General Vo Nguyen Giap, the media and public opinion.

General Giap was a brilliant, highly respected leader of the North Vietnam military. The following quote is from his memoirs currently found in the Vietnam war memorial in Hanoi:

"What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!"

General Giap has published his memoirs and confirmed what most Americans knew. The Vietnam war was not lost in Vietnam -- it was lost at home. The exact same slippery slope, sponsored by the US media, is currently well underway. It exposes the enormous power of a biased media to cut out the heart and will of the American public.

A truism worthy of note: Do not fear the enemy, for they can take only your life. Fear the media far more, for they will destroy your honour.


Dear All,

I have always believed the words of Giap are true. The cause of our failure was the media and of course helped by the left

Tragically we are heading this way now in Iraq, and for the same reasons.

Digger James


Hello

The above brief comment is by "Digger" James who lost a leg fighting against the communists in Korea. He subsequently studied medicine and became a doctor.

The aim of war is to destroy the enemy's will to fight. It must be primarily a psychological effort that is achieved by the application of force; it may be overwhelming force applied for a very short period of time to achieve a large psychological effect, eg Hiroshima; or, a small military effort applied over a long period, eg the IRA that eventually brought the English to negotiate.

In Vietnam the aim was not to win, eg by beating hell out of North Vietnam because we thought that was unethical. The aim was to stop losing. That was not a winnable strategy. I you choose war, it must be uncompromising, and in the West, that means you had better have a good moral case.

Recent evidence from Iraq suggests that the Iraqis were killing each other at a rate causing psychological weariness that they do not wish to endure until after the next US elections when there is no guarantee of a US withdrawal.

(This post was supplied by a friend who served for many years in the Australian army. Thanks AP).

Productivity takes a political beating

Alan Wood: The Australian - Wednesday, June 20, 2007

ELECTION years are notable for the trivialisation of important policy issues, and lots of bad ideas for dealing with them. It would be hard to find a betterexample than the present political Punch and Judy show over productivity.

There is no doubting the importance of productivity to our national prosperity. As US economist Paul Krugman wrote in his 1992 book The Age of Diminished Expectations: “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.”

Why? Because “a country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker” (one definition of productivity). In short, it makes us all richer.

Most people find this appealing, the exception being our self-proclaimed intellectual Left, who regard our economic prosperity as a source of universal unhappiness. So let me quote two other distinguished US economists, Alan Blinder and William Baumol: “Nothing contributes more (than productivity) to reduction in poverty, to increases in leisure, and to the country’s ability to finance education, public health, environment and the arts.” Worth having, surely?

Whether anything worthwhile will result from the present political debate on productivity is much less obvious. At the moment it is Kevin Rudd who is being discomforted over his flaky performance when quizzed about productivity on the ABC’s AM program last Thursday.

His embarrassment has been increased by the leaking of a briefing note on productivity, written by his advisers the next day. They obviously shared the view that Rudd was floundering, and also exposed a couple of painful truths Rudd has been blissfully ignorant of.

One is that Australia’s weaker productivity performance in recent years has been influenced by the fact that we have been very successful in creating new jobs and cutting unemployment. As unemployment has dropped, lower-productivity workers have been drawn into the labour force, lowering our productivity performance.

Does Labor think this is bad news? Surely not, and the impact on productivity is only short-term anyway.

Another is that there is good reason to think productivity is on the rise. I am not talking about the lift in productivity in the past two sets of national accounts; it can hop around a lot. But there is a more fundamental factor at work.

For several years we have been seeing record levels of investment, driven by the mining industry. But in the initial stage, which lasts some years, a lot of labour is employed in construction before any output comes on stream, which sharply lowers national productivity, as the Productivity Commission has shown.

We are reaching the stage where this will turn around and output (exports) rises sharply as the temporary construction employment falls, leading to a probably sharp rise in productivity. That is, we will finally see the productivity reward from the rapid rise in our capital stock in recent years.

As for trivialisation of the productivity debate, we need look no further than the other hot political issue: broadband. Rudd frequently claims Labor’s plans to extend high-speed broadband to 98 per cent of Australians is crucial to improving the nation’s productivity performance. It is, he says, a vital piece of infrastructure, or as he told the ALP’s national conference in April: “In the 19th century, nation builders laid out the railway network. In the 21st century nation builders are laying out high-speed broadband networks.”

This is surely enough to give anybody familiar with Australia’s economic history pause for thought. The railways were a great way of opening up the nation, but their contribution to our national productivity performance was sadly diminished by the fact that the states all decided to have a different rail gauge.

There is no argument that the telecommunications revolution is a big part of the new global economy story. But what will spreading higher-speed broadband across the nation do?

The ability to download movies, music, internet scams and pornography faster isn’t going to add much to national productivity.

For those who really want it, faster broadband than the 12megabits per second being promised by Labor (and the Government) is already available.

Arguments can be made on other grounds, such as social or equity ones, but not on serious economic grounds. It’s just another handout to the bush on top of the billions already transferred from urban taxpayers by vote-hungry politicians.

Any government or Opposition serious about boosting productivity through telecommunications would have broken up Telstra and focused on increasing competitive forces in the industry to make broadband access much cheaper and a wider range of technology options available.

Labor wanted to retain the bloated Testra monopoly, created by Kim Beazley to keep the unions happy, in government hands, and the Howard Government was too eager to boost Testra’s share price and votes in the bush to break it up before sale.

Not much evidence of a political class interested in productivity improvement here. The only obvious virtue of the Howard Government’s scheme is that it wastes less public money.

But the most serious blow to Rudd’s credibility on productivity is Labor’s policy to roll back reform of Australia’s labour market. Labour market flexibility has a vital role to play in improving our productivity performance.

So far Labor’s concession to criticism of Julia Gillard’s push to restore union power and influence has been to promise to do it in 2010 instead of immediately. It isn’t credible policy.

The national tragedy behind this productivity stoush is that Rudd is right; Australia’s long-term productivity performance is a matter of enormous importance.

And it is true the Howard Government has not had a sufficiently voracious appetite for economic reform, although Labor has to share the blame because of its constant opposition to reforms that have been put forward.

There is no mystery about the reforms needed: water, electricity, transport, education, skills. Both sides are putting forward new policies they claim will address them, but will they?

Not if present performance is any guide. Progress on the Council of Australian Governments’ national reform agenda in all these areas is a bad joke. A national approach is needed, but instead we have constant conflict between the federal Government and the states, where the national interest too often runs a poor second to state parochialism. Whoever wins government this year is going to have to sort out Australia’s ailing federation if we are to lift our long-term productivity performance.

In Iraq, the US has failed to heed Woodrow Wilson's lesson of self-determination.

After 4 weeks' travel through the USA in April and May, this was the best newspaper article I saw on the Iraq issue. It's well worth reading and shows that the US can be self critical.

AN ERRANT PUSH FOR DEMOCRACY FIRST

In Iraq, the US has failed to heed Woodrow Wilson's lesson of self-determination. Instead, dysfunctional borders merely cement foreign policy failures of the past.

By Ralph Peters

Perhaps the worst of the countless mistakes the Bush administration has made in its attempt to open the Middle East to democracy was the rush to hold elections in Iraq before questions of ethnic and reli­gious identity had been resolved.

We confuse the will of the people with democracy, but the latter is a tool, the first a passion. Democracy, as we know it, presumes a national community of in­terests. The lust for self-determination - as manifested by the various factions in artificial states such as Iraq -seeks the supremacy of an exclusive group.

Humans can't be chided into "just getting along."

Because the administration and its partners lacked the vision and fortitude to dismantle Iraq and draw more promising borders for Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, the series of elections in which Iraqis braved terror to go to the polls had nothing to do with strengthening a nation and everything to do with empowering ethnic supremacists and religious demagogues.

Dismissed as a naive dreamer by the Washington es­tablishment, President Woodrow Wilson got it right nine decades ago: Significant population groups who possess (or assert) a unique identity must be given a chance at statehood.

Not all new states will succeed and frontier revisions will never be perfectly just, but the violence-spawning Conditions we face today - thanks to dysfunctional borders drawn for European advantage — will only worsen until men and women from Darfur through Kurdistan and Baluchistan to the Karenese in Burma enjoy the right to state, "I am X, this is my land, and this is my flag." We seek to reason with those pos­sessed by a dream. It never works.

'Failed borders'

For 500 years, Europe deformed the world. The iro­ny of our times is that the United States, history's greatest force for freedom, spent the years since 1991 maintaining failed borders drawn by the ministers of kaisers, czars and kings. We have dug our trenches on die wrong side of history.

By attempting to leapfrog over the issue of ethnic and religious self-determination in Iraq, we guaran­teed that each successive election would reflect em­battled identities, rather than common national in­terests. Until more-rational borders have been established, attempts at democracy throughout the developing world will continue to follow the African model, in which the largest tribe or religious group dominates the election, then perceives its victory as a license to loot the entire country.

Resolve the issues of identity and land; then vote. Otherwise, we will continue to get ramshackle pseudo-democracies that rely for their survival on our troops, our money and our ability to rationalize failure.

While democracy remains a noble - and wise - long-term goal, we need to master that great Ameri­can weakness, impatience. Democracy takes time: it's a grapevine, not a weed. Elections work best in two polar-opposite types of states: Those, such as the USA, where no single group can dominate and political par­ties rely upon fluid coalitions reflecting shifting in­terests, and those, such as Norway, where homoge­neous populations vote strictly on issues, not over ethnicity or faith. The many countries in between those poles are the problem.

Admittedly, a people's self-determination doesn't guarantee a smooth transition to democracy. The try-it-out phases of self-rule in a newly minted state can produce anything from ethnic fascism to a religious junta. But populations have to make their own mis­takes and learn from them. Democracy is self-taught.

We have to face a fundamental question: Can de­mocracy be "given," rather than learned?

Democracy is progressing around the world, but that progress is not without setbacks. Sudden free­dom can be as terrifying as it is exhilarating. In states such as Russia, voters accept the curtailment of politi­cal freedom in return for greater social freedoms and a sense of security. Even established democracies, such as Venezuela's, may vote for strongmen who despise the ballot box.

Expedience wins out

Two bipartisan failings in Washington hinder our ef­forts to help others achieve democracy: first, our blind acceptance of the world order left behind by collapsed European empires, and second, our prompt default to oppressive regimes in the name of maintaining stabil­ity. Even now, many on both sides of the aisle in Wash­ington advise a retreat into the embrace of the Saudi royal family and despots such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak - precisely the approach that put us on the path to 9/11.

We consistently choose the expedient option over the more difficult, but ultimately more promising, course in foreign policy. Without self-determination for major population groups that feel themselves wronged by history, we shall continue to fall short of our noblest goals.

Of course, amending borders to recognize Wilson's dream can't be done by the United States alone, nor need we pursue such a policy aggressively. It would be an enormous step forward if we only grasped opportu­nities to redraw faulty borders as they come - we threw away a great chance in Iraq. But we cannot go on standing on history's beach commanding the massive waves to freeze in place.

Those in Washington who have career-long stakes in the dysfunctional global order will insist that change is too hard, that small or landlocked states cannot sur­vive, that smaller minorities inevitably would be slighted. The reasons for clinging to the past are always legion - and usually wrong.

Until the remaining nations-without-a-state are al­lowed to assert their identities, elections will continue to be about bloodlines and faith, not democracy as we cherish it.

Ralph Peters is a member of USA TODAY'S board of contributors and the author, most recently, of Never Quit The Fight. This article was published on April 18, 2007

The Scare Campaign Against Recycled Sewage Water Continues

The West Australian newspaper dominates the state's media. It can make or break an issue or a person, regardless of the accuracy or validity of the criticism or cause which it has chosen to champion. On occasion, the paper appears to chose its subjects with sales targets in mind, rather than reasonable justification for its particular slant.

In The West recently, Yasmine Phillips wrote an article warning that recycled water could contain chemicals that posed a risk to human health. It wasn't a big article but, located in a prominent position on page 3 (a right hand page), many people would have seen it. Its provocative headline - Experts warn on recycled water - would then have encouraged most people to read it. Sadly, as shown below, the experts that Ms Phillips was quoting appear to have made a fundamentally incorrect assumption about the way that recycled water would be treated in Western Australia prior to human consumption. My email to Yasmine - see below - received the following unhelpful response:

Hello Bernie,

I appreciate your comments regarding my article.Unfortunately due to space constraints, my article was cut during the editing process.Thank you very much for your explanation.

Kind regards,

Yasmine Phillips

Journalist

Is this a case of The West deliberately scaremongering, knowing that recycled sewage water is one of the highest priority potential sources of future drinking water supplies for Perth? I guess it's a case of "watch this space .... in The West"!

Dear Yasmine,

I read your article in Thursday's West expressing concerns about some of the contaminants in recycled water. Can I ask that you investigate their concerns further because I believe they and you have made an incorrect assumption about what is meant by recycled water.

In fact, there are two general types of recycled water. The first is water that leaves a sewerage treatment plant after what one would consider 'normal' treatment - as applies here in WA - and then is put back into the hydrological cycle, i.e. is discharged to a river or ocean. In this situation, the presence of undesirable and potentially harmful contaminants - in particular endocrine disruptors which your article describes as pharmaceutical products - can be significant and of genuine concern to human health.

However, the second type of recycled water is where water from a sewerage treatment plant is subjected to reserve osmosis (RO) filtration, the same process that is used in WA's seawater desalination plant. In this situation, the filtration plus several other treatments that are applied to the water before it is allowed to be drunk removes all of the contaminants that might be present in the non-RO treated water.

To understand why I am so confident of this statement, can I ask that you consider what happens to water when it is subjected to RO. Under high pressure, the water is squeezed through such a fine filter that the molecules of sodium and chlorine - the common salt that makes seawater salty - cannot pass through the pores. Only the much smaller water molecules can pass through. When you use RO on sewerage water, all the large molecules including the

endocrine disruptors (which are dozens to hundreds of times larger than a water molecule) are left behind with the salt; only water molecules are able to pass through the filter pores.

The Singapore government and the Orange County Water Board in southern California both use RO and between them they provide recycled water to several million people. All other recycled water in the USA and UK is not subjected to RO treatment.

My understanding is that the Water Corporation's proposal to use Perth's sewerage water for drinking purposes includes RO treatment. On this basis, the concerns by your quoted experts are almost totally overcome.

Regards

Bernie Masters

RENEWABLE ENERGY - the article that Crikey chose not to publish.

History repeats itself when we don't learn the lessons of the past. Yes, we have some renewable energy technologies that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions right now but let's take a reality check.

First, there is nothing that the world can do today that will make any difference to the changes of climate that will occur over the next decade or two. We've been putting out too much CO2 and methane for too many years to be able to make an instant difference. So let's focus on the long term solutions and on what we can do to minimise the impacts of the climate change that will occur no matter what.

Second, some existing technologies are simply not economic to implement. Why waste billions of dollars on high cost or problematic solutions when promising lines of research of new technologies (new PV strips as seen recently on the ABC's Catalyst program) and carbon sequestration (not just clean coal) suggest better and more workable solutions are just a few years away?

Third, the most important and cheapest action that can be taken right now is not the use of renewable energy or clean coal but being more efficient with the energy that we're already producing. It's not an emotionally attractive solutions like some others but it's the one that can be implemented immediately and cheaply. Savings in energy usage of 30% or more are readily available in almost every energy-using situation around the globe at costs that provide a pay-back period of only a few years. Solar hot water systems are one of the best examples, with pay-back periods of 5 to 7 years and an 80% or more reduction in energy required to heat most domestic and commercial situations.

Yes, we have to install more renewable energy facilities into Australia as suggested by Crikey's correspondent Sophie Black (March 13, 2007). But she wants our taxpayer dollars to be provided in large amounts to do this - Mandatory Renewable Energy Targets or MRETs for example - yet she criticises the federal government for wanting to use public funds to make coal more environmentally friendly.

As for BP who claim to be greener than green these days and leading the charge to more renewable energy production, I'll believe their 'holier than thou' statements when they stop selling the product that is the primary cause of our global warming problems: liquid fossil fuels.

The bottom line is that ALL governments must consider ALL options carefully, assist in the funding of ALL technologies that offer promise - picking winners is poor public policy - and inform the public what ALL the options are. At present, no political party or lobby group has put forward a credible and comprehensive package which addresses all the issues, including the need to mitigate the next 20 or more years of climate changes which are unavoidable.

MOVING BEYOND KYOTO

This is the third article by Jeffrey Sachs that I've copied from Scientific American and published on this blog site. For an American, he seems to make an enormous amount of sense. Maybe the next US president will listen to him more.

To seriously address the issue of global climate change, policymakers need to establish a framework that extends through the end of the century.

By JEFFREY D. SACHS

Late in 2006, several events moved the U.S. and other countries closer to serious global negotiations to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is therefore timely to ask what a meaningful global agreement would entail. A solid starting point is the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that binds countries to act on the problem and under which specific measures, such as the Kyoto Protocol, are adopted. The signatories to the Framework Convention, including the U.S. and almost all other countries, declared the objective to be the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level which would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [man-made] interference with the climate system." The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in 1997, did not implement this idea very well: it took a short-term view of a long-term objective and as a result lost clarity, credibility and support along the way. The key now is to move beyond it.

The Kyoto Protocol calls on the high-income countries and the post-communist nations of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to reduce their GHG emissions as of 2012 by around 6 percent compared with the 1990 level. This commitment is far better than nothing (a fair description of the Bush administration's non-policy), but it has two major flaws. First, it leaves out the developing countries, which soon will emit more than half of the world's GHGs. Without the active participation of China, India and other developing countries, stabilization of emissions is simply impossible. Second, the Kyoto Protocol takes the long-term objective of stabilization of GHG concentrations and transforms it into a short-term target on emissions reductions, with no clear link between the two. The main actions for stabilization will have to be long-term changes in technology, which exceed the 2012 horizon of the Kyoto Protocol.

This time around, it is better to start with a long-term view. "Dangerous anthropogenic interference" will most likely kick in when carbon concentrations in the atmosphere are at 450 to 550 parts per million (ppm). The world's current trajectory of energy use, deforestation and industrial growth could easily take us to twice that range by the end of the century. The Stern Review, an excellent new report by the U.K. Treasury, makes clear that the consequences could be catastrophic: melting of ice sheets, with a huge rise of ocean levels; massive crop failures; increased transmission of diseases; and potentially calamitous effects on ecosystem services.

The world should therefore agree to stabilize GHG concentrations in the 450 to 550 range (my esteemed colleague Jim Hansen urges the lower end of the range, others the higher end). A mid-century goal, perhaps 50 ppm lower, would provide a 40-year target consistent with the end-century target. As new scientific evidence arises, the goals would be periodically adjusted. With the two long-term anchors set, the world's governments could then agree on strategies for reaching them. These strategies would include market incentives to reduce emissions; greatly expanded research on sustainable energy use, land use and industrial development; and technology transfers from rich to poor countries.

The Stern Review makes clear that the costs of such control will be far lower than the costs of inaction. Low-cost, high-benefit efforts look promising in at least three major areas: improved energy efficiency, energy technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and sustainable land use. Smart technologies can probably keep the long-term annual costs of GHG stabilization at below 1 percent of global GDP. Rich countries can help poor countries to adopt the needed technologies.

It is time, therefore, to aim for a sensible long-term framework in which all countries will participate. The economics are right. The U.S. Congress is set to back such a course. The White House will as well, soon after 2008 and, with some luck, even before.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Scientific American, February 2007