What's an Aussie Anyway?

Or here's another title: why I feel sorry for Jana Pittman.

Those of you who aren't Australian might not know who Jana Pittman is. She's the 400 meters hurdles World Champion, currently being subjected to a good old fashioned Australian tall-poppy syndrome lynching. If you are Australian, and a sports fan, you'll probably know this all too well.

Well anyway, poor Jana, having had many dramas (and earned the nickname 'Jana Drama') thought she'd finally gotten over her difficult relationship with ordinary Australians when she won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in front of 80,000 screaming Melbournians and a TV audience of millions. Then she went to a nightclub to show off her gold medal, and this happened.

Well, this is why I don't go to nightclubs, because they're usually full of pricks. But there's something else going on here, something that's puzzled me about my home country for quite some time. Australians like to laud themselves as the most laid back people on Earth, which is possibly true... but the actions of so many Australians towards people like Jana (she sure as hell isn't the first to get this treatment) seem incredibly self-important. As statements go, 'I hate you for no particular reason and want to make you cry' is about as stuck-up, selfish and immature as is possible to get. So what's happening here? Are we Aussies really so inclusive and friendly after all? Or are we really, under the facade of mateship and fair go, just a pack of wankers?

So okay... what makes Australians, including myself, feel so proud to be Australian? Mostly, I think it's a bunch of characteristics that are largely related. Informality, for one. Also at the Commonwealth Games, my basketball girls not only got to snog the Prime Minister, they called him 'Johnny'. Can't get much more informal than that. Which is connected to all the other things -- we don't take ourselves too seriously, we think nationalism is kind of ridiculous and best done with a smile, a beer and tongue-firmly-in-cheek, we like people who think of others more than themselves, and we distrust enormous egos. We embrace the word 'ordinary'. At Australian funerals, there are few epithets more affectionately delivered than 'he was just an ordinary bloke'. That tells you something, I think.

So along comes a person like Jana Pittman. She's a pro-athlete. She's very driven, very serious, and very self-important. It's a character-type pretty common in sports, especially individual sports, where everything is about you because everything IS. That's the sport, from early morning to late evening, the whole day is about ME ME ME, because that's the dedication and self-attention it takes to get to the top. It's not a team sport, there's not someone else who can do part of it for you. It's just you, and self-centeredness is a part of the job description. Now of course there are many athletes who can do this while still earning an Aussie crowd's love... but Jana has the disadvantage of also being a social-dyslexic. Meaning she really just doesn't get it, the same way a kid with Asperger's Syndrome just doesn't get it. It's called social skills, the instinctive ability to know what people think of you, and why, and how to change your behavior to affect outcomes. Some people are really good at this, to the point that everyone loves them, despite them actually being assholes. And some people are really bad at it, and manage to make lots of people dislike them despite being good people, while having no idea what they've done wrong and desperately wanting everyone to love them. That's Jana.

I sympathise because to some extent, it's also me. Some of the time anyway. Clearly I'm not as bad as Jana, because I know enough to be able to cringe when I see her interviews, and see her prattle on so earnestly about her plans and dreams and goals and achievements... not because she annoys me, but because I can just see how she'll annoy other people. Other Australians, who just don't like anyone sounding like they think themselves important or something. But Jana just blunders into it, as blind as a fly into a funnelweb's lair, deeper and deeper.

It shouldn't happen, because of course, Australians are all so easy-going, so laid back, so forgiving... yeah, right. You can make this great list of wonderful qualities that your average mythical Australian is supposed to possess, and they're largely true. But this becomes nationalism, and nationalism is exclusive. It's a club, and in this club, we have rules. You must conform to the rules, or you're out. Never mind that one of those rules is supposed to be about how we don't give a stuff about rules and how everyone's invited... it doesn't matter, any rule forcefully applied becomes exclusive, even if it was intended to be inclusive.

And thus, a bunch of people who fancy themselves to be easy-going, egalitarian and good humored, in attempting to enforce those qualities as compulsory membership rules, end up acting like a bunch of priggish, stuck up, puritan, judgmental snobs -- in other words, like everything Australians once professed to hate about the elitist British upper classes, and defined ourselves in opposition AGAINST. Crazy, huh? But human behavior is circular. That means that if you run far enough away from a paricular form of behaviour, you'll eventually find yourself right back where you started, every time. That's why Socialists who hated fascists ended up acting just like them in the USSR, and vice-versa in Nazi Germany. It's all just different expressions of the same human thing, and we're all stuck in the circle.

The enemy here, of course, is exclusivity. You're not allowed in. You're different. I hate you for being different, because you make me feel insecure. Because I am insecure. I must pound on you to make myself feel better, and that at least despite my insecurities, I'm not getting pounded, and you are. That will allow me to fool myself into thinking my penis is larger than it really is.

I'm tired of exclusivists, and I'm tired of people who make excuses to justify irrational hatred in any form. If you can make an excuse for irrational hatred of unusual people in one form, you can make it in another. That's a precedent, and a dangerous one. I shouldn't need to say what it's a precedent for. Smart people shouldn't need to ask why institutionalised hatred of outsiders is dangerous. These people in the nightclub should just remember -- the pack can be your friend, and it can make you feel powerful, and wanted, just as neo-nazis no doubt feel powerful and wanted when they're gang bashing some Asian kid in a car park. But one day the pack will turn, and then it'll be your turn.

Human behavior is circular. Break the pattern.

The Broken Record...

So the French are at it again, and if you are French, and hopeful for the future, it must be enough to make you weep.

As the van driver in the article remarks, there's something fundamentally wrong with the French left's grasp of economics. But sadly, it's not just a lack of education that's done it. From my six months in France, the thing that struck me most clearly was that the French debate, such as it is, isn't so much about technicalities as it is about ideologies. In other words, most of what's being debated, by all sides of politics, has almost no bearing on reality whatsoever.

Take the argument about Europe. Europe? What Europe? Which Europe? All this debate about high-falutin concepts and constitutions and the like, and they can't even get the economy to work. They set down ground rules for fiscal stringency, and nearly everyone's so far broken them. The Europe of the debates is largely a figment of bureaucratic imagination, yet they argue like it actually exists... because in Europe, and in France in particular, belief is not contingent upon reality. It's like relgion that way. Secularism my foot, they merely swapped one belief system for another, religion for ideology, Christ for Marx, Mother Mary for Derida. These kids smashing shopfronts in the name of workers' rights aren't so different from the Muslims protesting the Mohammed cartoons in that sense -- each of them feels strongly that their rigid and inflexible belief system has been offended, and retribution must follow. Voltaire would weep.

Which leads to the next problem, the fact that the French State doesn't actually work. The simplest definition of 'The State' is that it is the institution that possesses a legal monopoly of violence within its borders. That means it can force you do to what it wants, and while its violence is legal, your's is not. That sounds terrible, but in reality, even the most free and liberal democracies work that way. Say you don't pay taxes in America, what happens? Well the IRS finds out, and if you ignore them long enough, the cops turn up. If you resist them, they'll grab you. If you use violence against them, they're perfectly entitled to kill you, if necessary. The same chain of events applies to any civil disobedience... if you resort to violence to disobey the State, the State can use violence straight back at you. This is where non-violent disobedience can be a far more effective way to challenge state authority in liberal democracies -- deprived of its excuse to use violence back, the State must go through the courts, in public, and may lose the debate that follows.

Sadly, that doesn't happen in France, because bad behaviour has been rewarded. Say what you like about Thatcher -- when push came to shove in England, she reestablished the State's primacy, and enforced her electoral mandate as she felt she had to, by force. Because that's how democracies work -- the majority rules, and the majority in England in the '80s, as in France today, didn't vote for the unions. The unions weren't just sticking it to Thatcher, they were sticking it to Thatcher's electoral majority, and she beat the unions down on their behalf. That's the system, and that's why it works, when it works.

But in France, no one has the guts to send in the dogs. One hint of violence, and the State goes scurrying for cover. Which of course encourages more violence. In France, a good riot seems to have far more impact on politicians' policymaking than a democratic vote. Worse, it renders democracy almost futile. Why vote for anyone if they'll back down from their stated policies as soon as some goon threatens a shopfront with a rock?

Maybe Sarkozy will have the guts, when he wins the 2007 election. He's the Interior Minister now, after all, which has to be a good place to lay down the groundwork required with the police. He'd have to plan a war, after all, to actually confront all the unions that would take to the streets if he tried to enforce all his favored policies. He'd have to be sure he had all the security forces onside, and prepared, because it would get very, very ugly if he really tried.

The worst thing about this is that if Sarkozy tried it, he'd be accused of turning France into a dictatorship. Wrong. He'd actually be saving France from a dictatorship, because the way France stands now, with democracy so pointless, dictatorship must surely start looking attractive. The democratic majority must be enforced, or democracy is pointless. What France has now is the rule of the tiny minority over the vast majority, by unlawful violence.

Pathetic NY Times

It's been said before, but the NY Times is frequently pathetic. Here's another example.

Let's get this straight -- the NY Times, that never supported democracy in Afghanistan in the first place, and that was amongst the first to declare the American invasion of Afghanistan a quagmire after a couple of weeks (you have to do it in a couple, because it was over in three) is now claiming to be the guardian of liberal democratic ideals in Afghanistan?

Adding to the silliness, what the editorial is arguing for sounds suspiciously like... IMPERIALISM! Nasty Imperial America, telling the poor, innocent peoples of the third world how to run their lives. So it's okay when the NY Times does it, but not when the US government does? And when your paper in particular has previously taken editorial stances that would have precluded the present democracy in Afghanistan in the first place? So first, Bush is stupid for thinking to impose democracy in Afghanistan, and now he's to be blamed for not pushing it hard enough?

Ever get the feeling you can't win with some people?

I have a feeling the Afghans will brush this one under the carpet somehow, it's gotta be embarrassing for them. Of course I'd love to see them abolish all such stupid, theocratic laws, and I'm sure that one day, as the country continues to develop, it will. But having said that, the existence of stupid, backward laws does not preclude a nation from being a genuine democracy. After all, if the majority of citizens believe that converts should be executed, and vote for representatives who share those beliefs... well, that's nothing if not democratic.

Commonwealth Games

Interesting little event on in Melbourne right now called the Commonwealth Games. A few Commonwealth readers might have noticed it. Americans probably won't have. Don't worry, you probably need to be resident of a Commonwealth nation to actually care, anyway.

For all the head-kicking that colonialism receives, it's interesting that the Commonwealth Games still actually exist. Is there another European ex-colonial power that has anything like it? If so, I don't know of it. It's pretty amazing, really, that all the nations formerly a part of, settled by, founded by or conquered by Imperial Britain over the centuries, are still positive enough on the experience to want to come together for something like this. All except the Americans, anyhow... but that'd pretty much kill the event, it's bad enough with Australia dominating everything.

I mean, imagine if the French tried a Francophone Games, or whatever they'd call it? Would Vietnam turn up? To demand reparations, maybe. The Algerians? With explosives strapped to their chests, perhaps. Or how about if Spain had a games? How many South American nations would want to celebrate historical ties to a nation that massacred entire ancient civilisations? Would the Indonesians turn up to a Dutch games? Not bloody likely. The Taiwanese and Koreans to a Japanese games? You're joking.

The point is that the English, for all we like to crap on them, didn't really do a half-bad job, all things considered. Many English colonies prospered -- USA, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa (kinda), whereas there are precious few prosperous ex-territories of other European powers. The English built institutions, attempted some kind of democracy in most places (eventually), and gave many territories enough foundation that continued association with the Commonwealth is valued and even celebrated today. And they gave the Indians cricket, for which a billion people shall be eternally grateful. Yeah, a lot of stuff sucked too, as colonialism always will, but they weren't the worst of the bunch, that's for sure. And in some things, they really did some good.

Oh yeah.. then there's the sport itself. My basketball girls won, but the opposition were about two-foot tall and only learned to play last week. Jana Pittman again proves that Australian sports fans can be the biggest bunch of sh*ts yet to grace the sporting world -- let's get it straight, if you dump on Jana, you can't celebrate when she wins. Anything. Ever. Got it? God I can't stand these hypocrites who profess to love Australia but can't stand Australians. Yeah she's a weirdo. As a total weirdo myself, I resent the discrimination. As for her arch-nemesis Tamsyn Lewis... if Tamsyn was as good at running as she is at flapping her big mouth, I might care what she thinks.

Otherwise, the biggest interest for me is seeing India coming third on the medal tally. Last Games they came fourth. Before that, something like 12th. They are the self-professed worst sporting nation in the world, given successes-per-head-of-population. They also have the next Games, in Delhi in 2010, so they might be finally on their way to turning things around. A little. Not what we can watch any of that on regular Australian TV. Feature sporting events with no Australians in them? Channel Nine's managements heads would explode. But it's a good thing to have lower-standard events like this that still draw big crowds, so that all the developing nations get some incentive to develop some more.

Quiet, isn't it?

Not much posting lately -- I'm back at university (Bachelor of International Studies) plus of course I'm writing, plus lately I've been working on a short film script (hopefully more on that later). Still, it's good to be busy...

Iran

Another Washington Post article about Iran's machinations as the Ayatollahs try and wind their way through the obstacle course towards nuclear weapons.

There's a train of thought that says we (the democratic west) should just leave Iran alone, because we don't want a war, and with Iraq still rumbling we can't afford one anyway. It's sad, isn't it, how fast people forget what international diplomacy in that part of the world looked like before 9-11? We stay 'stop' to Saddam, and Saddam laughs and does whatever he was doing anyway... until we stay 'stop' again, and he laughs harder, and keeps doing it? If there's no real threat, autocratic regimes, be they Saddam's old one, or Iran's present one, just won't care what anyone says. Thus making it easier for them to gain nuclear weapons, thus actually INCREASING the odds of the war that everyone's trying to prevent.

The Iranian system is very different from Iraq's Baathists in that there are multiple competing centers of power. It's not an absolute dictatorship, and President Ahmedinejad does not have absolute power -- there's a parliament, and the Guardian Council to deal with too. Not all of them agree with Ahmedinejad. This gives the west the kind of leverage within Iran that autocratic regimes usually use against the west -- the ability try and split them politically down the middle, as the anti-democracy forces in Iraq are currently trying, with reasonable success, with America. But you can't do that unless there's a credible threat, and some Iranian factions start wondering what kind of disaster their President is driving them toward.

Here are some questions I don't know the answers to, but would love to. What's up with the Iranian Army? Yeah, there's a lot of Revolutionary Guard, and they're pretty fanatical (we hear) but what about the regular conscripts? Conscripts are drawn from the young population, and the young population is more pro-American than anti-American, and completely anti-Ayatollah. How happy will they be with the notion of being led into war against America? Or the police force, come to that, the majority of whom are regular guys not selected for religious zealotry?

The biggest problem the Bush Administration has is that they haven't pushed Iranian democracy anywhere near hard enough. That's not a failure just on ideological grounds, it's a failure on strategic grounds, because these rifts within Iranian society have not been exacerbated and widened... which means the Iranian leadership aren't anywhere near scared enough of what really ought to scare them far more than American bombs -- their own people.

The System

Yes, I have eclectic interests, from world affairs to technology to... you might have noticed by now, women's basketball. Here's the latest I wrote for Fullcourt Press a week ago.


Here’s why every non-aligned fan of women’s basketball should barrack for Adelaide in the Australian WNBL.

Put most simply, Adelaide plays the game the way women’s basketball ought to be played. Adelaide are fast, physical and aggressive. They like to score just as much as they like to stop other teams from scoring, and they don’t try to restrict their star players from doing what comes naturally. In the 2005/06 season, Adelaide did not have the most talented line-up, and were certainly far from the tallest. Most analysts predicted they wouldn’t even make the finals. But not only did Adelaide finish second on the ladder, they can count themselves pretty unfortunate not to have at least made the Grand Final.

So why is all this a big deal, and why should even non-Australian basketball fans care what happens to Adelaide? It’s like this. For as far back as anyone can remember, defence and tight, rigid structure has dominated Australian women’s basketball. It started with Tom Maher, who began his coaching career at a time when women’s basketball in Australia was so much less developed, it was almost a different sport. Very few players of that era can be compared to today’s players in any respect -- with one or two exceptions, they were less athletic, less talented, and less pretty-much everything. Maher, realising that he couldn’t rely on his players’ on-court skills to win matches, created a SYSTEM. That SYSTEM was so tightly structured that it dictated nearly everything a player would do on the court. No deviations would be tolerated.

Australian women’s basketball gained a reputation for ferocious defence -- a credit to the SYSTEM, no question. Maher won an enormous number of games with that SYSTEM, and gained an enormous reputation to go with it. The SYSTEM won games, not the players. But the SYSTEM did something else, too. It nearly killed individualism on the court, especially on offence. Under Tom Maher’s SYSTEM, for example, Gina Stevens, for a few years Australia’s best ever shooting guard, couldn’t get a game for the Australian team. Why? Well Stevens liked to take the initiative. She was a new generation of player -- like Lauren Jackson and Penny Taylor today, Stevens didn’t need any SYSTEM to help her score. She could score on her own, and didn’t need much encouragement to do so.

Maher didn’t like it, and would rarely let her off the Opals’ bench, on the rare occasion she even made the team. Then Stevens was sadly diagnosed with chronic-fatigue syndrome, and was never half the player afterwards -- she retired in 2004.

Today, Maher is off coaching in Communist China (a perfect philosophical match, I think), but the SYSTEM lives on, under current Opals coach Jan Stirling. Stirling is Maher mark-2, and is far from universally popular amongst Australian players, inside or outside the Opals. She got the job, it seems, because a) Basketball Australia makes a point of policy not to care what Australian players think, b) she’s senior, and it was her turn, and c) she, like Maher, has a SYSTEM. She’s Basketball Australia’s kind of coach, and it has forever been thus.

Adelaide’s Chris Lucas doesn’t coach like that. Lucas confesses he got the inspiration for Adelaide’s present style of play from watching the Czech Under-20 team play during a European tour. The Czechs, prior to the 2001 Junior World Championships, were neither highly rated, nor tall. But they ran, attacked, and played with a speed and aggression that their opponents had rarely seen before. It made them junior world champs.

Lucas saw something in the Czechs that he thought might work for his present bunch of girls in Adelaide, and he was right. Adelaide don’t give a half-court defence any time to get set -- one rebound, and they’re off and running. Even if they don’t get a fast lay-up, the defence is often flustered, out of breath, and unable to get their matchups right. It also helped that Adelaide had the best rebounding backcourt in the WNBL -- even when outsized, the forwards would box out on the defensive rebounds, and allow the guards to grab lots of boards... immediately followed by a fast run down the floor. That Adelaide were probably the fittest team in the league didn’t hurt either.

It wouldn’t have worked without such a strong backcourt. Anchoring the point guard slot was Erin Phillips, without question the most talented and explosive all-round point guard Australia has ever produced... or so she’ll become, given a little more experience. Sharing backcourt duties were Jenni Screen, a talented three-point shooter and terrific defender, unlucky to have missed Opals selection, and Deanne Ranford, a streaky yet dangerous shooting guard.

Up forward is where most WNBL teams struggle for depth, and Adelaide was no exception. Yet in a team lacking height, Lucas did something unusual -- he let go 6-7 Tracey Braithwaite, the tallest player in Australia. Braithwaite was simply never going to keep up with the end-to-end pace Adelaide were planning to set, and that mattered more than size.

He ran 6-2 Laura Summerton, who is still a little short on post-moves, but loves to get out and run the break; 6-0 American Tami Willey, who was a revelation with her cool nerves and smooth shooting; 5-11 Cherie Smith, a quiet achieving hard-worker and defender; and 6-1 team captain Sam Woosnam, who is strong, clever and experienced, and has the charming good nature to oil the gears in conversations between a reserved, intense coach, and a bunch of occassionally free-spirited players.

Adelaide weren’t outsized against some teams, but against Canberra and Dandenong, the eventual Grand Final contestants, height became a real issue. Dandenong had 6-2 Jacinta Hamilton, 6-3 Emma Randall, 6-1 Jenna O’Hea and (when fit) 6-2 Shelley Hammond. Canberra had the tallest line-up in the history of the WNBL, with 6-6 Jenny Whittle, 6-7 Tracey Braithwaite, and some blonde kid named Jackson, you might have seen her around.

Canberra and Adelaide finished the season with 2 wins apiece head-to-head, despite the mismatch. Sure, one of Adelaide’s losses was in the Qualifying Final to get into the Grand Final, but Adelaide played all over Canberra in that game, only to be beaten by 33 points from that Jackson girl. Moral victories don’t feel any better when the scoreboard indicates a loss, but in the battle against giant frontcourts, slow half-court offences and boring-play-in-general, the moral victory this season was surely Adelaide’s. Which is not to say that Canberra coach Carrie Graf is another Maher/Stirling clone -- she’s certainly not. But with three giants up front, a run-and-gun style wasn’t ever going to be a feature in 2005/06.

But it can be done, with a smaller team, and for much of the season Adelaide proved it. If only a coach would dare to have faith in his or her players. In talking with Lucas and his players, one thing about Adelaide’s style becomes clear above all others -- Lucas lets his players be themselves. There is some concern, for example, over Erin Phillips’ transition to the Opals squad. Will Jan Stirling allow her the free reign that she’s accustomed under Lucas’s coaching? Given Stirling’s record, it doesn’t seem likely. Phillips is spectacular. She takes risks, and creates her own opportunities on the court, instead of always waiting for the SYSTEM to create something for her. Lucas sees this as an advantage, allows her to cut opponents to pieces as she sees fit, and resigns himself to live with the inevitable mistakes. Stirling, on the other hand, has rarely ever trusted a player like Phillips. Phillips does not always conform to the SYSTEM, and the SYSTEM matters more than the players.

For Chris Lucas, the players are the system. Their capabilities and limitations determine how the system works, and where its boundaries lie. It’s fast, it’s tough and it’s flexible. The result is basketball that’s fun to watch, and where spectators can see one hundred percent of what each player can do, and not just the fifty percent that the SYSTEM might grudgingly allow. Adelaide will certainly lose Tami Willey next season, and probably Jenni Screen as well. Hopefully, though, there are AIS juniors and others out there, who’d like to come and play in a team where they can use everything they’ve got, provided they’re prepared to work hard, run like hell, and make idiots of themselves in end-of-season video clips.

Australia might not be a powerhouse producing great female players in the quantities that America does, but the best of those we do produce have proven themselves worth watching at any level. If Australian coaching ever gets over this mental straightjacket of conservatism and defence-first-and-only, the quality of those players will improve even more, as will Australia’s contribution to women’s basketball on the global stage.

If you’d like to see that happen, cheer for Adelaide. Cheer for them to win titles. Then, maybe, the ice will finally break, and women’s basketball in Australia will be played the way its players know how.

Indian Nukes

So Bush did a nuclear deal with India that’ll cause difficulties for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Some pundits are claiming it’ll cause Bush more difficulties than the Dubai Ports thing.

I don’t think so. I don’t claim to know the inner workings of the Washington elite, but I think a lot of people who try and cause trouble for this deal are going to get run over... and not by the neo-cons. Some lip-smacking politicians might not see this coming, because American businesses have been very coy in talking about India. Most US firms don’t like to publicise the fact that they’re outsourcing increasing thousands of jobs to India, and don’t particularly want their political representatives to be aware of the fact least they try and make a protectionist issue out of it.

But the high-tech and service industries have huge stakes in this. The nuclear deal is seen by many as the lynchpin that proves America’s good faith to India, thus allowing India’s prickly politicians to back Prime Minister Singh’s further liberalisation efforts that will open Indian markets to US companies. Anyone blocking the nuclear deal is going to make such US companies unhappy. Cisco, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, etc, etc... all are projecting big investments and returns to and from India over the coming years. I’m sure they can find the telephone numbers of their local representatives easily enough, and I’m sure they can quote the figures of how much they contributed to various political campaigns in the last election.

Ditto Boeing, which is landing deals for hundreds of Indian aircraft at present, with hopes for many hundreds more. If India-US relations encountered a rocky patch, with the nuclear deal held up in acrimonious Congress and Senate debates, I wonder how many of the mushrooming Indian private airlines might decide it would be easier all-round to buy from Airbus? And then there’s defence contractors. The Indian military has always traditionally bought Russian, but there’s a push on to change that. In another few decades, India’s military expenditure will be amongst the highest in the world. Do defence industries have political clout? Gee, do you think?

If I were an American politician, I just wouldn’t go there... not unless I had no defence, aerospace or high-tech interests in my constituency. Or retail. Wal-Mart hopes to make billions in India. Who doesn’t have Wal-Mart in their constituency? To say nothing of the 2.4 million Indian-Americans, who just happen to be by far the wealthiest ethnic group in the nation, and are increasingly less shy about spending it on political interests. And if certain politicians do start thumping the drum on this, and getting lots of public opposition to the nuclear deal, they risk squeezing themselves between a rock and a hard place when all the pro-India interests start squeezing from the other direction. The most interesting development from all of this could be the education it will provide, to many American politicians, of just how strong those pro-India interests actually are.

Money usually wins these arguments. It’s not always a bad thing.

Personally I think the non-proliferation treaty itself is fairly silly, as much as non-proliferation remains a very good idea. India hasn’t proliferated so far, and probably wouldn’t even if this deal fell through -- they’re more principled than some, and know their credibility as a civilised, trustworthy nation would suffer. The treaty’s an ancient document reflecting an obsolete view of world power, and the only real moral authority any current nuclear power could gain, by which to deny a nation like India its own nukes, would be to declare unilateral disarmament itself. Which isn’t going to happen.

The world has nukes, that’s a fact. Best to deal with their proliferation in an orderly, case-by-case basis, getting the reliable nations (democracies) onside so as to better contain the unreliable ones (North Korea, Iran, Pakistan). India will be more help within the fold than out of it, and anyhow, the broader strategic opportunities presented by India’s growth won’t wait. I don't mind at all if we have a double standard favouring democracies with possession of nukes over non-democracies. In fact, I don't mind at all if we favour democracies in most things... and as I've stated before, India's policies and intentions just don't alarm me very much. If Iran huffs at the double-standard, tough. When they hold their first fully democratic election, I'll start caring what they think.

If this whole situation proves anything, it’s the utter inability of so-called global law, global bodies or global treaties to contain or direct anything in the world today. The nation state rules, and there’s no such thing as a workable global consensus. There’s just nations that act, and nations that don’t, and the rest is all sophistry.