Israel and Delta

                                           Pic courtesy WSJ

Israel's experience with the Delta strain of the virus, and the success or otherwise of its vaccination programme is instructive for Australia, given the likely rocky road ahead on the road map set out by the PM and the NSW Premier.

As this is written, Israel is dealing with a third wave of the virus, specifically the Delta variant. On September 9th 2021, Israel reported 5861 new cases and 6 new deaths. This contrasted with the situation in 2020 when the country went into lockdown averaging 4000 new daily infections, and daily deaths reached a high of 101 on January 20th 2021.

So the rate of infection is higher in 2021, but the death rate lower. The other change since a few months ago is that the lockdowns in Israel were lifted prior to the increased rate of infections.

Because we are not comparing like with like in two aspects (a different more infectious variant and lighter restrictions) it is difficult to come to definite conclusions, but some things seem evident.

1.  More people are becoming infected, but fewer are being hospitalised and dying.

2.  The lockdowns were effective in reducing transmission, and lifting them has increased transmission.

3. More people are recovering, but it is too early to understand the nature of that recovery.

All of this suggests caution. 

This caution should emanate not only from the figures above, but also from the possibility (or likelihood) that new variants will emerge. That is, after all, how viruses behave.

Vaccination is not the silver bullet, but it does seem to help. It needs to be remembered that even in Israel, only 61.1% of people are fully vaccinated. 

That doesn't bode well for Australia, where the figure stands at 32.6% fully vaccinated as this is posted.

Song for Adam Goodes

Apart from the fact that this is a great song, it has an interesting back story.

It was written by Paul Kelly for the documentary "The Final Quarter", which looks at the last few years of Goodes playing career.

It won the Best Original Song Composed for the Screen in the 2019 Screen Music Awards.

Because Goodes' had the temerity to object to the crowd booing every time he touched the ball, he came in for a lot of criticism.

Indigenous players are supposed to accept that casual racism without a murmur.

He didn't. Well done that man.....

The song is about his mother, and how her values forged his success as a footballer and Australian of the Year.

  

Good News and Bad News

Pic courtesy Al Jazeera

Some elements of the old joke hold in relation to Afghanistan, but the good news pales somewhat in relation to the cost of the twenty year commitment.

We lost forty-one Australian soldiers, and that will always be the greatest cost. The damage done to all who served there, and the aftermath of the defeat also comes at enormous cost.

Vietnam veterans are only too familiar with that.

Frankly, the reputation of the US is neither here nor there. That reputation was permanently damaged in March 2003 when the Neocons invaded Iraq on a lie in order to "get square" for 9/11. What was David Kilcullen's reaction?

There has always been something entirely childish about US responses to terrorism, which in the final analysis, ensures that it will continue to be a problem into the future. Arrogance and ignorance creates its own issues.

All presidents since Bush have been trying to extract the US military from Afghanistan, and it would not have mattered in the long run who was in the White House when it happened. The fact that the deal that Trump "negotiated" included no consultation with the people or government of Afghanistan is more than a little responsible for the chaos we have seen during the last week or two.

But there is some good news.

No more American or Australians will die in Afghanistan.

The Afghanistan we know now is a very different country from what it was twenty years ago. There is a generation of young Afghans who have known a different experience. 

Afghani women know a different way of life, and most young women have had some experience of schooling.

How these changes will play out will depend on a whole heap of imponderables, most of them poorly understood by westerners. 

There is very little we can do about it, so pragmatic optimism is as viable as despair.

What is absolutely essential is that we don't treat Afghanistan veterans in the same shabby manner as Vietnam veterans were treated, until they took reconciliation into their own hands with the 1987 Welcome Home march.

The other essential is that we treat Afghan refugees as generously as we treated the Vietnamese in the late seventies and early eighties. Since the poisonous atmosphere created by the Tampa incident in August 2001, I sincerely doubt that possibility.

The Thrill is Gone

For years (foolishly perhaps) I've been lurking on a blog that described itself as "Libertarian". It was fun whilst it lasted. Thanks, Professor Davidson.

It's gone. It persists only in archive. And this little blog survives, gentle reader. Darwin was spot on...

At the same time, a pandemic has killed six hundred and twenty-seven thousand in the Land of the Free. It's reasonable to conclude that the two situations (the deaths of over half a million Americans, and the demise of a "Libertarian" blog) are linked.

Libertarianism has always been a romantically destructive philosophy. It is associated these days with the American Right, but ironically has its origins in the later works of Marx and Engels (Ernesto Screpanti, Libertarian communism: Marx Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007).

Its ideological base has been co-opted by politicians such as Rand Paul and many Americans who admire the thought of writers like Ayn Rand. There is a depth of irony in this association, of course. You have only to read a few of Ayn Rand's quotes on  Libertarianism to understand that - 

Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication when that fits their purpose.

Libertarianism has always been impossibly romantic, espoused by dilettantes, and deemed fashionable by the shallow. It has always lacked substance and pragmatism, and of course, as a system of association and organisation, is entirely impossible. It is essentially the refuge of the intellectually lazy and the naive. God knows there's a few of those loose in the Land of the Free, and many of them post in the lunatic Right blogosphere.

That has been revealed so clearly by the consequence of the pandemic across the Pacific, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth caused by the attempted application of science to its management. The non-existent US health system has a lot to do with it, of course.

An even deeper irony holds when you consider that by most recognised criteria, The USA is not up there on international comparisons when it comes to actual Liberty.

The 2021 Index of Economic Freedom which promotes economic opportunity, individual empowerment, and prosperity puts the US at twentieth on the scale, well below countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Ireland. 

And I didn't use this post as an excuse to play some BB King. That's my story and I'm sticking to it, but the thrill of Glibertarianism has indeed gone...

 

The War on Terror - Guest Post - by Panda General

 

                                               Pic courtesy the denverchannel.com

I have decided to add a little variety by providing a guest poster. This person is less than half my age and has a unique viewpoint. He provides an original point of view, and his analysis is comprehensive. Let me know what you think.

 Though it's not really *over* over, I think it's fair to say that we're reaching a point where the War on Terror will no longer be the primary paradigm through which western powers engage militarily with the world in short order. So what I am thinking at the moment is - how will future historians define this era? Where does it start? Where will it end? 

The 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US seem like the obvious starting point - however, there had certainly been related actions to these attacks leading back to the 80's. Osama Bin Laden had officially declared war on the United States in 1996 - and he had actually already organized attacks on US targets repeatedly before 9/11 (most notably embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole near Yemen). 9/11 is probably when these conflicts entered the greater public consciousness, but even afterwards the goal of fighting terrorism became murky. Did they mean terrorism as a phenomenon? Did they mean Islamist terrorism specifically? Did they mean states that had sponsored terrorism? 

The answer was, of course, all of the above, but if that's the case then things go back much further than 2001. The countries that ended up on the 'axis of evil' - Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, were all countries that had had antagonisms for the US stretching back decades (back to the 50's in the case of North Korea). There were also secondary 'axis' countries - Cuba, Libya, and Syria. Ideologically, none of these countries have that much in common, exemplifying a series of world views that include Marxist-Leninism, Ba'athism, Khomeini-brand Islamism, Juche, and whatever the hell Qadhafi thought he was doing that week. They weren't really allies (Iraq and Iran, in particular, were sworn enemies) and had few formal connections or organised alliances between them. All they really had in common were the fact that the US had beef with them. 

Also notable, none of them really ideologically aligned with Osama Bin Laden's own perspective - Salafist Jihadism. No state was really. The Salafi movement had been around for a while, but it really began to pick up steam in the 80's, when various states including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan essentially started exporting it throughout the Islamic world, pumping money and Wahhabist clerics (the particularly conservative brand of Islam that prevails in the KSA) into every mosque and madras they could - partially for religious reasons, partially as an ideological counter to Soviet Communism, Arab Socialism, and Iran's newly emergent Shia-infused Islamism. 

The combination of the Siege of the Grand Mosque by the sons of Ikwhan fanatics, the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan meant that much of the 80's was spent pushing this ideology everywhere they could. and it became very strong in the Islamic world. 

In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the collapse of the USSR, these guys basically reached the height of their prestige within the Islamic world - there were seen as heroes who had destroyed an evil atheistic empire. Foreign veterans of the Afghanistan war returned to their home countries and used this momentum to attempt their own overthrows there - this happened in Algeria most notably, but also in Tajikistan. Islamist-aligned officers overthrew the government in Sudan, setting up an Islamist-themed military dictatorship. 

The Taliban defeated the Afghan Warlords, remnants of the Mujahedeen, and set up their brand of Deobundi Islamist Fundamentalism in the country. Salafist Jihadists joined in secessionist and ethnic conflicts in Chechnya (Russia), Xinjiang (China), Kashmir (India), Palestine, the Philippines, and Bosnia. A lot of these insurgencies would become targets of the War on Terror paradigm after 9/11, but at the time most Americans, in particular, had no idea they were even a thing. 

So where does it start? It's fair to say its origins lie in the Cold War. but where does this conflict actually begin? In the 50's in Egypt, when Nasser banned the Muslim Brotherhood and drove them underground (and into more militant formations)? In '79, when the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the Grand Siege of Mecca all occurred within a few months of each other, leading to the violent (and state-sponsored) radicalization of Sunni militants? in '96, when OBL declared war on the US, marking it as a direct target for these movements? Or 9/11, when the largest terrorist attacks in history bought this conflict to world attention? 

Trying to map things after this gets even murkier - trying to figure out how a solid *end* point might be murkier still. A lot of the states the US has problems with are still around, but blocs have been forming between them and more powerful nations. Salafi terrorism is still around, but its ability to strike much outside of Islamic-Majority countries is becoming increasingly limited. US security infrastructure is in the midst of pivoting away from focus on those groups, abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban, and no doubt minimising their footprint in Iraq before too long. They aren't looking at the little fish so much anymore - Russia and China have captured their imagination far more (though they remain, as ever, fixated on Iran and Cuba). 

This is a very different world to the one that dominated headlines for most of the 00's. 

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The Librarian

 

Image courtesy Braceworks - not the librarian

Back in the seventies, I worked as a teacher in a special school in Brisbane. 

The school was the location of a great deal of innovative practice, and the charity it serviced was equipped with a pretty comprehensive library that specialised in books and journals about cerebral palsy.

The resident librarian was a young woman with cerebral palsy, who, despite the fact that she was aphasic, ran a very efficient library.

If you failed to return a book or journal by the due date, you pretty soon heard the hum of her powered wheelchair at your classroom door, as she chased you down to deliver a reminder. She used notes tapped out on a communication machine to let you know the details, and she'd turn up with these notes pegged to her wheelchair. It paid to read them. 

In the three years I taught there, I got to know her pretty well. Both of us attended evening lectures after work at the University of Queensland, St Lucia, and I used to give her a lift once or twice a week after school to the campus. Her parents would collect her at the end of the class to get her home. 

We shared a couple of Education faculty subjects, and her machine ticked away as she took copious notes at lectures. Her notes were always more comprehensive and better organised than mine, which was useful as she shared them generously.

At one stage she had to have surgery on both her legs to remedy contracting large muscles, a common problem when you have athetosis. Both legs were set in plaster which became a problem when I had to get her into my Renault R12 to drive to uni. No matter how far back I set the passenger seat, she would not fit behind the dashboard with legs unable to bend, so I got creative and put her in the back seat sideways.

This was fine until we were driving through Fortitude Valley on the way out to St Lucia, and I had to brake hard to avoid skittling a careless pedestrian. I heard a muffled thump and looked around to see my passenger on the floor wedged between the rear seat squab and the backs of the front seats. I pulled over and attempted to lift her back on the seat, but when I got one end of her located successfully on the seat, the other end would fall again. My few unsuccessful attempts attracted the attention of a passing police constable, who thought initially that I was up to no good.

With him at one end (the traffic side) and me at the other, we managed to get her back on deck. What sticks in my memory is that she thought the whole thing was hilarious. She had an amazing capacity to find the funny side of most situations, a talent that no doubt stood her in good stead given the issues she had to deal with daily. 

She had a very dim view of the notion of charity for people with disabilities, as I discovered one day when I drove her out to the airport to meet a plane. In those days, Brisbane domestic airport was adorned with one or two plaster statues of a child with cerebral palsy complete with a little money box into which you could stuff coins and notes if you felt inclined. Jess (not her real name) carried a walking stick which allowed her to occasionally stand upright with assistance for short periods.

She motioned me to push her wheelchair (a manual chair - the powered one stayed at work in the library) over to one of these plaster monstrosities. Thinking that she was going to generously donate to the cause, I did as I was asked.

When she was close enough, she grabbed the stick and began to bash the living daylights out of the statue, which caused great embarrassment to me, and confusion and consternation to the people behind the counter in the store where the statue was installed.

Offending statue (Pic courtesy Pinterest)

I wheeled her away in a great hurry. A little later she typed a note which read - "Sorry, but I hate those bloody things".

I lost track of her after I left the school to work elsewhere, but she has left me with lots of memories of a courageous, talented and assertive person.

She completed her course at the same time I did but could not be awarded a B Ed St, as she wasn't a registered teacher. I think she went on to earn a B A using her Education subjects.

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The Graveyard of Empires

Pic courtesy Britannica.com

The news emanating from Afghanistan lately has a familiar ring.

 The same cadence emanated from Saigon on 20th April 1975.

There are some similarities when the situation is compared with Vietnam. Each conflict persisted for more than a decade, the most powerful military in the world has failed in its attempt to stabilise each country, and locals who supported the West's commitment are now in fear of their lives.

Both countries were utterly devastated by the conflicts. In the case of Vietnam, the best figures indicate that over 2 million civilians were casualties by 1975, and over 562,000 Afghans have been killed and about 6 million have fled as refugees since 2001.

Both countries were cockpits during the cold war, with the Russians invading Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, and the Americans deploying into Vietnam most significantly in 1965 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The proxy wars fought were similar in nature and outcome, with the Americans supporting the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, and the Russians the Communists in Vietnam.

There are also some significant differences.

The outcome for the Vietnamese was unification under a culturally Confucian style of Communism, but for the Afghans, although it is not yet resolved, the likelihood of a cohesive central government seems remote.

If history is a guide, and the country returns to default mode, a series of tribally based spheres of influence, competing with each other in a deadly struggle for land, wealth and raw power seems the most likely result.

The Talibs will have their work cut out trying to establish a national government.

Afghanistan has defeated both colonialism and enduring central governance for centuries.

The Duke of Wellington, who knew a thing or two about military attempts to establish empire, spoke in the House of Lords in 1838 condemning the British invasion of Afghanistan saying that the real difficulties would only begin after the invasion's success, predicting that the Anglo-Indian force would rout the Afghan tribal levy, but then find themselves struggling to hold the terrain of the Hindu Kush mountains. 

He noted that Afghanistan was a land with no modern roads, and called the whole operation "stupid" given that Afghanistan was a land of "rocks, sands, Deserts, ice, and snow".

I've blogged before about the difference in scale between the Australian casualty figures in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but this difference probably matters little in terms of the individual grief shared by their friends and families.

Whether our involvement in these wars was ill-advised or not, they died in the service of our country and should be honoured for that. Unfortunately, the enduring controversy about the behavior of Special Forces in Afghanistan has put at risk the reputation of those involved. They deserve better, just as those returning to Australia after Vietnam deserved better.

Whether the same honour is due to the politicians who committed them to both conflicts is another matter entirely. 

Given the history of well-intentioned, but ham-fisted attempts to impose Western-style democracy on a pair of countries whose cultural history would indicate that it was an impossible task, these governments were either completely ignorant or more focussed on domestic politics than the welfare and collective freedom of Vietnamese and Afghans.

You decide...

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