Apologies.

Interesting things, apologies. People who call for them are not interested in an apology. What they are seeking is the abject humiliation of the person whom they are calling upon to apologise.

An interesting case in Sydney today. According to this morning’s SMH the RSL has accepted an apology from a youth (connected with the Cronulla riots) convicted of burning an Australian flag and sentenced to making an apology. He did so at a public function conducted by his local RSL. The presidfent of the latter felt it was a sincere apology and gracefully accepted it. End of story? Oh no! Rotten cunt Scully appears on the News tonight saying it isn’t enough and the youth ought to be publicly humiliated. Channel Nine is conducting a poll, the result so far is in agreement with Scully. According to the News, members of that local RSL don’t agree with their president and want more blood. Disgraceful ungracefulness all round except for the original acceptance. But in my experience this is the norm in the apology business. Most calls for apologies are totally disingenuous. I don’t think your’s is an exception, Nick. Sure I’ve had a couple of sauvignon blancs, and this news has made me feel real shitty. Lesson in life – never, but never apologise.

I consider myself a conservative, on the right etc etc. But I am old. I think good manners are still fairly important at least in public (obviously not in blog comments, however!). I hate flag burning, especially by migrants who lack the grace to fit in. I’m in favour of the RSL and respect exservicemen enormously. I felt really proud of that RSL chap this morning. But obviously gracefully accepting apologies which used to be a social norm is no longer so. Never apologise – never.

I think you’ve got your percentages arse about Chris.

Look at the predicament of these troops. The security situation is running out of control. The government of Iraq is a mere front for the warring factions that have taken control of its few working institutions. Iraq is a candidate for massive intervention.

But what does Bush do? Bush refuses either to reinforce the patently inadequate force or to withdraw them to end their agony. He offers them neither the promise of victory, nor relief.

Instead these soldiers are sitting ducks, sent out on fools’ errands. How many times do they need to conquer Baghdad?

And why does Bush do this? Because, bizarrely, Bush still thinks that he has an historical reputation to protect. He isn’t going to be then next president to lose a war. Instead, he’ll sacrifice the nation’s soldiers in the vain hope of escaping that ignominy.

Here is a perfect case of a President putting ego before national interest.

Here is a perfect opportunity for Americans to ask themselves the question how their system of government can allow this state of affairs to continue until, with enormous relief, they watch Bush shamble over the White House threshold for the last time.

Interestingly, on their last day of sitting before the midterms, the Senate unanimously withdrew any funding for US permanent bases in Iraq and for US government control of Iraq’s oil.

The Democrats have long thought that this measure was necessary.

But the Republicans had always voted it down.

Now the Republicans agree. They’re tugging Bush’s chain.

They’re telling Bush that it’s time to go.

But Bush won’t because he has a reputation to protect.

I cant see how your theory that the Iraqis want the COW to pull out and be they be left to the death squads will see the light of day. Call me old fashioned and all..

Now there weren’t any WMD after all, but ‘we’ have conducted elections for ‘them’, twice, and ‘we’ now have the technologies of opinion polls and ‘they’, the ‘people’ whom we have ‘liberated’ from their miserable existence under the heel of Arab despotism, have told us, to the tune of over 70% that ‘they’ would like it if ‘we’ would piss off.

Call me old fashioned, but the people have spoken. Just what in the name of deomcratic norms, can now be put forward, as an excuse to ignore what the newly liberated Iraqi people actually want? Surely no-one here can be arguing for the proposition that ‘our’ views of what is in our interests, should now outweigh the desires of the very people whose interests were always to the fore in that excellent little adventure of the cakewalk for freedom?

James: “Acknowledging mistakes” is pretty close to “apologise” in my book. That is why I found Mark’s comments hard to accept. Really big mistakes require that you take a good-hard-look-at-yourself, if for no other reason than not to repeat them. The issues of whose judgement to trust, what are the likely costs of mistaken assessments, need to be kept in front of mind for the challenges that we are likely to face over the next few years. In other words, the post mortem is not an academic exercise.

I do not agree that “people of good faith could have believed the WMD story.” They might reasonably have believed that there were some bio or chem weapons sitting somewhere in Iraq but not that this was a justification for full scale invasion. In the rhetoric of the pre-war build up, a single rusty chem weapon being found in a desert bunker would been hailed as some kind of vindication for the neo-cons. But it would not have been. The case for war would still have been crap.

Jason: I am blaming the huge casualties in Iraq over the past three years on the removal of Saddam. It does not follow from this that Saddam was a good guy. It does follow that you need to have a water-tight gold-standard argument for invasion and a reconstruction strategy like the Marshall plan. I am not blaming the current death toll on the coalition forces presence, in the sense that I do not think that they should pull out.

But it happened. The problem now is a completely different one: what to do next, when to pull out. I don’t know the answer. But when it comes to choosing whose analysis and advice to heed, I won’t be paying much attention to people who approved of the invasion and still won’t acknowledge the error.

And yes, the press is both an enemy and irrelevant, dont you read the papers?

The Germans – perhaps unfairly – are stereotyped as being somewhat leaden in bringing off deft, ironic, tongue-in-cheek humour.

“The image should be of a self important school teacher wagging his finger”

On the other hand, you certainly pulled that off.

And who is doing all this blowing up, Chris?

If you want to say the Iraqi people are too uncivilised not to be at each other’s throats without a dictator like Saddam by all means make that argument. Can I say honestly I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that Saddam was a net good myself. I could care less about saving the Iraqi people myself and what mattered was that what they left us alone. But let’s not get all huffy and pin all this carnage on the Coalition forces.

Bushs biggest enemy is in the US, its the liberal press, its not the ME.

Rog 2

I dont think he has underestimated the liberal press, I dont think that he thinks them particularly relevant.

Huh?

Short memory, NICM. The vast majority of so-called liberals in the US, the leftist (self-appointed) elites in Australia, and in Europe rejoiced in the US pain, saying things like “the chickens have come home to rest”.

Re-reading the letters page of the SMH on September 13 (the first letters day after 911 – I’ve kept a copy) fills me with disgust. Letters from Peter Fawkes, Virginia Johnston, Richard Boult, Iwan Dzulivan Amir, Henk Verhoeven, Harvey Marrable, David Lyons, M. K. Perkins, Saman Jebell-Javan, David Colfelt, Kim Sanders, William S. Lloyd, and Peter Bott just fill me with disgust at the left, a disgust that only deepens with every leftist pronouncement I read.

Apparently Chris intended his comment “tongue in cheek”, at least according to Nicholas Gruen. I must say the humour escaped me and still does, but I suppose Chris’s attempted clarification at comment 84 mitigates the situation marginally. My sometimes haphazard commitment to deep civility precludes further comment.

I’m sure he’ll be overjoyed and very grateful to hear that, Chris.

One thing that gets lost in these discussions is the way Bush has squandered the political capital (for want of a better expression) that existed after 9/11. There was a worldwide outpouring of sympathy for the US. The nation united behind him and most countries were willing to stand with the US against their attackers.

I think many people saw the Iraq invasion as Bush taking advantage of that mood to pursue a policy that was mostly idealogical and somewhat personal – “After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my Dad.” The rhetoric “with us or with the terrorists” grated with people as unnecessary – we were with them already. Hence the suspicion with which the arguments for the war were treated. Now, dissapointingly, those suspicions have being proved correct. For a brief time the US stood tall and inspired many. Bush blew all that away.

Privately, Chamberlain never expected that Hitler would stop making territorial demands after Munich. As Alex Douglas Home, Chamberlain’s private secretary recalls, Chamberlain waved that piece of paper around to alert the world, especially the US, that Hitler had made a promise, which he was likely to renege on. It thus wasn’t a misunderstanding of Nazi totalitarianism that caused Chamberlain to wave that bit of paper, it was a perhaps misguided hope that the US would end its period of isolationism and join forces with the European democracies against Hitler.

There was also another dimension at Munich. Benes, the Czech president, was offered Soviet military assistance. Benes and Chamberlain both thought that being saved by Stalin was worse than being invaded by Hitler. Thus Benes rejected Soviet assistance.

Britain and France, for different reasons, were in no condition to protect Czechoslavakia in the middle of Europe. The French were in the middle of a domestic political crisis, and the British had allowed their armed forces to decay. As I said above, Chamberlain immediately began to rectify that deficiency.

Thus, Chamberlain in 1938, unlike in 1940, had a realistic appreciation of the ability of Britain to achieve success against Germany by force of arms.

If Chamberlain had gone to war over Czechoslavakia he would have failed more miserably and earlier in Britain’s rearmament cycle than he eventually did in 1940 fighting much closer to home in France rather than on some fool errand against Germany somewhere else in 1938.

When it comes to fool errands, Chimpo’s the Champ.

It could not threaten a neighbour let alone the US or the world. Only morons thought differently. Moreover Hussein did not possess a defence force capable of following through on an attack with decent WMDs.

Anyone who thought Hussein bore any comparison to Hitler should have been immediately been put in Callan park.

AQ and therefore Afghanistan should have been the front for a full blown attack not Iraq as it had nothing to do with AQ.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/munich1.htm