Year: 2007

Mercenaries

John Quiggin16 Comments

Mercenary soldiers have a deservedly bad name in history, both for their conduct and for the fact that they have not generally lived up to the expectations of those who hired them. But, under the more appealing name “private military contractors”, they have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years.

This piece in Salon by PW Singer concludes

If we judge by what has happened in Iraq, when it comes to counterinsurgency and the use of private military contractors, the U.S. has locked its national security into a vicious cycle. It can’t win with them, but can’t go to war without them.

Note: I omitted the link, but have included it now

Bad news for Howard

John Quiggin20 Comments

Most people are still treating the opinion polls, showing a big lead for Labor, with a grain of salt and sometimes more. They may be right – views can change a lot in an election campaign. But this poll undertaken by the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney (PDF over the fold) suggests that Howard will have a fair bit of trouble winding back Labor’s lead. It doesn’t ask anything about party preferences, but it does ask about issues that seem likely to drive quite a lot of votes, including attitudes to Iraq, climate change and George Bush. It seems reasonably to bet that someone who strongly opposes the war in Iraq, strongly supports action on climate change and strongly dislikes George Bush is going to put Labor ahead of the government, and vice versa. People who have neutral qualified views on these issues are likely to decide on other grounds. So, we can use the proportion giving “strongly agree/disagree” answers to get an idea of the core votes for the parties. So here are some results

Australias involvement in Iraq*; Strongly oppose 41, strongly support 10
Climate Change; More serious than Islamic fundamentalism 40, Less serious 20
Overall opinion of Bush: Very unfavourable 39, Very favourable 4

On all these questions, there are around 40 per cent of respondents with strong support for the position most strongly opposed to that of the government. Presumably, the composition of this group varies a bit from question to question, but still it seems fair to say that Labor is going into the election with a base of 40 per cent, while the government’s core support is 5-10 per cent.

* Asking after a question about Al Qaeda reduced this to 34
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Changes

John Quiggin9 Comments

In hopes of improving the site’s woeful performance, I’ve made a few changes, including upgrading to WordPress 2.3. I also changed back to the red theme I had a while back. Most significantly, I’ve removed login requirements. I’m hoping that I’ve been inaccessible to spammers long enough to have reduced the flow to a level Akismet can handle. Please advise if problems with loading the page are better, worse or (most likely, I guess) unchanged.

Update 2/10/07 9pm After some ups and downs it looks as if things are working better. Please comment and advise either way

A tangled web

John Quiggin4 Comments

This story of a DFAT employee sacked for the “unethical” action of responding to an email from a Labor party staff member, and reinstated yesterday by the IRC seemed to be just another example of the politicisation and rule by fear that characterises the public service under the current government*. But digging into the story a bit further, my wife found an amazing tangled web, in which the government’s star witness was entangled in drug dealing, money laundering and blackmail. This naturally qualified him to be part of the team that successfully oversaw the actions of AWB in Baghdad, and, in 2002, to have his security classification restored

The original reason that the DFAT employee, Trent Smith, was targeted was that he was under suspicion for leaking minutes of meeting in early 2003, in which Alexander Downer stated what we all now know to be true, that, despite its protestations the Australian government was committed to war with Iraq**.

* Of course, this process started before the current government

** Subject of course, to the need to keep Saddam sweet as long as possible so he would keep buying our wheat.

The party of Jefferson Davis

John Quiggin19 Comments

Having decided more or less unanimously that war, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without trial are good (provided, of course, we talking about actions of the US), the Right may finally have opened up a topic where they can find some disagreement. Was slavery (in the US, of course) all that bad? Michael Medved at TownHall says No, and gets plenty of support from TownHall readers and other rightwing bloggers (here, here, here, here, here and here. But there’s at lest one dissenter, and some qualifications here.

Of course, leftwingers have been looking for the great split, in which real conservatives repudiate the rightwing radicalism of the Republican party, for longer than I can recall, and it’s never really happened. Every now and then someone like Andrew Sullivan or Bruce Bartlett peels off, and the rest of the Right circles the wagons a little closer. My guess is that the final abandonment of the anti-slavery tradition on which the Republican Party was founded cannot be far off, and that the party of Lincoln will become, once and for all, the party of Jefferson Davis (in some places, this has already happened).

Why Tuesday ?

John Quiggin7 Comments

Among many questions that you could ask about the US electoral systems, one of the more minor but harder to answer is Why Tuesday. More precisely, if you want to maximise turnout, why not hold the election on Saturday as in Australia, or even keep the polls open all weekend? I asked this question a couple of years ago , and there was no obvious answer. Now there’s an effort to raise the issue and force candidates to take a stand.

As with many other features of the US system, there is a historical explanation that has long since ceased to be relevant, but the bigger question is why such things persist. In particular, why don’t

It’s fair to note that the UK situation is even worse. Elections are traditionally held on Thursday, even though the Prime Minister is free to select a more sensible day of the week.