Via Salon, I learn that the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page is pushing a range of conspiracy theories implicating Iraq in both World Trade Centre attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. The interesting thing about these theories is not Iraq but the fact they require the continuing complicity of the US government at all levels.

On Oklahoma City, the WSJ relies on a local journalist Jayna Davis and reports

Ms. Davis, for example, has a copy of a bulletin put out by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol immediately after the Murrah bombing. It specifies a blue car occupied by “Middle Eastern male subject or subjects.” According to police radio traffic at the time, also obtained by Ms. Davis, a search was on as well for a brown Chevrolet pickup “occupied by Middle Eastern subjects.” When an officer radioed in asking if “this is good information or do we really not know,” a dispatcher responded “authorization FBI.” Law-enforcement sources tell Ms. Davis that the FBI bulletin was quickly and mysteriously withdrawn. (emphasis added)

Similarly, on the First World Trade centre bombing, the source is a ‘Middle East expert” Laura Myroie, and the WSJ says:

Beyond this, Ms. Mylroie contends that the bombing was “an Iraqi intelligence operation with the Muslim extremists as dupes.” She says that the original lead FBI official on the case, Jim Fox, concluded that “Iraq was behind the World Trade Center bombing.” In late 1993, shortly before his retirement, Mr. Fox was suspended by FBI Director Louis Freeh for speaking to the media about the case; he died in 1997. Ms. Mylroie says that Mr. Fox indicated to her that he did not continue to pursue the Iraq connection because Justice Department officials “did not want state sponsorship addressed” (emphasis added).

Of course, all of this was under the hated Clinton administration (which just happened to be bombing Iraq on a regular basis, but let that pass). The Bushies have been in office for two years, and, if the WSJ is to be believed, seem equally determined to give Saddam a free pass.

The WSJ opinion pages have always been extreme, but, in my opinion this kind of thing, which is, after all, news (claims about fact) rather than opinion, undermines the credibility of the paper as a whole. (To anticipate criticism, I should note that the WSJ does not explicitly endorse these conspiracy theories – it simply reports them and fails to mention the extensive contrary evidence or discuss their inherent improbability).

There’s nothing particularly startling in this interview with Charles Kupchan except perhaps the fact that a journal as sophisticated as Salon sees his views as startling. Kupchan has written a book called The End of the American Era which presents the big issue for the 21st century as competition between America and the EU – a staple topic of this and other blogs.

Yesterday was 30 years since the election of the Whitlam government. Most reporting so far has been positive, but the SMH runs two pieces, both critical Gerard Henderson briefly acknowledges Whitlam’s strengths, but points out a list of generally acknowledged poor performances, (all of which can be traced to an excessively realist view of international politics) on Timor, the Baltic States and Vietnamese refugees.

Criticising a claim that Whitlam ‘defined modern Australia’, Henderson says “The Whitlam Labor government’s impact on the social agenda is obvious. But few would maintain that Whitlamism “defined” contemporary Australia’s economy.” On the contrary, as I argue in my book Great Expectations, the shift to microeconomic reform began with the Whitlam government’s 25 per cent tariff cut and creation of the IAC, now the Productivity Commission. Most of the contradictory trends that define the economic policy debate today emerged under Whitlam.

Meanwhile on the same page, Paddy McGuinness offers a tirade so predictable and trivial it doesn’t deserve a link (you can read it after Henderson). There are no real criticisms of policy, only complaints about the number of political advisors the Whitlam government appointed and their alleged rorts. I haven’t got numbers, but I’ll bet that the number of advisors is much higher today, and certainly rorts haven’t gone away.

Moreover, while some of the steps Whitlam took promoted the trend towards politicisation of the public service, the creation of a separate class of explicitly political advisors helped to slow it down, by providing ministers with a source of advice responsible to them in a personal rather than ministerial form.

Ken Parish, Don Arthur and others blogged on this on the November 11 anniversary. My contribution is here.

note Some Blogger flaw meant this piece wasn’t published when I wrote it this morning, and now Ken Parish has already covered it, so I’m a bit behind the curve here. Ken’s comments thread has lots of interesting stuff.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the first piece of my draft review of Pinker. Here’s another section

In fact, the most interesting parts of Pinker’s book do not relate to human nature at all, but to his restatement of a pessimistic view of the human condition. In the process of this restatement, Pinker abandons his evolutionary psychology model without realising that he is doing so.
Take, for instance, his observation, following an approving citation of Hobbes, that ‘violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a “pathology”, except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms’. (p 329) This is backed up by the work of political scientists who claim that war has generally benefited the aggressors.
Pinker may well be right, but his argument is totally inconsistent with the claim that violence is the product of genetic predispositions acquired by our distant ancestors, that is, of primitive, irrational urges. If the Hobbesian view is right, then violence will arise as a rational response to this environment in the absence of any predisposition to violence or even in the presence of an instinctive aversion to violence.
In particular, the emphasis of evolutionary psychologists on the specifically male predisposition to violence seems to imply that an increase in the political power of women should result in the adoption of more pacific policies. As has been observed on many occasions, the political careers of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher give little support to this view.

I’ve seen this kind of confusion before. Rational egoist models like homo economicus, ‘selfish gene’ models like evolutionary psychology, and ‘realist’ models of international relations (in which nation-states are viewed as unitary actors) use similar styles of argument and therefore appeal to the same sort of person, but they radically inconsistent with each other, because they each posit a single level at which everything can be explained, different in each case.

Originality is probably over-rated, but blogging certainly reveals the commonplace nature of ones thoughts, and the difficulty of making a genuine conceptual scoop. A couple of days ago, Tim Dunlop and I had almost identical posts bagging a relatively obscure Op-ed piece by Liberal MP Petro Georgiou.Mine is here

Today, I was looking over some American blogs,and came, via CalPundit , to this quote from Ken Layne

As I’ve written before, the California GOP is run by bitter losers who can’t seem to understand why the party is doing so well on the national level. While Bush has something for everybody in his administration — blacks, Jews, women, Latinos, moderates, Ashcroft, even an Afghan — the California party is still stuck in the disgusting race baiting and abortion grandstanding of the Pete Wilson years.

In the Fin in July, I observed that

while Bush pitched for the votes of Spanish-speaking immigrants, fellow-Republicans like Pete Wilson, former governor of California, ran hard on border protection and preservation of the status of English as the dominant language. Wilson’s successful campaign in 1994 was based on ads showing grainy video footage of ‘illegals’ crossing the Mexican border, with the voiceover, “They keep coming.” Wilson hoped to ride anti-immigrant sentiment all the way to the White House in 2000, but, thankfully failed.

I don’t think much of Bush in general, and looking at Ken’s blog I probably disagree with him on a lot of things too, but we share the view that Bush is genuinely non-racist, which makes up for a lot.

The Thursday experiment didn’t work, so it’s back to once a week for the moment. This is your chance to post your thoughts on any topic. If you want to continue discussion on one of the older posts (last week or earlier) you’ll probably get more attention here. I’m still keen for suggested improvements to the blog, but anything (civilised) goes!

Update We’re off to a flying start with an extensive discussion of merkins (look it up). I’ve never quite understood what would create a demand for such an item, but the recent upsurge of Brazilian chic must be driving some sort of boom.

Google has been a huge aid in research, but I haven’t found a good site with a chronological set of Australian state and federal election results. I’m trying to check my recollection that, in about 1995, we had the opposite situation to that of today with Labor in office nationally but nowhere else. I’m sure about everywhere except NSW and Queensland – I can’t remember whether Fahey outlasted Goss.

So if anyone can answer the specific question or point me to a good site, I’d be grateful.

My view, for what it’s worth, is that the 1995 situation was a fluke, and the current alignment reflects more fundamental developments with public opinion to the left of the major parties on domestic issues, but not on foreign policy.

Update Thanks to Tim Dymond for pointing me to this database. At the beginning of 1995, Labor was in office in the ACT and Queensland, as well as nationally. Labor lost the ACT in February and Queensland in July, but, in the meantime, they won NSW in March. Labor’s winning streak started in June 1998 – they’ve won every state and territory election since then. Assuming Carr wins again next March, and there are no early elections, the run will extend into 2004. I’ll have a piece on the meaning of all this in Thursday’s Fin.

Further updateThe Psephologist aids my failing memory by reminding me of the Mundingburra fiasco. Goss actually hung on by one seat, but the 16-vote win in Mundingburra was overturned by the Court of Disputed Returns. At the same time, the member for Mundingburra got into some financial trouble and was dumped by Labor, which, not surprisingly, lost the ensuing by-election. The dirty tricks associated with campaign, while par for the course in NQ (one of our local MPs later went to prison for bogus electoral enrolments), gave rise to a lengthy inquiry. Since I voted in Mundingburra both times, I have no excuse for forgetting all this.

I’ve been appointed to the academic advisory committee for the Prime Minister’s Home Ownership Task Force. Most of the work will be done by the executive eommittee, which has some high-powered Australian and international economists including Stephen King, Joshua Gans and Andrew Caplin as well as Christopher Joye, who’s been the leading promoter of the idea of equity partnerships as a method of home financing.
But the real international stars, including Robert Shiller and Richard Zeckhauser are on the advisory committee. I don’t suppose we’ll be meeting regularly for coffee, but it’s great honor to be in the same group as these guys.
Readers may be interested to know how I managed this, given that governments generally give jobs like this to their friends and that I am well-known to be ‘no friend of the government’. As with a lot of things it happened pretty much by chance. Commentators of all stripes were piling on to denounce the equity partnerships idea and I wrote a piece in the Finarguing that it had some promise and deserved closer investigation. Next thing you know I got my invitation.

With weapons inspectors now in Iraq and apparently well on the job, it seems like a good time to reassess things, although all the evidence is preliminary. First, as I understand the news, the inspectors have already made unannounced visits to some of the sites featured in the Blair satellite dossier and found nothing. Perhaps the Iraqis have demolished the relevant buildings and removed the equipment, but I imagine this would leave some traces. A more plausible view is, as Thomas Friedman says, that anything of significance is much more carefully hidden, ‘inside mosques or under cemeteries’. This degree of concealment would rule out, I would think, an active nuclear weapons program. In any case, it does not appear as if the Blair dossier provided the level of evidence supporting war that was claimed at the time.

The next big date is 8 December when the Iraqis have to make their declaration, listing all their relevant sites, data etc. They’ve already denied having any weapons program, but this is consequence-free ‘cheap talk’. I doubt that they’ll turn up with a blank sheet of paper, but they may well try to hide something, and if they do, they’ll probably get caught. So war remains a likely outcome, but not a certain one.

Given the way the UN has coalesced behind the inspections and the vigour with which they are proceeding, I think the likelihood of the favored warblogger scenario, a unilateral US invasion, has dwindled nearly to zero. By contrast, even after Iraq accepted the UN resolution,Steven Den Beste predicted ‘We’re still right on track for hostilities to begin in December, unless there’s a coup in Iraq before then.’ The point about a coup, reflected Den Beste’s belief, now refuted by events, that if Saddam accepted unfettered inspections, he would be overthrown. (Of course, in a regime like Iraq’s such a coup could happen without any warning to outsiders and would be a highly desirable event. ) But the warbloggers, arguing on the basis of wishful thinking, have been consistently wrong ever since Bush’s address to the UN, and I think will be proved wrong yet again.

One of the sillier pieces of conventional wisdom about Victoria is that Melbourne now has a ‘buzz’ thanks to Jeff Kennett, and that Bracks is the beneficiary of this and of Kennett’s policies in general. The same ‘buzz’ was there at the time of the last election and the same commentators were surprised at the outcome and the lack of any apparent nostalgia for Kennett on the part of Victorian electors. In fact, the ‘buzz’ was the reason Kennett lost.

The basic reason is that ‘Melbourne’ in this story means the Melbourne CBD and inner suburbs where most most of these commentators live and work. Kennett’s spending priorities involved cutting basic services for the suburbs and the bush while dispensing bread and circuses in the CBD. His spending cuts were unsustainable and his privatisation program did nothing for the net worth of the public sector, so his only big contribution to the budget surplus was gambling taxes.

It’s true that the Victorian economy has recovered since the 1990s. But the depth of the Victorian recession had very little to do with Cain and Kirner, and a lot to do with Victoria’s reliance on manufacturing. Similarly the recovery has more to do with the cyclical nature of macroeconomic shocks than with any brilliance on Kennett’s part.
Update Shaun Carney agrees, saying

The Liberals refused to accept the ’99 result, and fought that campaign again

and

To people in the suburbs and outlying areas, the biggest project in their lives is to make sure their children are properly educated and that their families will be looked after if they get sick.

Getting schools and hospitals right – these are the major projects of contemporary Victorian politics.

And when it comes to the “inheritance” being spent, that’s what voters chose in 1999 and again on Saturday. They want cautious, steady financial management but they also want services. In good economic times they want their own money back, not politicians’ boasts about massive surpluses or never-never promises of a social dividend.