John Quiggin

Looking at the developing disaster of this war, I’ve been trying my best to think of possible exit strategies (not that anyone who matters will listen). Here’s the best I can come up with so far. Suppose that the liberation of Basra turns out the best that can possibly be expected – that is, at least some of the inhabitants join in a rebellion against the regime and succeed with the support of British troops. The chaos in Basra (no water, not enough food, remnants of the Fedayeen) would be sufficient to justify a lengthy pause in the fighting to establish Basra as the core of a liberated Iraq. Given enough time, something might turn up – Saddam might die of his wounds or whatever.

At worst, the establishment of a liberated Southern Iraq, and an expanded Kurdish area in the North could be regarded as settling the unfinished business of 1991. The Coalition could establish a provisional government, give it sufficient arms to deal with any remaining Fedayeen, and provide air support against any counterattack from Saddam. Then it would be time to declare victory and get out. Given sufficient chutzpah, the Coalition could even say that they have forcibly inspected all the WMD sites identified by their intelligence and destroyed a number of WMDs found there (zero, but zero is a number).

Josh Marshall has also been considering possible outcomes, two of which are disaster scenarios of different degrees of severity, and one (making Rummy the scapegoat and going back to Blix) is an exit strategy, though one I can’t see the administration going for.

If anyone has seen or thought of any other ideas that don’t involve either a siege of Baghdad or a new Stalingrad, I’d be keen to hear about it.

Within the first hour of war (when I was at Parliament House in fact), the newsticker included claims that two entire Iraqi divisions were about to surrender. Twelve days later, Associate Press is running a story headed Three Iraqi Soldiers Desert the Army (running frontpage on the LA Times website). I was going to do one of those calculations about how long it would take for the entire Iraqi army to desert at this pace, but you get the drift.

Quite a while ago, I posted on the apparent willingness of the Bracks government to keep a promise to reform the electoral system for the Victorian Legislative Council, even though this will probably mean they will lose control of the Council at the next election (a few years away, but it seems a pretty good bet that Labor will win in the Assembly and therefore continue in government. According to Paul Strangio in the Age, the legislation has now been passed. Dr Strangio is a bit upset that there hasn’t been much jubilation about this (perhaps people have something else on their minds right now) so I’d like to say that I, for one, am jubilant, not only about the substantive reform but at the possibility that political promise-keeping may be coming back into favor.

Via The Agonist, I found this story of a journalist who sued Fox News after being fired because she was unwilling to participate in a false report about growth hormones. Allegedly, Fox won its case at the appellate level on the basis that the First Amendment included the right to lie (and presumably to force employees to lie).
I couldn’t find a confirming source for the story, which is in an Internet publication called the Sierra Times, and includes a mis-spelling of Rupert Murdoch’s name, and I must admit it sounds too good to be true -has anyone else among the Agonist’s legion of readers picked this up?

Almost instant update Me No No supplies a range of links, which led me to the Appeal Court’s judgement, available as a PDF file from this site, basically confirming the Sierra Times story (but not the original heading of my post, which I’ve now qualified). The crucial para is “We agree with WTVT that the FCC’s policy against the intentional falsification of the news – which the FCC has called its “news distortion policy” – does not qualify as the required “law, rule, or regulation” under section 448.102.” To clarify, the lawsuit was brought under a whistleblower protection act, and the judgement is that a reporter exposing lies by a TV station is not protected under the act. Fox does not admit that they were distorting the news, but chose to fight on procedural grounds rather than on the facts, which is pretty standard legal tactics.

It’s time for your comments on any topic. As things have got a little over-excited in some recent comments threads, I want to emphasise my request for civilised discussion and no coarse language

Ten days into the war, the high moral standards proclaimed by the Coalition leaders are rapidly being replaced by the brutal reality that this is going to be a war much like most others, with both sides committing grave crimes, and nobody really winning in the end. It’s already become clear that nothing said by either side can be trusted (I won’t resume the futile debate over which side is lying more). And, as the Pentagon has quietly dropped or relaxed restrictions on targeting civilian areas and civilian infrastructure, we can expect a steadily rising civilian death toll even before large-scale urban fighting begins. Of course, if Saddam had only surrendered peacably, or fought out in the open as the US wanted him to, none of this would have happened – the same is true of every war in history where one side has an overwhelming advantage in conventional terms.

Until now, I haven’t seen anything as disturbing as this Washington Post report which approvingly quotes the use of food aid as a weapon, not in the general sense of ‘winning hearts and minds’, but in the same way Saddam has long used it, with food being given as a reward for co-operation and withheld as a punishment for resistance.

Two trucks laden with food and water pulled up in front of a school this morning on the southern edge of this dusty industrial town where paramilitary fighters loyal to President Saddam Hussein have roamed the streets since shortly after the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq.

There was nothing random about the choice of this neighborhood for the first humanitarian effort by Special Operations forces. A local Shiite Muslim religious leader had been identified by a team of Green Berets as pro-American. …U.S. forces gave the Shiite notable a microphone to let the swelling crowd know that he, and not the soldiers, would determine who got the food. And, he said, more would follow in coming days.

The crowd applauded and a U.S. campaign to win political allies in southern Iraq through selective favors began in earnest….

“We have to give this guy legitimacy and let his people see that he’s the man that can get what his community needs,” said one Special Operations major of today’s operation at Zubair, a crossroads 10 miles southwest of Basra. “We have to find friends who can help us build support. There’s a purpose behind where we unload.”

An interpreter working with the Americans told the crowd over a microphone that they must be orderly or “we won’t come back.” …

The payback for such handouts, according to the major, is more than goodwill. With access to community leaders, the United States can obtain intelligence to target Hussein’s irregulars who are turning the 10-day-old war into a guerrilla campaign.

At a water treatment plant just outside Basra, for instance, workers who had been provided with food pointed out a hidden weapons cache to a Special Operations civil defense team after a second day of aid. (emphasis added)

And this is called a war of liberation.

I’m still leafing through my collection of Borges short stories. A particularly interesting one, in the light of various debates in this corner of Ozplogistan last year (try starting here and reading forward through the archive), is The Don Quixote of Pierre Menard, about a writer who attempts to think himself into the position of Cervantes, and then reproduce Don Quixote, succeeding to the extent of two chapters. Borges, in the person of a literary executor, quotes from Cervantes’ original a conventional apostrophe to History , then the identical passage from Menard’s ‘reproduction’ which, he argues, is utterly different by virtue of being written by a 20th century author.

As much as I throw myself into this intellectual escapism, I have to admit that I’m reading everything I can find about the war. At an intellectual level, I’m still convinced that this is a pointless activity – having tried and failed to stop the war, there’s very little that supporters of peace can do now to mitigate its awful consequences. But this hasn’t stopped me thinking about it most of the time, and so I’ll probably resume posting about it before long.

My piece on oligopolies gave rise to a lively, and often vituperative, comments thread. As is usually the case, the substantive issues got lost in the name-calling (entertaining though the latter was at times). Attempting to extract some coherent issues from the thread, I focused on two:

• whether some industries are naturally monopolistic and
• what, if anything should be the role of competition policy (for historical reasons, this is called ‘antitrust’ in the US).

In this post, I’ll stick to natural monopoly. I think economists have tended to underplay the importance of natural monopoly, particularly in the period of microeconomic reform that began in the 1980s. There are three main factors leading to natural monopoly (or maybe, I like threeway classifications, and have organised a diverse set of factors into three classes).

First, physical economies of scale are important in a lot of different contexts. For a city the size of Brisbane (a million or so people), it makes sense to have just one airport, one major brewery, a handful of major hospitals and so on. For network distribution services (phones, electricity, water supply etc) the same point arises a bit differently. In physical terms, it’s optimal to have only a single distribution network in any given local area. This is pretty obvious, but there were a lot of silly claims in the 1990s based on the fact that since microcomputers had displaced mainframes, it was obvious that technology would in future be small-scale and inherently favorable to competition. The fact that the world’s microcomputer chips were made in a steadily shrinking number of plants costing a billion dollars apiece (and rising) escaped the attention of these gurus.

Second, the economic importance of information is increasing all the time and information is nonrival in consumption – giving information to me doesn’t make it any less available to you. So, the technically efficient procedure is for information to be produced once and shared freely. Again in the 1990s, the slogan ‘information wants to be free’ was repeated a lot. Unlike the idea that new technology is inherently small-scale, this slogan was at least half-right. Once information has been discovered it’s costly and wasteful to keep it secret or restrict its use. But the slogan is also half false. Discovering/producing information in the first place is costly and those who discover/produce it want to be paid in some way.

So far I’ve been talking about information of the “E=MC-squared” type, but another sort of information is equally important or more so in explaining the prevalence of natural monopoly. Human relationships, including long-term economic relationships depend on the beliefs, preferences and intentions of those involved, and these are hard to discover. I can discover my own intentions and beliefs by introspection and I can infer those of other people from observation and experience – the human capacity for self-deceptions means that the latter kind of information is sometimes more reliable than the former.

As a trivial example, when I write a column for the Financial Review, the opinion editor expects that I will check my facts before I submit the column – (I flagged my uncertainty about the authorship of the airlines cartoon I cited recently, but as it turned out I should have asked on my blog first). For some columnists and some papers, this isn’t a problem of course, but for papers that aspire to accuracy, it’s easier to rely on contributors who are known to be reliable than to take on new writers who may require more careful checking. This kind of problem arises in all kinds of employment and contractual relationships.

As Ronald Coase pointed out over 60 years ago, it is the transactions costs associated with this kind of information that explain why so much economic activity is arranged through firms and other organisations (governments, households, clubs, and now Internet-based virtual communities) rather than through markets. If it were not for transactions costs, even physical economies of scale would not produce monopoly, since the same asset could be shared by an arbitrarily large number of firms.

I’m going to leave the question of competition policy for another post, but I’ll observe that one factual implication of the arguments above is that competition policy makes a difference. If it were not for restrictions on mergers and for the tight regulation to which monopolies are often subject, a lot of industries that are currently oligopolies (dominated by a few firms) would be monopolies.

As I said a few days ago, I’ve decided to stop posting on the war for the moment – I can’t see anything good coming out of it, or propose anything that is likely to produce a better outcome. But, as usual, I agree with nearly everything Tim Dunlop has written.

Although it took place eons ago in blogtime, I haven’t got around to commenting on last weekend’s New South Wales state election until now. The result is a striking one, giving another landslide victory to a government that’s looked pretty tired at times in the last few years. It seems to me that Labor has become the natural party of government at the State level in Australia, simply because people want more public expenditure and services and don’t think the Liberals will deliver them. The fact that the Federal government raises most of the revenue while the states do most of the spending (and that most voters aren’t really aware of this) means that this factor isn’t as significant at the Federal level. Even so, without Tampa and other foreign policy crises, the Howard government would almost certainly have lost in 2001.

In quite a few recent state elections, the combined Liberal-National vote has been near, and sometimes below, 33 per cent. This is a critical value in a preferential system (for overseas readers, this is the same as an instant runoff). As long as a party can hold its vote above 33 per cent, it is guaranteed of finishing first or second in the primary vote, and cannot be displaced by a third party. Below 33 per cent, and the possibility of a wholesale loss of seats to a new party becomes real. This happened with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Queensland in 1998, but the fortunate implosion of Hanson’s party gave the Coalition another chance.

As an aside, the other crucial figure in relation to three party contests is 25 per cent. If you have less than 25 per cent of the ‘three-party preferred vote’ you can’t win. Either you finish third and are eliminated, or you finish second, but the first-placed party already has more than 50 per cent.

My AFR piece today subscription required is about oligopolies (industries with a few dominant firms) and why they can be such a pain to deal with. It was prompted by a particularly painful experience with one of the major banks, and begins

Although the two airlines policy was the subject of many analytical studies, it was perhaps best summed up by a cartoon that ran in the 1980s (as I recall it was by Pryor in the Canberra Times). An employee of one of the duopolists, dealing with an irate customer, is on the phone to his opposite number at the ‘competing’ airline, saying: ‘Bloke here says he’s going to take his business elsewhere – you take care of him will you, Macca?’.
In the language of academic political theory, the irate customer was trying to exercise both ‘voice’ and ‘exit’ and failing in both endeavours.

It’s a real longshot, but if any readers remember the cartoon and can point me to the original, I’d be very grateful.

Update Loads of fun in the comments section, especially for those with an ANU connection.

In sad times, there are always those who provide us with innocent diversion. Here’s the full text of a letter from one of our elected representatives to the Financial Review (subscription required

French are inherently treacherous

I agree with Gregory Viscusi (“US attacks on France ignore the facts”, AFR, March 25), that it is probably disingenuous to say France is against the war on Iraq purely on commercial grounds. After all, the French are inherently treacherous.

They betrayed Joan of Arc one of their greatest, who liberated France to the stake, and obviously they have not changed since 1431.

Julian McGauran ,

Senator, National Party, Victoria.

I’ve decided not to post anything more about the war for the moment. I can see nothing but disaster ahead – huge Iraqi casualties, both military and civilian, then a long and bitter occupation, with the likelihood of substantial Coalition losses over time in subsequent ‘counter-terrorist’ actions.

Unfortunately, I also can’t see any way of averting this outcome. A withdrawal, leading to victory for Saddam, would be an even greater disaster than what can only be a Pyrrhic victory for the Coalition. If there is some sort of possible compromise, I have no idea what it is.

Life, and especially war, is unpredictable. Perhaps things will take a sudden turn for the better. I hope for a quick end to war and bloodshed, even though I see no reason to expect it.

My observation that “One of the most striking features of the war so far has been the fact that, on a wide range of issues, Iraqi official statements have been a more reliable source of information than those of the US and allied governments” drew some derision from my friendly nemesis, Jason Soon, though he did not give any counterarguments. Following the same line, Catallaxy contributors Heath Gibson and Jack Strocchi reproduced as fact British reports of an uprising in Basra, despite denials not only from Iraqi officials but from the much more credible Al-Jazeera. The same reports predicted an imminent British assault in support of the rising.

A day later, the British defence minister, Geoff Hoon is quoted as saying the situation is ‘unclear’, and there has been no move to assist the putative rising with ground troops, as opposed to shelling. Either the Shias have been left in the lurch yet again or, as seems more likely, the original reports were bogus, just like:

The crowds cheering the liberation of Safwan
The Scud attacks on Kuwait
Saddam’s death
The effortless victory at Umm Qasr
The effortless victory at Nasariyah
The chemical weapons factory at Al Najaf
The surrender of entire Iraqi divisions
The 8000 prisoners taken in the first two days

This would be bad enough if these falsehoods were the product of deliberate propaganda aimed at shoring up public support. The worst of it is that the Coalition leaders believe them and act on them, producing yet more disasters.

And as I write this comes the news of a Coalition hit on a crowded market in Baghdad – shades of Sarajevo.

Globalisation is one of those ‘vogue’ words that suddenly become ubiquitous. They are used in all sorts of contexts by all sorts of people. They seem to promise understanding of the ills and hopes of the day, and yet no one seems to know precisely what they mean. In the 1960s, ‘alienation’ was such a word, while ‘systems’ and ‘structural’ had their vogue in the 1970s.

Undoubtedly the word of the 1990s is ‘globalisation’. It has been used to explain everything from the fashion for baseball caps worn backwards to the decline of the welfare state. It has been represented both as the culmination of human history and as a regression to the 19th century. But in all its forms, globalisation is a crippling and disabling concept. It implies that in future, every aspect of our economic and social lives will be determined by impersonal global forces over which we as a community have no control.

Although no precise definition of such an elastic term is possible, globalisation refers in essence to the growth in international flows of goods, services and especially capital that has taken place since the 1970s.

Two different stories are commonly told about globalisation. The first story is basically about technology. Globalisation is commonly claimed to be the inevitable result of technological changes and, in particular, the striking innovations in computing and telecommunications that have taken place since the 1970s. These developments, it is claimed, have made possible a massive growth in international financial flows, and the development of highly sophisticated international financial markets which form the basis of a new global economy. This story is nonsense. The world economy was far more globalised in 1900 than 1950 and instantaneous links between financial markets were established with the laying of the trans-Atlantic telegraph around 1870.

Whereas the technological story of globalisation ignores the global economy of the 19th century, the neoliberal story presents the 19th century as an economic golden age to which we are about to return. In fact, for neoliberal true believers, the entire 20th century may be seen as a mistake, a statist interruption of the natural development of the free market economy.

According to the neoliberal story, the 19th century economy based on free movement of goods, capital and labour produced strong economic growth and was generally beneficial. However, some groups, such as workers in industries threatened by competition from imports, generated a backlash against globalisation which led to the widespread adoption of tariffs and restrictions on migration. The end of globalisation was completed by the suspension of free capital movements during and after World War I. According to this story, we are only now returning to the true path of a free-market economy.

In this story, globalisation per se is less important than the imperative of a return to free markets. Globalisation goes hand in hand with domestic free-market reform.

Opposition to ‘globalisation’ does not necessarily imply support for economic or cultural nationalism. The term ‘internationalism’ is far older than ‘globalisation’ and connotes a democratic and progressive position of support for international cooperation. The same position is sometimes summarised in the pejorative phrase ‘transational progressivism” (adherents are more briefly referred to as “Tranzis”).

Along with James Morrow and Gareth Parker, I’ve been interviewed for a possible 7:30 Report segment on blogs and the war, presumably to be aired when the straight war news has slowed down a bit. Mick O’Donnell, the ABC journalist also mentioned that he might interview Gianna, and some US bloggers.

Actually, I don’t think that the war is a topic where blogs have a comparative advantage. The traditional media are the primary source and are devoting huge analytical resources to it. Blogs are better for longer-running stories where careful analysis and public domain research are the strong point. An exception is the Baghdad blog of Salam Pax. Assuming (as I have no reason to doubt) that this is a genuine insider’s account, it is better than anything that visiting journalists can do. If it is a work of fiction, it’s a compelling one.

The story of a chemical weapons plant found at Al Najaf received wide coverage, the subsequent Pentagon statement that claims were ‘premature’ received a bit less, and this item seems to have run only in the Financial Times so far.

Department of Defense officials said on Monday that no evidence of chemical weapons production had been found at a facility close to the southern Iraqi town of Najaf occupied by US forces on Sunday

. It’s still possible that Saddam has some chemical weapons stashed around Baghdad for a last stand. But if so, it’s clear that, even in these extreme circumstances, deterrence is still working. The claim that Saddam’s weapons presented an imminent danger to the US or to Iraq’s neighbours has already been refuted by events.

In military terms, the Coalition setbacks of the past few days don’t appear very significant. But this is essentially a political war and politically things are going very badly. There is little sign that the Coalition forces are regarded as liberators, even in Southern Iraq where it was expected that they would be welcomed with open arms by the mainly Shia population. While the anti-war camp can say ‘I told you so’, this is scant comfort. We will all have to live with the consequences of a war which is rapidly becoming one of conquest rather than liberation.

The only thing that could make the situation much worse is large-scale civilian casualties. These are most likely to arise, as they have in the past, not from the direct impact of bombing but from starvation and disease. Such an outcome is already threatened in Basra where the water supply to much of the city has been cut off following the destruction of the power plant at the main water supply station. So far, there has been no serious response from the Coalition leaders to this potential disaster.

If there is to be any chance of a successful peace, the Coalition must take all necessary measures to ensure that water supply to Basra is restored, even if this means lifting the siege of the city.

One of the most striking features of the war so far has been the fact that, on a wide range of issues, Iraqi official statements have been a more reliable source of information than those of the US and allied governments. Within the first day or so of the invasion, US sources on the spot in Southern Iraq were claiming the capture of towns like Nasiriya and Umm Qasr, the surrender of entire Iraqi divisions and predicting the imminent fall of Basra. Meanwhile, Iraqi officials in Baghdad were denying all this and claiming that their forces were fighting on. Even for someone as skeptical of US official pronouncements as me, it did not seem difficult to tell who had the facts on their side and who was merely blustering.

But as it has turned out, the Iraqis were right on all these counts, while the US was wrong. The Iraqi claims may have been just lucky guesses but it seems more likely that their communications have not been disrupted to the extent that the US has claimed.

On the US side, there’s no reason to suppose that the claims were deliberate lies or military misinformation. The most plausible explanation is less sinister but in many ways more disturbing. Throughout the journey to war, the US Administration has displayed wishful thinking on a massive scale, leading to uncritical acceptance of anything that seemed to reinforce its self-belief. The easy credulity that was given to the forged documents supposedly showing Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger and the clumsily doctored and plagiarised analysis of Iraqi intelligence put forward by Blair’s spin doctors are two of the most notable examples, but there are many more.

The most critical piece of wishful thinking is the assumption that the armed forces of the US and UK, which have been bombing and starving Iraqis for the last decade, will be welcomed as liberators when they finally defeat Saddam. The argument that Saddam’s defiance was responsible for the bombings and that his corruption was responsible for the devastating impact of the sanctions, plays well in Washington thinktanks, but I imagine the view of the average Iraqi is much closer to ‘a plague on both your houses’.

Having long feared the adoption of a ‘shock and awe’ strategy in Iraq, I assumed the worst when large-scale bombardment of Baghdad began a few days ago. ‘The worst’, in this context means a strategy designed to terrify the population into submission either by inflicting substantial casualties or knocking out services like electricity and water. In fact, the reports from Baghdad so far suggest that, while massive in scale, the bombardment was tightly focused on targets like government departments and Saddam’s palaces, and that civilian casualties have been limited. This is a good thing, and gives at least some hope that the war will not turn out disastrously badly.

On the other hand, while technologically impressive, this kind of attack does not seem to have generated much shock or awe and nor was it likely to. Everyone knew that the US had the capacity to flatten Saddam’s palaces and assumed they would do so. That included the regime which appears to have evacuated most of the obvious targets in Baghdad itself, although the situation may be different with the Republican Guard perimeter defences.

The strategy of striking at symbolic targets associated with the regime, and of attempting ‘decapitation’ would be an effective one if (as some commentators have assumed) the regime is so much hated that the majority of people would actively support an invasion as soon as it appeared safe to do so. But so far, that does not appear to be the case. No doubt most Iraqis hate Saddam, but there’s little evidence that they have any love for Bush.

It’s time once again for your comments on any topic. I’d be particularly interested in how people’s views about the war have changed (or been confirmed) now that it’s actually happening. As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.

I haven’t seen any comment on this rather troubling item. The Bush Administration is confiscating frozen Iraqi funds and demanding, with the threat of exclusion from the US banking system that others do likewise. The concern is that countries such as France will seek to use the money to repay debts, rather than giving it back for the benefit of the Iraqi people. But the Administration is keeping $300 million to settle suits brought by US citizens against Saddam Hussein’s regime. As with the announcement that only US firms will be permitted to tender for reconstruction work, there are defences that can be offered for this inconsistent treatment. But a pattern is starting to form, and it’s not looking good.

I’m resorting my bookshelves following the move to Brisbane and doing a lot of rereading, including The Aleph and other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Given the depressing state of reality at present, a bit of magical realism makes for a pleasant escape.

A new book I’m reading is The Man who knew Infinity a biography of the Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan. Although a lot of my work is highly mathematical, I can’t imagine having Ramanujan’s amazing ability to mainpulate infinite series.

I’m shocked and it’s awful

The war is only two days old, but it’s already clear that its central rationale is fatally flawed. If Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction represented a threat to the US under any circumstances, they would already have been used, against US forces or against Israel.

The absence of an attack on Israel is particularly striking. US forces are already seizing possible bases for Scud attacks in Western Iraq (finding no Scuds apparently) so the opportunity for such an attack will be over very shortly. There is no reason why Saddam should refrain from such an attack except that he lacks any capacity. Similarly, the Iraqi forces in Southern Iraq are throwing everything they have at Kuwait. This clearly doesn’t include WMDs and, despite early reports, apparently doesn’t include Scuds either.

Although the war has just begin, a lot of crucial decisions about the post-war shape of the Middle East are going to be made over the next day or so. The post of Palestinian PM has been accepted by Mahmoud Abbas, thus meeting Bush’s stated condition for the publication of a “roadmap” for an Israel-Palestine settlement. Sharon has already rejected crucial elements of the roadmap inclduing the ultimate goal of an independent Palestinian state.

Bush has the choice between publishing the roadmap now, as he is committed to do, or deferring it until after the war with Iraq is resolved, as the Israeli government hopes and expects, knowing that delay will give them enough time either to force their desired changes through or to derail the process altogether. I expect he will defer, but I would be very glad to be proved wrong.

On another front, it appears likely that the Turkish government will mount what is, in effect, an independent invasion of Iraq, with the stated objective of coping with refugees, but the barely-concealed motive of keeping the Kurds in check. Ken Parish has a good post on the problems this will raise.

Turkey’s moral position may be weak, but, as I note in Ken’s comment box, the legal position is trickier. Turkey can use all the same arguments as the US about resolutions 678, 687 and 1441, as well as the right of self-defence. Again this will be a big, and difficult, test for Bush. Will he seek to protect the Kurds, risking the loss of Turkish airbases and airspace, or leave the problem to be resolved after the war, when the Turkish army may be well-entrenched? Again, I expect the worst, but hope for the best.

One hopeful sign is that the much-heralded “shock and awe” attack has not been launched (at least not yet). Again, Ken Parish has a good post on this. I expressed the hope a few days ago that talk of “shock and awe” was the product of a misinformation campaign. It’s still unclear whether this is correct or whether the delay has been due to the confusion about whether Saddam had been killed in the opening surprise attack. Given that war had effectively been declared, an attempt to end it quickly by killing Saddam was justified, but it appears not to have succeeded. The chances of a sustainable peace will be greatly enhanced if the “shock and awe” option is forsworn.

I sort-of promised a post on my impressions of Question Time, but Geoff Kitney was there too, and has done a much better job than I would have.

Now that war has started we can only hope that that it will be over quickly and that there will be as little bloodshed as possible on all sides. While all loss of life is equally tragic. it’s natural for us to think particularly about Australians. One thing I learned in listening to Question Time is that in addition to our troops (about 2000), there are about a dozen other Australian citizens known to be in Iraq (some media people, some human shields and a handful of others) as well as an unknown number of people with dual Australian-Iraqi citizenship. Regardless of their reason for being there, I hope that all will survive unharmed and that no Australian families will be bereaved by this war.

I had to be a bit mysterious about my visit to Canberra, as my big news was subject to an embargo. I’ve been awarded a Federation Fellowship, which is one of the biggest awards going for Australian academics ( you can read more here if you’re interested). The award ceremony was yesterday and involved a hastily-arranged flying visit to Canberra. I’ll be working on one of my abiding research interests – the management of the Murray-Darling Basin – along with a continuation of interests in uncertainty and sustainability.

It wasn’t exactly an auspicious day for such an event – the war began a few hours before the awards – but the problems I’m working on will be around long after Saddam has been forgotten.

PS: Along with the award comes a very nice lapel pin – free of charge!

I’m unexpectedly going on a very brief visit to Canberra tomorrow, and my itinerary includes attendance at Question Time, which should be a historic occasion. I’ll give a full report when I can, but there will probably be no more blogging until Friday.