The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy)
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
Recently Britain set up an enquiry to examine the reasons that they became involved in George Bush's invasion of Iraq. And this week come calls in America to look at what the CIA has been up to in torturing people. It is time to follow those countries in looking at how we became involved in the "war on terror" and how it was conducted. In fact I would take the examination back to the "First Gulf War" and the subsequent sanctions. And you could, easily, argue that the examination should extend back to our involvement in the Vietnam War. Why do we keep following America, blindly, into wars which even at the time, let alone with the advantage of hindsight, seemed like bad ideas?
Look I'm not naive enough to believe that anything will really come out of the British and US enquiries. The British one is being held in secret, so there's a clue that not much will be revealed (never hold an enquiry if you don't know the answer, but if forced into one, hold it in secret). The US one will probably come to nothing because of the understanding that US presidents have not to investigate their predecessors so that they won't in turn be investigated for the horrors that lie hidden behind every US administration, Republican or Democrat - sort of a "inquire not into others as you would not wish others to inquire into you" approach.
And the recent media coverage of the supposed withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, reported straight from the US press release, cheering Iraqis and all, is both an answer as to why we get into these messes, and a reason for expecting nothing to come from an inquiry. You'd think after being hood-winked by weapons of mass destruction, and rescued female soldiers, and US troops pulling down statues, and purple fingers bringing in democracy, and all the other publicity stunts that have created a perception of the recent history of Iraq as accurate as a recent history of Brigadoon would be, that the media would be a bit more cautious when American publicity officers appeared carrying large bags of wool, but not a bit of it. The most cursory knowledge of American politics would tell you that the troops were not withdrawing but moving to the dozens of large permanent American army bases (managed from the largest embassy on the world) there to keep (along with tens of thousands of "contractors") control over Iraq long into the future.
But even asking the questions of Howard and Downer and Reith might alert the public to the fact that there are questions to be asked. Is it really possible that our diplomatic and security and defence personnel didn't know, as the British did in 2002, that "Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy [to invade Iraq]"? Did they not know that there were no WMD; that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; that Hussein and bin Laden were sworn enemies; that there were major divisions between Sunni, Shia and Kurd in Iraq? If they didn't know those things, why not? And if they did, why didn't Australia, like France, say "no thanks" when the call came in from the president? Was John Howard promised something? Was he asking for something? Was there a deal about wheat, about oil? Or was he just under the spell, as Tony Blair seems to have been, of the swaggering cowboy president who called him a "man of steel"?
I can't be the only one who would like some answers. And I can't be the only one who thinks that if similar questions had been asked about the Vietnam War, or the First Gulf War, we might not have finished up in Iraq yet again, helping to kill a million or more Iraqis, displace over 2 million refugees, wreck many towns, exacerbate divisions, damage women's interests, cause ethnic cleansing, destroy infrastructure and the economy and, not least, help to improve the position of both Al Quaeda and Iran.
"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)
"nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." (Keats)