Our boys will be home by Christmas, I see on page 3 of the smh, after eight years of my urging and many, many deaths — of children, goats and women, and twenty or so of our Diggers — from a war we should never have joined, in a country unconquered for two thousand years, or never held for long, as mountainous countries tend to be, and it is time now, I guess, to speak of a war lost, and we who died in vain, in a war without point or sense, a missionary war, like so many others, that will be I think our last.
It means Labor will win now, and Gillard be, most like, Prime Minister for ten years or so, now this is done, and Bob Carr Foreign Minister for eight or ten years, now this is done, an excellent thing, in my view, for I know him fairly well. In that time he should enquire into how we got into this war, and what good we did, if any, and how many little girls were shot in the head for embracing the ideas we brought to it, and if this was a good thing; or whether it would have been better to merely invite every Afghan woman, and every Hazara, to come to Australia if they chose to, and have a better life. A million would have come, and made themselves welcome, and replenished our country towns, and it would have cost us less than what we have spent thus far on killing them and their neighbours, and blowing up their farmhouses, and have saved a hundred thousand lives including the eighty-eight of us killed in Bali, and the Diggers we now mourn.
We had no right to be there, obliterating towns and farms in which Osama was not hiding, and asking a government who did not control him to ‘give him up’; as if they had the armed constables who would obediently go and find him, and after a firefight bring him to ‘justice’ in Guantanamo. It was a fantasy from the start, that has cost a trillion dollars and a million lives. More to come.
Name:
Sometimes Bob, like right now, you confuse me.
For 2 years you have said Labor cannot win with Ms Gillard at the helm. You wrote nasty, vile things about her. You called her others to be PM, like an Ambassador who isn’t in parliament, or a senator who is retiring.
Now you hail to the chief that she will be PM for 10 more years. Based on an article on page 3 of the SMH.
I too think Labor will win. But I think they’ll win because of Ms Gillard’s inspired leadership.
Maybe during her next decade, you will apologise for the “girly tears” remark, the “going AWOL” slur and the other crappy things you have written about the woman who will be, most like, the third longest serving Prime Minister in Australia’s history.
To quote Lord Keynes: ‘When I find my opinion is wrong, I change it. What do you do?’
How about an apology? I think the PM deserves it from you.
I said nothing wrong. Only that she could not win, a political judgment that recent events have altered. I was rightnthen, and wrong now.
That is as far as I will go.
But what about an apology for the name calling?
Or do you condone name calling?
What name? What name calling?
What name did I call her?
You set up the choices that Gillard was either “brilliant” or a political dill”. You then said that you “tend to the latter view”.
That means that you have just called her a “political dill”.
Please don’t try and play semantics with me Bob. Just be adult about it and own it.
Is ‘dill’ a name? A bad name? What human has not heard it said of him, or her? How is this remarkable, in any way? Or unfair?
Bob, was SMH piece you mention the one by Dylan Welch?
I read it to say that the Combat troops are withdrawing from one of the provinces, not everyone coming home at Xmas.
Thats the same as announced by Stephen Smith in Brussels this week.
Am I wrong?
What other province are they in?
Please answer this.
Special Forces are everywhere
While I have my own misgivings about our role in Afghanistan, I don’t believe our departure will figure significantly in the next election.
A lot of people who supported the war will continue to think it was the right thing; those who opposed it will wonder why it took so long for the government to pull us out; and those who were of two minds about will be relieved we’re out, that our soldiers are home, and will then move on to the other issues which really will decide the election.
And while we’ve no doubt wrought much damage in Afghanistan, I don’t think introducing children to the idea of education is a bad thing. And I don’t think creating an environment in which almost six million Afghans have chosen to go home is a bad thing either. That those six million will probably be moving out again when the Taliban returns is the sad thing.
Thos who continue to think it was the right thing are about eighteen percent. The rest will tend more to vote Labor, and less to applaud the Liberals, who got us into it, on the false pretense that that OBL would come out with his hands up if we dropped enough bombs there, on the country he wasn’t in. These include the army, and their wives and mothers.
Well, I don’t know what the figures are these days, for and against the war. But it’s not the percentages that matter, it’s how strong the feelings are. And my personal take is that there will be no significant votes one way or the other to garner from the pull-out once we’re out of Afghanistan. Other issues will become more important: if the ALP and the Coalition live for the spin cycle, it’s because we all seem to have the attention span of gnats.
PS thanks for withdrawing the lifetime ban. I shall tread very carefully. But I don’t promise to agree with you.
Welcome.
If you don’t know what the figures are, how can you pronounce on the depth of feeling?
Do you really think that any soldier’s wife or mother — or father –wants him to stay? And will vote for the party of Howard, who got him in there, and not his rescuer?
This adds up to forty thousand votes Labor didn’t have before.
And you say those votes won’t change? To Labor?
Really?
Being more patiotic than most, they probably won’t turn to the ALP/Greens.
And, no – I won’t name ten of them.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. I was trying to argue that, for most people, once we’re out of Afghanistan, it won’t matter as an election issue. People will have other things that will affect their votes more: cost of living, unemployment, boats, and the like. The significance of having troops in Afghanistan will fade as a factor in which way the swing voters swing (the rusted on’s will stay as rusty as ever).
As to the soldiers’ families, I think rather a lot of them thought their sons were doing something worthwhile in Afghanistan, and some at least will be disappointed that those efforts will have gone to waste. So I don’t believe for one minute that every one of those 40,000 votes will go the ALP’s way.
This is a welcome but hollow decision – the real Glory would have been us leaving when the Americans were staying; or us staying when the Americans were leaving… either way it’d be us acting on our own principled judgement.
But now its just us leaving because the Americans are leaving.
Culture is liquid, and conservatism is only as good as what it seeks to conserve. As October snow falls over Canberra, as mollusks battle with kranskies on the beaches of meaning in the battle that will decide the fate of how we brand our genitalia forever, we hear the news of the inevitable withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In 1842, in Afghanistan’s Gallipoli, a British Army of 15,000 were slaughtered as they fled with only one man on a donkey making it back to India to tell the tale. Perhaps next ANZAC day, enough light will have fallen on our involvement in Afghanistan for us to ask similar semantic questions of words like glory, imperialism or perhaps even sovereignty.
If one can discuss the holiest of holies in the most lewd manner without dislodging the stars from the sky, surely one should be able to debunk the diggers’ myth. We dug from the hills the wealth that secured the leveling of this then young colony, we did not win anything by digging trenches for the Queen and filling them with blood.
Perhaps, it could be argued, the same primeval nationalism that drew us into Afghanistan again is exactly the same nationalism that defeated us. Except that we have never been a nation of goat-herders. We are a secular state with controls and measures, intelligence experts, an organised military and a whole chain of bureaucracy that should ensure our compliance with international law and prevent the catastrophe of fighting an illegal, unwinnable war against an enemy that’s doing what he’s done for 200 years.
To call for peace, to call for the accountability of elected officials, as the honourable Cantwell has shown us, is not a sign of weakness but a sign of intelligence, of inevitability.
Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan by Theodor Fontane, 1858
‘The whole of society was tied to the convict system – the senior government officers, the military officers, the chaplains, the school teachers and the employers of labour. But the surge of opinion in Whitehall was running against them. The liberal consensus in London was that the assignment of convicts was a form of slavery. It was that time in history of a society when the swan’s down feather stood upon the swell at full tide and was neither way inclined.’ Manning Clark
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID – Eliot.
Shanti, Shanti.
Top post, William, read it aloud on ANZAC day.
LOL about mollusks and kranskies, a happy battle between Anglo and Polski.
The Polish do not only have kranskies,they have the Polski ghorki as well.
Is that your heritage Helvi? Polish?
No, not Polish, but I have a Polish sister in law, also one who is Russian, and a German brother in law, so I know of piroshkis, Borscht…
Polskie Ogórki …yum. The best ones in my humble opinion are Bicks from Canada, still Polish in a roundabout sort of way.
Yes, the Canadian ones are good, the ones imported from Israel tasted strange.
Great with a Montreal steamed smoked beef on rye with mustard. Dunns is great but Bens was best- closed now.
Anything on rye, anything with French mustard is good. In Montreal they’d have plenty of French.
Kiss?
A kiss for who? Surely not for R1, Kendall or Hilde or Annabell?Yak.
A top Sunday lunch with interesting and nice people from Oz,Ireland, Germany etc…
Excellent Aussie show ‘Jack Irish’ and even better NZ Sav Blanc to end the week.
I thought you were referring to the French x Helvi or was it me. Just joking blue eyes
for your delightfully innocent mind Helvi
XOAZtLGACeaE
“At last”, we say, but no doubt the Afghans are saying it louder.
And if they begged us to stay, begged?
We’ll think about that when it happens.
Read any William Dalrymple? Quite interesting..(he says that Benazir Bhutto had a pile of Mills and Boon on her bedside table – yes, I know that that is not relevant.)
Thanks F.I.Kendall, I have not heard of Dalrymple, I’ve grown quite fond of historical fiction of late, I was skimming “The Howard Years” just the other day. Mills and Boon eh, fascinating and highly relevant, she could obviously read them in English, but I wonder if the local version would have included burkha ripping as opposed to bodice ripping romantic encounters?
Thirty thousand people marched in Melbourne recently for a poor young woman who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a 14 yr old girl got shot in the head for wanting to go to the wrong place in the wrong time in the wrong place.
Women eh?
Women: just trouble.
As for educating them: the father in “The Poisonwood Bible” had it right.
“Educating girls is like pouring water into a shoe. It either runs out and is wasted, or it stays in and ruins the shoe.”
I mention Jonathan Swift’s arguments for educating women :
who actually raise your sons? Is it not the women, for the most part; and you would have ignorant and uneducated people to raise your sons?
Very advanced for 1720 or so; the Muslim-Taliban types might catch up in another 500 years or so.
I hope you read my post as ironic, as intended, DQ.
Of course, but only because I know you. If you want to use irony, you must give the reader a clue, a key to help the uninitiated to unravel the meaning.
If you want to know how dangerous irony is, as k the best Prime Minister we never had – Bill Hayden.
Everyone knew it was wrong, everyone knew in fact it was impossible. Time after time enquiries were demanded, there was procrastination, deflections and outright denials of due process. Even the investigators themselves were suspected of wrongdoing. It seemed as if the conspiracy was worldwide and though allegations were continually being made, no proof, no evidence, no doubt was offered and the culprit slipped free each and every time.
His crown has been taken away from him, he has been banned from the sport of cycling forever, he has been ridiculed and denigrated as a dope taking cheat and his seven wins of the Tour de France have been stripped from him and from the record and more importantly from the sport loving population of the world. Lance Armstrong cheated, his cheating was assisted by his team mates, his medical advisors, it is alleged that his various sponsors should have known, and the Cycling Federation governing body knew or should have been aware of, given the rampant cheating by drug use uncovered continually in their sport year in and year out, the likelihood of Armstrong not being clean. Not only disappointment from the fans but a sense of moral outrage pervades the entire bike loving world, as we have been seduced by his seven historic superhuman efforts to win the Tour de France, one at least I can remember powered by only one testicle, only to be let down by the very human foible of cheating, of fraud, of lack of will.
I fear for the sanity if not the very life of Lance Armstrong, under so much scrutiny from the media, so many betrayals by his friends, colleagues and team mates that he may buckle and do something stupid, the price to pay for letting us down. Seven years on the trot, seven wins, flat and empty like a punctured tire. Is there nothing left for us to believe in?
Cadel. It’s the Katherine, NT influence. By rights he should have won every tour since 1993. They were all hopped up to their eyeballs and you have to admire Lance simply for having access to the best drugs.
We had the best intelligence, the best weapons, we had the best teams and pelaton. Why are we not being kissed by the two pretty girls on the Champs Elysees?
Like Lance we will dismount from Afghanistan bow legged and perhaps with one remaining testicle and our victories will be stripped from us later on, for cheating, for fraud.
Cut it again, Jack.
‘I fear for the sanity if not the very life of Lance Armstrong,…’
I think it was H.S. Thompson who said something along the lines of .. ‘You buy the ticket, you take the ride.’
If the reports regarding Armstrong’s long-lived affair with performance-enhancers are true, then why should one feel any sympathy for the guy? He is a cheat who did not win on merit alone.
When emperors appear naked in public we realise they are only, after all, merely human. As we are prone to weakness, so are they.
I have no sympathy for Armstrong, I like bloodsport, I am just curious as to how much blood will suffice for the media, the fans and the like. Will he have to find Jesus? I thought it an amusing comparison to the failure in Afghanistan.
Team Taliban, great at the mountain climbs, and the downhills, a bit slow on the time trials but they always manage to finish. Lousy television coverage though.
No
Luckily
You are not going gently into that good dawn, Robert “Boom Boom” Ellis. In ways of social media. Cantankerous old bastard.
And this moment is for you, unabashed and of heart. Enjoy.
I’ve watched the Tour De France every year since falling in love with it in about 1996. And as I watched Armstrong win 7 years running, I pondered just how he did it, besides the fact that his team was very good and very dedicated. Many drug cheats were caught out and stripped, but never Armstrong. I had suspicions, and I hoped against hope that he might get caught.
Better late than never.
So try this quick quiz :
1. Who won the Tour De France in 1999?
Lance Armstrong?
Wrong, Alex Zulle who was 7 minutes behind but apparently ‘clean’
Who won in 2000?
Armstrong?
Wrong : Jan Ullrich 6 min behind but apparently clean.
Who won in 2001?
Ullrich again,6 min
2002?
Beloki, 7 min
2003?
Ullrich 1 min
2004?
Kloden 6 min
2005?
Basso 4 min
Warning : Serious content follows.
History is rewritten in a way Orwell dreaded but well understood in “1984″.
We have always been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia; it is a figment of your imagination that we were ever in alliance (last year?)with Eastasia and against Eurasia. Or vice versa, next year.
I suppose stripping drug cheats of gold medals and race victories is a little less serious a rewriting of history than what Orwell contemplated, but it will soon enough be much easier to do on that scale, as “books” become letters on a screen rather than the rather more permanent paper variety.
To borrow a phrase from Huxley, a Brave New World may not be far away.
‘To borrow a phrase from Huxley, a Brave New World may not be far away.’
‘O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
Look around you. It’s here already DQ.
“John.”
He would not answer. “Fat rump and potato finger.”
“John.”
“What is it?” he asked gruffly.
“I wonder if you’d mind giving me my Malthusian belt.”
Impudent botches.
Thanks for that Canguro; of course, as much else it came originally from Shakespeare; but its usage there was straightforward and not ironical as Huxley used it.
I meant it ironically, and of course as a reference to Huxley’s book.
But thanks anyway.
I knew you were being ironic.
Depending on whether one has a GHF or GHE perspective on things, it’s either a brave new world full of optimistic hope and acceptance of new paradigms and technologies as vanguards of a limitless future, or it’s the nightmare as envisaged by Eric Blair.
I don’t see a lot to be optimistic about.
Short-term actions and results are fine, but the trends are something else, whether you parse them into specifics or not.
For all the blather that comes out of the mouths of politicians and the media, the underlying trends continue. Talk’s the cheapest commodity in town and we’re all under the spell that the yack yack yack is going to do it for us (pave the way to a better future).
What about Tommy Smith and Gai Waterhouse. Just asking or maybe talking through my wallet
If you are following the Caulfield races your wallet has been taken off life support.
yeah I backed Black Caviar’s little brother.
Scrutiny in Victoria leaves Sydney for dead
If withdrawal from Afghanistan was a vote winner, shouldn’t we have a Green government by now?
There is no logic in that statement, non at all, not one iota.
Please explain allthumbs.
Do it now or be banned for life