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September 22, 2004
"campaign posters"
The campaign posters are everywhere these days. There is no escaping them. These are different kinds of posters, ones with far more bite and irony than those we adorning the electricity poles around our cities.
Leunig
What is envisioned is a relatively low-level incursion with a few troops, that may last longer than the interventionists expected, but would still be over fairly quickly. Something along the lines of the US invasion of Panama that led to the capture of Manuel Noriega? It is a "pre-emptive strike", which means that we attack our adversary, although he has not yet actually attacked us.
Whilst I've ben on the road the pre-emptive strike issue has been discussed by John Quiggin, Road to Surfdom and Back Pages
The re-affirmation of the pre-emptive strike doctrine in the name of anticipatory self-defence by the Coalition is a troubling one. In the world of international relations the principle that one state may attack another to defend itself is well established. The new principle or body of ideas assocaited with pre-emptive strike implies the limits of sovereignty. Sovereignty entails obligations. One is not to massacre your own people. Another is not to support terrorism in any way. If a Government fails to meet these obligations, then it forfeits some of the normal advantages of sovereignty, including the right to be left alone inside your own territory. Other Governments, including Australia, gain the right to intervene."
However, Howard's pre-emptive strike doctrine ignores the key principle that an intrusion into the territory of another state can be justified as an act of self-defense only in those "cases in which the necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming and leaves no choice of means and no moment of deliberation."
If the rationale for pre-emptive strike is that an attack from the hostile nation or a terrorist is an imminent threat, then the only way that Canberra can justify its pre-emptive strike against Indonesia is to argue that JI is poised with weapons of mass destruction to attack Australia or one of its allies.
Is anyone--Howard or Downer---claiming this? No.
Yet they are prepared to suddenly abandon a set of foreign policy precepts that have carried Australia successfully through a fundamental and often dangerous changes in the distribution and the scale of world power in the Asia-Pacific Rim.
Hence the immediate backpeddling. And they need to because the doctrine of pre-emptive strike implies that Australia is not operating within a context of equally sovereign nations. Australia views itself as a regional-straddling power, whose mission is to keep lesser countries--–Indonesia---in line. A supercop acting to keep law and order.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 22, 2004 10:09 PM
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