There are all sorts of odd things hap­pen­ing in the dunia-politik.

Not least of those for me are the con­vo­lu­tions in New Zealand over the sug­ges­tions / dis­clo­sures that the National Party are per­haps try­ing to win a gen­eral elec­tion on not really telling the exact truth as to what they really plan to do if elected. As a died in the wool lefty that doesn’t really sur­prise me that much…you can’t trust ‘em at the best of times as we know from recent expe­ri­ence (as an aside, if National had been in power in 2003, I won­der if New Zealand’s troops would be back from Iraq yet…still at least they were rel­a­tively open with that agenda).

I’m not so sure though. I’m find­ing it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to work out if they have any agenda, let alone a das­tardly hid­den one.

Yes­ter­day, with a free hour, how­ever I spent some time scour­ing the web and the National Party web site try­ing to work out what the party’s For­eign Pol­icy might be. These things affect me as a New Zealan­der abroad. Sadly it was fruit­less and all I could come up with was this vac­u­ous wishy washy speech from John Key ear­lier this year where he makes argu­ments for, uhh, inte­grat­ing with Asia, play­ing our part in the Pacific, try­ing to be more like Ire­land, and, ohh, improv­ing the bilat­eral rela­tion­ship with the US…(considering ear­lier National cow­er­ing to the US that last part remains a worry). These are hardly rev­o­lu­tion­ary, reveal­ing or inci­sive poli­cies of the sort of thing you’d rea­son­ably expect from a party which wishes to be seen as a gov­ern­ment in waiting.

But that speech aside, and an equally vac­u­ous speech a year ear­lier from the odi­ous Mur­ray McCully, which he says does not rep­re­sent pol­icy, there is noth­ing. The only con­clu­sion that I could rea­son­ably come up with was that National have fig­ured out that large parts of the NZ elec­torate are increas­ingly clue­less, and sim­ply don’t feel com­fort­able with things like pol­icy and other chal­lenges, and the key to win­ning an elec­tion is to treat them as if they are stu­pid. They don’t want to know so why tell them.

Either that, and the National Party web­site is cor­rect, as are the protes­ta­tions of National in Par­lia­ment that they have no hid­den agenda, which means, since they have no pub­lic pol­icy, they sim­ply have none at all. Zip.

Which brings me to my real prob­lem: two peo­ple, both Aus­tralian, have asked me in recent days what New Zealand’s for­eign stance is likely to look like under a National Gov­ern­ment. I have to answer that I don’t know. The party has no for­eign pol­icy. We all know and under­stand the pol­icy posi­tions of the cur­rent lead­er­ship, and that of Aus­tralia, both US can­di­dates and just about every other coun­try in the region..but in New Zealand’s case, come the end of the year we sim­ply won’t have one. I can’t answer.

As inter­est­ing and divert­ing as that is, I’m equally fas­ci­nated by the stuff going down under the radar in the USA.

The anthrax thing, being the sui­cide of the US defence sci­en­tist who may or may not have sent the anthrax that killed 5 peo­ple in 2003 is both dark and increas­ingly twisted. Whether he did it or not is one thing but the other ques­tion, just as impor­tant, is whether the anthrax arrivals were manip­u­lated to suit the pur­poses of the US admin­is­tra­tion as Glen Green­wald sug­gests, using com­pli­ant media to link it to Iraq, an asser­tion which seem­ingly had no legs or basis in fact, but was picked up and touted pub­licly, despite the lack of evi­dence by the likes of ABC News and John McCain at the time. I want to see where this one heads, but wher­ever it goes it strips another strand away from the GOP candidate’s credibility.

Even more poten­tially explo­sive is the book from Pulitzer Prize win­ner Ron Suskind, which alleges in part that a doc­u­ment was forged under instruc­tion from the Bush White­house, indeed from Bush him­self. And not just any doc­u­ment, but one which was sup­posed to show a senior Iraqi intel­li­gence offi­cial writ­ing to Sad­dam Hus­sein and tying Iraq into 9/11. The let­ter was slipped to a right wing UK jour­nal­ist (for The Tele­graph which, bless Con­rad Black, has a his­tory of run­ning with these half baked sto­ries) and briefly, despite the fact that it looked like a fake from day one, was touted as the new com­ing for those who found plea­sure in the war and all it entailed.

Suskind’s book is bound to be attacked and he’s already being accused of gut­ter jour­nal­ism and every other depraved and heinous crime against decent god fear­ing free­dom lovin’ folk, despite his rep­u­ta­tion as a seri­ous jour­nal­ist, his his­tory as a Wall Street Jour­nal edi­tor, and his sources who are two high-level CIA oper­a­tives on who went the record.

And why are we sur­prised. The lead up to the war was a litany of lies and half baked decep­tion; the US vice pres­i­dent has repeat­edly gone on glob­ally tele­vised shows and uttered things as truth he knew to be com­pletely untrue. As Louis Bayard says at Salon:

Suskind sug­gests that “the White House’s know­ingly mis­us­ing an arm of gov­ern­ment” would be “the sort of thing gen­er­ally taken up in impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings.” Whether or not the impeach­ment drums start beat­ing in earnest, it’s hard to imag­ine any­one say­ing, at this stage of the game, that the White House couldn’t have done what Richer and Maguire say it did. This is an admin­is­tra­tion, after all, that lost all its moor­ings the moment it fixed its com­pass on Sad­dam. Since then, it has selec­tively mis­read evi­dence, impris­oned hun­dreds of inno­cent men, and tried to sti­fle oppo­si­tion in every quar­ter. How great a leap is there, finally, between quash­ing dis­sent and man­u­fac­tur­ing support?

But the dif­fer­ence is this time it’s a poten­tial line straight to Bush him­self, and the White House denials and those of the oth­ers quoted in the book, are, accord­ing to the WaPo, both weak and uncon­vinc­ing, and writ­ten to deceive. This one has just begun.

And a hat tip to my friend Simon for putting me onto Robert E Bartos’s blog, Shrap­nel, which has this sharp post about, amongst other things, the increas­ingly bizarre John McCain’s cre­den­tials as a com­man­der in chief. His years in a North Viet­namese prison must have been less than pleas­ant but I’m not sure how those qual­ify him (and from an Asian per­spec­tive he did vol­un­teer to go, twice, and drop bombs from an alti­tude on inno­cent peo­ple in a third world nation which some­what tem­pers my sym­pa­thy, and any idea that he may be a ‘hero’)..yes Gen­eral Clark was bang on, despite Obama backpedalling from the General’s rather qual­i­fied opin­ion,  so, I guess, as not to offend that truly odd Amer­i­can thing they have about hon­our­ing the military.

Which is yet another rea­son I still think McCain will romp in…

About two months ago The Straits Times in Singapore…the gov­ern­men­tal mouthpiece…ran what I guess they would con­sider a fairly safe piece can­vass­ing the var­i­ous US Pres­i­den­tial likelys (then at least) on China, and it’s emer­gence as a world superpower.

This, nat­u­rally, is an impor­tant topic, but espe­cially so in Asia, where China is now eas­ily the dom­i­nant power…something Amer­i­cans at almost every level seem unable to come to terms with, or sim­ply don’t get…the tran­si­tion has essen­tially hap­pened, the torch was passed with­out one party even being aware of it.

So each can­di­date was asked what their posi­tion was on China. Their answers were illuminating.

1. McCain said that he would seek to use America’s eco­nomic and mil­i­tary mus­cle to limit China. He men­tioned using air­craft car­ri­ers to ‘con­tain’ China.
Beep. Wrong answer: in this part of the world at least the US is already on the back­foot and the per­ceived fail­ure of the six hun­dred bil­lion dol­lar mil­i­tary to defeat even a rag-tag adver­sary in the Mid­dle East makes the US mil­i­tary look slightly less scary and a lit­tle more like an over-teched, slightly impo­tent mon­ster. And we’re not even gonna men­tion who has the grow­ing eco­nomic mus­cle, includ­ing a bil­lion and a half strong domes­tic mar­ket cushion.

2. Hillary’s answer was that she would allow China to emerge but within US terms.
Beep again. Wrong answer. Who’s gonna allow who to do what. You don’t make the rules any­more Hillary. See 1) above.

3. Obama’s response was that he’d work with China. He said Amer­ica had to come to terms with what was already a fact.
Bing: the penny drops.

I know quite a few Americans…some of my good friends over the years have been Amer­i­can (yes and all that sort of thing). I have online con­ver­sa­tions with Amer­i­cans. They are pretty much decent, car­ing, think­ing, smart people.

So, since I guess they are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a part of that mas­sive and diverse land, what I truly have never been able to under­stand is why so many Amer­i­cans, and in par­tic­u­lar the lead­ers, not only want, but actively to go strive to war. Not just now and then, but since 1945, almost con­tin­u­ally. And as a nation it seems to go out of it’s way to always find some per­son or some coun­try which it can vil­ify to a level where great swathes of it’s pop­u­la­tion think they / it are a threat to not only the USA, but to mankind as a whole.

Take Iran. Now, Teheran and its pres­i­dent and the reli­gious lead­ers may not be the world’s most pleas­ant regime and I don’t want to live there, although I have lit­tle doubt it’s not as grue­somely unpleas­ant on a day to day basis as we are sup­posed to believe, but if you can take a step back and ratio­nally look at Iran, you’d need to be seri­ously deluded to think that they pre­sented a threat to any­one out­side their region, or for that mat­ter any­one close. Their two major crimes seem to be, firstly, back­ing Hezbol­lah who are, it must be said, enor­mously pop­u­lar in the parts of the Lebanon where they hold sway, and in the region as a whole with one or two excep­tions; and sec­ondly, and this is the far greater offence, tweak­ing the nose of the USA in 1979. Repeated claims as to their role in Iraq seem to lack cred­i­ble evi­dence.

But no can­di­date is will­ing to step back from the plat­form that Iran is a loom­ing threat to mankind as we know it, despite any evi­dence to the con­trary. For nutty old McCain, stuck in the depths of the Cold War and Viet­nam, they are evil and need to be destroyed. I know who I’m more wor­ried about.

Hillary also threat­ens to ‘oblit­er­ate’ them.

Fuck­ing hell…..it’s like The Alamo all over again, with those plucky US Marines, and the heroic USAF B-2As defend­ing the Right­eous Empire against the Mex­i­can sav­ages, who are now appar­ently car­ry­ing Korans.

Even Obama, whilst he wants to talk, won’t back off from the war foot­ing stance that Amer­ica seems to regard as its destiny.

Mar­garet Talev in McClatchy says:

For McCain, who sup­ports the unpop­u­lar war in Iraq and is run­ning in a tough year for Repub­li­cans, Obama’s lack of mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence may be his strongest line of attack in the fall.

In other words, he’s not entwined enough in the war machine to keep mid­dle Amer­ica happy. He may not be “Commander-in-Chief” material!

What in god’s name is wrong with this country???

It wasn’t always this way. After they’d fin­ished deal­ing to their indige­nous peo­ples, and the folks in the Philip­pines, the USA had a pretty benign (if you were white) half cen­tury. Sure they went to war in 1917 but Ger­many had taken to sink­ing their ships and killing their civil­ians so I guess Ger­man mis­cal­cu­la­tion and provo­ca­tion played a bit of a role there.

And as the troops went home the USA went back into it’s shell. So much so that in 1940 they really had no real stand­ing mil­i­tary of any size.

And they had to be forced unto WW2. Remem­ber, it was Hitler that declared war on the US.

But in that war, some­thing seemed to snap. I guess, firstly, they made lots and lots of money out of it with­out suf­fer­ing in the way that just about every other com­bat­ant nation did, thus the vic­tory was both prof­itable and rel­a­tively pain­less. The vic­tory gave the nation a taste of power which was some­thing they’d not seemed to crave before. And sec­ondly, they seemed to like it. They liked all of it. As a nation they decided they liked wars, it gave them a sense of national iden­tity. They liked the ego boost that the end­less flex­ing of mil­i­tary mus­cle gave them. They made count­less movies about and still do. They liked the fact that hav­ing ene­mies and fight­ing them gave them, the nation, a chance to flex those mus­cles. Amer­ica liked hav­ing evil empires to rail against and fight wars, albeit often proxy wars, with.

And the nation set­tled into the Orwellian state of per­pet­ual war, which is pretty much where it’s been ever since.

The end of the cold war removed one enemy but it didn’t take long to invent a cou­ple more. Seri­ous dis­cus­sion in Wash­ing­ton asks now if war with China is inevitable.

Inevitable…why for gods sake.

Why do you need to invent these ene­mies, why?

Well I guess war is one of the few growth indus­tries the USA has left, but it’s a largely self defeat­ing one, espe­cially as the nation bor­rows to fund the indus­try and seems to spin into an ever big­ger defence / war spend­ing hole as China, Japan and Ger­many look on with loans at hand.

An increas­ingly unhappy endgame seems closer than any of the can­di­dates, or their elec­torate, realise and one needs to worry what sort of lash­ing out is going to take place when that real­ity sinks in.