Gas Attack In Khan Sheikhoun! But Why Would Bashar al-Assad Blow Himself Up?

A War Crime? Yes - But Whose? The most obvious interpretation of the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun is that it was intended to inflict as much damage on the Syrian Government as possible. Stopping in their tracks all moves towards accepting that the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must be involved in the peace-making process. Ensuring that the flow of arms to Assad’s enemies continues – or is increased. Placing the Russians under massive international pressure to abandon their alliance with the Assad regime. And forcing the Trump Administration to back away smartly from its “Assad can stay” position.
 

JUST ONCE, it would be nice to encounter a Western journalist willing to challenge the “International Community’s” official line. Someone willing to acknowledge that the term “International Community” is, itself, a cynical misnomer intended to cloak the self-interested policies of the United States and its Nato allies in the highfalutin language of global solidarity. A journalist willing to have a crack at sifting a nugget or two of truth from the dross of convenient lies.
 

Take this latest story about the use of poison gas against Syrian civilians. It seems certain that on 4 April 2017, the deadly nerve agent Sarin was released in in the rebel stronghold of Khan Sheikhoun, killing scores of civilians, including women and children. Before the last victim of the attack had been loaded into an ambulance, however, the world was being told that the party responsible for this unlawful attack was the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
 

Nobody thought to ask the obvious question: “Why would Assad do such a thing?” Syria was en route to a new round of peace talks. More importantly, she was about to enter negotiations in which the usual American, British and French demands that “Assad must go!” were to be, for the first time since the Syrian Civil War broke out in earnest, quietly put to one side. Having won the war on the ground, the Assad regime was on the brink of clearing away its enemies’ unrealistic preconditions. Finally, a serious conversation about Syria’s future could begin.
 

And yet, we are being invited to believe that, with all this at stake, President Assad ordered the use of Sarin gas on his own citizens. Somehow, instigating a reprehensible war crime against women and children was going to strengthen his moral authority. Somehow, by revolting the entire world, he would improve his chances of being accepted as Syria’s legitimate ruler. Somehow, by embarrassing the Russian Federation, his country’s most valuable military ally, he would enhance Syria’s national security. The whole notion is absurd.
 

The much more obvious interpretation of the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun is that it was intended to inflict as much damage on the Syrian Government as possible. Stopping in their tracks all moves towards accepting that Assad must be involved in the peace-making process. Ensuring that the flow of arms to Assad’s enemies continues – or is increased. Placing the Russians under massive international pressure to abandon their alliance with the Assad regime. And forcing the Trump Administration to back away smartly from its “Assad can stay” position.
 

So many birds with just one, Sarin-smeared stone.
 

The failure of Western journalism to ask “cui bono?” (who benefits?) is made all the greater by the fact that its “Assad uses poison gas on his own people!” headline has been used before. On 22 August 2013, the world awoke to the news that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Syrian civilians living in the rebel-controlled Ghouta suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus, had been attacked with what appeared to be chemical weapons, specifically, the deadly nerve agent Sarin. The author of the attack? Yes, you guessed it, Bashar al-Assad!
 

Surely, the International Community, opined (through its journalistic mouthpieces) President Barack Obama’s “red line” had been crossed? Surely, it was time for the USA to intervene?
 

Then a story appeared on the Mint Press News website based in the US state of Minnesota. Following numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, two freelance journalists, Dale Gavlak and Yahya Ababneh, concluded that the attack had been carried out by rebel forces using chemical weapons supplied by Saudi Intelligence.
 

The International Community and its flacks weren’t buying any of it. And yet, for some reason, Obama declined to be stampeded into war by the Ghouta outrage. Could it be that US intelligence officers and their Israeli counterparts uncovered exactly the same evidence as Gavlak and Ababneh? Did Russian Intelligence come forward with corroborative intercepts? Whatever the explanation, the USA declined to escalate the Syrian conflict.
 

Those peddling the same “Assad did it!” line in 2017 should, perhaps, ask themselves whether the person currently occupying the White House; the man who believes himself besieged by his own intelligence agencies; the man whose quick temper and sensitivity to criticism is legendary; the man currently in the market for a major political distraction; will, like Barack Obama, allow himself to be steered away from diplomatic and military responses that could only further inflame an already critical situation in the Middle East?
 

Just once, I wish the Western news media would use its fucking head!
 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 5 April 2017.

Not Worth The Effort: Decoding Bill English’s Response to “Operation Burnham”.

Bad Call: The Prime Minister's decision not to order an independent inquiry into Operation Burnham is as dishonourable as it is misguided.

 

NOTE TO READERS: As I was writing the following post, the Prime Minister announced to his post-Cabinet media conference (3/4/17) that he would not be ordering an independent inquiry into Operation Burnham. On the face of it, then, my last-minute appeal to the better angels of Bill English's nature had been overtaken by events. Re-reading the post, however, I felt that, far from blunting the point of the posting, the Prime Minister's reprehensible decision had sharpened it. I hope you agree.

 

THE PRIME MINISTER can still save himself from dishonour. There is still time for Bill English to set in motion an independent commission of inquiry into the events described in Nicky Hager’s and Jon Stephenson’s book Hit & Run. Over the past fortnight a powerful consensus has formed in support of such an inquiry. Senior parliamentarians, including the leaders of Labour, the Greens and United Future, have added their voices to those of the former National Party Defence Minister, Dr Wayne Mapp, and most of the nation’s leading newspaper editors and political journalists.

 

At the heart of that consensus lies a strong conviction that the reputation of the New Zealand Defence Force can only be protected by an independent and thoroughly transparent investigation into “Operation Burnham”. Anything less will, almost certainly, see our country subjected to the full rigour of international legal scrutiny. In the worst possible case, New Zealand could be found to have breached the rules of war. The Prime Minister owes his fellow citizens a better outcome than to be made the objects of international condemnation and censure.

 

Confronted with the painstakingly assembled evidence of Hager and Stephenson, English had only two options: to accept it, or, to reject it.

 

By accepting it, the Prime Minister would not be declaring Hager’s and Stephenson’s narrative to be accurate in every respect (mistakes have already been detected and acknowledged). What he would be saying, however, is that the authors have established a prima facie case for commissioning an independent examination of the evidence presented in their book.

 

The outcomes of any such investigation would, naturally, be unpredictable. The outcomes of a decision not to hold a full and independent inquiry, however, are readily foreseeable. A solid majority of informed New Zealanders will be left with no option but to conclude that English, his government and the NZDF have something to hide.

 

Deciding against an inquiry would also reveal something particularly shameful in the Prime Minister’s reasoning. English has repeatedly stated that there is insufficient “credible” evidence to justify an investigation. In other words, it is the Prime Minister’s contention that the investigation of Hager and Stephenson cannot/should not be given credence by his government.

 

What does this mean? The only logical conclusion to be drawn is that the Prime Minister is convinced that Hager and Stephenson have either concocted a false account of Operation Burnham; or, that the eye-witness accounts of the raid supplied by the villagers of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad; the death certificates and medical reports issued by responsible local officials (in which the names and injuries of 21 civilian casualties are listed) are not to be relied upon and should, therefore, be accorded no probative weight whatsoever.

 

The Prime Minister is further suggesting that the testimony of unnamed SAS troopers involved in “Operation Burnham”, gathered by Hager and Stephenson in order to corroborate the evidence of their Afghan witnesses, is without substance. Essentially, that they made it up. That everyone involved in Hit & Run: the authors, the villagers, the Afghan officials; are liars.

 

Just think about that for a moment. English had the option of treating the testimony of Afghan citizens (on whose behalf New Zealand undertook its 10 year military commitment) as a truthful rehearsal of the events of the night of 22 August 2010. Instead, he has described their evidence as lacking in credibility. But why would they lie? Presumably, because they were either fully-fledged “insurgents”, or Taliban supporters. (Even three-year-old, Fatima?!) Having killed a Kiwi soldier, these “enemy combatants” were now attempting to besmirch the reputation of his avengers.

 

Is this what the NZDF told the Prime Minister? Is this the essence of their classified briefings? That, in the villages of Naik and Khak Khuday Dad, and along the whole length of the Tirgiran Valley, there were no innocent civilians – only “insurgents”. That, wittingly or unwillingly, Hager and Stephenson have allowed themselves to be caught up in a Taliban propaganda exercise aimed at turning an “exemplary” SAS operation into a war crime.

 

But, surely, an “exemplary” SAS operation is something the NZDF would be only too willing to open up to the scrutiny of their fellow New Zealanders? What’s more, having been stung more than once by the investigative reporting of Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, the NZDF would presumably relish the opportunity to expose the authors of Hit & Run as Taliban dupes – or worse. If the NZDF has nothing to hide then, surely, it has nothing to fear – and much to gain – by recommending to the Prime Minister that he set up an independent inquiry into Operation Burnham?

 

And Bill English, himself? What are we to draw from his willingness to turn his face from the inhabitants of the Tirgiran Valley who have spoken so movingly of the terror, pain and loss they experienced at the hands of SAS troopers and US helicopter gunships acting in our name? Doesn’t he want to make certain that New Zealand does not have blood on its hands? And if there are SAS personnel out there with grave misgivings about the orders they were obliged to follow on the night of 22 August 2010 – doesn’t he want them to be heard? Or are a handful of weather-beaten Afghan peasants, and their brats, not worth the effort?

 

Because if that is the conclusion of our Prime Minister: and if that, ultimately, is his decision; then it is as dishonourable as it is misguided.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 4 April 2017.

The Ideology That Dares Not Speak Its Name.

The March Of Neoliberalism: In essence: a codification of the economic, social and political pre-conditions required for massive social inequality to become a permanent feature of contemporary capitalist society; neoliberalism generally prefers to avoid self-identification.

 

THERE IS SOMETHING PECULIAR about an ideology that dares not speak its name. Historically speaking, those who claimed to have discovered how the world works were never reticent about giving their discovery a name. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not publish The Manifesto in 1848, they published The Communist Manifesto. By the end of the Nineteenth Century there were very few educated persons who did not grasp the essence of the Marxists’ economic, social and political programme.

 

In the case of neoliberal ideology, however, we are presented with a very different picture. In essence: a codification of the economic, social and political pre-conditions required for massive social inequality to become a permanent feature of contemporary capitalist society; neoliberalism generally prefers to avoid self-identification.

 

Last week, for example, The National Business Review’s Rob Hosking responded to Sue Bradford’s accusation that the Greens had sold out to neoliberalism like this:

 

“As always, it isn’t clear what is meant by ‘neo-liberal’, apart from ‘bad things’.”

 

In the age of Google, Hosking’s professed ignorance as to the term’s meaning is curious. Even the humble Wikipedia could have offered him enough to be going on with:

 

“Neoliberalism (neo-liberalism) refers primarily to the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These include extensive economic liberalisation policies such as privatisation, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society. These market-based ideas and the policies they inspired constitute a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus which lasted from 1945 to 1980.”

 

Admirably clear. And while there’s certainly scope for scholarly debate around detail and emphasis, Wikipedia’s definition is more than sufficient to dispel the feigned ignorance of neoliberalism’s most zealous defenders.

 

Why, then, do neoliberals like Hosking continue to insist that they have no firm grasp of the term’s usage – other than as an expression of left-wing abuse?

 

The answer is simple. To survive and prosper, neoliberalism and the policies it inspires cannot afford to be seen as ‘just another ideology’ – like communism or fascism. Rather, it must be accepted as a law of nature – as unyielding to human influence as the weather.

 

What absolutely must not become widely understood is that neoliberalism is, indeed, an all-too-human artefact: formulated by twentieth century economists and given popular currency by individuals and institutes funded by extremely wealthy and politically motivated capitalists.

 

In the face of multiple post-war democratic challenges, these capitalists were anxious to recover and consolidate their class’s dominant position. This had been in steady decline since the 1930s and, by the 1970s, was facing an emancipatory explosion of hitherto suppressed social groups: workers, ethnic minorities, women, youth, gays and lesbians.

 

Consider the fate of these groups since the neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s, and the neoliberals’ reluctance to speak their true name becomes clear.

 

The destruction of the trade union movement as a vital economic and political counterweight to the power of capital has permitted a massive transfer of wealth from the employees of capitalist enterprises to their shareholders and senior executives.

 

The elimination and/or privatisation of the public providers of Maori employment ripped entire communities apart – giving rise to social pathologies that, three decades later, are not only still prevalent in Maori society, but increasing. It is no accident that the Maori incarceration rate, at 56 percent, is higher now than it has ever been.

 

In spite of a massive rise in post-war female workforce participation, Kiwi women are still paid, on average, 12 percent less than men. Violent sexism still oppresses them.

 

After 33 years of neoliberalism, young New Zealanders find themselves burdened down with debt and, increasingly, shut out of the housing market.

 

From being among the most forthright critics of capitalism’s power to define the “normal” in the early-1980s, the twenty-first century LGBTI community finds itself re-defined and re-presented as proof of neoliberal capitalism’s tolerance. Many LGBTI individuals now inhabit happily social institutions which their predecessors rejected as oppressive.

 

It is, however, neoliberalism’s unique ability to empty the future of hope that goes to the heart of its apologists’ reticence.

 

The young All Souls Fellowship holder, Max Harris, has written a whole book on what he sees as young New Zealanders’ alienation from politics. But how could a generation raised under neoliberalism be anything else? All their lives they have been told that to be human is to compete. That the way they buy and sell things (commodities, other people, themselves) is much more important than the way they vote. That their position in the socio-economic hierarchy is entirely attributable to the wisdom or unwisdom of their personal choices.

 

“I am interested in whether love could be made a bigger feature of our politics”, writes Harris.

 

Not while neoliberalism endures, Max.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 April 2017.

Centaurs Need Not Apply.

Keeper of the Green Faith: From the moment the Labour/Green “Budget Responsibility Rules” were announced, I knew that a scorching sermon from Sue Bradford was only a matter of time. She did not disappoint. Barely 72 hours after Grant Robertson’s and James Shaw’s blasphemy had sullied the ears of the faithful, Sue was on RNZ’s Morning Report castigating her erstwhile comrades with considerable passion.

 

AS A GUARDIAN of left-wing orthodoxy, Sue Bradford is without peer. At the first hint of heresy she can be relied upon to stride purposefully to the nearest progressive pulpit and start preaching.

 

From the moment the Labour/Green “Budget Responsibility Rules” were announced, I knew that a scorching sermon from Sue was only a matter of time. She did not disappoint. Barely 72 hours after Grant Robertson’s and James Shaw’s blasphemy had sullied the ears of the faithful, Sue was on RNZ’s Morning Report castigating her erstwhile comrades with considerable passion.

 

“The Greens have completely sold out on where they started from in my generation of MPs in 1999”, Sue thundered. “So what you see here is the Green Party deciding to go after votes on the centre and the right of the New Zealand political spectrum. It wants business in its corner. It wants your National blue-green voters in its corner.”

 

What does this mean? Sue is in no doubt. It means “completely abandoning the huge number of people who are in desperate need in the areas of housing, welfare, jobs, and education.”

 

There’s a part of me that inclines towards Sue’s critique. It’s the part that remembers those original Green MPs, the “magnificent seven”, as they galloped up the steps of Parliament and onto the floor of the House of Representatives like “an invasion of centaurs”. (If I may borrow Theodore Roszak’s evocative image.)

 

Which was great to see. (And even greater to be, Sue, I’m sure!) But only if your purpose was (borrowing once again from Roszak’s 1969 best-seller The Making of a Counter-Culture) to embody “the experience of radical critical disjuncture, the clash of irreconcilable conceptions of life”. Or, as an old-time Maoist like Sue might express it: only if the Greens were there to make revolution.

 

An Invasion of Centaurs: "the clash of irreconcilable conceptions of life".

 

But even back then, in 1999, the Greens’ revolutionary faction was in the minority. Alongside Sue, Keith Locke and Nandor Tanczos, sat Rod Donald, Jeanette Fitzsimons, Sue Kedgely and Ian Ewen-Street. Radical and visionary these latter four may have been, but they had come to Parliament to accomplish things, not to turn New Zealand’s capitalist society upside down.

 

Twenty years later and the Greens are still waiting to fulfil even a small fraction of the Magnificent Seven’s agenda. Most members of the Green Party are not interested in being seen as the harbingers of a “radical critical disjuncture” but as members of a political party dedicated to finding practical solutions to global warming; cleaning up New Zealand’s lakes, rivers and streams; housing the homeless and helping to develop a principled and purposeful role for New Zealand on the international stage.

 

For most New Zealand voters, the idea of revolutionary Green Party centaurs rampaging through Parliament is equally politically uninteresting.

 

So perhaps Sue should cast her mind back to the 1999 election and recall just how narrow was the margin that separated the Greens from parliamentary representation and political oblivion. Rod Donald delighted in his white shirt and coloured braces for six years, but by 2005 he was very publicly having himself measured for a stylish Kiwi-made business suit. When the brute arithmetic of political power kept him out of Helen Clark’s Cabinet it, quite literally, broke his heart.

 

“At what price power,” Sue demands “if you sell out everything that your party was originally set out to achieve? I mean, this Green Party here is following the same trail as green parties all over the world – some of who have ended up in coalitions and alliance with really right-wing governments.”

 

But in 2014, with just one image, the National Party destroyed the Green Party’s (and Labour’s) hopes of achieving anything for New Zealand. Their depiction of a Red/Green government as an uncoordinated and unreliable “Ship of Fools” was devastating.

 

That’s the public perception that Andrew Little, Grant Robertson, James Shaw and Metiria Turei are up against. And it is the widespread public misgivings about the Left’s economic realism and reliability that their “Budget Responsibility Rules” are intended to allay.

 

That’s because powerlessness also comes at a price.

 

A real revolutionary would understand the importance of inoculating the two leading parties of the Left against the “Show me the money!” ambushes of elections past.

 

The Greens are not trying to make a counter-culture, Sue – they’re trying to make a government.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 March 2017.

Us and Them: The Fatal Divisions of Exploitative Culture.

Us and Them: The trick to running a successful Exploitative Culture lies in defining who is – and who is not – a member of it. Or, to put it another way: who is included in the idea of “Us”, and who belongs with “Them”.

 

OURS IS NOT JUST A RAPE CULTURE: it’s a Kill Culture, a Rip-off Culture and a Lie Culture as well. But, rather than attempting to reconcile ourselves to living in a multiplicity of malign cultures, it is probably more helpful to think of ourselves as inhabiting a single Exploitative Culture. One in which human-beings are consistently treated as means to another’s end – not as ends in themselves.

 

The trick to running a successful Exploitative Culture, therefore, lies in defining who is – and who is not – a member of it. Or, to put it another way: who is included in the idea of “Us”, and who belongs with “Them”.

 

Generally speaking the smaller the “Us”, the greater the power. If you’re a member of the “One Percent”, for example, it not only means that you are obscenely wealthy and powerful, but also that 99 percent of your fellow human-beings are, in one way or another, exploitable.

 

Exploitation is always and everywhere associated with actual physical violence, or the threat of it. Without violence people simply would not consent to being treated as the means to someone else’s ends – they would rebel. Exploitative Culture (which is to say all culture) may thus be further defined as the organisation of, and the devising of justifications for, purposive social violence.

 

We thus return to “Us” and “Them”: which may now be thought of, respectively, as those who must be protected from the imposition of purposive violence; and those upon whom such violence may be inflicted with impunity.

 

Consider the current controversy surrounding “Operation Burnham” the botched, or exemplary (depending on whether you believe journalists Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson, or the Chief of the New Zealand Defence Force, Lt-General Tim Keating) attack on settlements in the Tirgiran Valley in Northern Afghanistan.

 

What happened in the Tirgiran Valley could not have happened if its inhabitants were regarded by the New Zealand soldiers taking part in the operation as members of “Us”. To listen to Lt-General Keating deliver his media briefing on Monday afternoon (27/3/17) was to hear a man doing everything within his power to make sure that the men under his command continued to be regarded by the New Zealand public as “Us”; and that the villagers of the Tirgiran Valley, “the insurgents”, as he called them, were seen as “Them” – our enemies.

 

In the eyes of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) Hager and Stephenson are guilty of engaging in the most basic prohibition of all Exploitative Cultures: attempting to redefine the meaning of “Us” and “Them”.

 

The whole purpose of their book, Hit & Run, is to make the reader see the victims of Operation Burnham as people like themselves: hard-working farmers; a trainee schoolteacher home for the holidays; parents and grandparents; a three-year-old girl called Fatima. And the more successful the authors are at transforming “Them” into “Us”, the more outrageous Operation Burnham seems to the New Zealand public.

 

The subtitle of Hit & Run refers to the “meaning of honour”. The reference shows considerable insight on the part of Hager and Stephenson, because the concept of “honour” is inseparable from what it means to be a soldier – a warrior.

 

The military virtues are all “hard” virtues: valour, prowess, discipline, loyalty. They need to be, because bodies of armed men, willing to inflict injury and death on command, are the ultimate guarantors of Exploitative Culture. Crucial to the success of these hard military virtues is the continual and favourable contrast provided by the justifiers of exploitation with the “soft” virtues of civilian life: wisdom, creativity, tolerance, solidarity.

 

Significantly, Exploitative Culture assigns almost identical combinations of qualities to the constructs of masculine and feminine. Strength and masculinity is pitted against weakness and femininity in what can only be described as the primal social dichotomy: the first and most destructive reduction of human-beings from ends-in-themselves to means-to-an-end.

 

For ordinary men to accept their subordination to stronger, richer and more powerful men, Exploitative Culture supplies them with their own inexhaustible supply of subordinates – women and children. And since there can be no exploitation – no power – without violence, the maintenance of this primal dichotomy is of necessity achieved through the unremitting application of physical and emotional coercion. Domestic violence, rape, child abuse: these are not just the products of the masculine/feminine dichotomy, they are also the most tragic expression of the “Us” and “Them” divide.

 

The non-consensual penetration of a young woman at a party; the invasion of a distant river valley by airborne special forces; both are symptoms of the same dreadful disease.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 29 March 2017.

Everyone Owns The Water.

Ours - Not Yours: If water belongs to everyone, then immediately two principles become very clear. The first is that water can only ever be owned collectively – and never individually. The second is that whatever the collective entity in which public ownership is vested, be it the state or a local authority, public officials cannot ethically permit collectively owned water to be diverted for private profit without first extracting from the profit-seeker an appropriate fee for its use.

 

NO ONE OWNS THE WATER. It sounds so reasonable. How could anyone “own” water? It “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven”, according to Shakespeare, and is sent to fall “on the just and on the unjust”, if you believe the New Testament. Playing no part in its creation, what plausible claim could we, as human-beings, possibly advance for its ownership?

 

Well, that all depends on how human-beings organise themselves. A hunter-gatherer society takes its water pretty much as Mother Nature delivers it. From springs and streams and rivers, and directly, from the sky above.

 

Agricultural and/or pastoral societies, however, tend to take a much more proprietary view of water. Without a reliable water supply crops cannot flourish and herds die of thirst. The human-beings who live in these kinds of societies are not disposed to share “their” springs and streams and rivers with anyone – not without a fight.

 

And then there are the human-beings who live in cities. Without water, cities simply can’t exist. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the key capability which makes any sort of enduring civilisation possible is the ability to collect, transfer and distribute large quantities of water for the consumption and use of large numbers of human-beings. How would the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt have survived without their sophisticated systems of water storage and irrigation? Where would Rome have been without her aqueducts and cisterns?

 

Civilised Collectivism: Where would Rome have been without her aqueducts?

 

In a civilised society, the bald assertion that “no one owns the water” is, therefore, nonsense. Because, in a civilised society, water belongs to everyone.

 

But, if water belongs to everyone, then immediately two principles become very clear.

 

The first is that water can only ever be owned collectively – and never individually. (In the simplest terms, you can’t own it – because we own it.) The second principle is that whatever the collective entity in which public ownership is vested, be it the state or a local authority, public officials cannot ethically permit collectively owned water to be diverted for private profit without first extracting from the profit-seeker an appropriate fee for its use.

 

It is only when we work back from these first principles that the bitter controversy over the use (and misuse) of water which has arisen in New Zealand is explained. They make it all-too-clear why politicians and officials in the thrall of farmers – especially dairy farmers – are so determined to make us believe that: “no one owns the water”.

 

Like all good agriculturalists and pastoralists, New Zealand’s dairy farmers claim a proprietary interest in the springs, streams, rivers and aquifers which water their crops, preserve their herds and wash out their cowsheds.

 

Their problem, of course, is that they can’t claim ownership of these water sources openly because New Zealand isn’t ancient Mesopotamia or medieval England. They live in a society in which the overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens dwell in towns and cities and where the collective ownership and protection of potable water constitutes the foundation of urban health and comfort.

 

Bluntly, the springs, streams, rivers and aquifers of New Zealand are not the de facto property of the farming sector, they belong to the whole nation. This is the truth that has, at all costs, to be kept hidden. So long as the whole nation can be hoodwinked into believing that they are not the collective owners of New Zealand’s water; so long as they adhere to the nonsensical notion that “no one owns the water”; so long will the farming sector go on extracting profit from this critical resource without paying a cent for the massive collateral environmental damage they’re causing.

 

This was the motivation behind the shutting down of Ecan, the Canterbury Regional Council; the reason why democracy has been suspended in that part of New Zealand for more than six years. So reckless had the greed and selfishness of the Canterbury farming community become that they were willing to strip their city-dwelling compatriots of their political rights rather than be denied the massive, publicly-subsidised, irrigation schemes that would make them and their neighbours rich.

 

When the Prime Minister’s brother, Conor English, shortly after National’s election victory in 2008, vouchsafed to me his prediction that the single biggest issue facing New Zealand for the next twenty years would be “water”, I thought he was joking.

 

He wasn’t.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 March 2017.

Blowback.

 “Have a care when fighting monsters – lest ye become a monster yourself.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

 

 

WAS “MONGOOSE” the word that flashed through Bobby Kennedy’s brain when he received the awful news of his brother’s assassination in Dallas? Like JFK, Bobby knew all about the activities of  “Mongoose” – the top-secret CIA operation dedicated to killing the revolutionary Cuban leader, Fidel Castro. Was it possible that the ruthless and criminal tactics sanctioned by “Operation Mongoose” had blown back in the Kennedy brothers’ faces?

 

The temptation to join the dots must have been very strong – especially after it became known that the man identified as President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been an active member of “Hands Off Cuba!”, a political organisation dedicated to keeping the Castro regime safe from US intervention?

 

“Blowback” is the name given to the unintended and often disastrous consequences of officially-sanctioned behaviour which crosses the line separating legitimate public policy from unethical, and, all-too-often, criminal behaviour.

 

Sometimes blowback is spectacular: as when Osama Bin Laden, the man the CIA helped to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan, turned his murderous talents against the USA. More often, however, blowback describes the insidious effects of unethical and/or criminal practices on the integrity of the people and institutions who initially gave them sanction.

 

Nietzsche’s oft-quoted aphorism: “Have a care when fighting monsters – lest ye become a monster yourself.”, sums up the dilemma very nicely.

 

When evil strikes, the temptation to “fight fire with fire” is always very strong. Indeed, to suggest anything less is all-too-easily construed as evidence of insufficient zeal, or, even worse, abject weakness. This impetuous inclination to embrace the monstrous methods of one’s enemies is nowhere more pronounced than in the institutions of national defence and security. And those leading the charge will, invariably, be drawn from the most elite and aggressive “special forces” units.

 

The great danger in these circumstances is that policy-makers begin to confuse tactical weaponry with viable strategy.

 

The whole ethos of the special forces is based upon their self-characterisation as the point of the national security spear. Not for them the ponderous deliberation of the innumerable variables that constitute a sensible and morally defensible foreign policy. A spear, and most especially, the point of a spear, is only useful if your prime purpose is to thrust something deadly into your enemy’s body. It’s usefulness as an instrument for debating and determining durable international relationships is considerably less apparent.

 

Unless, of course, the nation’s political and military leadership can be persuaded that careful deliberation and debate, far from being the solution to the problem of national security, should be counted among its principal causes. When terrorists fly airliners into tall buildings, people don’t want debate – they want action. When politicians are being pressed to exact vengeance upon “evildoers”, their first instinct is not to reach for the compendiums of international law, or to consult the history books. Their over-riding priority is to close their fingers around the hilt of a sword.

 

The only problem, of course, is that, to a sword, every problem looks like an exposed belly, or a vulnerable neck. In the eyes of special forces personnel: their intelligence gatherers and the officers who plan their special operations; the only thing that matters is the mission. If the mission is to defeat terrorism, then anything, or anyone, who gets in the way risks being lumped-in with the terrorists.

 

In the context of a working democracy, this sort of professional tunnel-vision can lead to catastrophe. Independent journalists, for example, investigating in-theatre and asking too many awkward questions, are not seen as symbols of the democratic institutions that soldiers are sworn to protect, but as persons capable of compromising the mission. To “neutralise” these actual or potential enemies, special forces will not hesitate to deploy all the weapons of psychological warfare: misinformation, rumour-mongering, false allegations, fake news.

 

And if a particular operation fails? Or something terrible happens in the course of carrying out that operation? Well then, in order to prevent outsiders from interfering or (worst case scenario) cancelling the mission, it may prove necessary to withhold potentially compromising information from unfriendly eyes. That those “unfriendly eyes” might belong to Members of Parliament, Cabinet Ministers, or even the Prime Minister, matters much less than safeguarding the mission from any and all external “threats”.

 

This is how a “sword” thinks. And, perhaps, it would be unreasonable to expect our sword, The NZ Special Air Service, to think in any other way. What we, as a democratic people, cannot allow, however, is for sword-like thinking to take over the mind of the NZ Defence Force, or to deflect our political representatives from the responsibilities and duties of democratic government.

 

Attacking journalists, suppressing evidence of civilian deaths, misleading the civilian power: such behaviour would confirm the serious moral degeneration of our armed forces. The blowback from that could be devastating.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 March 2017.