A Rodent Within The Washington Speakers Bureau  

Crikey reports that the Rodent is now on staff at The Washington Speakers Bureau. I used to have a regular reader at that organisation last year - clearly they weren't deterred by my many criticisms of Mr Howard - though I got the impression they were mostly interested in my running commentary on the proposed Iraq oil law.

The agency represents a who's who of the political, media and military establishment. Other recent high profile Washington Speakers Bureau recruits include Tony Blair, former US Senate leader Trent Lott and Arianna Huffington.

Former world leaders such as Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Jose Maria Aznar and Brian Mulroney are on their books, along with international political figures like Colin Powell, Joschka Fischer, James Baker and Chris Pattern.

Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, Jeb Bush, Norman Schwarzkopf, James Carville, Barbara Walters, Bob Woodward, Donald Trump and the Duchess of York are also on the Bureau's roster.

The Washington Speakers Bureau publicity material describes the former PM as "one of the most thought-provoking world leaders in modern history". John Howard is the "ideal choice to bring high-level international insight to your next event," it says.

Mungo MacCallum has a column up at Crikey - "The Permit System Should Stay" - which notes that the popular permit system that allows Aboriginal communities to keep unwanted intruders (like uranium miners and journalists from The Australian) out is being reinstated by the Rudd government, to the gnashing of fangs from some of Rupert's minions.

So it's back to work, and the Rudd government's honeymoon is already over – at least it is if the Murdoch press has anything to say about it.

Last week Aboriginal Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin announced that the permit system for Northern Territory settlements, marked for abolition under the previous government's intervention, would be retained; and the wrath of the Sun King descended upon her and all her works.

Admittedly, this makes The Australian and its messenger, Nicholas Rothwell, a trifle out of step with the mainstream. The permit system favoured by the present federal government, the Northern Territory government, the Northern Territory police force, most Aboriginal leaders, most independent experts in the field and even the Arts and Media Alliance – the union representing the journalists who have most to lose by being barred from entering the settlements without permission.

And of course most of the communities affected were puzzled and alarmed when the gung-ho commander-in-chief of the invasion, the late and unlamented Mal Brough, announced that the permit system was to go.

But to Rothwell and his various editors, the system was anathema: a symbol of apartheid that provided very real protection for paedophiles and drug pedlars. The Australian has provided no evidence of how the system sheltered such criminals, and the police say it had the opposite effect of enabling communities to exile such offenders when they could not be charged. But it is true that the permit system at least once kept Rothwell from visiting Wadeye at a time of unrest.

Far from being some sinister and unique privilege granted only to Aborigines, as The Australian suggests, the permit system is a simple recognition that land owned by Aborigines has exactly the same legal status as land owned by other Australians. The title has been granted by the courts under the Land Rights Act; it is therefore private property, no more or less so than Rupert Murdoch's own backyard. It is true that it is owned by a trust rather than by an individual, but that is irrelevant; the law allows for all kinds of multiple occupancy, strata title, gated communities etc and has for a very long time.

The permit system reaffirms the validity of the Land Rights Act; and one of the reasons there was so much distress and even outrage when Brough proposed to abolish it was that the proposal was seen as a covert attack on the whole system of land rights, a suspicion confirmed by Brough's insistence that the settlements would be leased back by the Commonwealth for the duration of the intervention. Once the communities could no longer control who came to their land (or the circumstances by which they came, as John Howard might have added) it ceased to be their land in any meaningful sense; they were there only by the grace and favour of the government, which could be withdrawn (as the intervention showed) at any time.

Land rights has been arguably the only substantial achievement on the path to reconciliation. The idea remains absolutely central to Aboriginal culture and to any aspirations towards genuine reconciliation. Rothwell and The Australian have, in recent times, provided serious and thoughtful coverage of indigenous Australia. We can only hope last week's attack was an aberration. If they really must beat up the Rudd government, there are plenty of less sensitive areas in which to pick a fight.

One last story from Crikey, this one from Jeff Sparrow noting that it is the first birthday of the surge in Iraq.

Downgraded from full scale catastrophe, Iraq has become just another foreign crisis, rarely worthy of the front page. In that sense, the US troop surge must be hailed as success. On its own terms, not so much.

The press coverage has focused on military successes (while ignoring the very Vietnam-like strategy of reducing US casualties through increased air strikes)

Yet the surge was advertised as a political intervention as much as a military one. Here's President Bush announcing his plan:

A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.

What were those benchmarks?

The Iraqi government was to take responsibility for security in Iraq's provinces by November 2007. It promised to pass legislation fairly distributing oil revenue. It pledged to spend $10 billion dollars of its own money on infrastructure projects. It was supposed to hold provincial elections, and pass de-Baathification laws to allow Sunnis to re-enter political life.

A year later, none (count them) of those accountability measures has been met.

The deadline for Iraqi control over provincial security has crept steadily back: it's now scheduled for July 2008. The oil laws are stalled, with the Kurds continuing to cut their own deals with foreign oil companies. Not only has the Iraqi government fallen entirely short of its own infrastructure targets, it's provided incapable of spending the billions handed to it by the US. The provincial elections simply failed to happen.

As for de-Baathificaiton, the legislation was opposed by the very ex-Baathists it was supposed to assist. As Newsweek recently commented: "The complicated new law on de-Baathification has been, in the words of a senior Iraqi official, 'a big mess, perhaps worse than if we had done nothing'."

If anything, the past six months have brought heightened sectarianism to Iraq, with the falling levels of violence correlating with the successful ethnic cleansing of Baghdad.

It's not simply that Sunnis and Shiites have been driven into separate areas. As Andrew J. Bacevich explains:

By offering arms and bribes to Sunni insurgents -- an initiative that has been far more important to the temporary reduction in the level of violence than the influx of additional American troops -- U.S. forces have affirmed the fundamental irrelevance of the political apparatus bunkered inside the Green Zone.

Rather than fostering political reconciliation, accommodating Sunni tribal leaders ratifies the ethnic cleansing that resulted from the civil war touched off by the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, a Shiite shrine. That conflict has shredded the fragile connective tissue linking the various elements of Iraqi society; the deals being cut with insurgent factions serve only to ratify that dismal outcome. First Sgt. Richard Meiers of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division got it exactly right: "We're paying them not to blow us up. It looks good right now, but what happens when the money stops?"

In other words, there are short term solutions – and then there's the effect of Balkanisation for decades to come.

Nonetheless, there's one point on which Iraqis remain united. As Kevin Young explains:

Iraqis have consistently stated that the occupation is a destabilizing force in their country, that the situation would improve after a US withdrawal, and that the US has ulterior motives for staying in Iraq. Over the last four years, and in polls from a wide range of sources, Iraqis have been especially unequivocal on one point: that the US military occupation of their country produces more violence than it prevents.

But what would they know? They only live there.