On the subject of Bush's cronies, his new ambassador to New Zealand has been causing quite a stir in Wellington. You may be interested in this editorial from the Dominion Post, the Wellington daily newspaper (and New Zealand's main political paper.) The editorial can also be found at http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/dominionpost/0,2106,3478676a6483,00.html

We'll leave it, thanks Bill

15 November 2005

It is a sure bet that new United States ambassador Bill McCormick will realise soon that the treaty is called Anzus, not Anzoo.

What is less certain is that he will realise his brusque approach is not the way to repair the rifts the dispute over that treaty opened in the relationship between the US and New Zealand.

Mr McCormick got his job because he is a deep-pocketed Republican Party supporter, not because he is an astute diplomat dispatched from Washington with an eye to finishing the unfinished business of the shattered Anzus alliance in a way that is satisfactory to both New Zealand and the US.

His approach in his first news conference was to suggest there would be no movement in the relationship without a change to New Zealand's anti-nuclear legislation, and to chide New Zealand for not taking part in the invasion of Iraq.

Mr McCormick is at pains to say New Zealand should make its own decisions on the nuclear issue, but it is clear he regards the impasse as New Zealand's problem.

It is that kind of take-it-or-leave-it approach that has contributed to the image of the US as a swaggering superpower, strutting the world in the expectation that small countries such as New Zealand will simply fall into line.

Mr McCormick boldly states "every intelligence network knew this fellow had weapons of mass destruction". He is wrong. Intelligence analysts may have suspected that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but they clearly did not know � otherwise the weapons would surely have been found by now. Two US inquiries, by a Senate committee and a presidential commission, found that the threat posed by Iraq's weapon programmes had been inflated, but stopped short of saying political pressure was responsible. The Bush administration's other reason for going to war was that there were links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. There is no evidence of that, either, with the CIA reluctant to buy into that view even before the war was launched.

New Zealand has shown itself willing to stand with the US and other Western countries when the evidence is there � its troops helped topple the Taleban in Afghanistan. It has also proved willing to help in Iraq, sending engineers under a United Nations Security Council resolution to assist in reconstruction. In short, it is willing to put its troops in harm's way if it believes the cause is justified.

What it is not willing to do, much to US displeasure, is blindly embark on foreign adventures that are dubious ethically and ill-conceived strategically. New Zealand followed the US into the quagmire of Vietnam. Wisely, it has not repeated that folly in Iraq.

There is little doubt that it has paid a price for its stance, but that price is more affordable than it might have been without US hypocrisy. Canberra has a free-trade deal, Wellington does not. However, the deal Australia has is severely limited by the US administration's pandering to domestic political interests with a policy of protectionism, despite its trumpeting of the virtues of open markets.

New Zealand and the US have a long-standing friendship. But friendship does not and should not mean blind allegiance. A more experienced diplomat than Mr McCormick would know that.

The whole Bush administration is simply the biggest bunch of Thieves, Pimps and Racetrack Touts to come down the pike and set up shop in DC in the last 100 years. You can smell the fascism emanating from downtown all the way out at NSA HQ in Anne Arundel county. I know as I drive past Ft. Meade twice every day.