There are all sorts of problems with the process that has made Arnold Schwarzenegger governor of California. The numbers needed for a recall seem too small, the mechanics of US elections are chaotic, and the first-past-the-post (plurality) system induces lots of strategic voting.

But the idea of recall is a good one, directly opposed to the notion that governments are entitled to a set term of office, the longer the better, that dominates Australian discussion of issues such as four-year terms. The more democratic checks on government, the better.

As regards the outcome, I can’t say I endorse it, but it’s easy to make the case that, considering the feasible outcomes from the viewpoint of the average Californian, Schwarzenegger looked like the best of a bad bunch. Whatever merits Davis might have had (and they were far from obvious) and whatever the role of adverse circumstances (clearly dominant) his administration had failed, and, in a democratic system, the usual response to failure is to let someone else have a go.

Following the recent British Labour Party conference, Chris Sheil suggests that Tony Blair will be gone by Christmas. In these narrow personal terms, I’mnot sure. Most commentary suggests that his position was somewhat strengthened. More importantly, Blairism is gone already. Back in 2001, I argued that, in substantive terms, the Third Way was already dead. After the recent conference this fact is right out in the open. Its most noteworthy feature was not the debate over Iraq, but the fact that Gordon Brown felt free to give a speech in which he mentioned Labour and its traditions 57 times and failed to use the phrase New Labour even once.

Read More »

I’m opposed to the death penalty, on the grounds that it does more harm than good in the circumstances of a modern society, but I don’t feel any particular repugnance at the execution of someone who has had a fair trial and is obviously guilty of murder. This, however, seems like something out of the Middle Ages.

Update Some more gruesome details have just emerged about the chemical execution process.

I haven’t got around to blogging about the parallel Plame/Kelly/Wilkie scandals, but I didn’t have a well-thought out reason for not doing so either. Nathan Newman supplies the gap (see also here). To restate Nathan’s key points more generically

• The main purpose of secrecy laws is to protect governments against their own citizens, so breaking these laws isn’t such a big deal
• Scandals are a distraction from the real issues

I wrote an essay on the spy myth a couple of years ago, concluding as follows

The spy myth clearly served the interests of intelligence agencies, which prospered during the 20th century more than any set of spies before them. The real beneficiaries, however, were the counterintelligence agencies or, to dispense with euphemisms, the secret police, of both Western and Communist countries. The powers granted to them for their struggle against armies of spies were used primarily against domestic dissidents. Terms such as ‘agent of influence’ were used to stigmatise anyone whose activities, however open and above-board, could be represented as helpful to the other side.

The supposed role of the secret police, to keep secrets from opposing governments, was, as we have seen, futile. Secret police, and the associated panoply of security laws, Official Secrets Acts and so forth, were much more successful in protecting their governments’ secrets from potentially embarrassing public scrutiny in their own countries.

As spies and the associated fears have faded in their public mind, their place has been taken by terrorists. In many ways, this is a reversion to the 19th century, when the bomb-throwing anarchist was a focus of popular fears and the subject of novels by such writers as Chesterton and Conrad.

As the attacks of September 11 showed us, the threat posed by terrorists is real. Nevertheless, even if terrorists were to mount attacks ten times as deadly in the future, they would still present the citizens of the Western World with less danger than we accept from our fellow-citizens every time we step into our cars.

If the century of the spy has taught us anything, it is that we need to assess the dangers posed by terrorists coolly and calmly rather than giving way to panic.

According to today’s Oz editorial,

Perhaps journalists at the ABC and Fairfax newspapers are trapped in a parallel universe where they receive and then report information that seems distorted from what the rest of us hear. This is the most charitable explanation of the reporting of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s speech to the General Assembly during the week. According to one report, Mr Annan “attacked American foreign policy, warning it could stoke terrorism and global chaos”.

Perhaps it’s the same parallel universe as that inhabited by the Voice of America whose story on the same speech was headlined “Annan Condemns Unilateral Military Action”.

Not long after the fall of Baghdad, I wrote a piece for the Fin pointing out that the

The total budget of the USAID, the main US agency for development and humanitarian assistance is $8.7 billion for the coming year. That is, the money already spent on the Iraq war could have doubled USAID’s budget for the next five years.

It seems certain, however, that the war will herald a sustained increase in military expenditure of at least $US100 billion per year. A more reasonable comparison, therefore, is the ambitious proposal of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, led by Harvard Economist Jeffrey Sachs. The Commission aimed to achieve, for all a poor countries, a two-thirds reduction of 1990 child mortality levels, a three-fourths reduction of 1990 maternal mortality ratios and an end to the rising prevalence of major diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

As the Commission pointed out, in addition to the humanitarian benefits of saving as many as 8 million lives per year, reductions in mortality are directly correlated with a reduced frequency of military coups and state collapse. These provide the breeding ground for terrorism and dictatorship and ultimately lead, in many cases, lead to US military intervention. The estimated cost for the Commission’s seemingly-utopian program over the next decade is estimated at between $US 50 billion and $US 100 billion per year.

Now, via Tim Dunlop, there’s a piece fromÊSachs himself saying

The cruelest twist, though, is that the all of the talk about US and UK compassion is accompanied by indifference where compassion is truly needed. Nine months ago, Bush spoke movingly about the tragedy of millions of people with AIDS turned away from African hospitals, because they were too poor to afford the drugs. During those nine months another two million or so Africans died, and the United States accomplished absolutely nothing to change the situation. The president’s much vaunted $15 billion five-year program for AIDS is on paper only.

This year Bush asked for only $200 million for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, a sum equal to 1.5 days of spending on the US occupying forces in Iraq. The US annual contributions to fight malaria are less than the costs of one day’s occupation, and as a result, 3 million Africans will die needlessly from that preventable and treatable disease.

But who is talking about $87 billion for the 30 million Africans dying from the effects of HIV/AIDS, or the children dying of malaria, or the 15 million AIDS orphans, or the dispossessed of Liberia and Sierra Leone, or the impoverished children of America without medical insurance?

As Atrios notes in the comments thread, Sachs has certainly shown a side of his character no one would have suspected when he was prescribing shock therapy for Russia.

The Israeli Cabinet has decided to exile Yassir Arafat, who, they say, “is an absolute obstacle to the whole process of peace and compromise”. It’s hard to disagree with this. But if that’s the criterion, why isn’t Sharon going into exile as well?

My Fin column today, the two-year anniversary of the S11 atrocity, looks at Bush’s request for $87 billion more for Iraq (it also includes a pittance for Afghanistan). Like most commentators, I conclude that while the request marks a welcome return to reality after months of dodging the issue, the money is little more than a downpayment on the costs that will be incurred. In fact, after deducting military expenditure, what’s left will barely be enough to pay running costs for the Occupation government. A short excerpt …

The 2003 Budget released by the Coalition Provision Authority in July called for the expenditure of $ 6 billion in the second half of 2003 alone.
Then there is the Oil-for-Food program which is due to expire on 21 November. Under this program, Iraq was allowed to export oil to the value of about $10 billion per year, which was used initially to buy food, medicine and from 1998, a wide range of essential imports. … Maintaining the imports funded under the Oil-For-Food program and the current expenditure levels of the 2003 Budget will require about $20 billion in 2004, less perhaps $5 billion in net proceeds from oil exports. This would swallow all the money allocated in the Bush request, leaving nothing for large-scale reconstruction, let alone the now-forgotten Afghans.

If Bush had followed through the Afghanistan war with a serious peacekeeping and reconstruction effort, that country could be well on the way to a relatively prosperous democracy by now, going a long way to discredit its previous Taliban rulers and their Al Qaeda accomplices. Instead, the Taliban are on the rise again, and no doubt Al Qaeda is not far behind them.

Humans being what they are, admissions of error are rare events. My own concession a while back that I had been overly pessimistic about the military phase of the Iraq war was sufficiently unusual to earn a para in the Bulletin from Tim Blair.

So it’s headline news that, after a long debate, Catallaxy blogger Jack Strocchi has come to the conclusion that he overestimated the benefits of the war and underestimated the costs, saying “The US invasion and occupation of Iraq can now be considered a failure”. His lengthy, closely argued and densely hyperlinked post on the subject is vintage Strocchi and may well be the best he’s ever done.

One or two swallows don’t make a summer. But it would be nice if the kind of debate that prevails, at least in this corner of Ozplogistan (continuous interaction, with civilised norms of debate and easily searchable records of who said what), prompted a greater willingness to admit error.

This piece by Daniel Benjamin in Slate attacks the idea, being popularised by Bush Administration figures like Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld that the occupying forces in Germany after World War II faced resistance from ‘Werewolves’, that is diehard remnants of the SS and Hitler youth similar to those found in Iraq today. The story seems to have been started by this National Review Online piece by Mackubin Owens

This story rang a bell with me, and, digging back I found this NRO piece by John O’Sullivan from early April which seems to have been the first mention of Werewolves. Interestingly, though, O’Sullivan, writing before Baghdad fell, was using this precedent to predict that no resistance would emerge.

Not a single “Werewolf” emerged from his lair. And the allies, who had arrived as conquerors not liberators, soon found themselves handing out food parcels to a grateful German population. That will happen in Iraq too. When? That no one can predict with certainty. But happen it will � and not long after the battle of Baghdad is joined.

So O’Sullivan’s account of the facts matches Benjamin’s and is exactly the opposite of his NRO colleague. I don’t know who’s right, though the fact that O’Sullivan’s version came first and that I had never heard anything of postwar German resistance before it became a Republican talking point suggests that O’Sullivan is correct.

I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘meme’ metaphor, but this example may force me to reconsider. Obviously, the Werewolves image has a good deal of reproductive power, and the virus changes its coat to survive in changing environments.