Comments on: Downing Street Memos Down Under

By: Matt Austern

Matt Austern — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 00:30:15 +0000

The “just making a lucky guess” claim isn’t very plausible, but, equally, it’s unnecessary to assume that Dauth had any inside knowledge.

By 2002, I think it was obvious to every honest observer that the US government was going to go to war against Iraq and that nothing, not world opinion, not diplomacy, not weapons inspections, was going to stand in the way of Bush’s war. The Australian government saw that there was going to be a US conquest because everyone saw it.

The real shame here is that the US press has to pretend that this is news because five years ago, when the runup to war was in progress, the press pretended to believe the Bush administration’s claim to be trying to avoid war. None of the reporters were fooled; they saw that Bush wanted a war just as clearly as everyone else. But for some reason they decided that they couldn’t print what they knew.

By: Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 20:11:03 +0000

If the economic units that get privatized are big enough and politically powerful enough, privatization results in a sort of vertical feudalism.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 11:14:22 +0000

I know this is an aside but the AWB thing really does back up something I said in the ‘economics is right wing’ thread earlier (for which I was much ridiculed), which is that economists’ attempts to seperate economics from sociology and anthropology (and, for that matter, criminology) and treat their field as though it was completely autonomous really is futile. Economists tend to assume that when a company is ‘privatised’ it has gained its ‘freedom’ and is now free from the ‘dead hand of the state’ etc. etc. etc. Common sense alone would tell you that there was something wrong with this story (why would the state give a firm freedom including, presumably, the freedom to act against the state?) and the AWB story seems to prove it with (at least in this case). To quote again: ‘the legal fiction that the formal privatisation of AWB, with its government-enforced monopoly powers intact, made it a private organisation rather than a government instrumentality has been exposed as a sham. Clearly, the government is just as responsible for the actions of AWB as if they had been those of a government department (of course, with the death of the doctrine ministerial responsibility, that’s not saying much).’

How many other ‘privatisations’ are in fact also shams? (One thinks specifically of the ‘privatisations’ in Russia, but also in the UK, and other countries). Given that this is the case, it is obvious that most of the arguments both ‘for’ and ‘against’ privatisation (almost all of which assume that when a firm is privatised it becomes ‘free’ from the state) are completely irrelevant.

By: War Department

War Department — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 10:09:00 +0000

I think it’s clear from the interview with Jill Courtney that everyone at DFAT had been told to shut up about this, but someone forgot to pass this on to the lower level staff. It is at least a wee bit odd that a staffer involved in passing communications on inside DFAT would remember company names outside of her own area, but the high level staff deeply involved in those areas – the actual recipients – would fail to recall them.

Obviously, given the hundreds of millions of dollars channelled to terrorists and dangerous dictators, it’s time to ditch those funny old quaint geneva conventions and see if anyone remembers a little more after some time on the waterboard.