Pre-Emption Revisited

Friday, 6 December 2002

John Quiggin has asked why so far no-one has made the obvious point on the new Howard Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against terrorism. This has caught me a bit on the hop, because I've been meaning to post this E-Mail from the other 50% of my regular readers, Ross M, for the past couple of days. He wrote:

G'day Gummo,

seems John Howard has the biggest kid in the school-yard on his side now, and if'n anyone has their usual attempt at pinching the iced Vo-vo's from his lunch he's gonna clobber'em first.

I'm old enough (that makes me one of those reviled boomers)...to remember shock horror stories and pictures of secret Ustashi training camps here in Oz...of course that was also before it was perfectly understandable that Yugoslavia could come in and take them out, and punish us for not exerting due diligence in rooting them out ourselves. Hell, come to think of it, the old yellow peril could take out some Falun Gong... Now if we can only get some nation to recognise the terrorist cells of Jehovah's Witlesses and Scientologists....

regards...Ross M

The only name I can think of to add to Ross' list is Aum Supreme Truth, the bunch of whackos who were responsible for the Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attack. (See Underground by Haruki Murukami if you want an account of how this event affected the victims, but be warned - I've had my copy for two years and I still haven't got through it. It's that kind of book). Shortly after the Tokyo Subway attack there were reports that Aum had set up shop in Australia, so under the Howard doctrine we could have had Japanese forces swooping in to deal with a very real terrorist threat to their country. I can't see that going down too well with the RSL.