{"id":4451,"date":"2012-08-16T09:58:17","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T09:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=4451"},"modified":"2012-08-16T09:58:17","modified_gmt":"2012-08-16T09:58:17","slug":"you-have-to-make-the-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2012\/08\/you-have-to-make-the-case\/","title":{"rendered":"You have to make the case!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former conservative Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (who, by the by, has long been an admirer of Ayn Rand), together with former Secretary of the Australian Commonwealth Department for Defence, Paul Barratt, and former Australian Defence Forces Chief, General Peter Gration, has called<\/a> for a public inquiry regarding the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.\u00a0\u00a0 As I noted at the time<\/a>, what was truly remarkable was the complete unwillingness of any of the principal decision-makers\u00a0 – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair or Howard – to publicly justify their decision, a decision taken before August 2002, until very late in the day.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So severe was this reticence on John Howard’s part that the Australian Senate – for the first and so far only time in its history – passed a censure\u00a0 motion against the Prime Minister for his refusal to explain or justify his decision.\u00a0 It seems that Fraser, Barratt, Gration, et al.<\/em>, are still waiting for those particular dogs to bark.
\nAs I said at the time<\/a>, there could be good and compelling reasons for a Government to not publicly justify a military decision.\u00a0 If so, one would have expected the principals at least to explain the reasons for their reticence to other friendly Governments, even if only in private.\u00a0 It is noteworthy then to recall Joschka Fischer’s public beration of Donald Rumsfeld:\u00a0 “You have to make the case!<\/em>” (video here<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0 Even the German Foreign Minister, it seems, could not be trusted by the decision-makers with either an explanation of the invasion decision or an explanation as to why no explanation could be given.\u00a0 After all this time of dogs still quiet, one is led increasingly to the conclusion that the real reason for the decision was something that ill-behooved or shamed the decision-makers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former conservative Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (who, by the by, has long been an admirer of Ayn Rand), together with former Secretary of the Australian Commonwealth Department for Defence, Paul Barratt, and former Australian Defence Forces Chief, General Peter Gration, has called for a public inquiry regarding the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,35,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decision-theory","category-history","category-politics","p1","y2012","m08","d16","h09"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}