Foreign Affairs

Calls by Senator George Brandis for the Government to take action to strip Hicks of profits from his book involve some risks that Senator Brandis might not have considered. Senator Brandis has suggested two approaches - one involving the Proceeds of Crimes Act, and another involving a condition on Hicks' plea bargain with the United States that he assign profits from any book to the Australian Government.

The US response to Howard's recent complaints that the Hicks matter has dragged on too long is strange. The charges were "sworn" but not laid by his mid-Februrary deadline. The US is refusing to guarantee that the Hicks accusations will be dealt with this year as Howard says he has demanded. Today Cheney has claimed the Bush Administration has no power to speed up even the process of having the charges approved, even though the organisation that has to approve them is a branch of the US military and can be instructed by the President to do so at any time.

This is starting to look like intentional delay. If the US Administration is intentionally delaying the Hicks matter when Howard has started making noises about wanting Hicks sent home this could only be because they want Australia to demand Hicks' return.

The headlines were sensational &emdash; "Howard sends more troops to Iraq" &emdash; but the truth more mundane. Howard has decided to send 70 military trainers to Iraq to help train Iraqi troops. Training Iraqi troops is in principle a good thing because it means they ought to be better positioned to take care of their own security. On the other hand, the CoWs have been in Iraq for almost four years now &emdash; in that time the Iraqi troops could have undertaken a university degree including an honours thesis. If more training were going to help, this raises the question of why there has not been ample opportunity to provide such training already.

The American Interest is running an article calling for the creation of a Concert of Democracies. It sets out a proposal to create a new international order as a successor to the United Nations - or at least an alternative to it. The proposed Concert of Democracies would be have a formalised structure and be able to make decisions binding on its members, and membership would only be available to genuine democracies.

Since the publication is widely regarded as a convalescence home for recovering neo-conservatives, it might seem strange that a liberal in the Jeffersonian mould like me would support it, but I do. I think this is exactly what needs to be done in international relations, and the sooner the better.

Another day, another Fiji coup. Our own Government has taken the right decision not to use military forces to defeat the coup - this is an internal matter for Fiji. Yet there is one glaring question that must be asked about the coup - why does Fiji have military forces at all?

With four coups in just under 20 years, the greatest military threat to Fijian democracy seems to be its own forces. Indeed the Fijian military seems to be the only threat to Fijian democracy. Fiji has no strategic military value to anybody else, and no crucial natural resources - there is no reason whatsoever that an external aggressor would take an interest in Fiji. Its location means it is not even a viable launching point for an attack on something else that might be a target of a military aggressor.

Major Peter Tinley (Ret'd), the SAS officer responsible for the Iraq war plan for Australia's special forces, has spoken out against the strategic and moral blunder that constituted the invasion of Iraq. He makes it clear that there was never anything approximating compelling evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, saying that the US forces would "[confess], off the record, that there had not been any tangible sighting of any WMD or WMD enabling equipment for some years."

More importantly, he has this to say about the Government's conduct in ordering our troops into that invasion:

News services have been reporting for a while now about various analysts - typically retired generals and intelligence service leaders - recently suggesting that a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq is necessary in order to force the Iraqi government to take the steps necessary to be able to manage its own security affairs. Now it seems that many officers in active service are saying the same thing.

The following are the key declassified paragraphs from the intelligence report that blows away the claim that the invasion of Iraq has not increased terrorism:

We assess that the Iraq jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives; perceived jihadist success there would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.

The Iraq conflict has become the "cause celebre" for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.

With today's big story being the leaking of a consensus report by all 16 US intelligence agencies stating that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has increased terrorism, it seems the Prime Minister's continued insistence that it has had no effect on terrorism will become even more untenable. A consensus report involves every agency agreeing on the conclusion to be reached - it is unanimous, without dissent.

Perhaps the Prime Minister will try to claim that the report cannot be trusted because intelligence is unreliable, but this is not the kind of intelligence - discovery of concealed facts - that suffers from major reliability problems. This is merely the analysis of known facts combined with educated inferences as to probable outcomes and causes.

The 5th anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks has brought a lot of commentary on the "war on terror", and unlike the past few years it seems that most commentators have woken up to the fact that there is no war. Points I have been making for some time now are increasingly emerging as the dominant viewpoint.

Just two examples of the recognition of the non-existence of the "state of war" that has driven US and Australian politics in the last five years are an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to President Carter, and an opinion piece by Scott Burchill.