Hans Blix has come in for a lot of criticism and caricature but he’s revealed himself as one of the cleverest political operators on the world scene today. His critical report on the Iraqi declaration got him exactly what he wanted. The US Administration passed up any chance of an immediate declaration of war based on the December 8 trigger and effectively made Blix’s interim report, due on Australia Day 26 January, the new trigger. On the other hand, the references to omissions and inconsistencies have put maximum pressure on the Iraqis to comply with all his demands.

All of this is good. If the Iraqis are hiding WMDs, the pressure Blix is now putting on will make it hard for them to conceal the fact. Even without an actual discovery, another negative report from Blix would certainly pave the way for a US invasion.

On the other hand, the Administration has given far more ground than seems to have been realised by most commentators. If Blix’s report is along the lines of ‘Iraqi compliance has been generally satisfactory, but more time and more inspections are needed’, it will be very hard to get UNSC support, or even domestic support in the US, for war. This in turn gives Blix a lot of leverage in pressing the US to hand over its evidence against Saddam (if in fact it has any useful evidence).

To summarise, Blix, not Bush, is now the person who will have the biggest say in deciding whether or not there is to be a war. When those inside the Beltway wake up to this, expect a dramatic change in the tone of discussion.

Here’s a history of SPAM and the Internet from the makers of the real thing.

Keith Windschuttle has made a lot of play of errors and wrong interpretations by his opponents and the title of his book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History makes it clear that any such errors and misinterpretations can arise only from ‘fabrication’ that is, academic fraud. He clearly has found some serious errors in Lyndall Ryan’s work, and has managed to discover one misattributed quotation by Henry Reynolds. His other line of criticism is semantic, attacking the use of words like ‘genocide’ and ‘guerilla warfare’, derived from European history, to describe what happened in Australia.

In only a few days, I’ve heard at least as many errors and misinterpretations from Windschuttle and his supporters as he’s managed to discover in years of painstaking work. First, there’s this statement reported by Miranda Devine

It told how Australia’s academic historians have “failed their public responsibility to tell the truth”, said Claudio Veliz, Boston University emeritus professor of history, who launched the book. The truth, he said, is that: “This is the first major nation in the history of the world to have secured full independence and sovereignty without killing anyone.”

This isn’t true even as regards Europeans. Veliz has apparently never heard of the Eureka Stockade and the Castle Hill rebellion, and obviously Windschuttle didn’t enlighten him. More importantly, even on Windschuttle’s own account of Tasmania, substantial numbers of Aborigines were killed in clashes with settlers and soldiers, so this claim must have some sort of postmodernist interpretation in which ‘killed’ doesn’t mean ‘killed’ but something else like ‘killed unlawfully’. Veliz’s claim that ‘no-one was killed’ is far more egregiously wrong that Lyndall Ryan’s suggestion that the Tasmanian Aborigines were victims of genocide – after all, nearly all of them died in a very short period. (Another possibility is that Veliz is talking about Federation – but if so, there’s no possible sense in which progressive historians have failed in their responsibility to tell the truth. In fact, as Donald Horne observed, it’s the conservatives like Howard who prefer the blood-soaked Anzac myth to the boring story of a peaceful referendum. In any case, this has nothing to do with Reynolds and Ryan).

Next, there’s Windschuttle’s statement quoted by Robert Manne, that the Tasmanians became extinct because ‘they prostituted their women’. Leaving aside the nasty racism of this, Manne correctly points out that prostitution is a concept that makes sense only in a money economy. Its application to a tribal society is considerably less justifiable than Reynolds’ suggestion that such societies could practise ‘guerilla warfare’. And there’s the implication that sexual relations between whites and Aborigines were invariably voluntary. For Windschuttle, rape didn’t happen if there weren’t any police reports.

Then there’s his performance on Australia Talks Back, which you can listen to here. Among the contradictions and errors:

Windschuttle initially suggests that the fabrication of Aboriginal history is the work of radicals in the last thirty years. But by the end of the program he’s claiming that fabrication started in the 1830s and has been going on ever since.

Windschuttle claims that the British were uniquely sensitive colonists, as witness the fact that Indian tribes fought for them against the French. He didn’t mention the French and Indian War, the American component of the Seven Years War. Although some Indian tribes fought for the British, at least as many supported the French.

A caller who had done extensive research on Fiji and New Zealand in the 19th century asked him why, if Australian treatment of Aborigines was so good, Europeans in Fiji and NZ saw it as a model of what not to do. Windschuttle gave a non-answer to the question, either because he misunderstood it or because he had no answer. Since for Windschuttle, there is no such thing as innocent error, I’m counting this as a fabrication.

That’s five errors I’ve noted in my spare time in the course of a single week. I’m sure there must be more. People who live in glass houses …

Update I mentioned this previously, but I’ll note again that David Morgan has lots of good stuff on this topic.

I’ve read most of Windschuttle’s books, though not The Fabrication of Aboriginal History as well as a number of articles he’s written recently. I wanted to begin with my reaction to The Killing of History. Responding to this book, Brad DeLong observed

As I read the book, I found myself changing sides.

and my reaction was much the same. It was obvious that Windschuttle had moved to the right politically since he wrote Unemployment in the 1970s, but that didn’t bother me too much.

My problem was that, in methodological terms, Windschuttle threw out the modern baby with the postmodern bathwater. Not content with attacking the likes of Foucault and Derrida he denounced Thomas Kuhn and even Karl Popper (the most prescriptive writer on scientific methodology of modern times) as mushy relativists. His implied viewpoint, based on the work of David Stove, seems to be one in which historical truth can be directly apprehended from documentary evidence – a claim which I would have thought was discredited in the Middle Ages when the famous “Donation of Constantine” was found to be a fake. Of course, even Windschuttle admits that some documents are untrustworthy (for example, the writings of his opponents), but apparently right-thinking people such as himself are gifted with a special insight that enables him to dispense with the fallibilism of ‘irrationalists” like Popper, and to go straight to the truth.

An obvious corollary, which Windschuttle has expounded repeatedly, is that, if it isn’t documented it didn’t happen. His big objection to Henry Reynolds is that Reynolds took figures on the numbers of whites killed by Aborigines, added some limited evidence on relative casualty rates and estimated that ten times as many Aborigines were killed by whites. This kind of estimate would not raise any eyebrows among economists (in the absence of better evidence) but is taboo for Windschuttle. I find this about as sensible as the scientists who object to climate models on the basis that the only valid path to truth is through experimental testing.

The Guardian reports that (New Labour oriented) think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research has found that the Private Finance Initiative (the model for Australian Public-Private Partnerships) is ” failing schools and hospitals”. The IPPR found better results with respect to roads and prisons. PPPs need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, but as long as they are promoted on the spurious basis that they can finance projects that governments could otherwise not afford, they will mostly be bad deals. I’ve written on this at length here (big PDF file)

It’s now clear to all that the US Administration has no real evidence on Iraqi weapons -there might be enough hints to help the inspectors, but even that’s not clear. Evidently, the strategy has been to apply maximum pressure and hope something turns up. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the Administration is pinning its hopes on a defector, having finally abandoned the idea of ‘compulsory out of country interrogation’ or, as Hans Blix put it, ‘abduction’. Others are not so sure:

At the crux of the differences between the administration and the inspectors, however, are questions about the value of such interviews. Rumsfeld and others have said that Iraqi defectors provided the basic leads proving that Hussein had withheld prohibited weapons during earlier rounds of inspections. But the inspectors maintain that the productive leads came from their investigations on the ground, for which interviews with Iraqi scientists were among several tools.

“They think a lot of scientists are just waiting to get out and tell their stories,” said one former inspector about the administration.

The U.S. intelligence community is leery about taking large numbers of Iraqis out of the country, saying that such a process will not necessarily produce the information the administration is seeking, and that it may undermine the existing clandestine relationships it has developed in Iraq.

Something may well turn up. But there’s no reason to suppose that this will happen at a time convenient for the wintertime war the Administration still seems to be planning. And, as I’ve previously observed, no evidence will almost certainly mean no British participation.

According to those well-known lefties at the Bureau of Meteorology, El Nino’s return in 2002 helped raise global temperatures to the second-highest on record , with Australia experiencing its hottest year on record and the Earth scorched with widespread drought. No doubt Bizarre Science and its imitators will shortly be producing lengthy demonstrations that the thermometers and rain gauges have been tampered with.

Before making a substantive post on Keith Windschuttle, I’ll declare an interest. Windschuttle’s press, MacLeay Press published a book by William Coleman and Alf Hagger (2001), entitled Exasperating Calculators: The Rage over Economic Rationalism and the Campaign against Australian Economists. I was criticized in the book (though not as sharply as others) and responded in kind in my review., which also covered a book by Wolfgang Kasper A short snippet:

lthough the authors claim to be responding to a ‘campaign against Australian economists’, their book contains more personal attacks on Australian economists, living and dead, of all schools and persuasions, than any other volume I have read. Those denounced include H.C. Coombs (‘elderly’ and ‘nostalgic’), Russel Mathews (‘frenzied’), Geoffrey Brennan (an ‘appeaser’), Stephen King and Peter Lloyd (‘indefensible’), Clive Hamilton (‘florid irrationalism’), Ted Wheelwright (‘insignificant’) and even Wolfgang Kasper, among many others. (The present reviewer gets off relatively lightly, as a ‘distinguished economic theorist’, who is prone to ‘foolishness’ in matters of policy).

My reaction to Windschuttle’s work is no doubt coloured by this book, which shares many of the faults he displays. It’s obviously polemical, but claims to be unbiased. The authors pick up trivial errors in the writings of those they want to attack, but (inevitably) their book is riddled with similar errors itself. They complain that opponents of economic rationalism haven’t defined the term, but offer no definition of their own.

In addition, although I didn’t want to waste the Fin’s review space on a personal gripe, I’ll use the freedom of blogging to suggest that the authors pinched the idea for their title from me. It’s a quote from W.K. Hancock’s Australia about the traditional Australian hostility to economists. In my book, Great Expectations: Microeconomic Reform in Australia, I quoted Hancock’s observation that ‘The Australians have always disliked scientific economics and (still more) scientific economists’ – I’m pretty sure I was the first to mention Hancock in the context of the microeconomic reform debate. Hancock’s reference to exasperating calculators is in the chapter following the one I quoted.

More generally, the historical discussion of economic rationalism in Exasperating Calculators draws heavily on my work and also on the work of Michael Schneider, without attribution (certainly in my case, and I think also in Schneider’s). It doesn’t rise to the level of plagiarism, a sin of which Windschuttle has been accused, but Coleman and Hagger are at least guilty of biting the hand that feeds them.

This NYT piece on the Bush response to the Iraqi declaration takes a long time to get the point, but finally says that Bush will not claim that the well-publicised omissions are sufficient to justify an invasion

Mr. Bush, some aides expect, will take a cautious approach, denouncing Iraq but stopping short of any pre-emptive action. Most likely, some officials say, is that President Bush will declare that what Washington sees as Iraq’s failure to account for missing chemical and biological weapons, and Baghdad’s declaration that all its nuclear weapons research has stopped, are the latest in a series of steps that violate Security Council Resolution 1441.

“I don’t expect the President will say that this this alone is casus belli” — a cause for war — said one senior Administration official. “But it builds the case.

Of course, the NYT has its best sources in the peace camp within the Administration, and people like Rumsfeld are clearly keen to declare war now, but the crucial point made in the report is that the British government is unwilling to back the claim that the declaration is a “material breach” sufficient to justify war. This accords with my reading of the British press. As I’ve consistently argued, Britain has an effective veto, not only because its military contribution is significant but also because the US public won’t support a war without international support and British participation is a minimal requirement for this.

An interesting sidelight is that the recent ‘Cheriegate’ mini-scandal over Cherie Blair’s dealings with Australian conman Peter Foster have been perfectly timed to weaken Tony Blair’s capacity to dragoon the Labour cabinet into supporting a war, assuming that this is what he wants. But the crucial factor is the weakness of the US case and the increasingly strong evidence that the ‘dossier’ Blair used as evidence against Iraq was at best erroneous in key respects and at worst fabricated. In these circumstances, it’s doubtful that Britain will be inclined to support any action until the UN weapons inspectors have made their report.

Obviously, all this is speculation. But I’ve had a pretty good track record on this so far. By contrast, the warbloggers have repeatedly overestimated the likelihood of war, and underestimated the need for international support. In September, for example, Steven Den Beste predicted

Support for the war in the US will rise; concern about foreign support for it will fall; American unilateralism will reemerge; Congress will grant formal approval in October; and actual hostilities will begin no later than the end of December.

We’re right on track.

I pick SDB because he’s among the most sensible of the warbloggers. As I noted a while ago, the majority have now descended into self-parody, or else moved on to other things.

Taking a break from corporate corruption and the war of the rich against the poor, Arianna Huffington focuses on America’s apostrophe catastrophe, one which is at least as bad in Australia, where any plural word can come with a free apostrophe. She defends spending time on this trivial issue saying

sometimes a small thing like this can have much bigger ramifications.

Think of it as the literary equivalent of the broken-windows theory of crime fighting, which holds that by fighting small quality-of-life crimes like graffiti and vandalism, police send a persuasive message that antisocial behavior, of any scale, will not be tolerated. In this case, putting an end to the chronic misplacement of apostrophes could eventually lead to a better-educated populace, a greater sense of harmony and order, more fuel-efficient cars, a slimmer, trimmer you, cleaner air, an end to the heartbreak of psoriasis, the cancellation of “The Bachelor,” and, who knows, maybe even world peace.

At this point, if Arianna were a blogger, she would surely invoke George Orwell. Mercifully, she doesn’t.