Mission & Justice

Jeremy Pearcel 7/7/08

Arthur William Galston; Agent Orange Researcher; 1920 — 15-6-2008

Arthur Galston, a Yale plant biologist who did early research that helped lead to the herbicide Agent Orange, and who then helped raise awareness of the US military’s use of it in Vietnam in the 1960s and its devastating effects on river ecosystems, has died of heart failure in Hamden, Connecticut. He was 88. In letters, academic papers, broadcasts and seminars, Galston described the environmental damage wrought by Agent Orange and travelled to South Vietnam to monitor its impact. From 1962 to 1970, US troops released about 76 million litres of the chemical defoliant to destroy crops and expose Vietcong positions and routes of movement. Galston asserted that harm to trees and plant species could continue perhaps for decades. He pointed out that spraying Agent Orange on riverbank mangroves in Vietnam was eliminating “one of the most important ecological niches for the completion of the life cycle of certain shellfish and migratory fish”.

(more…)

Phillip Adams; 5/7/08

Pour enough blood, tears and testosterone (or oil) into the dry and dusty dunes of the Greater Middle East and you create the quicksand that’s been swallowing mighty armies for millennia. The glorious Greeks came to grief there, as did the roaming Romans and the Christian Crusaders. More recent importers of military might that sank into the sand included the French, the British and the Russians. Now, learning nothing, the Americans (with the Brits and us in tow) have sunk deeper and faster. The US might have fared better under a President as arrogant and ignorant as George W. Bush - someone who knows little of geography and less of history - had he not been surrounded and dominated by others as dangerously stupid. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld bolstering Bush? That triumvirate made the Three Stooges look like intellectual giants and have doomed the next presidency. Whoever wins will be bogged to the axles in not one but two un-winnable wars.

(more…)

Emily Wilson; 5/7/08; Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard University Press).

The Roman Triumph; Mary Beard; Harvard University Press
Everybody above the age of four knows how important it is not to be a sore loser, and how difficult. When you lose your whole fortune to your sister at Monopoly, you are not supposed to burst into tears, accuse her of cheating, hit her, tear up the paper dollars or run screaming from the room. You are supposed to be gracious in defeat: congratulate the winner, allow her to enjoy her victory, stifle your sorrow and pretend not to mind too much.It is perhaps unfair that the moral and emotional burden of the situation should fall on tie one who has suffered defeat, but the same rules apply beyond the playroom. Even in war, when winning and losing is a matter of life or death, we still hang on to the unrealistic hope that the losing nation will do the decent thing, that it will accept defeat with good grace rather than fighting back with terrorism or breaking up into civil war.

(more…)

Sian Powell; 5/7/08

The girl in Sierra Leone’s Freetown spends all her time caring for her baby, a child born of violent rape. The adolescent in southern Afghanistan has finally begun to learn to read, but she is terrified because her school has been bombed. The young woman from Darfur, in Sudan, sexually assaulted by four men, disdained by her father and left to weep in a tent, is psychologically scarred beyond imagining. The girl living in a tent camp near East Timor’s Dili airport mourns her child, born in the hills and dead of untended medical complications. Like more than 200 million others, all these girls and young women live in war zones or troubled post-war zones. All have been traumatised beyond the ordinary vicissitudes of conflict simply because they were female. Apart from the standard stream of war stories, little publicity has been given to their plight, which not only entails common horrors of war, such as the physical danger, the hunger, the fear, but also those disasters peculiar to females: rape as a war crime, early marriages of convenience, giving birth without access to child care. If girls and women endure discrimination during times of peace, it is doubled in times of war.

(more…)

Emily Wilson; 5/7/08; Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard University Press).

The Roman Triumph; Mary Beard; Harvard University Press
Everybody above the age of four knows how important it is not to be a sore loser, and how difficult. When you lose your whole fortune to your sister at Monopoly, you are not supposed to burst into tears, accuse her of cheating, hit her, tear up the paper dollars or run screaming from the room. You are supposed to be gracious in defeat: congratulate the winner, allow her to enjoy her victory, stifle your sorrow and pretend not to mind too much.It is perhaps unfair that the moral and emotional burden of the situation should fall on tie one who has suffered defeat, but the same rules apply beyond the playroom. Even in war, when winning and losing is a matter of life or death, we still hang on to the unrealistic hope that the losing nation will do the decent thing, that it will accept defeat with good grace rather than fighting back with terrorism or breaking up into civil war.

(more…)

Editorial 2/7/08

The invasion of Iraq has turned into a disaster. The US should not heed those who are now urging a pre-emptive strike on Iran. In the sabre-rattling and tub-thumping aftermath to the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, President George Bush famously decried the existence of an “axis of evil”, linking North Korea, Iran and Iraq. The last member in this alleged triad, as the world knows only too well, was dealt with by an invasion and occupation that have resulted in the greatest debacle in American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. The first has recently been dropped from the Bush blacklist and gained the prospect of aid for disclosing details of its nuclear programs. But the third, Iran, continues to possess a pariah status, and is the subject of rumours and veiled threats of military action, by the US, Israel or both, which are alarmingly reminiscent of the rhetoric used in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The latest round of war talk arises from a report in the New Yorker by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, based in large part on information from sources close to Vice-President Dick Cheney, and describing an expansion of US covert operations in Iran.

(more…)

Dewi Cooke; 28/6/08

Women and girls are often caught in the crossfire of conflict, violated by men who have the power to do so. A new report argues  legal changes to protect them are crucial in the fight against poverty. Young women occupy a strange space in most cultures. As mothers, sisters and daughters, their strength and resilience help hold their communities together. But in times of war they are often the first and most vulnerable targets. That is how it was for Bintu and Rumenia. Bintu is from Liberia, where she was captured by rebels during the civil war. Rumenia is from East Timor and lost her 20-year-old older brother in the 2006 uprising when he was shot outside her family home.

(more…)

26/6/08

An Australian mining company says it will sue the Papua New Guinean Government for $3 billion after it was denied an exploration licence for a site near the Kokoda Trail. The Perth-based company Frontier Resources yesterday confirmed that the PNG Mining Minister, Puka Temu, had refused to renew its Mount Kodu licence. Planned work at the site would have threatened parts of the track, where 600 Australian soldiers died fighting the Japanese during World War II. In a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange, Frontier said it would seek to recover $3.2 million in exploration expenditure, in addition to “lost potential future profit” close to $3 billion.

(more…)

Frank Brennan; 24/6/08

Kevin Rudd visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on his first prime ministerial visit to Japan this month, the first serving Western leader to do so. His critics were outraged. Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt subscribed to the theory that ‘to visit is to encourage the offensive notion that the Japanese were victims of a western crime, and not of their own insane militarism’. The time has come to admit the Japanese were the victims of both. The US response to Japan’s insane militarism was, to quote the Second Vatican Council, ‘a crime against God and man himself’.

(more…)

20/6/08

Wars around the globe killed three times more people during the second half of the 20th century than previously estimated, according to a study released on Friday. Some 5.4 million deaths caused by armed conflicts occurred between 1955 and 2003 in 13 nations surveyed, ranging from a low of 7000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo to 3.8 million killed in Vietnam. Previous research, based on media reports or before-and-after census figures, have tended to severely underestimate war-related fatalities among both combatants and civilians, the new study argues. These so-called “passive” reports “are typically the only ones available during ongoing conflicts, and represent the most commonly cited sources for government and other estimates of war casualties, as in the current war in Iraq,” notes the study, published in the British Medical Journal. The number of civilian casualties in Iraq remains sharply contested, with some studies estimating the death toll at 10 times the figure given by the US military.

(more…)