Reviews
- Jeremy Agar
OTHER PEOPLE'S
WARS Shoot The Messenger
When “Other People’s Wars” came
out, almost before we knew what the book was about, we were offered
the Prime Minister’s view, which was that Hager had “no
evidence” for his critique, but that whinging was “business
as normal for Nicky Hager”. The PM wouldn’t open the
book because “I don’t have time to read fiction”.
If Key did read fiction he might become a more rounded person, but,
within his self-imposed limits, he could have a look at this book
because it’s non-fiction. It’s brilliantly, relentlessly
true. It is essential reading. Would the main electoral alternative
to the Key view of the world allow us to consider the central issue
to do with our presence internationally? No. Leader of the Opposition
Phil Goff was equally as kneejerkingly contemptuous as Key. What
a waste.
The book’s launch came two days into Jerry
Mateparae’s new gig as Governor General. The former Chief
of the New Zealand Army chimed in with his opinion that Hager’s
criticism of troops’ work in Afghanistan “doesn’t
sit with being a New Zealander”. The former Major General
elaborated with a series of the sort of empty platitudes long favoured
by military types. He had “every confidence” in the
“young men and women” who were enduring “trying
circumstances... in that troubled land”. This sort of stuff
was doubtless all very soothing to those who wanted to be soothed,
but it didn’t address the questions that Hager raised, and
it’s no reason to call Hager “abhorrent”. Chief
of Defence Force Air Vice Marshall Sir Bruce Ferguson waded in with
all the “to my knowledge” and “to my certain knowledge”
disclaimers that are always offered by public figures on the defensive.
He knew nothing and saw nothing.
Since then more responsible comment has established
that Hager’s charges are irrefutable, in that they are buttressed
by a painstaking, detailed - and fascinating - series of footnotes.
Media coverage has discussed some of the central aspects: that Americans,
almost certainly Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents, were
“invariably present” at the New Zealand base in Afghanistan;
that NZ took part in American operations; that NZ had an agent in
Pakistan. The one thing a writer of Hager’s reputation and
integrity would never do is leave gaps for the yahoos to exploit.
He’s careful with sources.
Besides, the attacks on Hager happened to coincide
with the fall of Gaddafi’s Tripoli, and the discovery of files
documenting that the American CIA, the British MI6, Italy, France,
Germany and Greece had long been up to the sort of tricks that Hager
was discussing. In one neat juxtaposition the Press ran
adjacent stories, the first of which, from 2004, told of British
complicity in delivering a rebel leader to Gaddafi’s torture
chambers. The headline below, based on current expediencies, referred
to Gaddafi as a rat in a tunnel. This from the outfits now claiming
purity and consistency
The moral flexibility that affairs of State require
trapped denigrators like Goff and US bureaucrats into logical confusion.
There were repeated instances of official denials that anything
wrong had happened in Iraq or Afghanistan; (the outraged gambit)
clashing with remarks that a bending of the rules was “not
a surprise” as, in war, you “often work with”
dicey types (the realpolitik gambit). Hager was being simultaneously
attacked as a devious liar and a naive simpleton. Had the politicians
opened the book, they would have done themselves a favour, but that
would have meant allowing themselves to consider new perspectives,
and this is not to be expected from ambitious conformists. In a
crisis our leaders’ default position is to present themselves
as Muldoonist bullies. If only they would play the ball and not
the man, but they can’t play the ball because if they did,
they’d lose. So, while official denials were inevitable, they
could have been presented with more grace.
Impeccable Inside Sources
As with “The Hollow Men” *Hager’s
vital sources were dissidents from within the Wellington bureaucracies,
who spoke very much off the record. The opinions they offered are
consistent with mainstream views of other articulate and informed
New Zealanders, and as such, are convincing. In January 2011 Defence
Chief, Lieutenant-General Rhys Jones, made one such statement when
he suggested that “the military can never win” in Afghanistan.
That the State apparatus hosts traditional conservatives and liberals,
and that they would have to stay mum, is a given. Also unsurprising
is the evidence of the extent to which New Zealand soldiers distrusted,
and even despised, their American counterparts. *Nicky Hager’s
“The Hollow Men” was reviewed by Jeremy in Watchdog
114, May 2007, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/14/03.htm.
Ed.
The Government had good reason to want to shut down
discussion. The biggest heresy, in their eyes, would have been Hager’s
demonstration that Army leaders were undermining the Labour government
of the day, but this, too, is what you’d expect. Commanders
are given to holding very Rightwing views about world affairs and
their opposition to policies like withdrawing from the ANZUS Treaty
(with the US and Australia) and becoming nuclear free has surely
always been assumed by most who know how New Zealand works. Even
in America, where the politics have always been resolutely in favour
of military muscle, there have been tensions between commanders
in the field and the Commander in Chief. There was General MacArthur,
in the 1950-53 Korean War, who defied President Truman, and, more
relevantly, President Obama had to sideline a belligerent commander
in Iraq.
When spies and secret services get up to their tricks
they don’t tell the civilians to whom they’re accountable.
It’s standard practice to allow Presidents and Prime Ministers
“deniability”, the idea being that if you don’t
know something then you don’t have to lie about it. It’s
well known that the State Department will “neither confirm
nor deny” what it sees as State secrets. So when our leaders
say they know nothing of the misdemeanours Hager analyses they’ll
be telling the truth. But it’s not the whole truth and nothing
but the truth. For that we have to follow Hager’s story, which
repeatedly shows that uncovering the whole truth would be a threat
to the Government’s spin on events. The Ministry of Defence
worked to suppress bad news. In one instance that Hager cites it
blanked out passages about how things weren’t working out
on the grounds that if the citizens of New Zealand had accurate
information about life in Afghanistan it would be bad for “the
security and defence of New Zealand”. This is not discretion
about operational details of the sort that is justifiably evoked
whenever citizens query Special Air Service (SAS) activities. It’s
the sort of censorship that normally marks dictatorships. In a 2009
review the Government deleted two key sentences, which read: “The
situation in Afghanistan is fragile, probably more so than at any
time since 2001. Security has been steadily deteriorating...”.
Very occasionally contrarian opinions surface in
leading media. “The people of England”, complained a
London Times editorial, “will not be dazzled by the glare
of brilliant actions when they lead to no useful consequences; and
what is the consequence here? We have hitherto done nothing, except
place an incapable tyrant, hated by his people, upon a throne...in
which he can only maintain himself with the aid of British arms...”.
Reacting to the same British invasion of Afghanistan, a politician
complained that the foray was “unnecessary, unwise and most
unjust”. This sounds contemporary but the year was 1842, and
the Victorian critics were validated to an extent that would not
now be possible, as not long afterwards, 16,000 British soldiers
lay dead, ambushed as they marched along a deep valley floor near
the Khyber Pass.
The Army had been dispatched to counter a scare
that the Russians were about to march over the mountains into India.
If there’s something that everyone thinks they know about
Afghanistan it’s that twice both the Brits and the Russians
have had a rough time. Then it’s said that it’s impossible
for outsiders to win a war there. A marvellous aspect of “Other
People’s Wars” is that not once in 439 dense pages does
Hager repeat this bit of trite conventional wisdom. He’s not
about to trot out unexamined folklore. He does mention an armchair
military theorist who prattles on about a 2,400 years history of
turbulence in Afghanistan, but that’s in the context of showing
the man’s mindset. Hager, always on topic, doesn’t go
after easy targets. His narrative, however, allows us to reflect
that just because something’s happened a couple of times (over
150 years, not 2,400 years) it doesn’t mean it’ll happen
again. For a start, the deployment of Western troops and the relative
balance of technology today bear no relationship to the chaos of
1842. This point is worth making: Hager is always specific and always
bases himself on empirical facts. There are some obvious permanent
aspects - like its corruption, tribalism and geography - which makes
an invasion of Afghanistan an unlikely prospect, but serious analysis
demands that these be established, not assumed.
In fact, in 1842, the Russians weren’t coming
(is every war based on misapprehensions about other people’s
intentions?) Hager uses this as a lead into an interview with a
US foreign service man who outlines the several similarities between
the current mess in Afghanistan and the rape of Vietnam 50 years
ago, a conflict that comes to mind because it too was said to be
about repelling Russians - but they weren’t coming then either.
In both cases, the invasions failed (or will fail) because the insurgents
had safe sanctuary, because the locals resented decades of imperial
aggression, because a north-south civil war subverted the hope for
a united pro-Western colonial state, because offensive US troop
behaviour inspired guerrilla resistance, because the regimes installed
by the West had no legitimacy and little reach beyond the capitals,
and because corrupt warlords had their own agenda.
If strategy was dreadful; so too were tactics. In
both cases US sorties into the hinterlands were doomed to fail.
In Vietnam the futility was called “search and destroy”;
in Afghanistan it was tagged “clearing operations”.
Hager’s source is describing both scenarios when he comments
that the idea was “to find easily replaced weapons or clear
a tiny, arbitrarily chosen patch of worthless ground for a short
period, and then turn it over to indigenous security forces who
can’t hold it, and then go do it again somewhere else....
chasing illiterate teenage boys with guns around the countryside
[and] answering the enemies’ prayers by blowing up compounds
with air strikes to martyr more of the teenage boys”.
That’s seven obvious parallels, none of which
can have been apparent to the war planners in Washington and London.
But, suggested Hager’s interviewee, there’s one crucial
difference. Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan is “not one insurgency
but several connected ones”, making it even more likely than
in Nam that the invasion will fail. You suspect that Hager himself
might have already discerned these patterns, and sought out a sympathetic
source to say them, such is the width and seriousness of his approach.
Getting NZ Back Into America’s Good
Books
But perhaps the derring-do in Afghanistan will not
ultimately prove to be the most important influence on NZ. Hager
has untangled the way in which the ground wars have served as a
pretext for high-tech surveillance to be developed so that NZ is
brought back into the US fold. America has what it calls “Tier
One Special Operations Forces”. The five lucky ones in the
team are the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. What
else does this quintet have in common? Yes, they’re the Echelon
partners (Echelon is the code name for the programme operated
by the five nation spy network that systematically listens in to
civilian telecommunications sent by satellite. Echelon involves
searching for keywords in the oceans of electronic chatter. New
Zealand is the junior partner in the super-secret UKUSA Agreement,
whereby the electronic spy agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand divide up the world for electronic spying purposes.
The biggest Big Brother is the US National Security Agency. There
is a global network of electronic spybases. The one in New Zealand
– effectively a US spybase, albeit one manned, and paid for,
by New Zealanders - is at Waihopai, in Marlborough, and is operated
by the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau, which is NZ’s
biggest spy agency. It was the subject of Nicky Hager’s groundbreaking
first book, “Secret Power”, published in 1996. Ed.).
“SIGINT (signals intelligence) operations
were defined by [the] response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September
2001, and the consequent heightened demands for those services”,
a confidential source reveals. Here the link between the “war
on terror” and the stuff that goes on at Waihopai is explicit.
And in 2004 a secret Wikileaked cable home from the US Ambassador
asked for an additional man to “advance US interests in New
Zealand by improving liaison and cooperation on vital signals intelligence
matters. This is an area where the US and New Zealand already work
closely and profitably, and continuing to build and expand that
relationship clearly stands to benefit both countries. This is especially
true in the post-September 11 environment, where NZ SIGINT capabilities
significantly enhance our common efforts to combat terrorism in
the region and the world”.
Obviously no word of these machinations could be
allowed into the public domain and the US was taking no chances.
Hager was told that the Ambassador paid a visit to the Editor of
the Dominion Post to ask him not to run Robert Fisk, a
British columnist who has been scathing about US policy. To his
credit, the Editor refused to comply. Poor Helen Clark (Labour Prime
Minister 1999-08).It can’t be doubted that her opposition
to NZ’s involvement in the wars was deeply felt but the pressures
were intense. In 2007 a secret US cable reported that Clark was
“willing to address targets of marginal benefit to New Zealand
that could do her political harm if made public”.
SAS & SIS
One way that all the belligerents, whether overt
or half-hearted, could muster support for what was hopefully called
“peacekeeping” and “nation building” in
Afghanistan was to tell good news stories. There haven’t been
many, but the Special Air Service (SAS) has long been a favourite
of the media, who have created a romance around it, a mood which
grew ecstatic when Willie Apiata was awarded the Victoria Cross
for his bravery in Afghanistan. In reality, the SAS has a grubby
history. It was formed in 1955 by the UK to repress nationalists
in Malaya. It then went to Indonesia and Vietnam, where it helped
in the killing of millions of Indonesians and Vietnamese to make
Asia safe for corrupt dictatorships. The British and New Zealand
people were told that the mass murder was needed for the sake of
freedom and honour, but the wars were waged to protect the profits
of transnational corporations. SAS mystique is enabled by the secret
squirrel silence that means we don’t know what it is doing,
let alone why.
New Zealand’s secret State has been well looked
after. Hager shows that in 2004, when the Government was trimming
core domestic services, the lads of the Security Intelligence Service
(SIS) got a big funding increase. In the tortuous words of the spooks,
the spend-up was all about an “expansion of the Service’s
technical operational capability in areas including interception
operations conducted under a warrant, secure operational communications
and photographic capacity”. As part of “doubling the
Service’s counter-terrorist capability” a security liaison
officer was based in Washington. All this was to counter the “threat
of international terrorism” and the “perception”
of it.
Back in the real world New Zealanders had not felt
threatened by international terrorism either side of 2004, and since
we have found out that Osama bin Laden was not hiding out in the
Ureweras after all, we’ve been vindicated. That’s where
“perceptions” come in handy for the spymasters, who
need to justify their existence. They perceived the dangerously
Arab-looking Ahmed Zaoui to be a terrorist threat. People are free
to perceive whatever they feel like, and the NZ spies have not lacked
for dupes. When Paul Henry perceived Zaoui, he didn’t like
the sight. “I don’t care if we shoot him and send him
out in a dog food can”, was the response of the (then) TV
host, a man who doesn’t care for people with moustaches. Officialdom
eschews overtly bigoted language, but not necessarily the attitudes
that inspire it. Hager lists nine nasty groups to which, in the
eyes of an Immigration official, Zaoui belonged. In the real world
he belonged to none of them.
Hager relates other misadventures as the SIS harassed
Tamils, Iraqis and Iranians, citizens of places with whom NZ has
no issues. They’re American obsessions, but, in the Wikileaked
words of the US Embassy, New Zealand “must give to get”.
The gist of American attitudes is revealed by a State Department
official (the US version of Foreign Affairs) who lectured a willing
NZ counterpart that the NZ government needed “to find more
opportunities to say ‘yes’, particularly on high-profile
issues of importance to the US government”. Another Wikileaked
Embassy cable referred to New Zealand’s decision to “sit
out” the Iraq invasion, phrasing which suggests that the junior
partners weren’t “pulling their weight”. Sometimes
the tone has been outrightly aggressive, as when a US official noted
that “we must be careful not to allow ourselves to be painted
by the Clark government as bullies telling Kiwis how to spend their
tax dollars.... We believe the message themes outlined above will
reduce the Clark government’s wiggle room on whether it prefers
to work with us and Australia in the region, or against us”.
“First Worlders” & “Other
Worlders”
“Or against us”. How anachronistic can
you get? This is the mindset of the 1950s, the era when America
launched its Cold War and the then Secretary of State notoriously
declaimed that “you (that is, the whole world) are either
for us or against us”. Even now, after 60 years of arrogant
folly, the Yanks still want the universe to fall in behind. There’s
a tellingly snide reference to New Zealand’s “multilateralism”,
the policy, that is, of charting an independent foreign policy and
striving to have good relations with other countries in our region.
The State Department is not at all keen on the United Nations and
peacekeepers and all that malarkey and the Clark Government’s
interest in the Pacific and Timor-Leste were seen as irresponsible
diversions from its US-imposed function as a host of nuclear armed
ships and an unquestioning junior partner in ANZUS.
Bush’s Ambassador to NZ at the time was a
certain Charles Swindells, who, in a pattern beloved by Republicans,
was being rewarded for his multi-million dollar donations to the
Bush election campaign. Swindells’ views of the little country
down under were clear. There are two types of New Zealanders. A
precious few lived in the “first world”, where the US
was a cherished ally and defended all that is good and right. Then
there was the ignorant majority, who lived in the “other world”.
They “viewed the US with suspicion or hostility”. Other
worlders included “most politicians, media, academics and
much of the public”.
Other worlders hold an “internationalist”
perspective, another coded reference to the Clark Government’s
respect for the United Nations and its attempt to forge a foreign
policy that is guided from New Zealand and based on our own strategic
interests. The relevance of the division between the two worlds
goes beyond the obvious reference to the war on Iraq. It’s
another reversion to Cold War rhetoric, which speaks of the world
beyond the US and its closest allies as a sullen, threatening horde
of aliens and ingrates.
The local Establishment seems to have consistently
prostrated itself to earn brownie points. Hager cites an NZ Defence
official whose plea to his American mentor to “help us get
out of the hole we have dug for ourselves” is effectively
insubordination, a disavowal of his Government’s instructions,
an attitude that - if it occurred in the USA - would get him fired
in disgrace. When Ferguson chewed the fat with a US military leader
he was ‘[p]articularly critical of the Labour Government’s
unwillingness to think creatively about how to restore the trust
and credibility New Zealand has lost by Labour’s handling
of the anti-nuclear dispute... and of National’s unwillingness
to address directly the need to resolve the anti-nuclear dispute”.
Cue Don Brash.
Reacting to the Gulf War, Simon Power, National’s
defence spokesman, proclaimed that “where Britain, the United
States and Australia go, we go”. You sometimes wonder if National
Ministers know any of their country’s history, so Power might
or might not have known that he was pastiching Michael Joseph Savage’s
statement that “where Britain goes, we go”. Let’s
assume he did know. It wasn’t a good idea. It means that Power
felt the country’s appetite to join Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan
would be as keen as it had been to join the fight against Hitler.
It means that the person who was guiding the future Government’s
defence policy thinks that New Zealanders’ relationship with
the Mother Country hasn’t changed in 70 years. It means that
he thinks that the Second World War and the Gulf War were morally
and strategically equivalent. Reaching for Churchillian grandeur,
the defence spokesman had grasped bathos. As Karl Marx observed,
historical events often occur for the first time as tragedy, and
for the second time as farce.
At the centre of power in Wellington was a man called
Maarten Wevers. The chief of the Prime Minister’s Department
and a former top man in Foreign Affairs, he represented orthodoxy.
As such he pleaded with a US official to deter Venezuela and Cuba,
who “are now coming into the Pacific”. Venezuela and
Cuba of course are the bad guys, but shouldn’t people in Wevers’
position touch base with reality? Neither Venezuela nor Cuba has
ever had any military presence in the Pacific. Neither country has
either the motive or the capability to conquer the Pacific, and
if they did, would not the USA, which has a certain history with
Venezuela and Cuba, know about it? Would the USA need NZ’s
leadership to forge a new Caribbean policy? A partial explanation
for this absurdity is found in Wevers’ reminder that Venezuela
and Cuba were behaving just as had “the Russians in the past”.
This suggestion would be baffling unless we know that 30 years ago
Foreign Affairs became obsessed with a non-existent Soviet threat
to the Pacific. Wevers was being nostalgic for the simpler good
old days of a bipolarly disordered world when his Department could
invent justifications for the American war on common sense.
The military like to express themselves in a Latinate
language that sometimes resembles English. As part of something
called “interoperability”, the military established
a “quadri”, short for “Quadripartite Working Groups”,
or QWG’s. You know without being told who’s in the quartet.
They’re the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. Who’s
not a quadri, but would be if a fifth member was admitted? Again
we don’t need to be told. NZ isn’t formally in the club
but we’re allowed to tag along. The quadris are the Echelon
partners minus the errand boy. NZ’s ambiguous status says
it all. We’re part of, and not part of, “the war on
terror”, according to a need for deniability that’s
convenient for all five quins. 2003, when the quadris’ conference
was held in Wellington, might have been when we passed a halfway
step of being allowed back into the warmongers’ camp.
Power Struggle In Military Leadership
Throughout the decade of American wars there was
a big, and mostly unpublicised, increase in NZ’s military
spending as the Government splurged on toys which are of no use
to the country, but plenty of use for the global “war on terror”.
Hager highlights the buying of electronic equipment for six Orion
planes for a cool $500 million. A favourite way to waste money was
propaganda. In 2010/11 the Defence Force Communications budget was
$2,731,675, up from around $1.5 million two years earlier (Sunday
Star Times, 11/9/11). Defence officials learned the art of
“media product vetting” as the department frittered
over $16 million with advertisers Saatchi and Saatchi on what is
called promotion. That’s something in addition to advertising,
which claimed a further $4.2 million.
This followed a power struggle within the armed
services. Hager makes sense of the otherwise inscrutable media slighting
of the Army Chief, who was due to take over as head of the three
services. He was successfully undermined by the Navy and Air Force.
According to Hager’s account, the reason was that the latter
were more into the high-tech spying stuff, whereas the Army was
associated with NZ’s peacekeeping roles that so displeased
the usual suspects. Incredibly, by 2010, the NZ Air Force could
boast five squadrons, 207 squadron leaders, 66 wing commanders and
19 group captains. That adds up to one officer for every three other
ranks. The flyers seem to be keen to emulate their counterparts
from old movies, given to cliches like how strike planes help them
to “punch above their weight”. New Zealanders, said
Ferguson, “aren’t in the habit of cutting and running
when the going gets tough”. The self-congratulation was frequently
combined with cringe. A New Zealand Air Force envoy expressed ‘”surprise
and privilege” to having been met off the plane in Guam by
a US military man. Air Chief John Hamilton found it “heartening
to be so readily accepted” by the Royal Air Force on a trip
to England that cost taxpayers $250,000.
Politicians were equally ready to demean themselves.
The sequence that led to the second Iraq war is almost comic in
its predictability. In 2002 British PM Tony Blair was summoned to
George Bush’s Texas ranch, where the two great men posed for
rugged outdoorsy photo ops and agreed that 9/11 had given them the
opportunity to take out Saddam Hussein. Shortly thereafter the Queen
Mother died, and the Commonwealth leaders - including Canada’s
Jean Chretien, Australia’s John Howard, and Helen Clark -
attended her funeral. A source identified as a senior NZ official
relates what happened next:
“‘Blair pulled aside Helen and Howard
and Chretien, and said: ‘The Americans are going to war. We
will have to go with them. Are you with us?’ This is when
he claimed he hadn’t made up his mind. Straight away, ‘little
Johnny the lapdog [Howard] says: ‘I’ll be with you,
Tony’, but ‘Helen and Chretien were aghast. They said:
‘No, you can’t’. Clark immediately took the position
that ‘you can’t do anything that doesn’t have
UN backing’ and Chretien agreed with that. She came away from
that meeting shaking her head...”.
The imperial dreamer who led the 16,000 British
soldiers over the Khyber Pass to slaughter was a man called Lord
Auckland. In the city named after him Khyber Pass Road records a
vision that no Aucklander would now endorse. The pre-eminent 19th
Century schemer of British adventurism was Lord Palmerston, a man
whose name is synonymous with what came to be called gunboat diplomacy.
So our forebears named two places after him. And of course our capital
commemorates the arch-reactionary who defeated Napoleon. In his
conclusion Hager reminds us of this swagger as he argues that NZ
elites have always had a choice between committing the country to
a puppy dog slavering after imperial folly or steering an independent
course. With the partial exception of the Clark Government, which
tried to resist the blandishments, they’ve almost always ignored
public opinion, which, as now, has been consistently sceptical.
They keep on making the wrong choice (the 1930s Savage Labour Government
is another that flirted with a made in New Zealand foreign policy,
but was reproved by the UK and fell into line).
Key Snuggles Up To Uncle Sam
The Key Government is taking us the wrong way as
fast as it dares. One typical response can be seen in its’
New Zealand Defence Review. It might be expected that a Government
thinking about how to defend the country from foreign invaders would
draw upon experts from fields like science, weaponry, history and
diplomacy, but the three men chosen to look into the matter for
Key were Simon Murdoch, Martyn Dunne and Rob McLeod. Let’s
look at their resumes. Murdoch, a former Foreign Affairs official,
was a graduate of a US university whose postings had been to Washington
and London. This detail can be taken two ways. A critic wanting
to disparage Hager’s research might want to say that he is
drawing unfounded or gratuitous implications or that he is (a favourite
gambit) inventing a conspiracy (we won’t say “reader”
because people like John Key boast of how they can diss a book without
reading it). Hager has so much factual information that he can’t
spell out every nuance. He expects an honest and objective reader
who would know that recent NZ history has been marked by graduates
who returned from American universities - think Geoffrey Palmer
or Graham Scott, Secretary to the Rogernomic Treasury - with a neo-liberal
reforming zeal. They would appreciate that staffers sent to quadri
capitals were likely to be the most politically correct. Dunne had
been in charge of war on terror deployments and the subsequent public
relations misinformation. McLeod is Chair of the New Zealand Business
Roundtable.
In a previous era the appointment of three people
to advise the Government on a topic with which they had no specialist
knowledge would have been astonishing. Imagine say, Britain in 1940
- in the days that Simon Power might or might not have been remembering
- with the Luftwaffe overhead and the Wehrmacht across the Channel
- and the Government reaches to ... a stockbroker and a public relations
firm to tell it where to put its guns. In our postmodern days it
passes unnoticed because we know it’s fake. Defence policy
is made in Washington. For domestic purposes, the Key Government
is interested only in what things cost and who’s going to
pay for them and Rogernome McLeod will give them their right answer.
Hager has a seemingly unerring ability to select
the telling detail and the apposite quotation. Here’s Deputy
PM Bill English, when in Opposition, speaking at an Anzac Day service
in 2003: “In the past we have not shirked our responsibilities.
[U]ntil now, we have never been fair-weather friends. I am ashamed
to say that is what we are becoming under our current Government...
Does anyone doubt that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction?...
Does anyone doubt that Saddam Hussein has sheltered and aided international
terrorist groups?...”. The disloyal tone is pure US Embassy.
And of course the assertions are notoriously and fatally wrong.
From a Hager confidant we learn that the Labour
leadership was against joining the invasion of Iraq - with one significant
exception, that being Mike Moore, the Labour person most closely
identified with pushing his country into the embrace of the global
transnationals. Moore is a former Prime Minister who became boss
of the World Trade Organisation and is now NZ’s Ambassador
to the US. In perhaps the most significant of all the Embassy cables,
Wikileaks has revealed that Mark Sinclair, New Zealand’s Free
Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiator, advised a US agriculture official
that in NZ there existed “a public perception that getting
into the United States will be an ‘el Dorado’ for New
Zealand’s commercial sector. However, the reality is quite
different, since the United States is already quite open to New
Zealand trade and investment. He underscored that New Zealand needs
to manage expectations in this regard”.
While it’s true that many in New Zealand’s
ruling classes have a naive hope that “free trade” deals
with America will make them rich, the same can’t be said for
Watchdog readers, who will know that FTA negotiations like the current
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) will help no section
of the economy. Look back at some recent issues and it should be
clear that the TPPA has the potential to be disastrous. So why pursue
a deal which our own negotiator knows will be a dud? This is where
the link between neo-liberal foreign and economic policies can be
seen to be two sides of the same (American) coin. The business and
political elites want to tie us to American corporations in the
same way that they want to tie us to American wars.
Nothing To Do With Safety Of NZ
What other conclusion is possible? Those who push
extreme “free market” economics and those who want to
serve as outriders in US invasions have common interests. That much
has long been apparent. The value of Hager’s research, and
the reason the Prime Minister was so quick to dismiss it, is that
he has documented that they are literally the same people. It’s
a small country. You could say that Hager has shown us a smoking
gun. In both economic and foreign policy the same small cabal has
foisted policies which were deeply unpopular with most New Zealanders.
In both cases the cabal argued that they had a wisdom that eluded
the rest of us. They are seeking global deregulation, by which they
mean the ability of transnational corporations and the governments
they dominate to act as they please. We’ve seen the results.
Economically it gave us the great financial meltdown. In the Gulf
it gave us the Bush-Howard-Blair fiasco in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ten years ago, when bin Laden and his mates were
at liberty to scheme, it made sense to destroy the State apparatus
that sponsored the terrorism, and those who criticise America for
doing so might ask themselves if it was realistic in the circumstances
to expect restraint. But that had been achieved before the New Zealanders
arrived. Bin Laden had already left Afghanistan, which means that
the justification for the whole exercise has always been false.
All sorts of motives are in play, but none of them are to do with
the safety of New Zealand. Other people’s wars. Other people’s
names. Other people’s thoughts. Other people’s needs.
Other people’s lies. Other centuries’ values.
New Zealand In
Afghanistan, Iraq And The War On Terror
by Nicky Hager,
Craig Potton Publishing, Nelson, 2011, $44.99
AT THE TURNING
POINT
Margaret Pope begins her account of the 1984-90
Labour government by describing how she got a job as a rookie speech
writer for Prime Minister David Lange*. She ends it in 1989 as his
wife with Lange’s resignation. Now of course she tells the
story as his widow, her role in the pivotal five years being the
subject of ongoing controversy and recrimination. The improbable
claim has been that Pope ran the Government for a disengaged and
manipulated Lange. More interesting than the personal settling of
scores is the light it throws on that era. *Murray Horton’s
obituary of David Lange is in Watchdog 110, December 2005,
http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/09.htm
Ed.
There are good reasons to read this. Pope of course
has her biases, but who doesn’t? Her interest is obvious so
you can look out for ambushes. It’s always going to be hard
to get an inside account of a Government that’ll be immune
from the author’s needs and Pope has two things going for
her: a fluid writing style and the very fact that she’s not
a politician. She comes across as close to a representative Kiwi.
She had an early interest in politics but was not at all a Labour
Party apologist. Her first two votes were for other parties, and
any attempt to portray her as radical or a hack will fail.
Distaste For Douglas, Foreign Affairs &
France
Witty and observant, Pope offers some neat character
sketches. Geoffrey Palmer* was “open, honest, upright and
artless. He was exhaustingly enthusiastic”. Although Palmer,
in his own telling, was solely responsible for the successes with
which he is associated, we read here that one of his major triumphs
was suggested to him by a senior adviser. When the PM was out of
the country, the Americans wanted to embarrass the Government by
asking for a possibly nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered ship to visit,
to say hello as it were. What should be said?
“Don’t tell them anything”. “But
I have to tell them something”. “No, you don’t.”
“I don’t?” “No, you’re the Government.
You don’t have to tell them anything. Tell them you’re
thinking about it”. Palmer here is playing TV’s Jim
Hacker from Yes, Prime Minister to a Sir Humphrey-type
bureaucrat. Let’s hope the conversation actually happened
just like that. Pope doesn’t mind admitting that as the skirmishing
heated within the Government, her boss and lover isolated from his
senior Ministers, she became involved. Her distaste for Roger Douglas
and his writer, her counterpart, was intense. *Jeremy’s
review of Raymond Richards’ “Palmer: The Parliamentary
Years” is in Watchdog 126, May 2011, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/26/10.htm.
Ed.
They’re not her only peeves. Although Lange
has the reputation of being a crusader for NZ’s independent
voice in world affairs, Pope thought him “much too considerate
of the pusillanimous poseurs who flourished in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs [MFA]”. MFA was always trying to divert Lange from
anything anti-nuke or anti-ANZUS*. In another context Pope makes
a passing reference to “ever-advancing Communism’”
thus taking at face value a Cold War invention of that same MFA
and its US mentors, so it’s not as if MFA is being critiqued
from the Left. In so many ways Pope was a typical child of her times,
reacting to the big, emotional issues. She was especially upset
at Lange’s release of the Rainbow Warrior bombers into French
custody. Lange’s justification was that any French retaliation
had the potential to worry farmers’ incomes. Pope argued that
MFA could have “cooked up” a threat. *ANZUS =the
Australia, New Zealand, US military treaty that was the foundation
of all New Zealand’s defence and foreign policy from its inception
in 1951 until the US, under President Ronald Reagan, kicked us out
in 1986. It remains in force today, under the same name, but only
between the US and Australia. Ed.
Treasury Subversion
Treasury was another source of angst. In a telling
detail Pope notes that they had about 70 economic advisers, ten
times more than the PM’s staff. That MFA was reactionary is
confirmed in Nicky Hager’s brilliant account, as is its pivotal
role, along with Treasury, in designing neo-liberalism. See my review
of Nicky’s “Other People’s Wars”, above.
When Graham Scott* joined the team as Treasury Secretary the finance
gurus “grew less tolerant of ideological difference. It no
longer attempted to synthesise competing views of economic management.
It disdained opposing views in the economics profession and rewarded
the sympathetic with contracts and consultancies.
“Treasury saw its mandate as extending beyond
economic policy. It took issue with the substance of departmental
proposals, and its officers tried to dictate departmental practice.
It released its reports at the last minute, giving departments no
time to respond. It subverted the Cabinet committee process: a Treasury
proposal opposed by two departments and duly defeated at the Cabinet
Policy Committee was taken by one of the Finance Ministers straight
to Cabinet, where it was decided in Treasury’s favour. Not
even a Cabinet decision might be enough to stop Treasury in its
tracks. It found some new point that demanded Cabinet’s reconsideration
and sent it back”. *For evidence that Scott and his mates
are still up to their old tricks, check my article on the Productivity
Commission, elsewhere in this issue
In retrospect the crippling hostility between Lange
and Douglas looks to have been inevitable. On the one hand, a detached
Prime Minister with little interest in detail and a dislike of intrigue;
on the other, an obsessive Finance Minister with an agenda of his
own. Neither man had what we’ve come to call social intelligence
(quite a few of the Cabinet shared this trait). Communication, at
least in the second term, seems to have been entirely by letter
or through proxies. This aids Pope’s account as she is able
to quote verbatim, and she says that the political revelations are
all on the public record anyway. There are none of those reconstructed
conversations - though the Palmer story is suspect - that lazy authors
imply are literally accurate (they can’t be. Human memory
isn’t that good). Lange wrote, pointing out that a flat tax
gambit from Douglas had “bound the Government either to make
large numbers of low and middle income people ... pay more tax,
or to avoid that by shrinking in arbitrary ways the size of Government.
That is intolerable. Whether or not Ministers should have been able
to work it out, they didn’t, and it was not made clear”.
Douglas’ Attempted Flat Tax King Hit
Lange always gave the impression of being a shrewd
judge of character and motive, if incapable of using his intuitions
to his own advantage, but remarks like this indicate that he had
a surer grasp of policy than has often been assumed. A flat rate
of income tax is a simple way to lighten the load on very rich people.
It’s usually accompanied by a lighter corporate tax rate and
increased GST. Nothing in Douglas’ intentions should be mistaken
as having any motive other than its being a State-sponsored redistribution
of wealth upwards to force a more unequal society. Flat tax proposals
are currently making the rounds among the manic offerings coming
from the US Republicans hoping to run for the Presidency.
The insolence of Douglas’ reply – “You
do not have any mandate from Cabinet, any more than I have, to depart
from the decisions Cabinet made’ - was typical. But Roger
had a deeper purpose. Had he wanted only to establish a regressive
fiscal policy, he needed only to introduce the concept of a flat
tax but, by insisting on an unsustainably low rate, he was hoping
to engineer a coup against social democratic ideals. There wouldn’t
have been enough revenue to maintain social programmes. Lange was
on to him. Even Treasury, the architect of neo-liberalism, made
the same point, advice that Douglas suppressed from the Cabinet.
Usually, though, Treasury routinely played this
same game of denying information. Pope’s access to power reveals
that some Ministers got Treasury’s background papers on the
flat tax the day they were presented. Of the six senior Ministers,
who included Richard Prebble, David Caygill, Michael Bassett and
Mike Moore, only Lange dissented, and in the Labour caucus, only
Michael Cullen did. This doesn’t surprise. Douglas has himself
boasted of how he used speed and a lack of information to bamboozle
colleagues.
In Pope’s telling, as sympathetic an interpretation
as the facts will allow, Lange had seen that the Muldoon economy
he inherited was inefficient and he had to introduce reforms as
the way to head off Treasury’s extremism. Had Government revenue
been enough to sustain public health, education and welfare, he
would have taken Douglas’ medicine. But Douglas wanted to
privatise these core public functions, just as he wanted to flog
off $14 billion’s worth of State assets. Bassett, a core Rogernome
and Lange’s cousin, has apparently written a detailed and
nasty account of Lange’s term in office. Media reports say
that his theme is that Pope was a malign influence on the PM, so
she has reason to want to discredit Bassett. But he’s done
a good job of that himself, with previous vituperative accounts.
Pope says he kept a Cabinet diary, which is not a habit that the
innocent and put-upon are likely to keep. Referring to Lange’s
supporters as “the poison tree”, he let be known that
“’I have a list of them”.
Paranoia, Spite & No Constituency
Paranoia and spite seem to have been the motivating
emotions in the fourth Labour government. In so many ways the senior
Ministers, the personalities on display here, were morally and intellectually
inadequate. Bassett, a key figure in that he has shown a nastiness
that exceeds even Douglas’, regarded Lange as incapable for
all sorts of reasons. Like so many of his colleagues, Bassett betrays
himself to have been short on experience of life as it is lived
beyond the Beehive. Pope reveals Bassett’s contempt for the
Prime Minister on the grounds that he didn’t spend all his
leisure time fussing about strategies or reading political biographies.
Lange, on the other hand, seems to have had no constituency
of the type that successful politicians spend careers cultivating.
He disliked Jim Anderton on his Left flank as much as the schemers
to his Right, in part because Anderton was identified with the radical
tradition within Labour. Pope says that one of Lange’s recurring
complaints was that he had to contend with a “Sydenham Women’s
Collective”. He wouldn’t have managed MMP, the midwife
of the contemporary versions of the Sydenham Women’s Collective,
who have since appeared in Parliament. Pope is dismissive of the
class background of Labour politics and Lange, too, seems to have
had no identification with industrial and employment issues. The
foreign policy stands for which the Government is known were of
no interest to Lange, who typically remarked that “the Labour
Party might as well self-immolate as say goodbye to ANZUS”.
Not much is left. None of the great social democratic traditions
captured Lange’s interest, and neither did most of his colleagues
in the caucus. They were “a unique combination of social misfits
and good people”. Lange drifted into power by accident, the
victim of his wit and oratory and the ambitions of the Auckland
Labour Ministers who wanted a front for Douglas.
by Margaret Pope,
AM Publishing, Auckland, 2011
THE GROWTH SYNDROME: ECONOMIC DESTITUTION
by Derek J Wilson,
2011
Derek Wilson says in his foreword that his first
memory is of travelling in 1925 on a horse-drawn wagon to a farm
in the Wairarapa through a countryside that seemed idyllic. So he’s
been around. Over the last 23 years of a long life he’s put
out ten books, all passionate about the fate of our planet. Here
Wilson sketches the links between environmental issues, militarism
and the economy. It’s a useful introduction to a progressive
take on our world and its woes; complete with references to some
key background sources.
The booklet can be downloaded from the author’s
Website at www.derekjwilson.co.nz
Non-Members:It takes a lot
of work to compile and write the material presented on these pages - if
you value the information, please send a donation to the address below to
help us continue the work.
Foreign Control Watchdog, P O Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand/Aotearoa. August 2008.
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