Yesterday we hosted former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser for a public conversation with our Executive Director, Michael Wesley. You can listen here to the discussion, which focused on the foreign policy elements of Mr Fraser's new book. It includes Q&A with the audience.

But I recommend you also listen to the interview Mr Fraser granted me. Things start out pretty sedately, but then Mr Fraser makes a comment about the need for a strong central government in China. This is a view a lot of China observers hold but which others regard as a pre-emptive excuse for repression.

So I challenged Mr Fraser on this point. As you'll hear, he doesn't take a backward step, and in fact he goes on to make some surprising human rights comparisons between China and Australia.

Steve Smith writes:

Really enjoy reading the blog. Just wondering if you caught this SMH article on Monday. A couple of quotes:

'There is not a single Australia-based scholar with up-to-the minute knowledge on either Chinese elite politics or macro-economics. Last year Stephen Joske, previously the Australian Government's top China economist, said "there's no one in Treasury who can tell up from down on China, beyond what they read in the newspapers".'

'The Office of National Assessments and Defence Intelligence Organisation have a core group of China specialists, but would no doubt love to increase their numbers. Even the Department of Foreign Affairs pulls up short - nobody can think of an obvious candidate to fill the shoes of the ambassador, Geoff Raby, when his term expires this year.'

Thanks for the tip, Steve; a great piece by the very talented John Garnaut, even if it does contain what I take to be a dig at this Dobell piece about the ASIC-Fortescue decision.

It's certainly true that the intelligence agencies Garnaut refers to are constantly on the look-out for China specialists, though at least ONA and Defence have had the funding they need to attract talent. DFAT has been starved of money, and it deserves not just a good ambassador but an expanded role in collecting information on China. Note I do not say 'collecting intelligence'; much of what we need to know isn't secret.

I do think some perspective is called for, though. We're a small country and the numbers are always going to be against us when it comes to trying to understand bigger countries such as China, Japan, Indonesia and the US. So this problem is never really going to be 'solved'.

Also, bigger isn't always better, and in fact, I reckon we ought to focus on improving the methods that our existing cadre of China analysts use to do their jobs rather than simply increasing their number.

Patrick Sheppard responds to a post of mine about Australia's air defences; that post also appeared (in lightly edited form) on Business Spectator:

I read your article in the Business Spectator. A very interesting read to say the least. One questions jumps out at me and I’m sure it would to many readers. Why couldn’t Australia purchase some so called PAK-FA T-50 aircraft? Indonesia has Sukhoi fights as well as F-16s; surely Australia could have a similar set up.

In the Cold War days, Patrick's suggestion of buying Russian fighters would have been impossible due to our diplomatic and strategic alignment. And even a decade ago, it would have seemed slightly barmy. Now? NATO members such as Greece have Russian air defence missiles, and Russia is getting UAVs from Israel and warships from France. The arms bazaar aint what it used to be.

So it's not really politics stopping us. I dare say there is a strong cultural preference in the Air Force for Western planes. That's partly a well-founded prejudice, since the Russian aviation industry has a poor reputation for after-sales support (something to remember next time you read about invincible Russian fighters condemning our air force to the strategic dustbin).

Also, we just don't know the Russians very well. Countries like India and China have doubtless developed very close technical and tactical relationships with the Russians that help them get the best out of their Russian kit. We would have to do that from scratch. Much easier to stick with what we know.

Those of you who receive The Interpreter's daily Email Digest will notice a change to tomorrow's edition. (And if you don't get the Email Digest, you can subscribe here for free — it's easy.)

Up to now, we have sent you a daily email with the headlines for every post published on The Interpreter in the preceding 24 hours, and the first 50-or-so words of text. You needed to click on the link to read the whole item. From tomorrow, you'll be able to read the full text of each item in the email, though for audio and video content, you'll still have to navigate to our site.

This move will reduce our click rates a little, but it's intended to stir up more word of mouth about our site. We hope that if you read something you like in the Email Digest, you'll forward it to your friends and colleagues.

Those of you who receive the weekly Email Digest will experience no change to your service.

Charles Burnard, a research analyst with RUSI, is sceptical of Fareed Zakaria's claim that '(t)he enemy is not vast; the swamp is being drained. Al Qaeda has already lost in the realm of ideology. What remains is the battle to defeat it in the nooks, crannies, and crevices of the real world':

I enjoyed reading Graeme Dobell's piece on 'the politics of a permanent threat' – and agree with most of it. I do have a few problems with the Zakaria article you linked to. Rather than go into my qualms with his argument, I’ll turn your attention to this article, which encapsulates my concerns perfectly. Keep up the good work!

Peter Hartcher is exactly right about the almost miraculous advances made by Indonesia since the end of the Suharto era.

And yet, it must be said that it is very easy to sing these praises when there is a friendly and largely amenable President holding office. But as long as SBY is in control, it will be difficult to tell how much of this good news from Indonesia is merely the reflected light from his leadership, and how much is a permanent new feature of the political landscape.

The true test of Indonesia's nascent democratic institutions, and of Australia's improved relations with Jakarta, will come when or if the country elects a Mahathir-like president. At that point, Indonesia's institutions will need to be strong enough to resist any moves back toward greater cronyism and corruption. And Australia and Indonesia will need to have deep enough economic and strategic ties to withstand any nationalist buffeting.

I don't think we are in this position yet.

Photo by Flickr user swissroli, used under a Creative Commons license.

Michael Cucek of Shisaku blog responds to Malcolm Cook. A brief comment from me follows:

Nearly every point made in today's post by Mr. Malcolm Cook regarding the Futenma move is either misleading or incorrect.

1. 'The DPJ may no longer need to rely on the Social Democratic Party of Japan in the Upper House, as the DPJ may have been able to convince enough other Upper House members to cross the floor and join them.' This is not a potentiality, this is a fact. The DPJ-led caucus in the House of Councillors has 122 members. You can look it up.

2. 'The Social Democrats themselves are softening their "all US bases out of Japan" rhetoric and are willing to consider alternate sites for Futenma.'

(a) The Socialists do not have an 'all bases out of Japan' stance. It is not in the party policy manifesto. None of the party's principal members asks for such. 

(b) Of the three parties in the coalition, the Socialists have been the most active in researching and proposing alternate Japan sites for the Futenma base. It is the DPJ that has remained inert.

Crikey yesterday ran a handy little summary (free subscription required) of the latest Productivity Commission report on the financial assistance that government provides to various industries. Crikey reports a recent increase in 'industry assistance', which is a polite term for what could more accurately be called hand-outs, subsidies or soft protectionism.

The Crikey piece says nothing about Australia's defence industry. But the Sydney Morning Herald today touches on the huge price Australian taxpayers pay for the Government's support of local industry:

...most of (Defence's) money vanishes in vast multibillion-dollar deals to buy new weapons. One of the current projects, the purchase of new destroyers, is a neat illustration. In 2004 the public was told that for as little as $4.5 billion, four of these massive new vessels would be delivered from 2013. But just a few years later, the project was recosted at $8 billion, and suddenly we were getting only three ships, not four, from 2014.

Frustratingly, the Herald article does not ask why this program has become so inflated. It just refers to 'cost overruns' and then returns to the sexier but financially insignificant subject of perks like first class travel. But as ASPI's Andrew Davies told The Interpreter last October, it's the Government's insistence on local production that has inflated the cost of these destroyers by 30-40%.

• Last week I linked to a Jakarta blogger who was sceptical about reports of Muslim extremists evading police in the Aceh highlands. He's now having second thoughts.
• Yesterday I discovered a blog devoted to resilience science.
• The Long March to Power: The New Historic Mission of the People's Liberation Army. A 2009 book published by the Danish Defence College, available free online.
• Defence blogger Eric Palmer responds to my air defence post.
• SBS News reports on the Swiss bunker hotel, an idea now set to go worldwide. A quick Google search shows the original bunker hotel started in Severlen, Switzerland, in 2008. But in my backpacking days in the early '90s, I stayed in a youth hostel located in a bunker in the Swiss town of Martigny.
• Further to last week's post on the Falklands, here's a thorough treatment of the diplomacy that preceded the war (the paper was first published in 1994).

Robert Gottliebsen of Business Spectator (which occasionally carries Interpreter posts) recently wrote a column about what he called 'the largest and most dangerous cover-up in the nation's history'. That's quite a claim, and it deserves some scrutiny.

'Largest' might be literally true, in that Gottliebsen is referring to the Government's intention to purchase up to 100 Joint Strike Fighters (JSF) in what would be Australia's biggest ever defence contract. But 'most dangerous'? That's a matter of perspective.

Gottliebsen is very concerned about how our air force will stack up against the new Russian Sukhoi T-50 fighter, which just made its first flight:

...the updated version of Russia’s Sukhoi – the so called the PAK-FA T-50 – (is) far superior to the JSF, which would – in time – give India, China and Indonesia air superiority over Australia.

 And because the JSF could be eight years late, the situation is even more dangerous:

In that eight year gap, Australian will rely on upgraded Super Hornets where there is widespread agreement that the aircraft is no match for the earlier versions of the Sukhoi – let alone PAK-FA T-50, which will be available later in the decade. So, Australia will have no independent air defence for eight years. If the JSF is no match for the PAK-FA T-50, then for the next 30 years we would have no way of countering a PAK-FA T-50 flying to any city in Australia.

In a sense, the situation is worse than Gottliebsen allows. 

• Passport links to a new report on women's rights in the Middle East. Their post includes a quote saying that female lawyers are not allowed to appear in Saudi courts. But that's changing.
• Japan has a case of ROK envy.
• German troops and vehicles are doing desert training in Australia.
• Photo essay of the Soviet-era 'Caspian sea monster', a weird aircraft-ship hybrid that used ground effect to travel fast while hugging the water. (H/t Russian Navy blog.)
• Simon Johnson on the dangers of 'too big to fail'. (H/t Free Exchange.)
• This may have to substitute for a Friday Funny today. It's economics in one easy lesson: 

Last month, reader Will Grant wrote to me in response to a post about Canberra's embassies. Will said, 'I've heard that having embassies in the national style was a specific request of the Australian Government (or possibly the National Capital Authority's predecessors) in the early Canberra years.'

After stumbling onto the National Capital Authority's website today, I see that Will is almost right:

The Embassy of the United Sates was the first embassy built in Canberra and the first to introduce the notion of design characteristics representative of the culture of each mission's home country. Many other missions have followed suit - India, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Egypt and Papua New Guinea.

The National Capital Authority encourages foreign governments to design their missions to reflect their country's national architectural style. This practice is quite unique and allows the embassy to be easily identified by visitors to the national capital.

Markus Pfister writes: 

Loved and agreed with your post. The issue is however not our perceptions, or even the truth, but the (necessarily flawed) perceptions of Chinese elites ('China'). My feeling is that, egged on by their own collective superiority/inferiority/narcissistic complex, China is beginning to believe its own propaganda — and beginning to believe OUR propaganda, especially that tsunami of boring books on how China is the Next Big Thing.

Thus it is Chinese attitudes and perceptions that need to be carefully tracked.

 Elben52 responds to my post on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall:

You ask for comments from readers. Well, here is one. Hilary Mantel’s book is excruciatingly long winded.True, she paints an interesting canvas of the times as is expected of literature.

I am familiar with the Tudor period. I suggest that a better recommendation than Mantel is Simon Schama's 'A History of Britain: 3000 BC to AD 1603'. Schama isn’t long winded and is a most talented writer, in particular when dealing with Elizabeth 1.

My criticism of Schama is that, in my view, he doesn’t adequately deal with the repercussions of the role of parliament to bring about the Reformation in Britain.

My beef with Mantel is more prosaic. She continually uses 'he' to refer to Thomas Cromwell, no matter how many other male characters are involved in the action being described. When you read novels as slowly as I do, you tend to forget this, which means you have to retrace your steps a lot.

Canberra blogger Andrew Carr dispatches Peter Costello's argument about the home insulation fiasco:

...this claim by Peter Costello...takes the cake for ludicrousness: "But let us draw an additional lesson from this sorry episode. Both sides of politics are now flirting with the idea that the Commonwealth should take over and run public hospitals. Bear this in mind. The Federal Government could not run a home insulation program. Do you think it can run every hospital and hospital department in the country?"

The logic behind this argument is akin to saying if you have spent your entire life walking around and just once trip and skin your knee, you can no longer claim to be able to walk, let alone run...small government advocates do themselves no favours by making such child like use of inductive reasoning...

Andrew might equally have said that just because the Government could not run a home insulation scheme does not mean it should stop conducting foreign policy, or that it should immediately privatise the Australian Defence Force.

Which leads me to the question in my headline: what do libertarians believe to be the proper role of government when it comes to international affairs? Libertarians like their government small and out of the way, but they presumably agree that there are some things government ought to be good at, like defending the country and protecting its interests.

But that can take in an enormous range of activities, so do libertarians believe foreign policy should promote to the world their limited government vision, or should 'defending the country and protecting its interests' be defined very narrowly?

I should say that I tried to tackle this question many years ago in an essay in Policy, published by the libertarian-ish Centre for Independent Studies. The CIS has always had a strong attachment to the work of Hayek and Friedman, but I'm not aware that either had very strong views about foreign policy, and it has always struck me that for CIS, there are no foreign policy thinkers that fit their worldview the way Hayek and Friedman do in the domestic economic sphere.

Photo by Flickr user Rampant Gian, used under a Creative Commons license.

Andrew R. responds to one reader's call for online Russia resources:

By far the most entertaining (if sometimes frightening, and always frothing at the mouth) Russia blog is La Russophobe.

And on Russia, have you guys seen this preview for the new Russia-Georgia war movie? Heart-pounding and over-the-top violent stuff. From the director of Die Hard II and Cliffhanger no less! The opening montage of heroic Georgian soldiers rescuing journalists from Iraqi insurgents and the resultant slow-mo car explosion really sets the tone here. I should hope that with the star-power derived from Andy Garcia, Dean Cain, and Val Kilmer this will be no straight-to-DVD affair. Surely one for the big screen.

Andrew, thanks for the blog link, but seriously, did you just put 'Dean Cain' and 'star power' in the same sentence? I've watched the trailer (be warned, it is ridiculously violent) and I confidently predict that 'Georgia' will be savaged by critics and ignored by the public. It looks dreadful.

Still, nice to see (in the final shot) that director Renny Harlin faithfully observes the Hollywood convention that Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions:

That's the nickname now attached to ASIO's huge new headquarters, I was told in Canberra earlier this week. You get a sense of the scale of the building from the above image of the building site, taken on The Interpreter's behalf by the good people at RiotACT, an indispensible blog about the life and politics of the Australian capital.

As Graeme Dobell said yesterday, '(t)he ASIO HQ is a tribute to the one of the truths of modern history: triumphant bureaucrats always crown their rise in concrete.'

East Asia Forum today carries a piece by Japanese academic Takashi Terada about Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada's recent visit to Australia. It ends like this:

Okada's visit to Australia last month might have been the first step towards this new-type of partnership between the two countries. But his frustration, plain for all to see on his face in the Japanese TV news broadcasts of the press conference in Perth with Stephen Smith  — who showed less enthusiasm for Okada’s nuclear disarmament vision than had Germany’s foreign minister — seemed more like the harbinger of ominous clouds over the prospects for his hoped-for diplomatic dawn in the relationship with Australia.

I can't comment on Okada's demeanour at the press conference since I haven't seen any footage, though he looks pretty relaxed in the DFAT photo above. 

More significantly, the joint statement on nuclear disarmament did contain some passages that would surely have encouraged Okada rather than frustrated him. In fact, the Asahi Shimbun editorial cited by Terada earlier in his piece makes a pretty good case that Smith and Okada made some progress.

Then there's the Japan Times, which says Smith and Okada 'bonded' on nuclear disarmament. And there is no hint of friction on nukes in this Japan Today summary of the press conference. So what am I missing?

• Some excellent advice for incoming ICC Vice-President John Howard on how he can use his diplomatic experience to improve world cricket.
• How profitable are China's state-owned enterprises?
• Yesterday James Brown mentioned that increased strategic competition in the Arctic could be a harbinger for the Antarctic. Here's a report from a Canadian conference on the Arctic, in which the phrase 'arms race' appears.
• On the status of women in Pakistan.
• Why is Shrek so popular in Iran? That's the hook for a long piece with plenty of deep thoughts about Iranian cinema and politics. (H/t AL Daily.)
• Where's the threat? The Joint Strike Fighter is militarily unnecessary for the US, says one analyst.
• Not really relevant to international policy, but this review of Clive James' latest book is too good not to share.

James Fallows recommends this Washington Post piece telling Americans to calm down when it comes to China:

This new Red Scare says a lot about America's collective psyche at this moment. A nation with a per capita income of $6,546 -- ensconced above Ukraine and below Namibia, according to the International Monetary Fund -- is putting the fear of God, or Mao, into our hearts.

To that cautionary note I would add the words of Thomas Barnett, writing about the 'princelings' (relatives of senior party officials) that dominate the management of China's top companies:

This is a great way to dominate an economy, but a crappy way to pick management talent. Why we should believe this inbred pool should outperform our ruthless market dynamics is beyond me. Such is our overblown crisis of confidence just because our quarter-century-long boom refused to extend itself further...Does that mean I predict state capitalism collapses? No. Means I simply don't buy the current hype of authoritarian capitalism's inexorably ascendancy. In fact, I find it a troublingly stupid trend among serious analysts.

Overwrought analysis of the 'China threat' is a pretty well established part of the American (and Australian) debate. Naive idealism about China becoming more democratic as it got richer is another strand, and certainly not the dominant one.

Photo by Flickr user Phil Romans, used under a Creative Commons license.

Military purchases can be construed differently by various countries; it's all a matter of perspective.

On the sale of French Mistral-class amphibious ships to Russia, London Times reporter Charles Bremner quotes an unnamed former French ambassador as saying, 'It's an empty hull, just the same as a civilian ferry'. Georgian national security advisor Eka Tkeshelashvili has a less benign assessment:

It has great potential of changing the security equation for Russia, though the French have tried to downgrade that. First of all, [the French] frequently cite that it's a humanitarian ship. [But] a ship is a ship. It has great amphibious capacities for carrying arms, helicopters, armed vehicles, soldiers, having a hospital attached to it, or a military headquarters. You can use it for humanitarian purposes if you wish, or you can use it for military purposes.

(H/t Passport.)

In an interview with Mark Colvin, former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser recounts a conversation with Vice-President Bush in 1982, during which Fraser is informed that President Reagan's UN Ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, is pushing Reagan to support Argentina after Argentina had invaded the Falkland Islands, a UK territory in the South Atlantic. Fraser doesn't think this is such a good idea:

“Well, have you thought how your most important NATO ally in Europe will react? If you support Argentina against Britain, do you think Margaret Thatcher will just sit down and take it? Or do you think she’ll condemn the United States for being an unreliable ally from one end of Europe to the next, and if she ever gets to Washington again, she’ll do it from the heart of Washington also. And there are many people around the world who would think that she has great justice on her side. And what will be left ,what will be left of NATO; will you still have NATO at the end of that argument?”

According to Fraser, Bush then abruptly cuts short their dinner to make a call to Washington, where Kirkpatrick is putting her case to a National Security Council meeting. He returns 90 minutes later:

...he came out about an hour and a half later, thumbs up: “It’s all right Malcolm, we’re supporting Margaret. And if you hadn’t keyed yourself into that meeting, Jeane would have won that argument in ten minutes”’.

If there are any readers out there with a deep knowledge of this period, I'd love to hear from them, because although Fraser's account may be accurate, it seems a trifle self-serving. Is it likely that the Vice-President hadn't thought through the implications of backing Argentina before Fraser intervened, or that no-one else had raised these issues with Reagan? As Colvin says in his piece, the Reagan Administration was divided on what to do about the Falklands, suggesting at least some of Reagan's senior advisers wanted to back Thatcher.

So was Fraser's intervention really so decisive?

• The European Union is said to specialise in civilian crisis management, but this article suggests it's largely a myth.
• Democratic Oversight of Intelligence Services: a soon to be released Australian book; includes a foreword by Kim Beazley and chapter by the Lowy Institute's Michael Wesley.
• Speaking of intelligence, here's a series of articles on how the US used social network analysis to capture Saddam Hussein.
• The difference in death tolls between Haiti and Chile shows that 'natural' disasters are anything but.
• The Facebook group endorsing Mohamed ElBaradei to run for president of Egypt has 100,000 members. 
• Extracts from a new book about Labour in government in the UK. Does this sound familiar to any observers of Australian politics?:

On Brown's subsequent account to his camp, Blair admitted that he was in a deep hole. "I won't turn it around before the election," he said. If Brown was co-operative and helped to "get me through the next six months", Blair pledged he would hand over the premiership in the summer of the following year. "Naive as always about Tony, Gordon believed him," says one of Brown's closest confidants. He left the dinner more certain than before that he had a promise of a handover.

Several colleagues and one ex-colleague recommended Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall to me last year. I was put off because I'm embarrassingly unfamiliar with the historical period depicted in the book. But I relented recently and although I have some grumbles about the book, I am quite engrossed in the story, in the history, and in some brilliant writing. Take this description of the political atmosphere around Henry VIII's court:

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an ax when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

'The resonance of the omitted thing'. Sometimes you just have to stand back and applaud.

Photo by Flickr user John Kroll, used under a Creative Commons license.

Anna Solar-Bassett writes:

I write as an avid reader of the Interpreter.

May I make a small request/suggestion that you post a call out for English-translated/written Russia media/blogs from workers on the ground, as you did with the Middle East a few months ago?

I have some interesting media suggestions: The Moscow Times (foreign written), Novaya Gazeta, obviously, and an independent radio station financed by Gazprom (name: Eho Moskvi). 

I would be greatly interested in analysis 'from the ground' from Westerners/critics. Obviously independent bloggers will, most likely, have been limited following Ana Politkovska but I have been looking for about two months and have not been able to find anything! (This is both interesting and suggestive - although, perhaps, simply of my research skills!)

The Iraq & Persian Gulf list we came up with was excellent — many of the blogs recommended by readers remain on my list of favourites today. So I hope we can all help Anna out with this Russia query.

Let me kick things off: Russia blog is quite good for following political and social issues; they have a lot of links to other sites on their page too. English Russia stays away from politics — it tends to focus on unusual aspects of Russian life, and carries some impressive photo collections.

On military matters, I recommend Russian Military Reform and Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces.

Photo by Flickr user Yukon White Light, used under a Creative Commons license.

Peter Frank writes:

You seem to have removed the ability to comment or respond to articles. Or have I missed something?

Anyway, latest links include a Foreign Policy article on pacificism in Europe; a quite pertinent article given the tendency of Australian PMs and Defence Ministers to criticise the European /NATO contribution to Afghanistan (admittedly more muted in recent months) 

However purpose of this email is to draw your attention to the article in the same edition of FP on the Gallup 2010 country Favorability Ratings. Needless to say, Australia fails to rate a mention. Useful reality check for those, including the Australian elites, who continue to kid themselves that Americans really give a stuff.

Actually, Peter, we've never carried open comment threads (our comments policy here).

Thanks for mentioning that Gallup poll story. I should have at least linked to it myself, though I'm happy to report that Walter Russell Mead did notice the poll and took to his blog to defend Australia's honour.

• A blog about peace operations and post-conflict reconstruction; lots of good Timor stuff here.
• Did you know YouTube is banned in Turkey? More facts about Turkey's social media scene here.
• The FT describes 10 innovations that will reshape business around the world.
• As Jakarta sinks, Indonesia mulls a new capital. But do these quotes from urban studies expert Deden Rukmana inspire confidence?: 'It can be done -- what you need is strong political commitment. Malaysia moved to Putrajaya because of the strength of Mahathir Mohamad...If we have a good plan...we can build a city from scratch, like Brasilia in Brazil.'
• The US Air Force says initial operational capability of its Joint Strike Fighter has slipped by two years.
• 'The shift of global power toward Asia' is fodder for a thousand op-eds. The Economist crunches the numbers.
• Why Aceh probably isn't a safe haven for Muslim extremists. (H/t Asia File.)
• Some hair-raising footage of an attempted landing of a Russian Sukhoi jet onto the country's sole aircraft carrier:

Scott Burchill replies to my thoughts on the Dubai assassination episode:

It's good to see a conservative which such a flexible and phlegmatic attitude to the rule of law, due process and transnational violence. Just designate someone a terrorist (don't bother with the messy ethics of illegal occupation or legitimate resistance), and kill them. What's the fuss, as Sharon would say if he was awake? You had better warn Kissinger that he's now a legitimate target for assassination by Chileans, Vietnamese, Cambodians and many others. Ditto for Clinton, both Bush's, etc. Is this how conservatives hope to bring order and stability to the world?

I gather from your comparison that you are not opposed to Australians killing Afghans in their country, but that you don't think we can kill enough of them to win — hence your belated opposition to the war?

Scott's last line actually gets reasonably close to my position. In the absence of practical alternatives for bringing terrorists to justice in an anarchical world, I can see no strong moral objection to the use of military force against those who have committed acts of terrorism, or those who are about to. 

But there are severe practical constraints to such a course, which is indeed why I am a critic of the Afghanistan war. It's not really a case of being unable to 'kill enough of them', but rather the difficulty of ever finding them, or of being able to distinguish them from the innocent.

I don't think the Afghanistan war is unjust in its motivation; rather, I think its unwinnable, and that the victory prize isn't worth the effort anyway.

Clinton Dines has lived most of his adult life in China and is one of Australia's most knowledgeable and respected business leaders there. Last Thursday he addressed the Lowy Institute on China's era of reform. You can listen to his address or read a transcript via our homepage.

I had a chance to sit down with Clinton to discuss some of major themes of his address.

Courtesy of The Browser, a cute and funny take on the Hollywood spy genre.

Enjoy your weekend.

It's not often that the foreign policy commentators at Australia's three major broadsheets agree on anything, but Peter Hartcher (SMH), Dan Flitton (The Age) and Greg Sheridan (The Australian) are all outraged over Israel's alleged use of fake Australian passports to help them carry out an assassination of a Hamas official.

Sheridan's piece is, for me, the stongest, in that he urges the Government to be very specific about exactly why it is unhappy. Given the fact that our troops in Afghanistan also target terrorist leaders, we can hardly complain about Israel doing the same. In fact, the chances of civilian deaths in an assassination like this are almost certainly lower than if Israel had ordered an air strike.

This quote from the Prime Minister, then, seems to get the target of our outrage slightly wrong (emphasis added): 'Any state that has been complicit in the use or abuse of the Australian passport system, let alone for the conduct of an assassination, is treating Australia with contempt...'

So what should we be upset about? Primarily, the possibility that Israel has harmed the reputations of three innocent Australians and damaged the credibility and authority of our passports, an important commodity for a nation whose citizens travel extensively. And if you wanted to get global about it, you could also point out that the integrity of passports is an international common good; when a sovereign state diminishes the value of any other country's passports, it hurts every country. 

Photo by Flickr user -nathan, used under a Creative Commons license.