Rudd at war with his own shadow

THAT the world has starkly changed in the six short years since al-Qaeda launched its terrorist attacks on the US mainland was evidenced by the security necessary at last week's fantastically successful APEC summit.That Osama bin Laden's murderous assault on the West and his jihad on its freedom-loving culture has also had an effect on Australian domestic politics is just as apparent to those who take the trouble to look behind the spin of the current election cycle.

From the moment of those attacks on September 11, 2001, Prime Minister John Howard, who happened to be in Washington at the time, left the world in no doubt where he and Australia stood - four-square against the Islamic extremists who sanctioned the terrorist suicide strikes on civilians. For a period the opposition - then under Kim Beazley - was largely of the same mind. Even when Beazley was deposed by Simon Crean and Kevin Rudd became shadow foreign affairs spokesman, the ALP's position remained roughly aligned with the Coalition's. Next to occur, however, was a feat of political legerdemain on the part of Labor which has particular resonance today as Rudd storms ahead in the polls during the countdown to the federal election. In an unsettling dance on defence strategy that must bring into question Rudd's own integrity and personal commitment to international security, he has moved from being a fervent believer in Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and the need for Australian troops to remain in Iraq, to defending a policy which would see Australia cut and run from the responsibilities he once adamantly claimed it owed the Iraqi people. Rudd now suffers Multiple Faulty Memory Syndrome on every contentious issue. Yet there are both accounts from Labor colleagues and masses of transcripts which document the fact that he (a) once possessed a memory and (b) made statements which he can no longer reconcile. One who attests to his memory is Pat Coomben, a former minister in Queensland's Goss government for which Rudd worked as chief of staff and later cabinet director-general. Three months ago Coomben recalled: "It didn't matter if you were seeing him informally for dinner at his place or elsewhere, there was no longer a case of worrying that he didn't understand the context. It was remarkable. He could recall conversations word perfectly." As for the smoking transcripts, try this sizzler from Lateline, September 24, 2002, in which Rudd makes clear his view on Saddam's WMD. "There is no debate or dispute as to whether Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction," Rudd said on his return from a trip to the UK. "He does. "There's no dispute as whether he's in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. "He is." (That won't stop the cyber-idiots and Howard-haters from claiming the Coalition knowingly led Australia into the liberation of Iraq on a false premise - but it's on the record.) Nor was Rudd in any doubt a scant year later that Australia had a moral duty to remain in Iraq, as he forcefully told a Monash University audience on August 25, 2003 - as this excerpt from his address shows. "But John Howard cannot escape from the unassailable reality that his Government is one of the three occupying powers in Iraq under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949)," he said. "This was recognised, grudgingly, by John Howard following the cessation of formal hostilities in April and only after a week of continuing pressure from the Opposition and the press. "In practical terms, what this means is that Australia today is conjointly responsible for ensuring the security, health, food, shelter and clothing for 20 million Iraqis. "That's what occupying powers do. Put simply, if you invade a country you get to run it afterwards until an Iraqi government takes over. And that is a long way off. "Pretending Iraq is now somebody else's problem is a domestic political strategy. It does not deal with the substantive problems on the ground in Iraq. And if these are not dealt with effectively there is a grave risk of Iraq becoming another Vietnam. "Our view is that, whatever people's views before the war might have been, the fate of 20 million Iraqis now depends on the Occupying Powers and the UN co-operating in a fundamental way to ensure that Iraq does have a future." Except that's not Rudd's view today, nor that of the ALP. He and Labor have adopted a craven, cringe-making excuse for a policy which would see Australia desert the Iraqis while maintaining or even expanding a force in Afghanistan, ignoring the reality that al-Qaeda is fighting in both theatres. Rudd's experience to run the nation has two strands - that as chief of staff and cabinet director-general he was the force behind the disastrous Goss government, and that as a diplomat he rose to third secretary in Stockholm (the lowest-ranking political appointee on the embassy's books) and first secretary in Beijing (still not in the Top 10 slots). Perhaps the Manchurian candidate can tell us how to say "Not much there" in Mandarin.