While we wait for the next critical date on Iraq (Powell’s peek at the evidence on Saddam’s weapons), I find myself without much new to say, except for the obvious point that the odds on war have shortened considerably, going against my predictions on the subject. So I’m going to keep linking to people with whose arguments I broadly sympathise. Gene Healy says:

I understand people who argue for war with Iraq because they want to (1) liberate Iraqis; and/or (2) help Israel; and/or (3) spread democracy. I think those are illegitimate reasons in a constitutional republic whose governing document speaks of the “common defence” of the United States, and not the general good of the world at large. More important, I think they’re damned frivolous reasons for killing American soldiers, innocent Iraqi civilians, and, for that matter, Iraqi conscripts. But I understand the arguments: if these Wilsonian goals are worthwhile to you, invading Iraq is something you might want to do.
But I’m having an increasingly hard time understanding why any rational person would argue that invading Iraq is something we need to do in order to protect the lives, liberty, and property of Americans (you know, the legitimate goals of American foreign policy)

Risking getting things badly wrong again, I’ll classify Gene as an antiwar libertarian similar to Jim Henley who makes the excellent point (which I’ve previously touched on) that pro-war parallels with pre-1939 appeasement can be matched with an anti-war comparison of current US policy with the 1914 ultimatum to Serbia.

I part company with Gene in that I am prepared to take a Wilsonian view that the world community should be willing to act to overthrow dictators. My problem is that breaking with the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty is full of perils and should not be undertaken lightly. The idea that any country should have the right to overthrow another country’s government if it judges it to be dictatorial, threatening etc is a recipe for disaster. The idea that the US alone should have this right is less dangerous in the short run, but will come to the same thing in the end. That’s why I (and I suspect many others) are so concerned about getting a UNSC resolution clearer than 1441.

Thanks to Mark Chambers for alerting me to this piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education, headlined “Taking On ‘Rational Man'”. It’s about the various challenges to the dominance of ‘neoclassical’ economics (the quotes are there because in this context, a very broad definition of ‘neoclassical’, encompassing most Keynesians and many behavioral economists, is being used).

I reviewed the book by Keen mentioned here and will try to post a link soon.

Everyone loves to argue about classifications. In his new (but perhaps temporary) blog, Ken Parish divides Ozploggers (political bloggers) into three roughly equal groups: “Left-ish, Right-ish, and Centre-ish”. There’s not too much doubt about the first two groups. Most of the “left-ish” ploggers, including me, write from the kind of position that used to be called ‘Left Labor’. Most of the “right-ish” ones, of whom Tim Blair is the most prominent, are part of the US-centred “warblogger” circle. Since I have little to say this group and vice versa, only a few of them are listed on my blogroll.

Inevitably, the centre group is the most problematic. Most of those in those group are either moderate and sensible right-of-centre ploggers like Gareth Parker and Scott Wickstein, or what I’ve called ‘cultural and satirical’ bloggers like Bright Cold Day. The fact that the centre of Ozplogistani politics is still a bit to the right of Oz politics in general is not surprising – a year or so ago the bias was much more marked.

But the classification has raised some issues for “Centre-ish” Jason Soon who, it has been suggested, is moving steadily to the left. Both comments by Ron Mead, and the rather grumpy departure of Mark Harrison from Catallaxy have raised this point.

In response, Jason has put forward a “Purpose statement” or Short lexicon of beliefs , which can be broadly summarised as strongly libertarian in terms of civil liberties, strongly market-oriented but nevertheless basically social-democratic in economic policy, and cautious in terms of foreign policy.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think Jason has shifted position much in the time I’ve been debating issues with him. Rather, some aspects of his position have become apparent that were previously obscured. First, like a lot of people (including me) who supported the war in Afghanistan and the war on terror more generally, Jason is chary about the rush to war with Saddam Hussein. Second, in debates with me and others, Jason has made it clear that his support for social welfare policies is genuine, rather than being a rhetorical fig-leaf as it is for many advocates of free-market policies.

Will I follow Jason’s example? Not for the moment. Apart from the occasional bit of rhetorical abuse, I don’t seem to have much of a problem with people misperceiving my political standpoint, even when my opinions on particular issues aren’t quite what they might expect. So I’ll think I’ll blog my views one post at a time for now.

After working pretty reliably for several months, Haloscan seems to have lost most of today’s comments. With luck, they’ll reappear soon. For the moment, though, if people have comments they think are worth recording for posterity, save them in a text or word processor as well as posting them here.

This research, reported in the SMH confirms what I’ve said before about the uselessness of short prison sentences

The lead researcher, Dr Eileen Baldry, of the school of social work at the University of NSW, said jailing people for less than six months was counterproductive. Their situation months after release was worse than before they went to jail.

I’ve been meaning to make a general comment about the ‘law and order’ debate. The left has clearly lost the debate as it’s been posed for a long time, and deservedly so. To oversimplify, the standard debate sets a kneejerk ‘lock ’em up’ position (right) against a kneejerk ‘let ’em go’ response (left).

While neither is at all satisfactory, locking ’em up at least achieves incapacitation (that is, those behind bars are not breaking into houses). The shift of the more sensible left to ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ is a step forward, but doesn’t resolve the problem of what a sensible ‘tough on crime’ policy might actually mean (there are also plenty of problems with the various causes of crime such as unemployment, but more on that another time). In my view, it means being willing to use lengthy prison sentences to incapacitate habitual and career criminals, but not giving people schooling in crime with a string of short sentences. This means some very hard thinking about what to do about those who commit crimes but are not yet hardened crims.

I was going to work on a post on Bush’s SOTU speech, but it turns out all I need is a couple of links. My blogtwin says it all for me. In particular,

The biggest thing to come out of Bush’s SOTU speech last night was the promise that Colin Powell would deliver the goods on Iraq, the compelling evidence, in a speech to the United Nations on February 5.

Tim links in his turn to Jeff Cooper who says, in part

The president and others in his administration have repeatedly asked for our trust when it comes to Iraq: they have strong evidence of Hussein’s complicity in terror, they have strong evidence of his possession of weapons of mass destruction and his progress toward nuclear weapons, but that evidence is too sensitive to be released to the public; we have to trust them. But it’s difficult to grant that trust to an administration whose domestic policy positions are so plainly founded on fundamental dishonesty. Quite simply, the Bush administration hasn’t earned our trust.

I don’t share Jeff’s personal dislike of Bush, but I distrust and fear the administration as a whole. As Andrew Sullivan has correctly noted, a lot of the opposition to a war with Iraq is based on this kind of dislike/distrust, which, of course, he does not share. For me, the validity of any particular case for this war, put forward by this administration, is undermined by its transparent eagerness to make a case of some kind for war with Saddam, whether or not it is part of a coherent policy of any kind.

My opinion piece in today’s Fin (subscription required), amplifies some themes that have been discussed earlier in blogs, notably mine and Kim Weatherall’s. Given the push towards effectively infinite copyrights and other forms of monopoly privilege for owners of “Intellectual Property” the traditional arguments for (and against) free trade aren’t particularly relevant in the debate over a Free Trade agreement with the US. The Americans don’t want us to remove trade barriers, they want us to adopt the policies dictated by their lobby groups in areas like IP, GM labelling, privatisation etc.

Short take

If the official negotiating stance of the US government contains some unappealing items, the demands that US lobby groups would like to push in subsequent rounds are even worse. The pharmaceutical industry wants to kill the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. The Recording Industry Association of America would like to ban parallel importing.

These groups have promoted their interests, with much vigour and few scruples, through their Australian hired guns, but have so far had limited success. Under the kind of agreement that is being contemplated at present, the US lobby groups would have as many second chances as they need. Far from promoting free trade, they want to turn Australia into a monopolists’ playground.

Update Jason Soon responds, quoting Henry Ergas on the benefits of regulatory harmonization. I will first observe that my piece opposed ‘ the kind of agreement that is being contemplated at present’ , rather than any agreement. I agree that, done right, a bilateral trade agreement could produce benefits.

But Ergas’ argument raises more concerns for me. The US is currently negotiating a string of these agreements on a bilateral basis. If they include regulatory harmonization, this can only mean that the other party adopts the US model, since otherwise the agreements would be inconsistent. Since I’m distinctly underwhelmed by US models of regulation, corporate governance and so on, this enhances my concerns rather than allaying them.

And I think the experience of NCP suggests the dangers of using an agreement negotiated in secret to ‘jumpstart the micro-reform process’. The bitter hostility to NCP that people like Pauline Hanson tapped into was as much due to the process by which it was presented as a fait accompli as to the actual content of micro-reform.

Blix’s critical report to the UN has certainly strengthened the case for war with Iraq. Unlike those of us commenting from afar, he is, after all, dealing with the Iraqis on a daily basis, and is obviously running into difficulties. At this point, Bush could clinch things if, as some have suggested, his State of the Union address is the occasion for producing the evidence of Iraq’s weapons that he has long claimed to possess.

If this doesn’t happen, Bush will still have a stronger bargaining position with the UNSC than seemed likely a few days ago. Assuming the alternative to war is a redefinition of ‘active co-operation’, it’s clear that this must include everything on Blix’s wishlist – unchaperoned interviews, surveillance flights, and more documentation of ‘missing’ weapons.

The incentive for Bush to take this route is strong. Despite the tough rhetoric of the past few days, a decision to bypass the UNSC poses immense risks of all kinds. If it went even moderately badly, both Blair and Howard would be finished, and Bush himself would suffer grave damage. And as I’ve noted, Blix’s report increases the likelihood that Bush will be able to get the UNSC on board with sufficient patience.

At the bottom of all this is the question, still unresolved as far as I am concerned, of whether the Iraqis actually have a weapons program. If so, I think the evidence of past successful inspections, cited in Blix’s report suggests that, if the inspectors have a sufficiently free hand, they will be found in the end. This in turn means that Saddam will probably defy any UNSC resolution that is sufficiently tightly worded. If not, then, however humiliating the demands may be, he will have no rational alternative but to comply.

In my discussion of the Canberra bushfires, I observed that Paddy McGuinness had made some ‘typically nasty and ill-informed’ comments, before going on to note that the blogworld does this kind of thing much better (or rather, much worse). In the Comments thread Me No No wrote

the real purpose of a column like that is to generate letters to the editor, so reminding SMH carpet strollers of why they pay an exhorbitant amount for columns that don’t really say much.

When tomorrow’s letters page is chockers with outrage, Paddy will feel useful again.

Looking at today’s SMH it becomes clear that the timing of this particular piece was also intended to provoke a flood of outrage from the chattering classes when Paddy’s AO was announced, to which he could respond with devastating wit. Instead, Lleyton Hewitt got the brickbats and the only response to Paddy was a letter from frequent commentator on this blog, Ron Mead, praising the award.

As a result, Paddy’s piece today was a bit sad. No-one even remembered that he was once a republican opponent of all kinds of honours, so he had to remind us of his own hypocrisy before defending himself. And his subtle self-comparison to Orwell, fighting against the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the left, came adrift when the sub-editor gave his piece the title, When no means yes, principle’s the same. This is Orwellian, but not in the good sense.

The person who should really be nailed on all this is John Howard. While he was saying all the right things about his concern for the people of Canberra, McGuinness, with the AO award already in the bag, was giving vent to the government’s real feelings on the subject.

Update Always vigorous in defence of his intellectual heroes, Jason Soon argues that

Paddy’s output of late has not necessarily been of sterling quality but that placed in the context of his past work his AO was well-deserved.

While I’m less of an admirer than Jason, I agree that McGuinness was a serious and credible commentator in the 1970s and 1980s. Unfortunately, looking at the rest of the Oz Day Honours list, I find it implausible that Paddy got his gong, even in part, for pieces like the one Jason mentioned where he argued that “Keating was a better pro-market reformer than Thatcher”.The AO is a reward for the partisan vitriol of the past seven years rather than for his earlier work.

Jason also didn’t like my suggestion that Paddy’s comments on Canberra reflected the government’s real feelings on the subject. Having lived in Canberra for a good part of my life, I think I’m pretty well attuned to these things, and stand by what I said.

My final say on the Windschuttle controversy has been posted on the Evatt Foundation website. It’s here. The final para:

I am always puzzled by the ease with which some people can repudiate their own past views while maintaining a dogmatic conviction of the infallible correctness of their current beliefs. Keith Windschuttle is, regrettably, an extreme instance of this phenomenon.

Before closing on this topic, I’ll mention that Saturday’s Courier-Mail included lengthy extracts from the diary of a senior Queensland police officer detailing numerous massacres and “dispersals” (I’ll add a link if possible). These academic controversies are absorbing, but get tiring in the end. I may post a bit more on the general question of historical truth, but I’ll leave Windschuttle himself (and also John Lott) to history from now on.