Wednesday, 19 March 2003

Sabbatical. Australian labor law has this wonderful, wonderful provision called "Long Service Leave," which says that if you work for a company for ten years, you get two calendar months of paid vacation, with an additional month off every five years thereafter.

I've only been in Australia for three years, and as an American expat on temporary assignment I wasn't eligible for this benefit anyway. (On the other hand, the company was covering my housing costs, foreign taxes, car expenses, and paying me in nice solid American currency while the Aussie dollar swooned to about US$0.50... so I'm not complaining.) But, last year I stopped being an expat on temporary assignment, and became a regular employee of our Australian subsidiary... and transferred in with twelve years of experience.

So I'll be taking the rest of March and April off. My parents are flying out for a week or two (they've never been to Australia before), and my lady-love and I will join them on a trip to Alice Springs, home of the great big rock in the middle of nowhere (known as either "Ayers Rock" or "Uluru;" it's one of those "Denali" vs. "Mount McKinley" things). But mostly I'm taking six weeks off to just recharge my batteries and relax for a while. I've got a great big stack of books to read—I'm one of those people who can't walk out of a bookstore without half a dozen books in hand, and lately my reading habits have fallen behind my buying habits—and a few odd projects to tackle, but beyond that I'm planning to enjoy my longest stretch of free time since, oh, somewhere in college I guess.

I'll still be blogging, but it'll be more travelogue than warblog for a while, which is probably just as well. I'm one of those people the pundits call a "liberal hawk," which means I believe we have a moral obligation to remove Saddam Hussein from power, that force is the only means by which this goal can be achieved—and that I'm holding my nose while Team Dubya takes makes a dog's breakfast of that compelling moral argument and shreds our international credibility. The raw-throated war chant "if we can't make them love us, we must make them fear us!" is good policy for Al Qaeda, but Dubya is applying it to Mexico, Chile, France, Germany, Russia, China, Turkey, Canada, Cameroon, South Korea and, well, everyone else—and it's not working. We're trashing our own reputation. The fire-eaters are counting on a swift victory in Iraq to rehabilitate America's image abroad, but I'm living abroad, and I can already tell you: It won't.

I think John Scalzi nailed it yesterday when he observed that America has, until now, successfully kept other nations from banding together against us, by honoring the polite fiction that we actually cared what other countries thought: We dutifully consulted the Frances and Britains and South Koreas of the world, politely asked their opinions, and at least gave the illusion that we were respectfully considering their views before we went off and did what we wanted regardless. Now the illusion is wearing thin, and as a result we're losing allies we should have persuaded. We're making it difficult and unpopular to back America, even in nations like Britain and Australia, whose mutual interests with America are so obvious and compelling that it should be a snap decision.

In any case, the bombs will start falling in less than 48 hours, Saddam will finally be removed from power, and then perhaps we talking heads can turn our attention to more urgent problems. (Sam Nunn is the American Cassandra.) I think everyone will be relieved when it's over; in spite all the rhetoric about "rushing to war," we've been on the road to Baghdad (and talking about little else) for months, if not years. To the troops I give my prayers and support: No matter how much I doubt Bush's diplomacy, I have nothing but confidence in America's armed forces—and nothing but admiration for the men and women who risk their lives for our country. Good luck and godspeed.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 5:20 am. comments.