I wonder how long we will remember this time. Three years or four? As the eighties turned into the nineties there were many collapses. Bond was jailed, Skase was on the run, two State banks had collapsed and Victoria was generally a basket case. Let’s face it, Canberra had to bail out Victoria.

I’m old enough to have corporate memories of that era seared into my psyche. As a youngster of 20, I went to a huge corporate party on October 17, 1987, the so-called Black Tuesday when stock markets collapsed. The next day I was still around Australia Square as crowds gathered in Bond Street to watch the Australian market collapse on the then Sydney Stock Exchange.

As I watched, I felt quite uneasy about the future – even as one so young. Later some guy landed in Australia Square after having jumped from somewhere above level 40. Years later I used to show people where it happened. It took them a long time to properly get the blood out of the paving. I didn’t see the actual jump happen but I saw the consequences and didn’t forget it. I finished my studies, including a subject on ethics, with this day in mind – the stock market collapse and one person’s final act.

There were even movies about the era and Gordon Gekko’s famous quote, “Greed is Good”, become infamous.

In the early 1990s I was in the USA and seconded to the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC). The RTC had a mission of bailing out troubled savings and loans institutions. It was a debacle that cost the US government billions. Ordinary people were horrified at the excesses and the consequences.

I was also horrified. Sitting in a midwestern suburb trawling through records with angry customers picketing was something I didn’t forget. The customers got their money back because the US government (who I was in effect working for) made sure of it. The taxpayers were screwed. Uncle Sam paid for every penny while the criminals got away with so much. I counted the losses for Uncle Sam. What a debacle, and a dreadful way to run a country.

Later that year I worked in the city hall of a major metropolitan area sifting through WIC (Women, Infants, Children) grants. There were so many conditions the city had to fill to extract this money from the federal government. It was a contrast to the savings and loans situation where the money flowed quickly. Some people had louder voices than others.

When I got back to Australia, the large accounting firms had enormous law suits against them. The figures were staggering. I was seconded to a litigation support project in Sydney. The firm I worked for was being sued over a collapse of a merchant bank, one of many cases they had against them.

I wasn’t involved in the original audit, but was asked to try and piece it all together. It was a farce. There was nothing to piece together. There were too many records missing and I strongly believe I had been sent on a fools errand. I couldn’t find anything to help, only things that would hurt our case.

A bit later, a colleague was on the audit of a developer. It was clear it would collapse. They had prepared workpapers documenting their concern about the client’s ability to continue as a going concern. When an audit report is signed it is implicit that the company will continue to be a going concern for a year. You can’t have workpapers on file that don’t support that view. The workpapers were later changed to support the clean audit opinion. Criminal, in my view.

After all these sort of things happened it was said we needed to focus on risks. Aaaah, yeah, right whatever. We were doing that in the past anyway, but no one wanted to know. No one that mattered.

For me the fact that we went through all of this in the late 80s and early 90s is enough. Shouldn’t this sort of level of scandal be only something you see once in a generation, or once in a career?

I’ve now seen it twice, and I don’t want to see it a third time. Scandals 12 years ago and scandals again now.

The people responsible were not really dealt with the first time around and they are not being dealt with this time. When I say dealt with, I mean imprisoned. I do not mean send the patsy to prison, send the real ones there. I am not one to go for elaborate conspiracy theories but there is definitely something rotten at the big end of town that needs to be rooted out once and for all.

Twice is enough in one career. I’m now afraid for the entire system and I don’t know what can replace it.

I agree with you Margo on your ethics suggestions (see Ethics overboard: How to promote integrity in the moment of choice at webdiary14Jan). We need more external involvement. Good players have absolutely nothing to fear. Ethical organisations should jump all over your suggestions. They can set themselves apart.

We also need watchdogs with teeth and people with missionary zeal to lead them. Alan Fels remains a bit of a hero of mine. Time magazine named three women as people of the year for 2002 – the whistle blowers of Enron, Worldcom and the FBI. The woman at the FBI highlighted the fact that the flight school concern was well known but not acted on. The Enron and Worldcom women tried to right wrongs and finally went external. People who tell are dobbers. In our culture this is even worse than elsewhere. You have to be one of the boys and any hint of disloyalty will be punished severely.

I haven’t been a dobber. What does that make me? Top marks for culture but a failure on ethics?

We need to re-examine our culture. People who tell are not always disloyal. It is possible they are the most loyal of all. I am absolutely sure of that. They are the people who believe the PR and the mission statements. They really believe it, only to find out later that it means nothing.

We need more people who will tell and we need people who will listen, because unless we have both the whole thing will happen again, probably around 2010.

Of course if we had a working system informants wouldn’t be so essential, but since we have lax regulation and poor corporate governance we have to design back-up systems.

The theme of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week is “Building Trust”. The foundations of the entire system are at stake and unless trust can be built (the real and sustaining way), I fear for the future. The lack of trust must be not only recognised, but addressed. The Davos thing is a talkfest, but what if it became a reality? What if we really found ways to build lasting trust?

Now that would be exciting and new. It has to be actions though, government has to act swiftly and meaningfully. Don’t just leave it to a few companies who are smart enough to see the competitive advantage in ethics – ram it home to the recalcitrants.

And for those who don’t want to play, send them to jail. If we show zero tolerance for mugging or speeding, let’s also show zero tolerance for crimes that ruin thousands of lives. Corporate corruption is criminal, and we need to root it out.

PS: The opposition needs to get off their fat, lazy arses and campaign like crazy on these issues. Why is it all off to the side only of interest to some – this should be bringing the government down. Maybe that is taking it too far, but I am FED UP with this crap!!! People need to be thrown in jail and governments need to be tossed out or answerable in some way. I want to know where the sense of outrage is. It seems strangely muted on all sides, almost like it is expected or accepted. It shouldn’t be this way!! Is this also about money?

The government did a lot of crazy things in the name of neo-liberal ideology when it first came to power – often for the benefit of its big business benefactors at the expense of the citizens who elected it. Senior ministers – including Peter Costello, former finance minister John Fahey and former higher education minister David Kemp – grotesquely misconceived the role of government and completely failed to fulfil their duties to the people.

The result has been disaster for the nation and its people, yet the perpetrators blithely refuse to admit error, rethink their principles for policy, or even wipe the self-satisfied smirks off their faces.

The Herald’s political editor Geoff Kitney nails the government’s responsibility, in part, for the HIF debacle in his column “Clubbing together for a soft touch” (smh). Big company collapses, just like development planning disasters, usually have a long and murky history, and HIH is no exception. Geoff traces the influence FAI and HIH bought over the years through generous donations to and heavy-duty networking within the Liberal Party, and shows that if John Howard as treasurer had not backed FAI in the 1970s the pain of HIH insurance holders and the cost to taxpayers in higher premiums and downgraded insurance coverage for risk might have been avoided:

“Had it not been for a decision by then treasurer Howard in 1978, when he overruled doubts by the insurance industry regulator about FAI’s ability to conduct an insurance business so that Larry Adler could do so, FAI would never have entered the industry.”

The contemporary political crime is that of Peter Costello, architect and implementor of “reform” of financial industry regulation on the advice of Stan Wallis, then a big business guru, since overseer of two more corporate basket cases, AMP and Coles Myer.

Yes folks, it’s the old “soft-touch” regulation model so attractive to Labor in government (remember the abolition of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal and its replacement with the pussy cat, powerless Australian Broadcasting Authority?) and then to the Coalition. APRA wasn’t a lame duck without reason – Costello’s reforms meant far fewer staff, a mandated culture of co-operation and hand-holding between the regulator and big business, and far too little time for the transition of power between the old and new regulators. As Geoff writes:

Set up by the Treasurer, Peter Costello, just weeks after the Government came into office, the Wallace inquiry concluded that prudential regulation which screened out riskier participants and reduced the likelihood an institution would fail “lessens competitive pressure and is a source of efficiency loss”.

Based on the Wallace recommendations, the Government scrapped the industry-specific system of regulation, replacing separate regulatory authorities for banking, credit union and building societies, superannuation and insurance with one financial system regulator, APRA. The new regulator’s brief was “soft surveillance of these institutions, with the emphasis on working with the industries on monitoring their financial condition and dealing with problems”…

The problem with all of this is that APRA was not even capable of carrying out its “soft touch” brief. To save money the Government gave the combined regulator 150 fewer staff than the former separate authorities. When the general insurance division was moved from Canberra to Sydney all but one of its experts resigned. When HIH was falling apart, five of eight positions in its industry monitoring division were vacant and none of the senior personnel had any experience with the insurance sector.

Little wonder it did not know what was going on. Which makes the Government’s washing its hands of any responsibility for the HIH disaster more than a bit rich.

The Australian Financial Review brought the matter even closer to the Treasurer today, with a story claiming Costello’s special big business advisory team for his financial reforms – the Financial Sector Advisory Council – told Treasury in 1999 “that HIH had been sharply undercutting insurance premiums in a bid to win business and that the whole sector needed monitoring”.

No wonder the government had to be pushed so hard to set up the Royal Commission! Yet not only is it not owning up to its role in the HIH collapse, it appears to have learnt nothing from it. Now the ACCC, a government regulator which takes its statutory obligations seriously and has done a great job in insisting that big business fulfils the ‘mutual obligations’ it owes to the community in exchange for neo-liberal policy, is under review. Big business pressure triggered the review – apparently competition policy is great until it suits the big boys to ‘soft touch’ its enforcement (for the beginnings of the big business push see Them and us,webdiary21Feb2001.)

The two other big management messes of Howard’s first term that come to my mind are IT outsourcing and the introduction of higher HECS rates to study maths and science.

The HECS decision was made on the basis that since it costs more to train mathematicians and scientists, they should pay more. The narrow focus of this cost-benefit analysis is almost criminal. The result is a collapse in enrolments for these two vital disciplines. Paying a penalty for a career that’s not highly paid is not something any government can expect most young people to do. Yet nothing has been done, and the system bleeds on.

And as Henry Ergas – the embodiment of pointy-headed economic rationalism – points out in a recent Business Review Weekly column, such crazy calculations proceed unchecked. Henry points out that the plan to refuse insurance coverage for dangerous pursuits like sky diving will mean fly-by-nighters will take over and the state will be saddled with the health bills of more accidents victims than before. Thanks Peter – you’re policies let HIH hold on too long, policy holders pay for it through levies on their policy premiums, and now you want them to pay more through reduced rights to compensation for injury caused by negligence! There’s got to be a better way – for example a low-cost, no fault compensation scheme for accident victims – but Peter Costello sure doesn’t want to think about it.

I sometimes wonder whether anyone in government these days cares about the public interest and really wants to work out good policy. Actually I don’t. They don’t.

IT outsourcing was John Fahey’s baby, assisted by Greg Barnes, now a member of the Democrats. It was pure ideology laced with short-term cost cutting and utter contempt for the public interest – including the legitimate expectation of citizens that personal information they’re forced to tell the state should not be handed over to the private sector. It led to maximum pain for government departments, a collective heart attack at the CSIRO, and a sensational lesson in the role of government from the head of the stock exchange, Richard Humphry. My feature on the policy, since dumped – again with no admission of mistake, no search for the lessons to be learned – follows.

I’ve argued for years that Labor needed, after government, to come up with some core principles about what government is for and why. It’s on a winner if it does, but it hasn’t.

***

System error

by Margo Kingston, 20/01/2001

John Fahey has only himself to blame for the computer outsourcing debacle.

Imagine if the welfare cheques of the nation failed to arrive one Thursday. It would be both a human and political catastrophe. Yet such risks were inherent in the Federal Government’s policy of outsourcing its information technology systems to the private sector, a Government report has found.

The biggest management scandal of the Howard Government – its almost inexplicably inept handling of information technology outsourcing – could have continued unchecked had it not been for the courage of the mild-mannered Auditor-General, Pat Barrett.

Barrett’s damning audit of the Howard Government’s policy of outsourcing forced the Finance Minister, John Fahey, to commission a review by the managing director of the Australian Stock Exchange, Richard Humphry.

The report, released by the Finance Minister on Friday of last week at 6pm, paints a truly alarming scenario of the potential risks in outsourcing the Government’s giant computer systems to the private sector.

“Centrelink performs a critical function for Government: around 6.4 million customers per fortnight receive payments from Centrelink,” Humphry wrote. “Many of these payments are for the most disadvantaged people in the community, whose livelihood and wellbeing depend in varying degree on government assistance.”

There was therefore “no tolerance for transition errors, unplanned downtime and system instability”, otherwise outsourcing could see “a substantial impact on individuals, the community at large and the broader economy”.

Despite this, “implementation risks have been magnified and the management of those risks subjugated in the pursuit of a contracted outcome”.

The Government swiftly accepted Humphry’s recommendations and immediately halted the Centrelink tender. It’s also abandoned the broader policy by accepting his recommendations that government agencies not yet drawn into the outsourcing whirlpool be given the authority to decide if, when and how to proceed.

It is a major blow to one of the key ideological planks of the Howard Government’s administration.

In 1997, Fahey persuaded Cabinet to decree that his Office of Asset Sales and Information Technology Outsourcing arrange total IT outsourcing at Centrelink and every other government department within two years, regardless of their needs, their business or the specialised nature of their information. It banned departments making in-house bids for the work, despite the fact that their specialist expertise and lower salaries would, in some cases, have made them the cheapest bid. It grouped departments into six big clusters and began ramming through tenders according to ludicrously tight timetables.

Fahey claimed, without producing evidence, that this would save the Government $1 billion, and slashed departments’ present and future budgets to reflect his guesstimate.

Barrett found the Finance Department had then overstated actual savings using a form of accounting it allowed no other department to use.

In reality, savings so far were $30 million, after deducting a staggering $15.2 million bill paid to legal consultants appointed by Fahey without tender, but before quantifying what Humphry called outage and service difficulties and “the considerable effort and cost” incurred by departments during implementation.

Humphry was incredulous that the departments involved had no say on whether it was cost effective or whether risks outweighed benefits.

“The Centrelink Board,” he insisted, “would need to be convinced that all relevant risks are identified and appropriately managed before agreeing to proceed with implementation.”

He continued: “It is possible that some aspects of Centrelink’s IT infrastructure are not suited to outsourcing, [and] the adoption of a selective outsourcing approach stands the best chance of achieving an optimal result.”

But the very process set up by Fahey did not give them that discretion.

Before Fahey grudgingly accepted Humphry’s recommendations, he was prepared not just to endanger welfare payments, but also to set in train a brain drain from the public sector.

Humphry noted that in any of these fields, outsourcing would end Government expertise in vital scientific areas by forcing staff with a mix of scientific and IT expertise to go private.

On the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), he said most IT systems “are directly linked to the monitoring of the nuclear reactor and security”. “In my opinion, this introduces special sensitivities which the chief executive should consider in assessing how ANSTO proceeds with outsourcing.”

CSIRO’s IT “is inherently research-oriented and does not easily lend itself to outsourcing. Much of the infrastructure forms part of the CSIRO’s core business in terms of specialist hardware and applications linked to highly specialised research. Communications links are also linked to research activities as well as universities engaged in collaborative research. In my opinion, this introduces special sensitivities …”

“Because of the time and safety critical nature” of the Bureau of Meteorology’s work, “it has developed a highly specialised technical infrastructure to provide critical meteorological data and information in real time. In my opinion this introduces special sensitivities …”.

On the IT outsourcing of law-enforcement agencies and the courts, Humphry saidthey “rely on high levels of security to protect sensitive data and electronic communications”.

“While it may be possible to outsource minor administrative components of these agencies, this may increase the risk of compromising security and exposing an agency to harmful consequences.”

The irony of a private-sector man such as Humphry explaining the concept of the public interest to government is frightening enough.

But before you breathe a sigh of relief that it’s all over, be aware that the IT infrastructure of the National Crime Authority, the Australian Tax Office, the Australian Electoral Commission and the Immigration Department has already gone under the hammer, with no protection for privacy.

The Privacy Act gives the right to complain to the Privacy Commissioner, get compensation, and ensure compliance only with respect to government agencies. There are no rights at all to take action against a private contractor.

In 1997, Fahey countered protests about the wipeout of citizen’s privacy rights by promising an urgent amendment to the Privacy Act, before contracts were signed, to extend its reach to contractors. The amendment was passed three years later, and will not come into effect until December this year.

Who can Fahey blame? No-one but himself and the Prime Minister. When he put up his Cabinet submission, every department bar his own and John Howard’s trenchantly opposed it.

Attorney-General’s warned of a privacy black hole, Treasury warned that “outsourcing posed major business and management risks without, in all cases, certain financial gains.” The Tax Office warned (correctly) of huge voluntary redundancy payments, costing government lots of cash to lose its expertise. Cabinet cleared the scheme, but left departments some discretion.

But when agencies such as the CSIRO said no, Howard stepped in, telling all departments in 1998 that outsourcing must proceed unless there was “a compelling business case [to be approved by Cabinet] for not doing so”.

The Office of Asset Sales used the prime ministerial backing to force the issue with recalcitrant departments.

The CSIRO tried to talk to Fahey about its special sensitivities but failed to make him understand, and the National Library and the Securities and Investments Commission demanded an indemnity from Fahey to protect it from future legal action before outsourcing. He refused.

No-one could make Fahey understand, and no wonder. Under questioning by Labor’s IT spokeswoman, Kate Lundy, in the Senate Estimates Committee, it was revealed that no-one in Finance or the Office of Asset Sales had anyone looking at best practice or overseas trends. The minister was flying blind.

If Fahey had bothered to look further afield, he’d have found that many private companies who outsourced IT were now “backsourcing”.

American studies have reported that economies of scale had proved illusory, senior executives were disturbed at their “lack of control”, and ambiguous contracts had led to protracted disagreements.

In making his findings, Humphry commissioned a report by the outsourcing expert Michael Reardon, whose checklist of best practice was broken on just about all counts by Fahey.

Reardon warned that outsourcing IT “involves a transfer of operational responsibility for an increasingly key business resource [and] failure to adequately address all the issues, and there are many, has the capability to seriously damage thebusiness”.

Despite agreeing to stop current tenders and let agencies decide how and what to outsource, Fahey insists that he’s already saved “hundreds of millions of dollars”. He also insists that “nothing’s changed in the policy”.

The business of government is government. Humphry’s dissection casts grave doubt on the Howard Government’s ability to manage the business for the long-term benefit of its shareholders, the Australian people. Unfortunately for John Fahey, in this case the bureaucracy was on the people’s side.

The point where I stopped reading Carmen (Proud to be ‘juvenile’, webdiary16Jan) was when she quoted something from The Guardian. Perhaps it is no worse than me quoting The Economist, but it is indicative of a gap I see. A big gap. The Guardian is a tired old London rag.

OK – I have read the rest of it, and Vietnam comes up yet again. I do not see the Vietnam experience being repeated in US foreign policy. It wasn’t in the first Gulf War, in Kosovo or Afghanistan. Nor will it be in Iraq this time around.

Carmen and those like her take the easy road. Target the US, offer no alternative solution and mush around in nostalgia for their youth, when they were weaned on very well founded anti-US sentiment. They are all products of the Vietnam trauma. I can understand it, but it does cause a distortion of reality.

Carmen says: “The momentum appears unstoppable and it’s my impression that many Australians have been lulled into a false sense of security about the Howard Government’s real intentions.” What kind of nonsense is this? There is no false sense of security. Everyone knows the Howard Government’s real intentions. Carmen alludes to a hidden agenda but she doesn’t spell it out.

The only agenda I am aware of is that Howard is a strong backer of the US, making him just the same as British Prime Minister Blair. Bush, Howard and Blair want a regime change in Iraq. It’s pretty simple. Where is the hidden part? Where is the false sense of security?

Carmen also comments that the US does not allow inspections of its own weapons of mass destruction. This is where all respect goes out the window. Some type of equivalence is being suggested between the US and vicious dictatorships. Iraq is a rogue state. The fact that a unanimous vote of the United Nations Security Council put the weapons inspectors in there in the first place is evidence of this. What purpose would be served in inspecting US weapons of mass destruction?

Then again, I suppose the UN only voted that way because America made them. It’s a zero sum game with the States and it’s always their fault. What a terrible world we live in. All created by Uncle Sam and his devious plans.

All would be fine if nothing was done. A bit of inspecting over there, a little more over here and we’ll all live in love and peace. The whole thing is a ridiculous charade. It is naivety in the extreme to think that there is not a significant threat of these weapons being released and used. Who really believes that Saddam Hussein is not likely to give or sell weapons to terrorists?

Exactly when will the inspections end? Let us imagine that the US just sat back and did nothing from this point. Would Hans Blick get up and say on Day X that the inspections are over and nothing much has been found? Let’s say he did that. Then what happens? I suppose all can relax and the world can go back to business as usual. We would be able to be so serene in the knowledge that nothing was found and the threat had passed. We could then just ignore Iraq and know that the whole thing was just a silly over reaction on the part of the United States.

Then in about two years from now when the weapons are sold to terrorists and deployed, killing say, three hundred or four hundred thousand people in a day or so, we could conclude that perhaps the inspectors didn’t find everything.

I think what is wanted is that at the MOMENT the weapons are sold or a millisecond before they are used, some action is taken. It’s an interesting approach. A sort of “let’s wait until the very last minute” thing. Let’s hope that last minute is well chosen.

So it seems the whole issue is about timing. Now is a tad early. If we wait until JUST the right time, perhaps it can be justified. Or taking it even further, let’s do nothing and wait until weapons are sold, released or used. Only THEN will we know we are justified. Only THEN will we know the mistakes of Vietnam are not repeated.

Protest is fine and should be encouraged. I don’t think it is juvenile, but I do think there is more than a hint of nostalgia about it in this case. I hope she had a nice day out on the water. I think Dr Lawrence is understandably moved by her historical association with encouraging Vietnam conscripts to tear up their “draft cards” (is that really what they were called in Australia or was that from Born on the Fourth of July? It all becomes so confusing).

This is not the 1970s. It is not about Gough Whitlam ending the Vietnam War all by himself. It’s not about conscription and sending 19 year olds into Vietnamese jungle for slaughter.

This is the 21st century. New York City has been attacked. Thousands dead. Australians have been attacked in Bali. There is an international network of extremists actively working to bring about “terror spectaculars”. The UN agrees that Saddam Hussein presents a real threat and should be disarmed. That’s why the weapons inspectors are there in Iraq. The United States has an overwhelming force. Australia is looking at supplying highly trained, career dedicated SAS resources plus some frigates and planes.

This is 2003, not 1973. A child born on the day Carmen encouraged the tearing up of “draft” cards would now be 30, heading into middle age. For such a child, the Whitlam government meant nothing. It was a long time ago that people were tearing up “draft” cards but no generation is quite so entitled as the Baby Boomers to own this current 21st century moment. After all, they are the entitled generation.

I suppose it is all part of the far reaching conspiracy of the American military industrial complex. They killed JFK and were responsible for Vietnam. Oliver Stone told me so. He’s a baby boomer and he’d surely know the truth.

Will we ever be free of that generation?

Hi. At the end Webdiary’s first week in 2003, pro-war readers have hit back with a vengeance.

 

Harry Heidelberg has big go at Carmen about her column yesterday (Proud to be juvenile, Carmen16Jan), but he’s begun the battle of our new columnists with style – engaged, constructive, and without personal abuse. He talks tough about what he calls the anti-war ‘nostalgia’ of the baby boomers at Harry17Jan.

I met Jim Nolan more than a decade ago when I covered the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal inquiry into Alan Bond’s fitness to keep the licence for Network Nine for the Herald and he appeared for the unions. Jim recently wrote a piece backing a war on Iraq on human rights grounds, and gave me permission to republish it. “What about us lefties who support Tony and George on this one? How about giving the left anti-Saddam, pro-human rights perspective a run?” he wrote. How could I resist?

After Jim’s piece, Darren Urquhart, inspired by the idea of Andrew Mamo and Helen Ferry for a “garage doors against the war” protest in yesterday’s Webdiary (webdiary16Jan) has another idea for suburban Australians to make their mark on the debate.

***

Regime Change for Saddam

by Jim Nolan

Disclosure: I am a Sydney barrister and labor lawyer who first joined the ALP in the mid sixties and was active in the anti-Vietnam movement and anti-Springbok South Africa movement in Brisbane. For the last fourteen years I’ve been a barrister appearing mainly for trade unions.

The prospect of a war against the fascist Ba’ath clique in Iraq has seen a predictable reaction by many in the political left in the United States, the United Kingdom Europe and now in Australia. It is well past time however for the knee jerk reaction to the prospect of ‘regime change’ in Iraq to be re-assessed. The rationale behind opposition to intervention in Iraq needs to be carefully considered.

Australians (and in particular the left) acted honourably in pressing for regime change in East Timor – even when the United Nations seemed to falter in its commitment to the East Timorese. Similarly, the intervention of the United Nations in Bosnia should have been welcomed by anyone who felt deeply about human rights. The actions of NATO in Kosovo – to rescue the most significant Muslim community in Europe from ethnic cleansing at the hands of the stalinist orthodox fascist – must also be regarded as a great humanitarian intervention. The same can be said for the British intervention in Sierra Leone. On the other hand, the international community can be condemned for its failure to intervene in a timely fashion in Rwanda.

These examples are sufficient to show that a blanket principle of non-intervention cannot rationally be sustained. The international community is and should be, obliged to act in the face of human tragedy and widespread human rights abuses. It has long been regarded as an important task for the left to take their own governments to task positively to require intervention in the name of human rights and democratic values. Campaigns against the racist regimes in South Africa and Zimbabwe and more recently, Cambodia, East Timor, Burma and Tibet bear this out.

Opposition to regime change in Iraq stands in stark contrast to these principled campaigns. It can only – objectively considered – lend aid and comfort to one of the most brutal and murderous regimes on earth. Anyone considering action which could lead to the prolongation of Saddam regime should be reminded of the ugly brutality of this fascist regime.

Have no doubt that the time will shortly come when this choice will have to be made. Saddam’s authority is not just built on fear and lies. His conduct gives every indication that he has long since lost the capacity for honest dealing. A material breach of the UN resolution by Iraq is as inevitable. So too will be the intervention which will follow.

Will the energies of the left then be spent in excoriating regime change or in championing the status quo of a fascist horror state which human rights advocates have described as having among the worst human rights records since World War II?

The Ba’ath party’s reign of terror

Early in its reign of terror, the Ba’athist regime liquidated communists, trade unionists and liberal democrats. Ever since it has systematically repressed and tortured its citizens- especially anyone suspected of opposition to the Ba’athist regime. Saddam continues to subject Iraqi citizens to forced relocation and deportation, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, “disappearance,” and summary political execution.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Iraq said as recently as November 1999: “Extreme and brutal force is threatened and applied without hesitation and with total impunity to control the population”. The human rights situation inside Iraq is worse than any country since the end of World War II. Methods of torture used in Iraqi jails include using electric drills to mutilate hands, pulling out fingernails, knife cuts, sexual attacks and ‘official rape’.

Some recent examples of human rights abuses are: 3000 prisoners executed at the Mahjar Prison between 1993 and 1998; about 2500 prisoners executed between 1997 and 1999 in a “prison cleansing” campaign; 122 male prisoners executed at Abu Ghraib prison in February/ March 2000 and another 23 political prisoners executed there in October 2001.In October 2000, dozens of women accused of prostitution were beheaded without any judicial process. Some were accused for political reasons. Women prisoners at Mahjar are routinely raped by their guards, and prisoners at the Qurtiyya Prison in Baghdad and elsewhere have been kept in metal boxes the size of tea chests. If they do not confess they are left to die.

The Kurds

Opposition to regime change in Iraq also ignores and trivialises the plight of nearly thirty million Kurds – all of whom would dearly love regime change in Iraq. The Kurds are the largest disenfranchised Muslim community in the middle east – much larger than the Palestinians for example.

Iraq’s 1988 Anfal campaign of extermination against the Kurdish people living within its borders resulted in the death of at least 50,000 and as many as 100,000 people, many of them women and children. The Anfal campaign has been widely recognised as a campaign of genocide against the Kurds. The Kurds hold the tragic distinction of being the only community to have been attacked with weapons of mass destruction by their own government.

Kurds in Northern Iraq currently enjoy significant freedom thanks to the protection against Saddam’s army provided by the air forces of the United States and United Kingdom. An absolute non-intervention policy would require withdrawal this air cover. This would serve only to permit Saddam to revive his campaign of genocide against the Kurds.

Saddam’s Shria laws

In 1994 Saddam – supposedly a secular ruler – introduced amputations and branding.

Saddam issued a series of decrees establishing severe penalties for ‘criminal’ offences. These include amputation, branding, cutting off ears, and other forms of mutilation. Anyone found guilty of slandering the President has their tongue removed. The branding was useful to distinguish war wounded amputees from ‘criminal’ amputees. (Information on the ugly truth of this regime is at humanrightswatch.)

Saddam as Sponsor of Terror

These well-chronicled human rights abuses should in themselves be sufficient to persuade the left to argue passionately for regime change. The prospect of Saddam and his clique as the wholesalers of weapons of mass destruction represents a clear and present danger to the civilised world.

It has been argued that there is no ‘smoking gun’ which associates Saddam with Al Qaeda. There is already clear evidence however that Saddam has long been an exporter of terror. Mostly this has taken the form of numerous assassinations of Iraqi dissidents living abroad who were opposed to the regime.

However the Ba’athist regime was also notoriously the sponsor and protector of the Abu Nidal group of Palestinians terrorists who were involved in a campaign of assassination of Palestinian moderates. Abu Nidal died recently in Baghdad – apparently of natural causes.

Saddam Gets ‘Religion’

In order to boost his credentials as a leading Muslim with theocratic fascists like Osama bin Laden, Saddam is presently squandering his limited oil revenues in the construction of grand Mosques. This is only one of numerous gross examples of using precious resources to shore up his regime at the expense of the welfare of the Iraqi population. The grandest will feature a moat in which an island landscaped to reproduce Saddam’s thumb print is to be built. An architect who worked on this bizarre project and gave a media interview about it recently died of ‘poisoning’.

Saddam is Iraq’s Ceausescu

The only possible objection to intervention in the interests of regime change is the civilian casualties which might ensue. The Afghanistan campaign demonstrated that casualties could be minimised. The Gulf war showed that the Iraqi army was a paper tiger and that its largely press-ganged ranks were eager to desert Saddam. The much vaunted ‘republican guard’ may be expected to collapse within days. So long as the Iraqi people are convinced that any intervention will be carried through with conviction – and not betrayed as it was in 1991 – they may be expected quickly to join the push to oust Saddam. Apart from some die hard Saddam loyalists, sensible army officers may be expected to surrender and defect.

Every rational indicator suggests that Saddam will sooner or later meet the same fate as that other joke dictator, Ceausescu. His recent farcical plebiscite and his amnesty for criminals (but not political prisoners) suggests that the regime is feeling the pressure. He has in the past few weeks reportedly recalled the children of Iraqi diplomats – no doubt as hostages against expected defections and denunciations.

When that time comes, if Saddam’s republican guard is permitted to strike out at the population without hindrance, many of his brave opponents may be expected to meet the same fate which befell democratic forces in 1991.

At the end of the Gulf war – at the urging principally of the corrupt Saudi oligarchy – the international community made the cowardly decision to permit Saddam to reassert his rule. The slaughter of his political opponents far exceeded the repression witnessed in East Timor. We in the west owe all these people and their families and comrades a significant debt which now waits to be repaid. The challenge for all of us is whether we are to be remembered as the supporters of those who will see Saddam off- or as having stood in their way.

None of the facts about the true horrors of the Ba’ath regime appear seriously to be challenged by anyone. What then (in the memorable phrase) is to be done?

There are two principal reasons for hesitation about intervention. The first is concerned with potential casualties. Many of my political comrades say that if a targeted assassination of Saddam and his henchmen could be arranged, they would not object. This in itself is a tectonic shift in thinking about the conduct of international relations – to recall for a moment Guatemala, Mossadeq and Allende! Leaving that aside, what this concession means is that the approach to intervention requires only a judgment about the probable results which flow from intervention or non intervention not about the morality of regime change itself.

This is a grim calculus but not one which suggests that one option is automatically superior. What it necessitates is a deliberate decision that a prolongation of Saddam’s regime will not lead to the murder, torture and further brutalisation and impoverishment of the Iraqi people on a scale which will exceed the human costs of intervention. In my judgment, another two or three (or more) years of brutality and its inevitable bloody and chaotic aftermath is too high a price for the Iraqi people to endure. It cannot be tolerated when the realistic alternative is a short sharp military intervention which can now confidently be predicted to topple the much hated Saddam in a matter of weeks if not days.

There is a second and perhaps in truth more substantial rationale against intervention. This is the visceral knee jerk anti-Americanism which still pervades political debate. America’s past sins, it is argued, disqualify it from any legitimacy in a struggle like this. A case in point is the former support for Saddam by the US.

Whereas the truth of this past alliance of convenience is incontrovertible, its justification to oppose US intervention now does not withstand analysis. Past sins to which the US and its allies were a party make the obligation to put things right all the more imperative, not otherwise. What better gesture to make amends to those who have suffered under the Ba’ath regime than to be their liberators – albeit belatedly. It is also worth reflecting upon the fact that that disqualification based on past conduct would have disqualified Australia from any role in East Timor.

The real campaign ahead will be to insist that the international community meets its obligations to the people of Iraq to rebuild the country, to develop democratic institutions based on tolerance and allow its people access to the benefits derived from its oil wealth. The price of that intervention must be that the international community is to be kept to its word in Iraq as much as in Afghanistan – even when more immediate issues distract the attention of decision makers. This task – to redouble the campaign for human rights, the rule of law, and secular democracy -is the far, far preferable call upon the left’s energies.

This article was first published in workersonline

***

Darren Urquhart in Sydney

I like the “Garage Doors Against the War” idea, and agree with its premises: The suburbanites in developed countries are the centre of the information war; corporations and the media are the real centers of power and contemporary strategies call for actions against them, and oil is at the center of the looming war.

I have a few points to add.

The rich suburbanites in the developed world (and that’s rich by “world” standards, not our standards) are at the centre of the ‘Information War’ because we hold the real power – the power that can see governments, and empires, fall. At the end of the day Bush, Howard, Blair are nothing without the support of the suburbs. However, the information war is being cleverly waged and we have been convinced that we are powerless.

Andrew Mamo and Helen Ferry say that “protest against government is an anachronistic agency for change”, but it can still work. The only problem is that suburbanites need to get thoroughly pissed off before they’ll leave the couch and wade through clouds of tear gas on the street. You need large numbers in street protests to get a government’s attention and you only get sufficient numbers when the suburbanites join in – see the Sorry march in Sydney and the anti-Vietnam war protests in the 60s.

However before the government will budge, the action must be sustained (see the failure of Sorry to impact policy) and that takes time. In the meantime much damage is done (see Vietnam).

In any event, protesting against the Howard government and even forcing policy change does nothing to impact the real source of power in Washington DC. Australia could tomorrow turn into a 18 million strong band of rabid tree-hugging commies and Washington wouldn’t blink. When it comes to influencing the power elite who seek to re-engineer our world we have no power as citizens. Zip.

However, we do have considerable power as consumers.

That oil plays a major role in the approaching Iraqi war and in the wider strategic goals of the Bush Administration is, surely, beyond question now. More and more people are seeing through the various smoke screens of WMD, liberating the Iraqi people, enforcing UN resolutions, tackling terrorism etc. The double standards and hypocrisy on display is pure comedy.

However, oil is just a part, maybe even a smallish part, of the overall Bush Administration strategy. The grand vision involves total US domination over land, sea, air and space (see newamericancentury). The authors of this report, written in 1999/2000, include Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defense secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), George W Bush’s younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). It is difficult to avoid the feeling that these people seek a level of power through military, economic and strategic domination that is beyond anything the world has seen before.

I have a few more premises to add to those made in “Garage Doors Against the War”.

Premise 4: Big business has the ear of the President. Big business finances the two US Presidential candidates when they campaign and so have a kind of veto right at that early stage. These campaigns are big, big deals and cost plenty. When the new king is anointed his benefactors line up for pay back.

Once in power the US President maintains close and serious contact with big business. Maybe someone could find out how many official conversations George W has had with the head(s) of Mobil-Exxon since coming to power and compare it with contacts with Howard. I wonder who wields the greatest power in Washington, Howard or Mr.Mobil?

Premise 5: Extremists pose a clear and present danger to peace-loving people all over the world. Islamic extremists flying planes into buildings, blowing up nightclubs and hotels causing considerable and understandable anxiety. Hindu extremism is on the rise in India. National extremism regularly rears its head and is apparently a concern today in Iraq. But another form of extremism is going unreported. American extremism is a dangerous reality in our world today. The views and actions of the Bush Administration are extreme.

Pre-emptive war without provocation or overwhelming evidence of imminent danger, is extreme.

Continuing to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the world’s most advanced and deadly war machine and into a whole new generation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is extreme.

Pouring money into the war machine and ignoring the plight of millions of Americans with no health care, barely-there welfare and an annual murder rate that leaves any recent American war in its wake, is extreme.

Thumbing your nose at international law, treaties, opinions and UN Resolutions is extreme.

Invading dozens of countries, killing millions of people, overthrowing democratic governments and supporting terrorists is extreme.

To believe, really believe, that you are God’s chosen people, his special sons and daughters for whom victory is destiny, is extreme.

In my experience the American people are not extremists. My friends, family and business partners there are great people. They are not extremists. However, extremists have taken power. They reside in the Pentagon, the media, the corporate world and now the White House.

I propose we identify these extremists as Amerikans, or maybe Americists, primarily to avoid confusing them with the American people – our mates forever.

So:

* the suburbanites are the key to Western political power;

* effective protest against government is slow and, for Australians, probably ineffective against the Amerikans;

* the pursuit of oil and wider strategic goals dictate US foreign policy; and

* big business is heard in Washington and American extremism is real and terrorising (specially if you are currently a resident of downtown Baghdad).

Proposal:

We, the suburbanites of the developed world, can have our voices heard via the heads of Big Business. It is our consumer dollars that makes them Big in the first place – they owe us one.

We should appoint say five US companies to be our spokespeople in Washington. Big, big companies with well loved consumer brands, iconic American brands, and with plenty of business being conducted outside of America. Businesses whose products have equally well distributed competitors.

This proposal is for an Amerikan Boycott.

The companies we nominate to be our spokespeople will not see any more of our consumer dollars until they achieve effective policy change in Washington DC. We do yet seek regime change but we are running out of patience with the current regime. They must hear us, and act, or innocent businesses will feel our wrath.

As a starting point we could look to Mobil-Exxon (number 2 on the Fortune 500 with revenues of US$191 billion), Ford (#4, US$162b), Coca-Cola (#99, US$20b), McDonalds (#139, US$15b) and Nike (#204, US$9b).

A total of US$397,000,000,000 in Big Business revenue, about the same size as the US Defence Budget.

These companies products are, generally, easily identified. Any consumer anywhere, with total anonymity and security can take part in the Amerikan Boycott. Suburbanites all over the world can express their concerns about the extremism emanating from Washington by altering, ever so slightly, their habits of consumption. BP instead of Mobil, Holden instead of Ford, Pepsi (or even a juice!) instead of Coke, any mum and dad burger-joint instead of Maccas and Bonds instead of Nike. There are plenty of options. What is needed is massive, sudden solidarity in sending the message.

If their sales and profits drop their shareholders will demand something be done. What are they going to do? They can’t demand we return to buying their products. Like all great companies in difficult times they must listen to their customers. If the bottom line is hurting it will be because their customers are asking their loved brands to speak for them in the corridors of power.

This can happen fast. No march permits needed, no strategies for breaking police lines, no getting arrested on the grounds of “national security”. Just millions of concerned consumers all over the world having their say.

The last time Carmen Lawrence staged “an action” was during an anti-war rally at the Perth Town Hall more than thirty years ago, when she urged young men who’d been drafted to tear up their draft cards then quickly disappeared (such urgings were a criminal offence).

Her column on yesterday’s attempt to inspect the US warship U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln off Freemantle for weapons of mass destruction is at carmen16Jan. The Herald news story on the action is at smh.

Scott Burchill has been busy too, dissecting Simon Crean’s latest policy on the war – not to back a US unilateral strike against Iraq unless United Nations’ authorisation was vetoed by one of the permanent members of the UN security council. To end, Andrew Mamo and Helen Ferry discuss their anti-war protest, ‘garage doors against the war’.

Webdiarist Jozef Imrich recommends a passionate piece by John le Carre in The Times, ‘The United States has gone mad’ (times) and a Boston Globe piece, ‘Arms deals criticized as corporate US welfare’ (bostonglobe).

To begin, Merrill Pye likes this extract of a WB Yeats poem:

The Stare’s Nest by My Window

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned.

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

…

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love;

…

(from “Meditations in Time of Civil War – VI”, 1928, at rice

***

Scott Burchill, Lecturer in International Relations, Deakin University

While his policy seems to be moving in a more sensible direction, Mr Crean’s caveat that ALP support for a war against Iraq is still possible if one of the permanent five of the UN Security Council exercises its veto over a resolution authorising an attack when such a strike is widely supported by most member states, is bizarre.

According to the Leader of the Opposition, “the exception to this position [of only supporting UN authorised action against Iraq] might occur in the case of overwhelming UN Security Council support for military action, but where support for such action was subject to veto”. Three points need to be made.

(1) This position is simply a copy of the new UK Government position. PM Blair said today that if one country on the Security Council imposed an “unreasonable or unilateral” block “we can’t be in a position where we are confined in that way”.

(2) On the one hand Mr Crean is saying only the moral authority of the UN can legitimate a strike against Baghdad. On the other he is effectively saying the process by which the UN arrives at that position – via the normal process of passing Security Council resolutions – is so corrupt it can be disregarded when convenient.

It’s like someone saying they will only obey laws which are passed by a two thirds majority of the Australian Parliament even though a simple majority suffices. He can’t have it both ways. Either he accepts the legitimacy of the UN process as it is and has been since 1945, or he doesn’t.

(3) What are the implications of this new policy for relations with Israel? Since the early 1970s, the US has vetoed 22 draft Security Council resolutions on Palestine alone – this figure doesn’t include 7 vetoes relating to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s. In Government, would the ALP disregard Washington’s “unreasonable [and] unilateral” use of its veto to protect Israel, blocks which routinely defy “overwhelming UN Security Council support”?

***

Andrew Mamo and Helen Ferry

Upon reading recent webdiary forums regarding the impending invasion of Iraq, it is obvious there are many people who feel helpless or overwhelmed in the face an onslaught of lies and propaganda that speak of war as an inevitability. Collective activism is of course necessary, but does not seem to be garnering any mainstream attention, as the majority of (mainly television and radio) journalists duly toe the ideological line.

My family has sought its own expression of dissent. We have come up with a concept called “Garage Doors Against The War”, based on the following premises:

Premise 1: The War on Terror is essentially being fought in the suburbs of the USA, UK and Australia via our TV sets, while the real atrocities are carried out clandestinely. An ‘Information War’ is being fought for the hearts and minds of Western citizens who live in predominantly suburban environments. These environments are sometimes enclaves of cultural values, where little of the so-called multicultural society can be experienced.

Premise 2: Current large scale protests occur in urban environments, where the voice of dissent must be broadcast and compete in a space already co-opted and dominated by advertisers. Furthermore, inner city residents, for a number of socio-economic reasons, are more likely to be progressive in their views, and with the media currently reluctant to cover or even admit to these protests, the effect of the protest is limited – the protesters are just preaching to the converted. Needless to say, protest against government is an anachronistic agency of change. Contemporary strategies call for actions against corporations and the media, the real centres of power, but these actions are dependent on an informed populace, and with control over information becoming increasingly tighter (witness the Total Information Awareness initiative), getting a message of dissent out to the suburbs is more crucial than ever.

Premise 3: One of the major driving forces of the war is the lust for oil. Suburban commuters are one of the major consumers (and polluters) to whom the oil industry caters. Urban residents have no problems living without cars but it is much harder for suburban residents to get by without one (or two). Movements such as ‘Reclaim The Streets’ again target urban environments, but to a large degree the alienating effect of suburban life can be pinned down to its focus on the car. The latest suburban developments merely provide housing arranged around clusters of dead ends and cul-de-sacs linked to major traffic arteries or to the nearest mall or business park. Footpaths and sidewalks are scarce. Suburban architecture makes the garage the dominant feature of the suburban domicile’s facade.

Based on these premises, we have proposed to use the suburban space as a space of dissent and protest against the Bush administration’s grab for global domination. Each house has a ready-made billboard just waiting to shout out a message to sleepy neighbours, waking them up to the reality of our current situation – the garage door.

GARAGE DOORS AGAINST THE WAR wants dissenting people to turn their garage doors into loud, colourful canvases where they can make their disapproval known. Protest the war on terror, protest the war on Iraq, protest globalization, protest media complicity, protest Bush! Make it funny, make it angry, make it artistic, make it simple, make it clear, make it true. Whatever you make it, just make it!

We live in the suburbs and we know how precious a lot of people are about their homes. But we ask: What’s a few coats of paint compared to the lives and liberties that have been and will continue to be lost if we all stand back and say nothing?

It will take guts to do this – for people to change their houses and to risk the ire of their neighbours – but that’s what protest is all about; the courage to stand up for your convictions. Even if people are unwilling to paint their doors, or find it too difficult, there are alternatives, such as putting up a protest sign in your front yard.

We have put our money where our mouths are and are painting a protest on our garage door. (We will send photos through when it’s done, and we will put up a website soon where people can send us shots of their protests.) For those who are not artistically inclined, we hope to establish loose co-operatives of artists in particular areas to offer their services. There are many possibilities and many opportunities.

We have put this idea out on the web and already it is going global, having been featured in forums at nologo.org, alternet.org and freevision.org, with a terrific response from activists in the US. By taking the fight to the suburbs, the real heartland of the War on Terror, maybe, just maybe, we can change a few minds, and changing minds is crucial if we are to win the War of Information.

Standing off the coast of Western Australia, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln is a stark reminder that the United States is preparing to attack Iraq, almost certainly without United Nations approval.

After a short stay here over Christmas for R&R, the vessel (and its battle group) returned unexpectedly to anchor off the Port of Fremantle, a city accustomed to hosting the warships of our allies. Despite this familiarity, many local people are alarmed at its presence, as much for what it symbolises as for the heightened risk associated with U.S. war readiness. As I’ve taken my regular evening walk along Port Beach with the aircraft carrier in full view, many have stopped me to express their alarm at the presence of the vessel, representing as it does, Australia’s potential involvement in a war they believe to be illegal and unjustified.

The carrier’s presence and its silhouette also remind us of the unparalleled fire power which the United States now commands. This battle group is but a tiny fragment of U.S. forces arrayed all over the world. U.S. Defence Department statistics reveal that of the 189 countries which are member states of the U.N., there is a U.S. military presence in 100. It is almost impossible to estimate the current U.S. expenditure on arms, but we do know that they funnelled billions of dollars into the anti-soviet forces in Afghanistan, including the dreaded Osama bin Laden.

For good reason, given our recent century of war, the United Nations has spent years debating and devising means to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons and biological and chemical weapons – though not, it must be said paying much attention to so-called “conventional” weapons.

With the end of the cold war, many of us hoped that we would see and end to the expansion of these weapons stockpiles. Instead we are seeing further proliferation and the collapse of agreements which had some capacity to limit their development and expansion.

According to the Bush administration, war against Iraq is justified by the alleged build up of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. And they have accused Iraq of damaging the weapons’ inspection system – which may be true. However, there is plenty of evidence that the U.S. has done a great deal to undermine the inspection system and has avoided scrutiny of its own weapons. As George Monbiot put it in the Guardian:

There is something almost comical about the prospect of George Bush waging war on another nation because that nation has defied international law. Since Mr Bush came to office, the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has done in twenty years.

It has scuppered the biological weapons convention, while experimenting, illegally, with biological weapons of its own. It has refused to grant chemical weapons inspectors full access to its laboratories, and destroyed attempts to launch chemical inspections in Iraq. It has ripped up the anti-ballistic missile treaty, and appears to be ready to violate the nuclear test ban treaty.

As William Blum has also pointed out in his excellent treatise, “Rogue State”:

“Washington officials are careful to distinguish between the explosives the U.S. drops from the sky and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), which only the officially designated enemies are depraved enough to use.”

He points out that the U.S. government (add the Australian Government to that) speaks sternly of WMDs which are used indiscriminately, as opposed to the precision cruise missiles, cluster bombs, depleted uranium weapons and landmines – which it must be said have no other purpose than indiscriminate damage to civilians.

Cluster bombs, used in the recent bombing of Afghanistan, are apparently described by the Pentagon as “combined effects munition” and by the manufacturer as “all-purpose, air delivered cluster weapons system”. They are, in reality, indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction, and anti-landmine campaigners have requested that they be placed on the list of banned weapons under the Geneva Convention. Reports from Afghanistan confirmed that these weapons are particularly lethal for children who are attracted to the colourful devices. It was reported that they were the same yellow as the packages of food dropped by the U.S. to signal their compassionate concern for the starving Afghan people.

The rhetoric of Bush administration invites us to believe that they are good international citizens, interested only in bringing democracy to downtrodden people and preventing the development of weapons of mass destruction. Sadly, neither is true. And the United States has reserved to itself the right to act as it chooses. The Howard Government not only endorses this stance, but angered our neighbours when Howard recently indicated that he believed he would be justified in bombing our neighbours in order to hit terrorist targets.

Anyone who’s paying even the slightest attention to the unrelenting propaganda emanating from “Pax Americana” will be aware that the Bush administration has no intention of waiting for the U.N. weapons inspectors to complete their work or to accept their findings. They reserve the right to attack without the endorsement or restraint of the international community. The build up of troops on Iraq’s borders, the unrelenting pressure on reluctant players such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia testify to their determination to conduct war with impunity.

The momentum appears unstoppable and it’s my impression that many Australians have been lulled into a false sense of security about the Howard Government’s real intentions.

That’s why yesterday, at the invitation of a group of young anti-war activists (the Fremantle Anti-Nuclear Group), I joined upper house Green MP, Jim Scott, an international law expert and an environmental scientist to “inspect” the weapons on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. We wanted to make the point that the U.S. is prepared to bomb the people of Iraq (estimates are that hundreds of thousands died as a result of the last conflict) with weapons, which will certainly be indiscriminate in their effect and cause ” mass destruction”. We also wanted to underline the fact that we do not have freedom of movement in our own waters and that the U.S. navy never allows inspection of its own “weapons of mass destruction”.

There are some who clearly disapprove of such direct (although lawful) action, but they appear unconcerned about the accelerating pace of war talk and the fact that we’re being seduced into accepting the Howard Government’s reassuring utterances about going along with the U.N., when it’s obvious that the moment George W snaps his fingers, Howard will jump and we’ll all suffer the consequences. It seemed to me that we had to seize every opportunity to voice our opposition to the conflict before it is too late.

Perhaps some of my anxiety stems from the fact that the anti-war movement was so slow to mobilise in response to the U.S./Australia “adventure” in Vietnam which killed so many in our region, producing decades of misery and conflict. Over thirty years ago I spoke at an ani-war rally and urged the young men who’d been drafted to tear up their draft cards. They did. Whitlam was elected on the wave of anti-war sentiment and Australia withdrew from the horror that was the Vietnam war which ended soon afterwards.

Perhaps, as some have charged, my actions in drawing attention to the double standards employed by the U.S administration are “juvenile”. But I know where I’d rather be today – supporting the young enthusiasts – those juveniles – who actually believe that peace is possible and that we all have an obligation to alert the community to the vile consequences of an unprovoked attack on the people of Iraq and the possibility of “blowback” on the Australian people.

HIH is the yarn today, but what’s the real, long-term solution to the collapse of ethics among big-end-of-town accountants, lawyers and actuaries? They’re the professionals involved who are meant to have duties separate to those of the companies they service. Higher duties. The workability of current practice – that they work directly for the companies that pay them – relies on strong professional ethics, and the enforcement thereof by peers and their professional associations. That’s broken down. Conflicts of interest aren’t even recognised as such these days. How can we repair the damage?

Should we move to government-employed professionals or panels of private sector professionals chosen by government but paid for by companies?

In September last year I gave a speech to the Corruption Prevention Network’s conference Ethics overboard: No apologies. I asked for your input first, and got some great replies. So today, I thought I’d publish that speech.

Following that, I’ve republished a Webdiary entry called Your ethics which I accidentally removed from the archive before Christmas. It includes some brilliant pieces, including the first piece by our new expat columnist and corporate outrider Harry Heidelberg, and a timely piece by Meagan Phillipson on the ethics of international relations. For other Webdiary discussions on ethics, see Ethics, webdiary9Sep2002, andBuzzword ethics, webdiary19Sep2002.

I’m about to start writing a chapter for a book on media ethics about ethics and online media, with particular reference to Webdiary. Again, I’d love your input. As you’ll see from the speech, your input last time was just what the doctor ordered.

You can access submissions to the HIH inquiry at fairfax.

We ran Scott Burchill’s piece in yesterday’s Webdiary on the rhetoric of war against Iraq off the front page of smh.com.au today, and readers hopped in for their say. Go to yoursay for the debate. As I write, Scott’s piece is the most read article on smh.com.au since midnight last night. We’ve asked the United States embassy if they’d care to respond. No word yet.

***

Ethics overboard

by Margo Kingston

When you think about ethics, by which I mean ‘professional standards of conduct’, your starting point has to be your own.

Just after I started work in the big smoke of Sydney many years ago, the Herald chief of staff told me in confidence that the paper was sending a reporter posing as a prospective student into a Sydney high school to report on the youth of today in today’s public education system. The editor was to pretend to be his father when enrolling him, but was too busy to do so. Could I pose as my colleagues aunt?

Weeks later, while the reporter was still at the school, another reporter stumbled upon the project and leaked it, resulting in political condemnation in the parliament and outrage from our readers and my colleagues. Thus I discovered that journalists in the journalists union were bound by a code of ethics.

This was the first time I’d heard of it. I had a duty, personal to me, to tell anyone I was speaking to for a story what my job was, unless the matter was of such compelling public interest that I was duty bound not to. Everyone in my industry believed that this was not a case where the exception applied.

The shock of the incident marked the beginning of my deep interest in journalistic ethics. I thought about my role in relationship to my readers, and my duties to assert my professional ethics to avoid abuse of power by my industry.

I was trained as a lawyer, not a journalist. I knew my ethical duties as a lawyer: My duty was not only to the client but to the court, and I should never knowingly use as evidence material I knew to be false. So I don’t agree with the idea that ethics are instinctive in all cases. Written principles are required, and they need to be vigorously communicated as a matter fundamental to your career.

I believe the principles should be general, not particular, as particularity breeds legalism and the dangerous belief that technical avoidance equals compliance with ethical duty. Every ethical code should include not only the principles to which adherence is required, but the reasons why. For ethics, in the end, is about ourself in relation to other individuals and to our society.

The elites are in relationship with the people, and professional ethics – by accountants, lawyers, engineers, clergymen, architects – are constraints on abuse of power by the elites. A sellout of ethics for money, power, or survival, weakens the stability of the polity itself.

Example

In the early 1990s, a construction company sued an establishment Brisbane law firm for its costs in a prolonged Federal Court civil action. The firm had acted for a developer, since jailed, who instructed it to resist and delay an action for payment of a debt due for building a shopping centre by alleging fraud. There was no evidence for this accusation. The ethical duties of solicitors and barristers forbid them from pleading fraud without supporting evidence.

When the developer went into liquidation, the plaintiff bought its legal files for a pittance and sued the legal firm. The barrister involved was Ian Callinan QC, since appointed a High Court judge.

So, a former leader of the Queensland bar and a partner in Queensland’s best connected law firm were caught red-handed with their pants down.

The Queensland Law Society, a body backed by legislation to police the ethical standards required by solicitors, would not say whether or not it was examining the solicitor’s behaviour. It was confidential. And the society implied that it only acted on a complaint, not of its own motion. End of story.

The president of the Australian Bar Council, NSW barrister Bret Walker QC, called for an inquiry into Justice Callinan’s fitness to remain a judge. The Senate numbers for an inquiry fell away after veiled threats by the government to target Justice Kirby in revenge. End of story.

But worst of all for me, the profession split on whether the two men had done anything wrong. Legal academic Professor Greg Craven, for example, said everyone did it, so why worry?

That meant the ethical edifice was a sham. It shot to pieces lawyer’s claims of effective self-regulation, stripped the trust shown by judges to lawyers on the assumption they were not abusing process, and allowed rich people to waste limited court time to wear down litigants with a just cause.

***

The ethical duties of a professional engineer, architect, lawyer, doctor or accountant – whether working in business or for government – are a counter-balance to the exploitation of others by organisations and individuals who have no ethics and care only for short term self-interest. Break these down, and the system is in crisis. Witness Enron and Arthur Anderson. Enron and investment banks. Enron and political figures.

The dominant neo-liberal ideology has helped trash those values in our society which cannot be quantified to a cash figure. That rules out or at the very least severely compromises ethical imperatives, as all the system’s incentives promote the glorification of individual freedom to pursue self-interest and a contempt for values other than bottom-line cash.

Ideas for reform

I’ve been trying for ages to think of a way to enforce journalists’ ethics without government legislation. I can’t. Only journalists belonging to the union have a duty to comply with its code of ethics,and many aren’t in the union. The bosses have no such duty unless they voluntarily sign up to a company code of ethics, and can and do employ people not in the union. In any event, ethics should be seen as ideals to strive for, ideals that can be highly nuanced, and easily forgotten.

Ethics are also a group standard, meaning they requires constant discussion and thought between colleagues, and that requires openness.

So what I’m thinking of is framework legislation, to cover all jobs with ethical duties. It could require all professions to have an ethical oversight body comprised of a chairperson and directors agreed to by consensus between the profession’s leaders and consumer groups, and if consensus cannot be reached, by election. Membership of the professional body would be compulsory to work, and members of the oversight body would have legal protection against defamation and the like.

The group or individuals on it would give advisory opinions to members in a bind. These would be regularly published in a pro-forma way. If a professional accidentally breached an ethical duty, apologies could be lodged, and published. The body would look at complaints it judged worthy of consideration or those it found out about independently, in open session. It would seek the views of members. It would publish reasons.

Except for extremely serious matters, like a psychiatrist sleeping with a patient, there would be no penalty or a reprimand on proof of a first breach. What I’d be looking for is an ongoing conversation, a genuine engagement, for the profession, not a penal system. Because the system is not penal, the person under investigation would be required to speak for him or herself.

The law partner in my example would be called to account. Both he and the barrister would have had access to authoritative advisory opinions if they had doubts. And what happens when someone in breach of professional ethics is made a judge before disclosure of the breach? Only parliament can sack a federal judge for not being fit for office. To strip the politics away as much as possible, a judicial oversight body would investigate and present a report to parliament. It could take it from there.

***

This week I asked Webdiary readers what they thought about ethics. I’d like to read from an email from Harry Heidelberg, a nom de plume to protect his career.

I’ve faced several ethical dilemmas in my working life. In one I was involved in the audit of a government bank in a developing country. It was clear to me that the financial statements of the bank were the proverbial croc of shit. I made this known to all involved and suggested massive asset write downs. I came to this conclusion about many assets – all basically worthless or certainly worth a fraction of their book value. Millions of dollars were involved. Lots of vested interests. Lots of big fish in a small pond.

How did I process the above? I convinced my boss in the developing country that we had no choice but to convince the bank to agree to massive asset writedowns or refuse to sign the audit. He was overruled by the developed country headquarters of our firm. I resigned but “came back” on the condition that I would not sign anything associated with that audit. The end result was that relationships were poisoned by my failure to tow the line of Big City, Developed Country, Big Accounting Firm. My career in that firm was never the same again. It’s hardly a Hollywood ending but I’m still glad I did that. My reward was internal. I could live with myself.

I later learned that everyone in that country’s administration was corrupt and later the bank collapsed. I did my job, or at least tried to. What a pity others didn’t. I suppose I could and should have done more. I made my personal protest, but I admit that by not going public, I weaken my superficially pure stance. This is a good reason why we need sound whistle blowing systems. A whistle blower should not have their life destroyed. A career setback is one thing, but not a destruction.

In another case, I was working for a foreign multinational. We had a particularly good year. We had way past what we needed for all senior management to get their bonuses. I was asked to cover up GOOD financial news. The idea was that we should report all we needed as revenue and profits in one year to get to the bonus level and then give the following year a kick start by shunting the part we “didn’t need” into the following year. I had some of the worst professional arguments I have ever had over that one.

I can be pragmatic as anyone but I would never have done what they wanted me to. In effect I would have been telling the headquarters (and for that matter the Australian authorities – tax and ASIC) that our revenue and profits were MUCH lower than they actually were. It was millions, again. All around me they were saying it was harmless because we were only “delaying” good news into the next year. It was just a timing thing.

Bullshit. Accounting is all about timing and if you can’t get the timing right you may as well give up. In effect we really had to say that inventory which was SOLD was still in our warehouse. They dressed it up in fancy language but that was the substance of it. My boss said that we had to do as we were told. I said no we don’t and I won’t. He asked whether I would resign if they went ahead with this plan and I said I would. I was under IMMENSE pressure. Not sleeping, filthy looks in the corridors etc etc.

That’s the part that stinks. Why should I resign for doing my job?

How did I process that one? I had a contact in headquarters I trusted. I told him about it and he said to do the right thing. Much to the fury of local people, I DID do the right thing. In the process I lost my most valuable staff member. He resigned in the midst of it because he too was ethical and couldn’t bear it anymore. I tried so hard to convince him to stick with me and that I would fix it.

In the end I got my way, I fixed it and the right results were reported. Again, relationships were poisoned.

Don’t believe existing bodies when they say they have it covered. I belong to one which has a members ethical counselling service. A mate of mine went to them in dire need of advice earlier this year and they were hopeless. They offered no help at all. The whole thing is window dressing crap. When you really need them, they won’t be there for you.

This mate of mine had to resign from his job to get out of his ethical dilemma and endure three months of frightening unemployment. Some people may treat this lightly but I think it is outrageous that a well known professional body has a so-called ethical counselling service that failed so abysmally. In the case of my mate it was serious stuff. His employer was on the verge of bankruptcy and hadn’t paid “group tax” (ie the pay as you earn tax deducted from employees) in nearly a year. No one cared for him. He’s a good guy and no one cared or listened. He could only trash himself to survive and sleep at night.

The new company I work for has an inspirational CEO. I know, I hear you moaning already. The days of inspirational CEOs are over. Not really. The right CEO for today is an ethical one. Long term interests of all companies and organisations are to behave ethically. Really.

The CEO of the company I now work for has established an “ethics ombudsman” in the headquarters. I suspect this move is a reaction to recent corporate scandals and a realisation that an internal process is required. Internal audit is hardly enough. We saw in Enron that internal audit questioned the practices but it did not help. Something more is needed. Something at a very high and very independent level. My current CEO should be commended. She is totally committed to ethics.

The idea of an internal “ethics ombudsman” is a great initiative, but Margo I think your idea is a great addition. You can have an “internally independent” process but ultimately you need something which can be totally pure in the sense of giving more than just the appearance of independence.

It has to be pure independence in fact, not just appearance. An internal process will always be seen as something which is more easily compromised.

All of us in the corporate world need to pause and reflect. Mere tinkering is not enough. A revolution is required and startling initiatives are urgently needed. I want to be startled. I want to be energised by something totally new. Faith and confidence in the system is key. That can’t be regained without substantial, far reaching changes.

Training is needed. Some have forgotten and need to be retrained in the ways of ethics. Some of it is indeed nuanced. That is why a discussion is helpful. We can never have enough discussion about this. It will never go away. I’m no saint and I’m all ears. I have become somewhat jaded, but live in hope.

Finally, I say show no mercy to those who act unethically. Absolutely none. A bit of carrot is nice but I reckon only a lot of potential stick will be the thing that will get some people acting ethically. Sydney’s full of crooks.

More people like Fels in this life would be good. A man with a mission. Less of the eastern suburbs set would be even better.

We urgently need a long, open and detailed debate on ethics. We did NOT learn the lessons of the 1980s. Are we to learn the lessons of the late nineties and early 21st century? We have to or the system will not recover

An ethics ombudsman in every big company! Wow! A place to go anonymously, if the ombudsman is an Alan Fels, for people like Harry, to nip unprofessional conduct in the bud.

Webdiarist Daniel Boase-Jelinek wrote:

I suggest that the problem with encouraging ethical behaviour is not that people don’t know what it (ethics) is, but that they don’t know how to respond without losing their jobs.

A couple of years ago I was invited to run a workshop for Environmental Engineering students at the University of WA. Environmental Engineers face ethical dilemmas all the time because their employers generally are companies that wish to promote projects that inevitably cause environmental destruction, and the environmental engineers are being used to justify this destruction and put a public relations gloss on it.

I used the research of Sharon Beder, professor of science, technology and society at the University of Wollongong, in working through a whole lot of issues with these idealistic students, searching with them to find a balance between protecting their integrity while keeping their jobs.

The outcome that they arrived at was that people working alone as whistle-blowers rarely and rarely succeed in getting their message out.

The students realised that the only alternative to becoming cynical was to work very hard to develop a community of support within and outside the organisation and to search collaboratively for ways to protect their integrity.

***

Ah development, where big money reigns supreme, where corporate donations buy political influence, where councillors and mayors and staff paid peanuts can be asked how much their integrity is worth and be paid it, where local government are so few expert reports must be taken at face value. The imbalance of power is too great. Communities feel powerless, no matter who they elect.

In cases where expert reports are required by legislation for the purposes of important decisions about our land and the financial state of our companies, these rampant conflicts of interest and imbalances of power must be fixed.

Here again, I’d go the legislative framework solution, with the professional bodies’ members to take charge of the process. You’d have a panel of acknowledged experts, all independent practitioners. The company would be allocated a relevant expert to prepare, say, an environmental impact statement as required by law, and pays his or her fees. If the company disagrees with the assessment, it could employ any expert it chose, and if the results materially differed, a panel of experts would decide which was right, the panel’s costs to be paid by the company. This system should also apply to auditors, who could not be chosen to audit a company from which thier firm earned non-audit fees.

In short, I want to empower professionals in all fields working in the public and private sectors to assert the values of their professions, and take pride in fulfilling their duties and maintaining their professional integrity. I want the ethics debate, and the rebuilding of the power of ethical standards to be conducted with reason and genuine engagement.

I want to rebalance the scales, so that many good people are able to insist on being ethical and not suffer for it, indeed to be thanked for it, and perhaps even promoted. I want ethics – integrity in the moment of choice – to become commonplace.

***

Your ethics

Ethics, huh? Great topic, great responses. Over to you.

1. Ethical moments: Rosie Young and Harry Heidelberg

2. Impossible odds: Daniel Boase-Jelinek and Jozef Imrich

3. What are ethics?: Karl Zegers, Nick Jans, Tony Kevin, Chris Kuan, Peter Woodforde, Helen Lawson-Williams

4. The sunshine test: Allison Newman

5. Ethics in international politics: Meagan Phillipson

***

Recommendations

Martin Canny recommends John Ralston Saul’s latest, On Equilibrium, for examples of ethical dilemmas.

James Woodcock suggests Ross Gittins’ article “Yes you can legislate for morality”, especially:

“The funny thing is that, in their double standards towards blue-collar and executive crime, the pollies have got it pretty much the wrong way round. They profess to believe (along with the shock jocks and the untutored masses) that more police on the beat and tougher sentences are the obvious solution to all manner of sexual and property crimes.

“But where people act in the heat of the moment, or under the grip of some overpowering emotional kink in their makeup, or to feed a drug habit, the likelihood of their being deterred by the size of the penalty or even their chances of getting caught would seem to be small.

“In the case of corporate crime, however, where emotion plays a secondary role to calculated greed – where they’re just doing it for the money – you’d expect the size of the penalty and the chances of apprehension to have a big effect on people’s behaviour.”

***

1. Ethical moments

Rosie Young

On Friday my 23 year old daughter, a gardener, had her first vehicle accident – the tray of her ute sideswiped a brand new stationary Peugot. In all her distress she immediately wrote a note with her details and left it on the car.

Subsequently several people tried to convince her she had done the wrong thing and told her to go and remove the note. She began to query her actions, but fortunately did not take their advice. I believe that as soon as the accident occurred she had a spontaneous attack of ethics!

Perhaps ethics are a bit like the “quality” which cannot be defined, as written about in Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance – we recognise quality but cannot define it, and we recognise ethics but cannot define them.

It seems we have a little meter inside us which always give a true indication of how things are or how we should behave, but as soon as we try and rationalise the situation we get lost in a complex mass of pros and cons.

PS: My daughter has to pay $800 excess and we have sent some household items off to auction to cover the cost – nevertheless, ETHICS rule OK? !!!

***

Harry Heidelberg (nom de plume to avoid damage to the writer)

For me, ethics are something deeply internal and individual. I think they are something quite fundamental, formed at a very young age, and best imparted by parents and older role models.

For some, even those who are taught well, the ethical compass goes haywire later in life. Greed and self interest are the biggest enemies of ethics. It’s mainly for money but it can also be for sex or power.

Failure to act ethically is at once a betrayal of another person or of a system/institution. Ultimately I believe it is even a type of self-betrayal of the individual who behaves unethically.

In one way or another, those who act that way will pay an individual price. The price may be one of emotional turmoil created by a complicated life or something as simple as the stress of being afraid of discovery. Nothing in this life comes for free. Except the truly priceless, good things (like happiness, love and trust)!

I’ve faced several ethical dilemmas in my working life. In one I was involved in the audit of a government bank in a developing country. It was clear to me that the financial statements of the bank were the proverbial croc of shit. I made this known to all involved and suggested massive asset write downs.

I became hated. I recall in one instance when we tried to value a bank asset of a resort in a hopeless location where nobody ever stayed. I was deeply suspicious. I said to a mate who had lived in the country for years, “How much do you think that hotel is worth”?. His answer was “How much is a big house worth in that area?… It’s worthless as a hotel”. I came to this conclusion about many assets – all basically worthless or certainly worth a fraction of their book value. Millions of dollars were involved. Lots of vested interests. Lots of big fish in a small pond.

How did I process the above? I convinced my boss in the developing country that we had no choice but to convince the bank to agree to massive asset writedowns or refuse to sign the audit. To cut a long story short, he agreed but was later overruled by the developed country headquarters of our firm. I resigned but “came back” on the condition that I would not sign anything associated with that audit. The end result was that relationships were poisoned by my failure to tow the line of Big City, Developed Country, Big Accounting Firm. My career in that firm was never the same again. It’s hardly a Hollywood ending but I’m still glad I did that. My reward was internal. I could live with myself.

I later learned that everyone in that country’s administration was corrupt and later the bank collapsed. I did my job, or at least tried to. What a pity others didn’t. I suppose I could and should have done more. I made my personal protest, but I admit that by not going public, I weaken my superficially pure stance. This is a good reason why we need sound whistle blowing systems. A whistle blower should not have their life destroyed. A career setback is one thing, but not a destruction. Veiled threats aren’t a good thing either.

In the case above, the situation was dire and people were involved in covering up bad financial news. I now know some were criminals. This is the classic scenario.

In another case, I was working for a foreign multinational. We had a particularly good year. We had way past what we needed for all senior management to get their bonuses. I was asked to cover up GOOD financial news. The idea was that we should report all we needed as revenue and profits in one year to get to the bonus level and then give the following year a kick start by shunting the part we “didn’t need” into the following year. I had some of the worst professional arguments I have ever had over that one.

I can be pragmatic as anyone but I would never have done what they wanted me to. In effect I would have been telling the headquarters (and for that matter the Australian authorities – tax and ASIC) that our revenue and profits were MUCH lower than they actually were. It was millions, again. All around me they were saying it was harmless because we were only “delaying” good news into the next year. It was just a timing thing.

Bullshit. Accounting is all about timing and if you can’t get the timing right you may as well give up. In effect we really had to say that inventory which was SOLD was still in our warehouse. They dressed it up in fancy language but that was the substance of it. My boss said that we had to do as we were told. I said no we don’t and I won’t. He asked whether I would resign if they went ahead with this plan and I said I would. I was under IMMENSE pressure. Not sleeping, filthy looks in the corridors etc etc.

That’s the part that stinks. Why should I resign for doing my job?

How did I process that one? I had a contact in headquarters I trusted. I told him about it and he said to do the right thing. Much to the fury of local people, I DID do the right thing. In the process I lost my most valuable staff member. He resigned in the midst of it because he too was ethical and couldn’t bear it anymore. I tried so hard to convince him to stick with me and that I would fix it.

In the end I got my way, I fixed it and the right results were reported. Again, relationships were poisoned. This story has a happy ending. Well, sort of. The headquarters contact arranged for a promotion and transfer for me to the headquarters. He was later screwed over in a merger by dirty politics and both of us have since left the company.

Oh joy.

The new company I work for has an inspirational CEO. I know, I hear you moaning already. The days of inspirational CEOs are over. Not really. The right CEO for today is an ethical one. Long term interests of all companies and organisations are to behave ethically. Really.

The CEO of the company I now work for has established an “ethics ombudsman” in the headquarters. I suspect this move is a reaction to recent corporate scandals and a realisation that an internal process is required. Internal audit is hardly enough. We saw in Enron that internal audit questioned the practices but it did not help. Something more is needed. Something at a very high and very independent level. My current CEO should be commended. She is totally committed to ethics.

The idea of an internal “ethics ombudsman” is a great initiative but Margo I think your idea is a great addition. You can have an “internally independent” process but ultimately you need something which can be totally pure in the sense of giving more than just the appearance of independence.

It has to be pure independence in fact, not just appearance. An internal process will always be seen as something which is more easily compromised. I am not trashing internal processes. They are the first line and the most important defence. That said though, something more would be really nice.

Why not? All of us in the corporate world need to pause and reflect. Mere tinkering is not enough. A revolution is required and startling initiatives are urgently needed. I want to be startled. I want to be energised by something totally new. Faith and confidence in the system is key. That can’t be regained without substantial, far reaching changes.

Training is needed. Some have forgotten and need to be retrained in the ways of ethics. Some of it is indeed nuanced. That is why a discussion is helpful. We can never have enough discussion about this. It will never go away. I’m no saint and I’m all ears.

And don’t believe existing bodies when they say they have it covered. I belong to one which has a members ethical counselling service. A mate of mine went to them in dire need of advice earlier this year and they were hopeless. They offered no help at all. The whole thing is window dressing crap. When you really need them, they won’t be there for you.

This mate of mine had to resign from his job to get out of his ethical dilemma and endure three months of frightening unemployment. Some people may treat this lightly but I think it is outrageous that a well known professional body has a so-called ethical counselling service that failed so abysmally. Sure, it may be an isolated case but it should never happen. In the case of my mate it was serious stuff. His employer was on the verge of bankruptcy and hadn’t paid “group tax” (ie the pay as you earn tax deducted from employees) in nearly a year. No one cared for him. He’s a good guy and no one cared or listened. He could only trash himself to survive and sleep at night.

I have become somewhat jaded, but live in hope.

Finally, I say show no mercy to those who act unethically. Absolutely none. A bit of carrot is nice but I reckon only a lot of potential stick will be the thing that will get some people acting ethically. Sydney’s full of crooks.

More people like Fels in this life would be good. A man with a mission. Less of the eastern suburbs set would be even better.

We urgently need a long, open and detailed debate on ethics. We did NOT learn the lessons of the 1980s. Are we to learn the lessons of the late nineties and early 21st century?

We have to or the system will not recover

PS: An open discussion on nuanced issues would also be nice.

***

2. Impossible odds

Daniel Boase-Jelinek

I suggest that the problem with encouraging ethical behaviour is not that people don’t know what it (ethics) is, but that they don’t know how to respond without losing their jobs.

You might wish to look up the work of Sharon Beder in researching your talk on ethics. Dr Sharon Beder is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Wollongong.

A couple of years ago I was invited to run a workshop for Environmental Engineering students at the University of WA. Environmental Engineers face ethical dilemmas all the time because their employers generally are companies that wish to promote projects that inevitably cause environmental destruction, and the environmental engineers are being used to justify this destruction and put a public relations gloss on it.

I used Sharon’s research in working through a whole lot of issues with these idealistic students, searching with them to find a balance between protecting their integrity while keeping their jobs.

The outcome that they arrived at was that people working alone as whistle-blowers rarely survive, and rarely succeed in getting their message out.

The students realised that the only alternative to becoming cynical was to work very hard to develop a community of support within and outside the organisation and to search collaboratively for ways to protect their integrity.

***

Jozef Imrich

Ghandi warned us of the dangers of living in an age characterised by:

Politics without principle

Wealth without work

Commerce without morality

Pleasure without conscience

Education without character

Science without humanity

Workship without sacrifice

 

***

3. What are ethics?

Karel Zegers

Too many confuse ethics with ideological opinion. Some want us to believe that anyone not agreeing with their particular ‘ethics’ (read dogmas) is un-ethical. Which in reality is taking away the freedom of speech and opinion under threat of being discredited and labelled.

***

Nick Jans

Like you, I’d like to think that I would have exposed the truth in the children-overboard affair. But few can be confident that they would actually follow through with their convictions.

I want to mention a cartoon on ethics I once saw in the New Yorker around Watergate time. Sleek business executive presses a button on his desk, barks into the intercom: Miss Jones, send me in a man who can tell the difference between right and wrong.

Seemed funny at the time, but I think I was (probably still am) naive.

***

Tony Kevin in Canberra

To me (and these are not original thoughts but distillations of thoughts of others) ethics and ethical behaviour relate directly to respect for the dignity and worth of every other human being or, if one wants to extend the point this far as Peter Singer does, to sentient pain-feeling animals.

Ethics is thus almost entirely about conduct in society – how one deals with other human beings. It would have little if any meaning to a person who was living in total isolation from others – Robinson Crusoe before Friday turned up – and therefore has no meaning to a psychopath who cannot empathise with others outside himself.

On this definition, ethics comes into everything – whether it would be how to define a “just war” against Iraq (an attack in which huge numbers of Iraqi civilians would die), the ethics of company honesty towards shareholders and employees, the ethics of border protection, sexual relationships, friendships – it is all about respecting other people and being aware of it when one’s actions hurt other people.

Ethics on this basis can be based either in religion (“we are all of equal value in the sight of God”) or on secular principles ( “we all share our common humanity”). The result in terms of conduct is the same (Raymond Gaita).

I don’t think ethics is all that complicated to think about. But living it is a lot harder.

***

Chris Kuan

When I was going through an idealistic phase a few years back, I grabbed some information from the St. James Ethics Centre. I noted a distinction being made between ethics and morals: ethics is concerned with one’s conduct towards others, whereas morals is (are?) concerned more with inward-looking behaviour.

So morals might relate to issues of right and good (e.g. justice *being* done) while ethics might relate to issues of accountability and transparency (e.g. justice being *seen* to be done)

PS: You mis-typed “etymology”. “Entomology” is concerned with insects. And while I’m quite prepared to believe that epithet is oft-applied to journos, I think we can keep this discussion on a more civil level 🙂

***

Peter Woodforde in Canberra

You ask: What are ethics and what is ethical behaviour? I was gonna say “Geez, where do I start?” But the real question is: where do you finish?

Few of us face, very often, the ethical dilemma of, say, a Catholic priest who follows the party line on abortion, but is morally, intellectually and emotionally opposed to the view that you should tell hundreds of millions of poorly educated, desperately poor, often superstitious women that they will burn in hell for eternity should they employ contraception. He knows it isn’t nice.

So where does that bloke end up? His Church is an instrument of some good, after all. Hopefully, he will end up comforting the afflicted and maybe, just maybe, afflicting the comfortable somewhere. His ethics might take him outside the church, and he might even end up with dependents or a partner rather than a flock.

It doesn’t matter that he is no longer selling his soul to the devil, or setting out each day trowelling together a pastiche of ad hoc personal misery.

What does matter is the notion of a conscientious step forward, rather than sideways or backwards, or even the moral marching on the spot currently so fashionable. A conscious feeling of personal moral progress, not merely a sort of ritual cleaning of personal defilement.

One of the weird things about ethics is that there does not seem to be any way of punishing another person for “a beach of ethics”, which has the air of getting inside Winston Smith’s head.

Thank Christ for good ol’ law, which saves us the trouble, even if it gives us the sternal stiflement of too much order.

***

Helen Lawson Williams in Sydney

I recently completed my PhD thesis in this area, looking at personal value systems and how they influence people’s responses to ethical dilemmas they witness at work. Apart from amassing miscellaneous quotes from terribly credible people (see below), here are some random thoughts on what business ethics might be, and what that might mean for businesses.

1. From any cursory look at the business ethics literature, I’d argue that no objective formulation of what is ethical and what is unethical can be derived (despite the conceptual tools offered by the teleological, deontological, stakeholder and “folk” approaches). As Aristotle himself argued, ethics can’t be an exact science.

Ultimately, the decision about whether a given action is ethical or not will rely on a value judgement, a decision as much based on internal, personal values as on external, objective rules for what is important or right. That is, it’s impossible to exclude the subjective from any study of ethics, and so our understanding of it has to focus on how such subjective evaluations are made – according to personal value systems, which tend to be fairly consistent within defined social groups.

2. However, the philosophical literature offers several very useful points, the most important of which (I believe), is that nearly all discussions of ethics share the common theme of priorities. No teleologist ever denied the right of a decision-maker to benefit herself or her company, as long as the decision brings no greater harm to others; no duty-bound deontologist would fault her for doing the same, as long as she can do so within the bounds of her duty to others.

In other words, no approach to ethics would deny the right or necessity of businesses to make a profit. It’s only when that profit comes at the expense of great harm to others, or to the detriment of duty, that it’s termed unethical. And in fact the empirical research I did backed this up – it’s the issue of fairness, of having got the priorities wrong, which most often made people angry enough to confront a supervisor who they felt had made an unethical decision, or leave an organisation where they felt unethical decisions were the norm.

3. But the big question is, why should organisations go to the trouble of trying to act ethically? The answer offered repeatedly, though not always explicitly, by business leaders in their discussions of business ethics is that “[a]s corporations, we live at the sufferance of the public” (Butler, 1997). That is, organisations operate in many ways as any other entity within a social group, and thus may be considered subject to similar rules of conduct.

Indeed, at least one definition of morality concerns the rules or sanctions used to classify behaviours which are considered right or wrong within a particular social group, and the understanding that these are applicable to all who regard themselves as members of that group or society (Reber, 1985).

The argument, in other words, is that for a business to survive in the social world, it must play by the rules. Which is really all ethics is about, for me – it’s setting the ground rules for how we need to behave in order to live together as a society, and ensuring that those who choose to play by other rules are firmly but gently reminded of how interdependent we all are.

Some quotes:

Aristotle: Our account of [ethics] will be adequate if it achieves such clarity as the subject-matter allows; for the same degree of precision is not to be expected in all discussions; it is the mark of the trained mind never to expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits; for demanding logical demonstrations from a teacher of rhetoric is clearly about as reasonable as accepting mere plausibility from a mathematician.

G.E. Moore: Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good.

Arnold Schopenhauer: Compassion is the basis of morality.

Bertrand Russell: Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

Thomas Jefferson: It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.

***

4. The sunshine test

Allison Newman

Aahhhh! Ethics is such a tricky concept! Or is it?

It needs to be said that there is no such thing as universal ethics. This distinction is important, because ethics are something that must be assessed in a societal conflict.

As Margo’s Ethics piece suggests, it is impossible to legislate for ethical behaviour, and any attempt to do so would be counter-productive. This is directly related to ethics being tied to societal values. Societal values are malleable, they change with time. No legislative framework could hope to keep up with such malleable values.

Fortunately there is another option Margo alludes to. In discussing ethics there is one overall “test” to determine whether behaviour is ethical or not. It is known as the Sunshine Test, and the idea is that you ask yourself if you would be happy for your friends and peers to know what you are doing. If the answer is no, then it’s a fair bet that what you are doing is unethical. The beauty of the test is that it implicitly takes into account society’s values (as expressed by your friends/peers).

In a practical sense, this Sunshine Test can be taken out of the realms of thought experiment, and enacted in real life. This is the type of thing Margo’s proposed body to investigate unethical behaviour would achieve. Because the hearings would be public, public censure would result if any unethical behaviour was uncovered. The threat of having a spotlight turned upon your internal affairs would certainly be something to give many a CEO pause for thought, as they considered applying the letter but not the spirit of the law.

Of course there are problems with the system. The reporting would have to be handled to ensure that the finally published results were equitable (if only one side of a story is presented in the media for example, then someone might suffer public censure without ever receiving a “right of reply”). And of course, with the cynicism of the modern age, public censure has lost some of it’s bite. Look at the last election. The Howard Government was caught out LYING to the public about children overboard mere days before the election, and they still got comfortably elected.

In fact, probably the only censure of any meaning is that CEOs might find it a bit more difficult to acquire lines of credit from banks, or to achieve trust in their business dealings. Then again, they might not, because in reality, the only thing that interests other commercial interests is your ability to generate money. In the society of a CEO’s peers, the overwhelming importance of money over all other things would have a major impact. Someone would be censured far more for losing money than for behaving unethically as society at large might see it (as opposed to how a board of peers would see it).

So both the hardline (legislative) approach, and the softly softly (public hearings approach) have substantial problems. This is probably one of those situations where a feedback mechanism (punishment for behaving unethically, reward for behaving ethically) is not going to work.

In engineering terms, an open loop system might work better. This basically means that you drum into children what ethical values are so that they will live by them in future life, with no need for enforcement (compliance is automatic, they can’t even consider not behaving that way). In years gone by this is precisely what the Church used to do. Nowadays there is no institution providing such a service, and the result is a proliferation of Jodee Rich’s.

We do still do this to a certain extent. For example, Australian society teaches its young that it is unacceptable to just throw rubbish on the ground. To a large extent this approach is successful, to the extent that Australians are shocked on visiting places like London to see people just dropping their rubbish on the ground. Australians find it nearly unthinkable to do the same thing. When they do litter, it is done so furtively, away from scrutiny.

In Australia, the Sunshine Test would be an effective way of controlling litter because of the lessons taught to us as children. In London, the same test would completely fail to change people’s behaviour, because it has become socially acceptable to litter.

You now get to have the fun of deciding just what values you are going to choose to teach the young. It could make for some interesting Civics classes!

***

5. Ethics and international affairs

Meagan Phillipson

It’s easy to give a descriptive of ethics/morality and how you personally relate to a system of it in your own, life but quite a different matter to attempt to understand its application in a social or political context. In a society, who decides what is ethical and what’s not? Just look at the ethical problems arising from the Israel/Palestinian conflict. One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist.

Because it is such a subjective issue, it’s more fascinating to look at the juncture between personal morality and collective morality rather than an individuals view on how they relate it to their life.

I have included an essay I wrote this year on whether morality and justice can mix. Although it’s a little formal in places, it is my view on morality/ethics and its possible place in society. Hope it helps.

Collective morality

By Meagan Phillipson

When approaching whether morality and justice can relate meaningfully to international politics, it is important to firstly clarify the approach to be taken in analysis. Without clarification, the elevation of the personal can be negative, as too much faith can make the analyser blind to flaws. Conversely, too much cynicism can make them blind to potential.

A possible solution to this problem may be to call for a balance between the two extremes, yet it would be more appropriate to remove the presence of faith in this particular question. For within the context of international politics, faith is redundant as it calls for assumptive reasoning in a landscape of constant change and hidden agendas.

That said, the absence of faith does not necessarily mean that the perceptual viewpoint falls completely into the realm of cynicism. Rather, it would be better to replace faith with hope, as the latter does not assume the future will be a certain way but rather merely allows for the possibility that the future can be a certain way.

In such a framework, cynicism can be tempered with enough hope to sidestep assumptions while opening perceptions to potentials for positive change in the future.

On an individual level, moral judgment is an aid to determining one’s position in relation to an objective situation or abstract concept. In this sense, morality is a subjective construct influenced by the external world view an individual is immersed in, with each individual shaped by their own interpretation and adoption of what they perceive to be right and wrong.

Because of the subjective nature of morality, it holds true that the morality of a situation is dependent upon the viewpoint through which it is being perceived and can therefore never truly be universal. That said though, it could be argued that morality can be shared collectively on a domestic level if the issue is polarizing a state against an outside force, such as is the case in war.

Yet even then, the result is not universal but rather majority led, as seen in America’s War on Terror, which is supported in moral principle by a majority yet not universally supported by all American citizens.

Above the individual level, the state acts with the agential power it has been imbued with by the people and so is a concentration of the collective will of the majority into one instrument. Therefore, the power of the state to act is much stronger than that of an individual but, in order to maintain power, the state actors should behave roughly in accordance to the moral appropriateness of the collective. Even in undemocratic cases of power being held by force there is a need, however more slight, that the moral will of the people be reflected for fear of power been swept away by revolution.

Yet attempts by state actors to behave in accordance with the perceived collective morality of the domestic constituency highlights the problematic inherent in the individualistic nature of morality. Namely, whether in the binary of citizen/state or state/international system, the application of reflected morality by the state is at best a guessing game and, at worst, open to some degree of partisan ends-orientated exploitation.

The failure of moral universality on the domestic level is transposable to international politics, as not all states hold the same set of morals just as not all individuals do within the overarching structure of a state. Nevertheless, morality in all its awkward diversity still has a role to play in International politics because it holds the possibility of bringing order to the system by helping to define generally accepted boundaries of behaviour.

If these boundaries of moral behaviour are not followed, there is a crucial need to act against individual state offenders – otherwise there would be little deterrence for other states not to act similarly. Because of this, justice is closely connected to morality and the desire to create and maintain order within international politics, as it creates consequences for moral aberrations.

Justice can be narrowly defined in international politics as morality in action through legislative, militaristic and economic means. More broadly, justice also encompasses the attempted realization of abstract morality into the lives of all global citizens and not just a select few. The moral key to such ambition is equality – between genders, races, north and south – as well as fairer distributive justice in relation to the world’s resources.

Applying morality in an objective way within international politics is near impossible because individual actors work within their own frameworks of vested interest and ends-orientation. The subjective nature of morality and its application within international politics is highlighted in the battle over the world’s resources being fought by civil society, governments and corporations alike.

Further complicating the issue is that moral benchmarks are been flouted by stronger state/non-state actors with virtually no ramifications because of the high level of interdependency within international politics. A weaker state dependent on a stronger state for growth would find it politically difficult to call the stronger state on a moral issue because there may be a threat to personal interests and continued relations. As an extension of the problems raised by inequitable power relations and the subjective nature of morality, the application of it through justice is flawed because even the most objective of laws are still interpreted and applied by subjective individuals.

Note also that moral responsibility and commitment to justice is not necessarily bound to international legal obligations. The adoption of moral judgment and a commitment to justice norms by an individual state is voluntary, yet usually adopted in order to gain legitimacy and recognition amongst like-minded peers on the international stage. As a result, there is a danger that issues of morality and justice will be supported in theory by the state for gain yet, in practice, barely adhered to for fear of loss.

Thus, a commitment to certain modalities of morality and justice have the potential to become little more than a mask individual states assume in order to garner legitimisation and form strategic alliances. Because of this, the acceptance of moral codes out of a desire for acceptance amongst peers should not be considered as a viable alternative to legal obligations as the non-binding nature means that the inherent potential is merely complimentary rather than successional.

In summary, morality and justice within the context of international politics is like mixing oil with water because of the complicity of self-interest and the subjective nature of the two concepts. Yet, for the sake of humanity, universal agreement and adoption of minimum standards in morality and justice must be striven towards. Whether this will ever be fully achieved or whether instruments of morality and justice within international politics will progress beyond current points of influence is an issue of great interest and perhaps even hope.

 

Ignorance is an abyss, by Webdiary artist Martin Davies in Canada

Happy New Year!

Harry Heidelberg is the first Webdiary columnist off the block this year, with a piece on the one million Australians living overseas. What to make of the Australian diasporais at harryJan13, and there’s already lots of reader feedback.

On the recommendation of an artist friend, I’ve started reading the work Cicero produced amid the breakup of the Roman republic and its replacement by dictatorship. Go back to the classics, she advised, and learn how to stay calm as the world burns.

I’m nearly 44, an age when the individual can personally attest to changing trends in our values and way of life. For me, I hope last year was the last when anger, frustration and despair ruled my professional psychology. When you don’t like what’s happening around you, you can burn out with impotent rage or you can retreat to a space you feel you can control. I’m looking for a third way this year – inner calm through articulation of my core values and living those values on a daily basis. I’ll try to be more measured in my observations, and will refuse to lose hope. That includes switching the emphasis on Webdiary from finding fault and railing against the horror around us to looking for the key disagreements on issues, searching for some consensus, and looking for solutions, as well as discussing the role of the individual in the state we’re in. Cross fingers.

Judging from your emails, Iraq was the political issue most on people’s minds over Christmas. I recall a brief period of hope after September 11 that the cancer of the Israeli/Palestinian war would finally be tackled head-on and solved by sheer force of world commitment forged by urgent necessity. Tony Blair took that hope further, arguing that September 11 could – if wise heads prevailed – cleanse global capitalism of its excesses and inspire concerted effort by the world’s great powers towards a sustainable peace. Tony Blair’s post-September 11 speech is at Blair vision, (webdiary4Oct2001). Canadian leader Jean Chretien also articulated the possibility of a rethink of the direction our world was taking ( The power to humiliate, webdiary17Sep2002) and Webdiarists also put their thinking caps on (see A pattern can be discerned,webdiary24July2002).

Yet John Howard and his government, as Scott Burchill shows in a piece for Webdiary today on the propaganda myths surrounding the proposed war on Iraq, has taken no part in this crucial debate. We have become an acolyte. After September 11, Howard was content to regurgitate the US story of what it meant until, the vacuum having become intolerable, he promised to state “the intellectual case” for invading Afghanistan. (See Howard’s case, webdiary25Oct2001, and, for the lead-up to the speech, see Intellectual intervention, webdiary23Oct2001.) Now, again, an intellectual vacuum in the lead-up to the threatened war on Iraq (see Don’t believe the hype, webdiary16Sep2002). As far as I know, Howard has not even responded to the new national security strategy of the world’s only superpower (published in Manifesto for world dictatorship (webdiary22Sep2002), let alone discussed its ramifications for us.

John Howard has become a deity to backbench members of his party, and a hugely popular Prime Minister lionised as the man in almost religious touch with the feelings of Australians. Yet on war on Iraq, Howard has not convinced the people that support for a unilateral United States strike could be in our interests, and seems so little concerned about the failure that he’s sent troops over there already.

Yet, to my knowledge, being part of a United States invading force not backed by UN resolution would be unprecedented in our history. We have never been an aggressive power, we have never invaded another country without the sanction of the United Nations. If we do this time, doesn’t that mean that we also assume responsibility for what happens after the victory? We’ve never, as far as I know, participated in covert or overt aggressive operations by the United States against a sovereign nation – for example in South America or Africa. Isn’t it a basic precondition for us going to war with the Yanks that we know and agree to their plan for regime change? Do we really want to be complicit in yet another American backed dictatorship like Iran before the revolution or Saudi Arabia today?

Surely Howard has the duty to tell us what America plans, to insist on our consent for the regime-change process before we go in, and to have some guarantees that the Americans would not go off the rails. For example, would we approve of an appropriation of French and Russian oil assets in Iraq? Would we want a democratic process initiated within a defined period, and would we require proof that it is a real process, not a pretence?

Howard has not asked these questions publicly, let alone sought to answer them or suggested that we have any bottom lines at all for joining a non-UN sanctioned invading force. Yet the ramifications of our leap into uncharted waters are mind-boggling.

Then there’s the issue of how our participation in an invasion would impact on our region, our regional neighbours’ attitude to us, and the possible reaction of Islamist terrorist forces in Asia. Again, Howard’s silence or throwaway assurances add to the air of unreality about the debate in Australia.

Before last year’s federal election, ALP foreign policy spokesman Laurie Brereton stated a clear set of principles he believed should underpin Australia’s foreign policy and its relations with the UN. The full text of his speech is at Brereton vision (webdiary5Nov2001).

An extract:

“Australia must always exercise our own independent judgment about our strategic circumstances and ensure that our national interests are safeguarded.

“The objective of the current campaign is to eliminate the global terrorist threat posed by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organisation, and ensure that Afghanistan ceases to harbour and sustain terrorist organisations. Military action to achieve these objectives should be focussed and conducted to minimise civilian casualties and damage to non-military infrastructure.

“Last week, I pointed out that a military campaign extending beyond Afghanistan would raise very difficult strategic and diplomatic issues. Any military action against targets in other countries which support, sponsor or harbour international terrorist groups would need to be considered quite separately, would need be based on compelling evidence, and would need to command wide international support.

“Beyond the immediate military task in Afghanistan, the international coalition must accept responsibility for the reconstruction of Afghanistan and assist its reintegration as a responsible member of the international community.

“We in Australia must be active in supporting the role of the United Nations in dealing with the humanitarian, security, political and reconstruction challenges that will follow the dissolution of the Taliban regime. I think it highly likely that a UN peacekeeping force, including contingents from a range of Muslim countries, will be required to provide the security required for long-term reconstruction.

“The future of Afghanistan must rest first and foremost with its own people, but a long-term international commitment to this unfortunate country and its people is absolutely imperative.

“Australia must also ensure that the campaign against international terrorism is matched by renewed efforts to address the circumstances that help breed extremism. We must recognise the on-going danger posed by the situation in the Middle East and make every effort to ensure that the Middle East Peace Process is started again. We must do everything we can to help Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in peace and security.

“As an ally of the United States and neighbour to Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, Australia also has a special role in helping ensure that the campaign against international terrorism continues to enjoy the widest possible support, especially among moderate Islamic countries, and is not perceived as a war against Muslims or Islam.

“Lastly, we must also be mindful of and responsive to the global economic and social consequences of the 11 September attacks.

“At the start of last month there was a very interesting, if generally overlooked, interview in the International Herald Tribune with World Bank President Jim Wolfensohn. Wolfensohn spoke about the global humanitarian impact of the 11 September attacks. He said this: “We have seen the human toll from the recent attacks, with citizens from some 80 nations perishing in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. But there is another human toll that is largely unseen and one that will be felt in all parts of the developing world, especially Africa. We [the World Bank] estimate that between 20,000 and 40,000 more children will die worldwide and some 10 million people will be condemned to live below the poverty line of $1 a day because of the terrorist attacks.”

“Wolfensohn made the point that when you have a combination of global downturn and severe drops in commodity prices and a huge reduction in international trade, the people who suffer most are those in the developing countries. It passes straight through to people living on the margin. There is an absolute link between declining global economic activity and rises infant mortality and poverty.

“Wolfensohn argues that to address this looming crisis we need greater financial support from governments and international institutions, a major build up of international aid, and a greater opening of trade for developing countries. More broadly, he spoke of the need for more social equity and political stability in the developing world, and for greater recognition of the fact that 80 percent of the world population has only 20 percent of world income.

“One of the big questions of the next few years is whether the developed world will take up this challenge, whether we will respond to the challenges of globalisation, of globalised trade and globalised inequality.

“Labor is convinced a new internationalist commitment is vital. National security issues loom larger, but we must not lose sight of the fact that inequality and insecurity are inextricably linked. Long-term security can only be achieved through international cooperation addressing injustice and inequality.”

***

Scott’s piece details the double standards at work in the Iraq ‘debate’. The debate seems to go nowhere from there – many supporters of a unilateral strike argue either that what America did in the region was a long time ago, or don’t argue the point at all. Yet the overwhelming evidence that the West armed Iraq surely deserves an acknowledgement of past mistakes, and a detailed debate on the lessons to be leant and a blueprint for how to avoid them again. Are we really stuck with “Welcome to the real world – and we’re on the side of the superpower so we should be OK’ line?

A big plus of Scott’s piece for me is that he proposes a ‘solution’. He argues that the policy of containment of Iraq is working, and remains the safest course of action.

There’s room for anything to happen in the big picture, including Saddam standing down. In Australia, Simon Crean looks as though he might be settling in to opposing a unilateral strike. There is a precedent – Labor opposed the war in Vietnam from the beginning – but this time Crean would be articulating a view held by the majority of Australians. A strong, detailed speech rejecting Australian participation in a unilateral invasion when Parliament resumes would put enormous pressure on Howard to at least outline his conditions for joining a US invasion, if he has any. My view on the domestic political dynamics of a war on Iraq hasn’t changed since I wrote When politics is in the blood (smh26Sep2002) for the Herald in September.

***

Our great debate between Webdiarists John Wojdylo and David Makinson on going to war took a twist over Christmas. John had put the knife into David on the erroneous basis that he was a Professor, and has apologised. David advised:

“Have looked through John’s reply to my piece. As I’ve declared the peace I’ll not be responding. Just one question though – why does he keep referring to me as a professor? At first I thought he was just being sarcastic, but the reference in his latest diatribe seems to be genuine. Please tell John from me that I am no professor – I don’t even have a degree. I suspect he may be mistaking me for someone else. I also suspect this may explain some of the hysterical tone of his attacks on me. He imputes motives to me which are just way beyond my reach. In all honesty – I am not that smart. My credentials are no more than those of a concerned middle class, middle aged, suburban dad. I am by trade an accountant. If in my naivete I am missing some subtle point of John’s with all these professor references (he seems above cheap sarcasm, somehow) I would appreciate an explanation.”

The John-v-David debate was a highlight for me last year, and generated significant interest from readers. The latest comment comes from Robert Adams, who didn’t like John’s aggressive tone in his year-end rejoinder to David’s Never give up your disbelief (webdiary10Dec2002 in The hope we deserve (johncol).

I have found the argument between John Wojdylo and David Makinson compelling. It is always fascinating to me when two people of such obviously considerable intelligence, working with essentially similar information, draw such diametrically opposed conclusions.

I think a key difference is that David writes instinctively, from what seems to be a clear conviction of what is right and what is wrong, whereas John writes from an intellectual or at least analytical perspective. David’s thinking seems to me to come from a core of essential humanity, John’s rests on hard nosed, and often very selective, rationality.

John is clearly frustrated that David will not meet him on this analytical ground, and has on a couple of occasions lamented that David has not done the reading that John so kindly provides for us. From even a cursory reading of David’s offerings it is clear he is at least as well versed in the issues as John, but he is right not to try to run this debate on terms set by John, for that would be foolish.

A key feature of John’s debating style is to disparage an opponent in terms that are often sneering and snide. Many of the labels John has pinned to David are simply silly. David has, I sense reluctantly, tried to respond in similar vein at times, but in truth it does not really work – he is outgunned. I note that he recently called an end to the fight with John, but I do hope he will reconsider. The debate needs two sides, and Webdiary needs David’s intelligence to balance John’s intellect.

To David I would say: Stick to your convictions, and present your arguments in your own way. Don’t try to play John at his game. To John, I would say: You make many telling points, but by playing the man and not the ball, as you so often do, you damage your message. The real debate is about Iraq, not David.

Which brings me to the core of the discussion, and here I must declare an earlier background in the legal profession, for far too many years. Donald Rumsfeld and others have said, regarding Iraq, that the United States is not trying to make a case that would stand up in a court of law. This is both fortunate and necessary for them, because, based on all the evidence we have so far been provided, there is no conceivable case – under any legal system – for going to war with Iraq.

On this basis, it is obviously quite important that we do not in fact require such a case.This absence of a legal, moral or ethical case is what stumps David. John describes the war as a “moral good”, but he has failed to prove his point, thus relegating it to mere assertion. It is those who advocate war, not those pleading for peaceful resolutions, who must meet the onus of proof.

Thus far they have failed to do so. In the end, this is the key reason why the David/John debate should continue. Because David’s instincts are right. And John, for all his analysis, is wrong.”

***

This year, David is hard at work on a piece about what us ordinary folks can do. John has read books from leading Islamic dissidents, and will write on the culture wars within Islam.

Here’s a short comment by Scott on the North Korea crisis, followed by his excellent ‘Counterspin: Pro-war mythology’.

***

Weapons of mass destruction as self-defence

by Scott Burchill

“We will work closely with our coalition to deny terrorists and their state sponsors the materials, technology and expertise to make and deliver weapons of mass destruction. …The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” President George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 29 January, 2002.

As the 12 month anniversary of President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ speech approaches, it’s worth reflecting on what a disaster it has been for moderates in Iran, South Korea’s embryonic ‘sunshine policy’ of rapprochement with the North and, undoubtedly in the weeks ahead, it will be for the people of Iraq.

More specifically, it is worth considering President Bush’s words above in light of the lesson that the Iraq-North Korea duality is now teaching the world: If you want to deter the war addicts in Washington, you’d better have weapons of mass destruction and resources of terror. Nothing else will work.

How else can we explain Washington’s contrasting approaches to Iraq (which doesn’t have nuclear weapons or the potential to build them for some years) and North Korea (which has at least two nuclear devices and wants to build more)? The former is being threatened with imminent war while the latter confronts only diplomatic offensives.

Given threats by Washington and London it’s little wonder Iraq and other members of the “axis of evil” want to develop weapons of mass destruction. As the realist theorist Kenneth Waltz argues, “North Korea, Iraq, Iran and others know that the United States can be held at bay only by deterrence. Weapons of mass destruction are the only means by which they can hope to deter the United States. They cannot hope to do so by relying on conventional weapons”.

However, because we have so deeply internalised the myth that the US is a defensive nation which never instigates aggression against others, we rarely, if ever, consider things from the viewpoints of Pyongyang, Teheran or Baghdad. In the West, these are states which by definition can never legitimately acquire the weaponry so keenly stockpiled in vast quantities by Washington and its allies. It’s an obvious double standard. North Korea can be criticised for withdrawing from the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), while Israel is not even though it has always refused to sign it.

There can be no doubt about North Korea’s ideological delinquency and the paranoia of its leaders. However, in the present climate its desire to acquire more weapons of mass destruction is perfectly rational and understandable.

***

Counterspin: Pro-war mythology

by Scott Burchill

Scott Burchill is a lecturer in international relations at the School of Social & International Studies, Deakin University.

 Your say

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this pre-war period is that despite intelligence dossiers, parliamentary speeches and months of disingenuous government propaganda portraying Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to life on earth, only 37% of Australians support an illegal, unilateral strike by Washington against Baghdad.

We can be confident the Australian Government is concerned by this figure when the Prime Minister starts conjuring implausible and hysterical “what if in 5 years time…” scenarios to bolster his case for war (The Australian, 1 January, 2003). It’s not easy making the current peace “seem unacceptably dangerous” (Mearsheimer & Walt 2002).

Spin doctors and PR consultants will therefore be working hard over the next two months in an effort to close the gap between public opposition to a war against Iraq and government enthusiasm thinly disguised as a commitment to the process of UNMOVIC (the United Nations Monitoring, Verification & Inspection Commission).

Their work will be made considerably easier by the support of loyal servants of state power within the fourth estate who will be reliable conduits for opinion management by governments in Canberra, London and Washington.

Amongst the agitprop, disinformation and outright fabrications by commissars and politicians, the following questions and themes will be prominent in future weeks. Each of them deserves careful analysis.

Is Saddam Hussein likely to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the US and its allies?

First, many states, including the US, the UK and Israel, acquire these weapons for deterrence against external attack. You’ve got to admire Prime Minister Howard and the pro-war lobby for pretending not to understand the lesson that Iraq-North Korea are now teaching the world: If you want to deter the war addicts in Washington, you’d better have weapons of mass destruction and resources of terror. Nothing else will work.

Why wouldn’t Iraq develop WMD for deterrence purposes given threats by Washington and London? We are discouraged from seeing things from Iraq’s point of view, but in many ways WMD make sense for vulnerable states. As the realist theorist Kenneth Waltz argues, “North Korea, Iraq, Iran and others know that the United States can be held at bay only by deterrence. Weapons of mass destruction are the only means by which they can hope to deter the United States. They cannot hope to do so by relying on conventional weapons.”

As with every country, Iraq’s weapons inventory and systems tell us precisely nothing about its strategic intentions.

Secondly, Iraq had chemical and biological weapons during the Gulf War in 1991 and chose not to use them. Why would Saddam Hussein be more inclined to use them now knowing the horrendous consequences (as they were explained to him by Brent Scowcroft in 1991), unless his personal survival was at stake and he had nothing left to lose? AS CIA head George Tenet reminded President George W. Bush, Saddam was unlikely to launch WMD against the US unless the survival of his regime was threatened.

As Mearsheimer and Walt argue, “the threat of Iraqi nuclear blackmail is not credible. Not surprisingly, hawks do not explain how Saddam could blackmail the United States and its allies when a rival superpower like the Soviet Union [with 40,000 nuclear weapons] never seriously attempted to blackmail Washington, much less did it.”

Saddam Hussein has form: He has used WMD before

It is true that Saddam Hussein has used these weapons before, against those who couldn’t respond in kind – Iranian soldiers and perhaps most infamously on 17 March 1988 against “his own people” in the Kurdish city of Halabja. Within half an hour of this attack over 5000 men, women and children were dead from chemical weapons containing a range of pathogens which were dropped on them.

If Washington and London are genuinely concerned about Iraq’s WMD, why did they continue to supply him with the means to acquire them for 18 months after the attack on Halabja?

Initially, the US blamed Iran for the Halabja attack, a particularly cynical ploy given Saddam had also used chemical weapons against Teheran’s forces during their nine-year conflict in the 1980s. In fact Washington continued to treat Saddam as a favoured ally and trading partner long after the attack on Halabja was exposed as his handiwork.

At the time, the Reagan Administration tried to prevent criticism of Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurds in the Congress and in December 1989, George Bush’s father authorised new loans to Saddam in order to achieve the “goal of increasing US exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record “. Surprisingly, the goal was never reached. In February 1989, eleven months after Halabja, John Kelly, US Assistant Secretary of State, flew to Baghdad to tell Saddam Hussein that “you are a source for moderation in the region, and the United States wants to broaden her relationship with Iraq”.

According to the reports of a Senate Banking Committee, the United States provided the government of Iraq with ‘dual-use’ licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programs. According to the report, this assistance included “chemical warfare-agent precursors; chemical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings; chemical warfare-filling equipment; biological warfare-related materials; missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment”. These technologies were sent to Iraq until December 1989, 20 months after Halabja.

According to William Blum a “veritable witch’s brew of biological materials were exported to Iraq by private American suppliers,” including Bacillus Anthracis (cause of anthrax), Clostridium Botulinum (a source of botulinum toxin), Histoplasma Capsulatam (causes disease which attacks lungs, brain, spinal chord and heart), Brucella Melitensis (bacteria which attacks vital organs) and other toxic agents. The US Senate Committee said “these biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction,” and it was later discovered that “these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program”.

After the recent leaking in Germany of Iraq’s 12,000 page declaration of its weapons program, it is now known that at least 150 companies, mostly in Europe, the United States and Japan, provided components and know-how needed by Saddam Hussein to build atomic bombs, chemical and biological weapons. Unsurprisingly, the US was keen to excise these details from Iraq’s report before its wider dissemination to non-permanent members of the Security Council (Newsday (US), 13 December, 2002; The Independent (UK), 18 & 19 December, 2002; Scotland on Sunday (UK), 22 December, 2002).

Historian Gabriel Kolko claims that “the United Stares supplied Iraq with intelligence throughout the war [with Iran] and provided it with more than $US5 billion in food credits, technology, and industrial products, most coming after it began to use mustard, cyanide, and nerve gases against both Iranians and dissident Iraqi Kurds”.

If the US is genuinely concerned by Saddam’s WMD, why did Donald Rumsfeld (then a presidential envoy for President Reagan, currently President George W. Bush’s Defence Secretary) fly to Baghdad in December 1983 to meet Saddam and normalise the US-Iraq relationship, at a time when Washington new Iraq was using chemical weapons on an “almost daily” basis against Iran (Washington Post, 30 December, 2002)? Why were no concerns about the use of these weapons raised with Baghdad?

Saddam has been successfully deterred from using WMD against other states with WMD. There is no reason to believe this situation has changed or will.

Saddam Hussein has invaded his neighbours twice

True, but this can hardly be a source of outrage for Western governments or a pretext for his removal from power given they actively supported his invasion of Iran in the 1980s with intelligence (eg satellite imagery of Iranian troop positions) and weaponry and, in the case of Washington, told Saddam it was agnostic about his border dispute with Kuwait just prior to Iraq’s invasion in August 1990 (US Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam in 1990 that “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” The U.S. State Department reinforced this message by declaring that Washington had “no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait”.) This is mock outrage at best.

Saddam’s behaviour is no worse than several of his neighbours. As Mearsheimer and Walt remind us, “Saddam’s past behavior is no worse than that of several other states in the Middle East, and it may even be marginally better”.

“Egypt fought six wars between 1948 and 1973 (five against Israel, plus the civil war in Yemen), and played a key role in starting four of them. Israel initiated wars on three occasions (the Suez War in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon), and has conducted innumerable air strikes and commando raids against its various Arab adversaries.”

Saddam Hussein is a monster who runs a violent, oppressive regime

True again, though this didn’t prevent him from being a favoured ally and trading partner of the West at the peak of his crimes in the 1980s. As Mark Thomas notes, the conspicuous aspect of British Labour’s attitude to Iraq has been the failure of Blair, Straw, Prescott, Blunkett, Cook or Hoon to register any concerns about Iraq’s human rights record whenever the opportunities arose in the British Parliament during the 1980s and 1990s (New Statesman, 9 December, 2002).

Washington, London and Canberra never had reservations about General Suharto’s brutal rule in Indonesia, to take on one example of relations between the West and autocratic regimes around the world, and were in fact overjoyed when he came to power over the bodies of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens in 1965.

Only the threat of force by the US has forced Iraq to accept weapons inspectors

Possibly true, although this ignores the fact that the last time force was used against Iraq on a significant scale because of its non-compliance with UN Security Resolutions, the opposite effect was produced.

After the Clinton Administration and Blair Government attacked Iraq from 16-19 December, 1998, the result was the collapse of Richard Butler’s UNSCOM and the absence of weapons inspectors from Iraq for the next four years. Hardly a testament to the use of force, to say nothing of the precedent this kind of behaviour sets. The Prime Minister’s claim that “Hussein effectively expelled weapons inspectors during 1998” is untrue and he knows it (The Australian, 1 January, 2003). Richard Butler withdrew his weapons inspectors on Washington’s advice only hours before the Anglo-American attacks in December 1998.

Why wasn’t the threat of force an appropriate strategy for the West in response to Indonesia’s brutal 24-year occupation of East Timor? Or South Africa’s occupation of Namibia? Or Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus? Or Israel’s occupation of Palestine? Etc, etc,.

Has the threat posed by Saddam Hussein increased recently?

The West, particularly London and Washington, was solidly supporting Saddam when he committed the worst of his crimes at the zenith of his power and influence in the 1980s.

In terms of international support – especially Western and Soviet backing, the strength of his armed forces and the state of his industry and equipment, Saddam was considerably more dangerous then than he is now under harsh UN sanctions, (illegal) no-fly zones in the north (since 1991) and south (since 1993) of the country, political isolation and a degraded civilian infrastructure. Why are Saddam’s attempts to develop WMD a concern now if they weren’t when he actually used them?

Saddam Hussein will pass WMD on to terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda

Despite forensic efforts by Washington to produce a pretext for war, no credible evidence for this claim has been found. All we are left with is unsubstantiated assertions by Bush Administration officials such as Richard Armitage that he has no doubts Iraq would pass WMD on to terrorists (though he doesn’t explain how an obvious return address resulting in reciprocal annihilation could be concealed).

This may be enough for compliant power-magnets in the Australian media, but it cannot withstand even a cursory examination. Where is the evidence for such a claim? Osama bin Laden offered the Saudi Government the resources of his organisation to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1990 instead of Riyadh relying on the US, such is the animosity between Islamic fundamentalists and secular nationalists in the Arab world. Saddam has responded by repressing fundamentalist groups within Iraq.

Would Saddam be likely to hand over to Al Qaeda nuclear weapons so painstakingly built when he, himself might be their first victim? Remarkably, the pro-war lobby reads this history as evidence of likely future co-operation between Baghdad and Al Qaeda.

Much of this is a smokescreen designed to conceal who the real proliferators of WMD are. Which states, for example assisted Israel to develop nuclear weapons – France and the US? What role did Pakistan and China play in helping North Korea build its nuclear stockpile? Why can’t we read the list of European, Asian and US companies which proliferated WMD technologies to Iraq? Instead of imaginary scenarios asking ‘what if Iraq acquires nuclear weapons in five years and what if it passes them on to terrorist organisations?, why not more sensible questions about which rogue states (most of whom are members of the so called ‘war against terrorism’) are already responsible for the proliferation of WMD?

The US wants to democratise Iraq

There is no serious US interest in a democratic transition in Iraq, because this could ultimately encourage the Shi’ite majority in the country to pursue a closer relationship with Shi’ite Iran – a nightmare scenario for Washington. It’s more likely that a dissident former General, possibly involved in war crimes against Iraq’s Kurdish or Shi’ite communities, will be returned from exile and presented as the “democratic opposition” to Saddam Hussein.

The US is interested in compliance and obedience rather than democracy. It has rarely, if ever, expressed an interest in democracy in the Middle East. Ideally, a pro-Western, anti-Iranian, secular “iron fist” would do. The recently rehabilitated Iraqi opposition in exile (with whom until recently the US refused to deal) has no democratic credibility and is largely unknown inside Iraq.

What is the status of pre-emptive strikes in international law?

A number of points can be made about Canberra’s interest in retrospectively amending international law to legitimise a shift of strategic doctrine from deterrence to pre-emption. It would establish a precedent that others (Pakistan, India; North and South Korea) might be encouraged to follow; it would have a destabilising effect on international order; the difficulty (impossibility) of getting changes through the UN Security Council; the heightened sense of vulnerability for smaller states and for states in the region, etc, etc,. It would open up a can of worms.

Significantly, there is currently only one country which could seriously consider exercising a right to anticipatory self-defence under existing international law – Iraq. It has been directly threatened with attack by both the US and UK. There has been no reciprocal threat from Iraq.

The term ‘pre-emptive war’ isn’t strictly accurate. As Steven Miller explains:

“Though Bush’s approach has been almost universally described, in the media and elsewhere, as a doctrine of preemption, this is incorrect. Preemption refers to a military strike provoked by indications that an opponent is preparing to attack. The logic is: better to strike than be struck. But no one is suggesting that Saddam is preparing to strike the United States. There are no indications that this is the case. Bush is instead making the case for preventive war, for removing today a threat that may be more menacing and difficult in the future. The administration may prefer to label its policy preemption because that is an easier case to make. But it is not an accurate use of the term as traditionally defined.”

According to international law specialist Michael Byers, “there is almost no support for a right of anticipatory self-defence as such in present-day customary international law”. To the extent that pre-emptive action is permissible under Article 51 of the UN Charter, it requires very strong evidence and there is a heavy burden of justification. The United States, for example, would have to be facing a specific, grave and imminent threat from Iraq which could only be averted by the use of force. According to the test established in the mid-nineteenth century by US Secretary of State Daniel Webster – criteria applied in 1945 at Nuremberg – the need for pre-emptive action must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”.

Otherwise a unilateral strike not authorised by the UN Security Council would be an act of aggression and a breach of international law. As claimed earlier, Iraq has a stronger case at this point in time (given US troop and equipment movements in Qatar, to say nothing of Bush’s stated threats).

Christine Gray, author of a seminal modern text on the use of force under international law, argues that the reluctance of states “to invoke anticipatory self-defence is in itself a clear indication of the doubtful status of this jurisdiction for the use of force”. According to Gray, in cases where Israel (Beirut 1968, Tunis 1985) and the US (Libya 1986, Iraq 1993, Sudan & Afghanistan 1998) have invoked anticipatory self-defence under Article 51 to justify attacks on their enemies, “the actions look more like reprisals, because they were punitive rather than defensive”. The problem for the US and Israel, she argues, “is that all states agree that in principle forcible reprisals are unlawful”.

By definition, pre-emptive strikes depend on conclusive intelligence. If the intelligence is wrong, as it was on 20 August 1998 when the Clinton Administration attacked the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, mistakenly believing it was an Al Qaeda chemical weapons factory, the results can be catastrophic for the innocent – self-defence becomes aggression.

Interestingly, the US has not always supported the ‘doctrine’ of anticipatory self-defence, even when its closest allies invoked it. On 7 June 1981 unmarked American-built F-16 aircraft of the Israeli airforce attacked and destroyed a nuclear reactor at Osirak in Iraq. The raid was authorised by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but had been internally opposed by Yitzhak Hofi, the director of Mossad, and Major-General Yehoshua Saguy, chief of military intelligence, because there was no evidence that Iraq was capable of building a nuclear bomb. This was also the view of the International Atomic Energy Authority. At the time of the attack, Israel itself had been developing and accumulating nuclear weapons for thirteen years, primarily at its nuclear facility at Dimona.

In response to Israel’s unprovoked pre-emptive strike, US Vice President George Bush Snr argued that sanctions had to be imposed on Israel. The US State Department condemned the bombing for its destabilising impact “which cannot but seriously add to the already tense situation in the area”. The basis of Washington’s concern, it must be said, was not its opposition to anticipatory self-defence per se but that Israel had violated the UN Charter by not exhausting all peaceful means for the resolution of the conflict – in truth no peaceful resolution had been sought. A few days after the raid, Ronald Reagan’s White House announced that the planned delivery of four additional F-16s to Israel would be suspended in protest against the attack. The suspension was discretely lifted soon after.

In the current climate when pre-emptive attacks are being invoked as just responses to terrorism, it is worth recalling Princeton University historian Arno Mayer comments in Le Monde shortly after the 9/11 attacks:

“…since 1947 America has been the chief and pioneering perpetrator of “pre-emptive” state terror, exclusively in the Third World and therefore widely dissembled. Besides the unexceptional subversion and overthrow of governments in competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Washington has resorted to political assassinations, surrogate death squads, and unseemly freedom fighters (eg, bin Laden). It masterminded the killing of Lumumba and Allende; and it unsuccessfully tried to put to death Castro, Khadafi, and Saddam Hussein… and vetoed all efforts to rein in not only Israel’s violation of international agreements and UN resolutions but also its practice of pre-emptive state terror.”

The question of oil: Access or control?

From the middle of last century Washington’s foreign policy priority in the Middle East was to establish US control over what the State Department described as “a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the great material prizes in world history”, namely the region’s vast reserves of crude oil. Middle Eastern oil was regarded in Washington as “probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment”, in what President Eisenhower described as the most “strategically important area in the world”.

Control could be most easily maintained via a number of despotic feudal oligarchies in the Gulf which ensured the extraordinary wealth of region would be shared between a small number of ruling families and US oil companies, rather than European commercial competitors or the population of these states. Until recently the US has not required the oil for itself though it needed to ensure that the oil price stayed within a desirable range or band – not too low for profit making or too high to discourage consumption and induce inflation. A side benefit of this control over such a vital industrial resource is the influence it gives the US over economic development in rival countries such as Japan.

The greatest threat to this control has always been independent economic nationalism, especially nationalist politicians within the oil-producing region who, unlike the feudal oligarchies of the Gulf states, would channel wealth into endogenous development priorities rather than to US transnationals.

The US wants to secure reliable access to the world’s second largest oil reserves, 112 billion barrels already known with possibly double that figure still to be mapped and claimed, thus depriving France and Russia of commercial advantages they have developed in Iraq over the last decade when US companies have been excluded. Just as importantly, access to Iraqi oil would also make the US less reliant upon – and therefore less supportive of – the regime in Saudi Arabia. The geo-political dynamics of the Middle East would be transformed.

If Russia and France maintain their inside track on Iraqi oil, then US corporations will be partially shut out from an enormous resource prize. No US administration is likely to accept that scenario. Meanwhile, Iraqi dissidents close to Washington have promised to cancel all existing oil contracts awarded to firms which do not assist the US to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Regime change in Baghdad could therefore be a bonanza for US oil companies and a disaster for Russian and French companies which have painstakingly built up their relations with the Iraqi dictator since the Gulf war. When Iraq’s oil comes fully back on stream, as many as 5 million barrels of oil (or 6.5%) could be added to the world’s daily supply. The implications of this for existing suppliers, the global spot price, economic growth, OPEC and the world’s consumers are enormous.

This is not an issue of access, it is primarily about control. The US was just as concerned to control Middle East oil producing regions when it didn’t depend on them at all. Until about 30 years ago, North America was the largest producer and the US scarcely used Middle East oil at all. Since then Venezuela has normally been the largest oil exporter to the United States. US intelligence projections suggest that in coming years the US will rely primarily on Western Hemisphere resources: primarily the Atlantic basin – Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, probably Colombia, but also possibly Canada, which has huge potential reserves if they become economically competitive. Imported supplies accounted for 50% of US oil consumption in 2000 and by 2020 the figure is expected to rise to 66%.

Control over the world’s greatest concentration of energy resources has two goals: (1) economic: huge profits for energy corporations, construction firms, arms producers, as well as petrodollars recycled to US treasury, etc; and (2) it’s a lever of global geo-political control. For those trying to understand the motives behind US behaviour towards Iraq, it is impossible to underestimate the importance which oil has in the minds of Washington’s strategic planners.

Attempts to discredit arguments about US access to Iraqi oil by claiming that it if it is interested in access to supplies it could more easily strike a deal with Saddam to satisfy its “thirst for oil” rather than overthrow him, entirely miss the crucial issue – control (The Australian, 2 January, 2003).

The credibility of the UN and Canberra

In September 2002, the Iraq issue in Australia suddenly centred on the honour and integrity of the UN, a subject not previously thought to have concerned the Howard Government. The international community “can’t afford” to have its authority “brushed aside,” argued foreign minister Alexander Downer, otherwise it will “look meaningless and weak, completely ineffectual”. According to the Prime Minister, “if the United Nations Security Council doesn’t rise to its responsibilities on this occasion it will badly weaken its credibility”.

Former chief weapons inspector and Australian Ambassador to the UN, Richard Butler, argued that the Security Council faces the “challenge of its life” and its future would be “terminal” if it didn’t hold Iraq to account this time. His predecessor at the UN, Michael Costello, agrees. “If the UN Security Council won’t enforce its own resolutions against Iraq, the whole UN collective security system will be badly wounded, perhaps fatally.”

One might have thought that the credibility of the UN Security Council had been badly weakened before now, say in Bosnia in 1993, Rwanda in 1994 or in East Timor in 1999 to cite only three recent cases when it failed to protect defenceless civilians from slaughter. Palestinians might wonder why the organisation’s authority hasn’t been “brushed aside” by Israel’s consistent non-compliance with numerous Security Council resolutions calling for it’s withdrawal from occupied territories, from resolution 242 in 1967 to resolution 1402 in March 2002.

Washington clearly has an idiosyncratic view about states complying with UN Security Council resolutions. If the US objects to non-compliance, the country is attacked. If the US favors non-compliance it either vetoes the resolution or disregards it, in which case it is as good as vetoed. Since the early 1970s, for example, the US has vetoed 22 draft Security Council resolutions on Palestine alone – this figure doesn’t include 7 vetoes relating to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s.

At the National Press Club and later on commercial talkback radio, Mr Howard seemed to think that because Israel was a democracy it shouldn’t be judged by the same standards as Iraq. The future of the UN Security Council is not apparently terminal when its resolutions regarding Palestine and Israel are flouted. He should be reminded that democracies are just as obliged to observe international law as authoritarian dictatorships – there is no exemption. In fact we should expect a higher commitment to the rule of law from countries which pronounce their democratic credentials. Later, the argument shifted slightly. Israel wasn’t obliged to observe UN Security Council Resolutions because they are only invoked under Chapter 6 of the UN Charter, rather than Chapter 7. This is a novel interpretation of international law, to put it kindly.

Despite rhetoric which portrays the UN as a foreign body at its moment of truth, it is nothing more than the states which comprise it – including Australia and the US. If it has become dysfunctional, it is those member states which manipulate it for their own individual purposes which are to blame. Those who think the credibility of the UN is suddenly at risk over the question of Iraq might like to explain why non-compliance now is suddenly a pretext for an imminent attack on Iraq when Baghdad has been in violation of UN Security Council resolutions for four years.

The Prime Minister asks if Iraq has “nothing to hide and nothing to conceal from the world community, why has it repeatedly refused to comply with the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council”?

Perhaps it’s for the same reason that he restricts the UN from entering Australia’s refugee detention centres? Or for the same reason Israel would not allow the UN to inspect its research institute at Nes Ziona near Tel Aviv which produces chemical and biological weapons, a stockpile of chemical agents Mr Howard claims he is “not aware” of.

If he had bothered to inquire, Mr Howard would have found that “there is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weaponswhich is not manufactured at the institute”, according to a biologist who held a senior post in Israeli intelligence. Nes Ziona does not work on defensive and protective devices, but only biological weapons for attack, claims the British Foreign Report.

The Prime Minister believes that Iraq’s “aspiration to develop a nuclear capacity” might be a sufficient pretext for war. He has repeatedly claimed that “there is already a mountain of evidence in the public domain,” though he didn’t say what any of it actually proved beyond the existing public record, or how it established that the United States faces a specific, grave and imminent threat from Iraq which can only be averted by the use of force.

According to the Prime Minister, the mountain of evidence includes an IISS report which actually found Saddam was much less dangerous now than in the past when he was backed by the West. Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, described the IISS report as little more than conjecture. “It’s absurd. It has zero factual basis. It’s all rhetoric…speculative and meaningless.” There was a similar response to President Bush’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 12 September, which outlined Iraq’s breaches of international law. According to conservative Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman, Bush’s speech was “clumsy and shallow” and little more than “a glorified press release.” It offered little, if anything, that wasn’t already on the public record. More a trough than a mountain.

At the UN on 13 September, Foreign Minister Downer claimed that “Iraq’s flagrant and persistent defiance is a direct challenge to the United Nations, to the authority of the Security Council, to international law, and to the will of the international community”. Four days later in the Australian Parliament Mr Downer repeated the charges, that Iraq “directly challenges the authority of the United Nations and international law,” that it poses “a grave threat” to the world, that it “has flouted and frustrated UN resolutionspersistently defied legally binding obligations” and is therefore “a serial transgressor.” Every one of these comments could also have been made about Israel. However, for reasons not explained there are to be no dossiers presented to the Parliament outlining its breaches of UN resolutions, it won’t be called “a serial transgressor” of international law, nor has it’s long history of defying Security Council resolutions ever meant that “the authority of the United Nations was at stake.”

If Washington bypasses the Security Council or cannot get UN authorisation for a strike against Iraq but unilaterally attacks the country regardless, it will have done much greater damage to the UN’s credibility than years of Iraqi non-compliance with Security Council resolutions.

Neither the Prime Minister nor the Foreign Minister have answered the key question: Where is the new evidence that makes military action against Iraq more urgent now than it has been since December 1998 when Richard Butler withdrew UNSCOM from Iraq? Prime Minister Howard claims the onus is on the critics of his Government’s approach to articulate an alternative (The Australian, 1 January, 2003). What about the policy of containment his Government comfortably lived with between 1996 and 2002? As two conservative realists noted:

“The belief that Saddam’s past behaviour shows that he cannot be contained rests on distorted history and dubious logic. In fact, the historical record shows that the United States can contain Iraq effectively – even if Saddam has nuclear weapons – just as it contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And that conclusion carries an obvious implication: there is no good reason to attack Iraq at this time” (Mearsheimer & Walt 2002).

***

Two powerful conservative/realist critiques of a US war against Iraq, which are nonetheless very sympathetic to Washington, are Steven E. Miller, ‘Gambling on War: Force, Order, and the Implications of Attacking Iraq’ in Carl Kaysen et al, War with Iraq: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives (American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Committee on International Security Studies, Cambridge MA 2002); and John J. Mearsheimer & Stephen M. Walt, Can Saddam Be Contained? History Says Yes,(Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, Cambridge MA November 2002).

 

What you say

There are around one million Australians living outside the country, according to figures from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. That’s more people than live in Adelaide, or twice the population living on Sydney’s North Shore. These far flung million are the great Australian diaspora. As a member of the diaspora, I am becoming increasingly curious about its nature and what it means for my homeland.

When the term diaspora is used, it is typically associated with the most dispersed people, the Jews. It has also been used in connection with the Irish, who were renowned for migrating to better lives. I have also seen it used for the great migration of blacks from the south to the northern cities of the US.

When you look at how the word has been used in the past, it has been mainly associated with people escaping persecution, poverty or other problems. Or perhaps those simply seeking better opportunities than their homeland can provide. The reality of the Australian diaspora is that it is poorly understood. The numbers now are so large in relation to the total Australian population that the diaspora is gaining more attention.

At one end of the spectrum, everyone knows about Joe or Jane Aussie who goes to London for two years, drinks warm beer, never quite becomes accustomed to the dreadful English weather and then does a six week jaunt around the continent at the end of it all (to see “Europe”). This is the classic “rite of passage” tour that has been going on for decades. The numbers now are a larger but that group is well understood and not of much interest. There are a couple of hundred thousand in that rather predictable but fun category. After two years they return to Australia using English slang such as “bollocks”, “cheers” and “chutney fairy”. It wears a but thin but it also wears off in 18 months and all is forgotten as they morph back into sunny suburban life. They are the Earls Court category. That still leaves 800,000 left unaccounted for.

The other end of the spectrum is the eminent scientist category. These are not large in number but at first glance would seem to represent a significant loss for Australia. They are those fitting into the most obvious “brain drain” category. They often seem to gravitate toward the US with its mega bucks research environment. They have opportunities there they couldn’t have back home. They are the boffin category. Well heeled boffins but a great loss to Australia. We should mourn their loss.

The largest number of members of the Australian diaspora are neither the Earls Court mob nor the boffin mob. I suspect many of them are people like me who are seen as valuable in global business but not in their home country. Many of them have no set plans to return to Australia but remain sentimentally attached to it and dream of one day returning for lifestyle and family reasons.

This may explain, Margo, why you get more than a few contributions from Australians living overseas. They are engaged people curious about the world and many remaining at least mentally attached to their homeland. They are also great in number.

The only good research I have seen on this is by Professor Graeme Hugo at the University of Adelaide. In May last year he presented a paper at Sydney Technology Park entitled “Emigration of Skilled Australians: Patterns Trends and Issues”. It’s a great 60 page read for anyone interested in the topic. It is revealing and impressive because he uses lots of numbers. I love numbers.

The only aspect that worries me about Professor Hugo’s work is a survey he conducted to try to get into the minds of the diaspora. Being based at a university himself I think he believed that university alumni lists could be of some value. In fact I understand this was a main source he used in tracking people down.

Yet most of the members of the Australian diaspora I know have university degrees but maintain no contact with their university. I had an affinity for my school but the university meant little. I don’t know a single person who is in a university alumni association or even remotely connected. We liked uni and the times we had there but the institution was too huge and impersonal to actually develop feelings toward it. That said, I am always happy to say where I went to university and strongly believe it is a good one. It’s the University of Queensland by the way!

Despite having some reservations about the above, I tend to agree with the Professor’s conclusions. Even though he loves his numbers too, the great thing is he looks beyond them. It has been argued by some that there is no brain drain. They argue that there is a net brain gain because that’s what the raw data on migration says. Simply stated we bring in more skilled people than those that leave. The Professor says “it is glib to simply state that Australia has a net brain gain so that one can ignore the outflow of skilled young Australians as a simple function of globalisation – why can’t the nation achieve the double bonus of attracting skilled foreign people while also retaining the best of our own talent?”

I agree. Perhaps I over value myself , but I think there is something sad about an Australian born and educated person leaving and never returning, except for holidays and perhaps retirement. It is not exchanging like with like.

Anyway, the diaspora may be gone but we are not forgotten. We still root for the home team. This is where we of the diaspora have our advantages. The empirical evidence is everywhere.

A good example would be a discussion I had on Friday night. I was talking to the US headquarters of the multinational I work for. The topic came up of “What to do with Asia”? We are reaching the conclusion that our Asia Pacific business is expanding so rapidly that it would make sense to have a regional headquarters in that region like we do here in Europe. It is only early days but we broached the topic of where to put such a headquarters. The only candidates were Singapore or Sydney. We already have business in Sydney but not Singapore.

I will have an influence on this decision and I have already pointed out some early advantages of Sydney. We would need people who speak all of the major Asian languages. Sydney delivers this in bucket loads. I was able to convince the key US based decision maker of this (he wasn’t aware of it). Sydney’s diverse multicultural nature and large Asian population is EXACTLY what my company wants to see. We would at a minimum need Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese. We may end up needing Japanese and some others as well. We would be dealing mainly via email, electronic bank transfers and phone customer service support. All this can be done from Sydney and on a large scale at good prices. Sydney is sleek, sharp and cost competitive.

I could also imagine the NSW government providing a tax break here or there (probably some kind of capped payroll tax holiday). On top of all that, Sydney costs less than Singapore at the top level. Salaries are less and rents are comparable for the CBD. So far Sydney is winning. Sydney has already attracted a few Asia Pacific regional headquarters. Depending on the business you are in, Sydney is not a hard sell. It has a hell of a lot going for it.

The thing that concerns me, and I mentioned this on Friday night, is the Australian federal taxes. My understanding is that the Commonwealth Government offers nothing – only lots of punishment and disincentive. I could see a series of problems if we wanted to shift management around. Australia is too inflexible in this regard and has extremely high income taxes at low (compared to global competition) salary levels. That would be a barrier that Singapore or other Asia Pacific capitals would not present. Thank you, Peter Costello?

I think it is only Singapore or Sydney. I don’t think Hong Kong or other parts of China would be in the running. Tokyo has already been dismissed on a cost and mono-cultural basis.

Singapore is in recession and would love to see us. I suspect Canberra wouldn’t do anything special for us. It never does. In the end our decision will be a business one. Either Sydney measures up or it doesn’t.

The point I am making is that here I am sitting in Europe, working for an American company and I am busily advancing Sydney’s interests. I do this because I am Australian. Quite simple really. It’s a real life example, millions of dollars are involved and jobs would be created in Sydney.

I could be interpreted as a low grade brain drain individual but I work for the homeland from afar.

This is where the diaspora pays back. We still call Australia home.

Why then have I lost my right to vote? Can someone tell me why? I suppose the problem is how to determine the electorate of the diaspora. That is where it gets hard. But it is a million Australian citizens!!!

By the way, for the first time ever the USA will do a census of its diaspora. Australia should too. It should remember the MILLION who look in from afar.

Dear Sir

 

by Jack Robertson

14 December 2002

Jack Robertson

BALMAIN NSW 2041

The Honourable John Howard, MP

Dear Mr Howard,

I write to you as a former Army officer and Aide-de-Camp to Governor-General Bill Hayden, and also as the brother of a current serving member of the Australian SAS, to express my growing unease at international Human Rights organization accusations made against our serving personnel, in particular the ugly suggestions that your government’s ‘Border Protection’ policies of recent times may have placed them in difficult non-military situations which resulted in Human Rights violations on their parts.

Prime Minister, I am of course only making a shrewd guess, but I am fairly sure that my brother was a member of the SAS party your government ordered to board the Tampa in late 2001, and I certainly know that he was also among the first contingent of Australian troops who later fought so courageously to help liberate Afghanistan.

I of course have not spoken to him in detail about his unit’s activities in these two markedly different ‘operational’ environments, nor he to me – as is only right and proper from a unit and national security point of view.

I am, however, growing anxious at the apparent fact that your government, and in particular former Minister for Defence Peter Reith and current incumbent Robert Hill, seems at best ambivalent, and at worst wilfully dismissive, towards what I regard as an increasingly urgent need for it take a pro-active interest in protecting the reputation, morale and perhaps even exposure to future prosecution, of our armed services. This is especially so given the real possibility that your government may soon be asking those men and women to embark on dangerous military service in Iraq next year.

Prime Minister, I refer you in particular to the recent study of Australia by the internationally-respected organization ‘Human Rights Watch’, an independent Human Rights NGO whose reports the United States has often referred to in the past – for example, when seeking moral justification for military action in such countries as Afghanistan and Iraq.

The following frightening quote is taken from the Press Release advising of this Report’s release, on 10 December 2002, under the heading: “By Invitation Only: Australian Asylum Policy”:

“Human Rights Watch’s evidence shows that the Australian Defence Forces violated the rights of asylum seekers on board boats intercepted in October 2001. They detained the single men under inhumane conditions, beat several of them with batons and used other unnecessary force against vulnerable refugee families. These findings contradict the report of the Australian Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident [issued on October 23, 2002] that praised the humanitarian conduct of the naval operations. Unlike the Senate Committee, which could not collect refugee testimony, Human Rights Watch interviewed dozens of refugees present during the naval operations.”

Prime Minister, as I said, my brother has naturally never discussed in any detail what exactly your government’s policy and orders required him (and/or his colleagues) to do on the Tampa, as is only proper for matters of ‘national security’. However, it unsettles me deeply that such an influential organization feels it is justified in making such ugly and unambiguous public accusations, and yet your government apparently feels no need to respond publicly to them, in order to defend our soldiers’ honour.

I refer you also to your government’s repeated ‘ducking and weaving’ on similar related matters, like the ‘children overboard’ affair (especially your personal refusal to pressure Mr Reith to appear before Senate committees); the government’s failure (in my view) to adequately defend our senior RAN and Defence Department civilians there; and your government’s continued silence over the growing calls – from such people as former diplomat Tony Kevin – for full disclosure of your government’s and our navy’s knowledge, if any, of events leading up to the tragic sinking of SIEV-X.

Prime Minister, my family are strong supporters of Australia’s firm stance against international terrorism. I have admired your national leadership in the immediate aftermath of both the S11 attacks and the Bali bombings. Furthermore, it may well be that these HRW Report accusations, and others from such people as Mr Kevin, are ill-judged and unfounded. However, as an ordinary Australian with a family member who has been thrust by you onto the ‘front line’ of both this country’s approach to asylum seekers and the war on terror, I feel justified in asking that you personally, your Ministers, and your government extend the full and proper public support in these matters that my, and other ADF families, surely deserve.

To that end, I now respectfully request you to a) publicly respond on behalf of my brother and his ADF colleagues to the HR abuse accusations in the HRW Report, and do your best to ensure that the mainstream press gives that response the fullest coverage; b) publicly state for the record – ‘before the fact’, so to speak – that responsibility for any such accusations against any member of our ADF that are subsequently proven correct lies ultimately not with them, but with you, your Ministers and your government for placing them in such difficult, non-military situations in the first place; and c) re-affirm that all past, present and future activities relating to ‘border protection’, on the part of our soldiers, sailors and airman, along with our AFP and ASIO, have been, are, and will continue to be, carried out with your government’s full authorisation, support, supervision and acknowledgment.

Prime Minister, thank you.

Jack Robertson

Via email, hard copy to Electoral Office (Bennelong), and hand-delivery to Kirribilli House Information copies: all Federal MPs and Senators (via PH email); Canberra Press Gallery

PS: I tried to deliver my PM’s letter to the Security Office at Kiribilli on Sunday arv, but they won’t accept anything there at all. Sigh. I’m getting sick of humiliating myself like this!

This article was first published in ‘Christmas letter to our leader’ at webdiary20Dec2002.