of property on a continental scale. It was also about whose law and whose sovereignty would prevail. The battles may have been more like skirmishes but they were essentially political and they were cumulatively about the ownership and control of one of the world’s great land masses. It was therefore a war of global importance. It was war about Australia fought in Australia. It was arguably the most important war in our history.

There is still a deep conservative resistance to recognising these wars in Australia, though ironically the chauvinistic trudge now adds flavour to noble foreign war remembrance by putting Aboriginal solders up front.

As Paul Daley records at that last link, this is not a new thing:

In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, anthropologist WEH Stanner called it the “great Australian silence”. He was referring to the failure of a number of books to substantively address Australian Indigenous history, including frontier violence:

"It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale."

 The maturity of Australia, our capacity to be taken seriously and act seriously and independently in the world, depends substantially on our capacity to get in touch with our own realities.

Follow the issue of a treaty with indigenous Australia here.

for those who get anxious about refugees and asylum seekers

regarding the R-Complex

I have made reference in various discussions to the concept of the Triune Brain and the R-Complex, the most primitive part of our brain that we share with ants and dinosaurs. That part of the brain which continues to force people to line up behind flags and phoney, spiritual phenomena and unbelievable stories supporting rituals and disciplines, to exclude people, build walls and fight.

Canada, more specifically a commercial entity in Toronto, shows us how much we look like ants... on the glorious 150th birthday of Canada. Here's the BBC movie, the screenshots below are from that.

From the BBC, do watch the whole little movie, only a minute of your time to be reminded how minute we are