Monday, December 20, 2004
SELF-APPOINTED INTELLIGENTSIA MANNE
Robert Manne is sad:
For the left-leaning political intelligentsia, 2004 was a peculiarly dispiriting year.
This group - in which I now include myself - has continued to believe that truth in government matters. In the week following the Scrafton incident, the Coalition’s electoral stocks actually rose.
The left-leaning intelligentsia remains concerned about the fate of the thousands of mainly Iraqi and Afghan refugees on temporary visas, who live in a daily purgatory and, even more, about the suffering of the dozens of mainly Iranian asylum seekers who have been gradually going mad as a result of their indefinite incarceration for the past five to six years.
No word on how long Manne has been imprisoned. I wonder if he’s noticed that policies pursued by Bush, Blair, and Howard have permitted three million Afghan refugees to return home since 2002.
Even stranger is the question of the invasion of Iraq. It is now clear beyond argument that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction; that it posed no danger to its neighbours, let alone to the West; and that since the invasion tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed while daily life has descended into a truly Hobbesian hell. Nevertheless, despite all this, Iraq barely rated a mention in the election campaign. Compared to truly serious matters, such as the domestic economy, the broad public frankly did not give a damn about our role in the origin of the Iraq tragedy.
The “Iraq tragedy”; Manne thinks it began with Saddam’s removal.