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- OPINION

To join a world cause we must rise above provincialism
Fear or hope? The common values John Howard says we are fighting for were better enunciated by his British counterpart, writes Margo Kingston.

Remarkable images flicker across our TV screens. Tony Blair on Al-Jazeera promising action on Palestine. Colin Powell cheek to cheek with Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, until recently head of a rogue state subject to US sanctions and suspended from the Commonwealth and now under offer from the Yanks to mediate in Kashmir. Powell wants members of the Taliban to help rule a new Afghanistan.

China, which George Bush warned he would do whatever it took to defend Taiwan against it, joins the coalition.

Yesterday we committed 1,550 defence personnel to "the operation". What is it? Unlike America and Britain, our leader has not addressed the nation to tell us. Yesterday John Howard talked of us fighting for "certain values". What are they? What do they have in common with those of Pakistan, China and Russia? How will we know when the war is over? How will the world have changed when that day comes?

The enemy is stateless. Just as global capital is stateless. Just as the world's ever growing hordes of refugees are stateless.

The enemy uses the mechanisms of a globalised world to wreak its havoc, and plays the global capital market to finance its evil. Revenge is pointless - the enemy wants to die to destroy us.

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The challenges are so big it's tempting to retire to the country and grow vegetables. Our troops can't do that. They're off to the 21st century's version of war - no front line, no nation as enemy, no etiquette of war - leaving us to face whatever the terrorists want to inflict on us at home.

Paul Keating has spoken of the need to reform our global architecture. The United Nations needs a major overhaul, economic trade treaties must address the crazy gap between rich and poor. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights must be resurrected and given teeth as the touchstone of global core moral values. It's time for impossible dreams again.

I keep returning to Tony Blair's incredible speech on October 4, and hope an isolationist Australia under a dangerously provincial prime minister can once again punch above its weight on the global stage, in our own interests. Australia does not need John Howard's politics of fear. We need Tony Blair's politics of hope.

Blair said: "The world community must show as much its capacity for compassion as for force. The critics will say: but how can the world be a community? Nations act in their own self-interest. Of course they do. But what is the lesson of the financial markets, climate change, international terrorism, nuclear proliferation or world trade? It is that our self-interest and our mutual interests are today inextricably woven together.

"If globalisation works only for the benefit of the few, then it will fail and will deserve to fail. But if we follow the principles that have served us so well at home - that power, wealth and opportunity must be in the hands of the many, not the few - if we make that our guiding light for the global economy, then it will be a force for good and an international movement that we should take pride in leading.

"This is an extraordinary moment for progressive politics. Our values are the right ones for this age: the power of community, solidarity, the collective ability to further the individual's interests.

"What does this concept of justice consist of? Fairness, people all of equal worth, of course. But also reason and tolerance. Justice has no favourites; not amongst nations, peoples or faiths. So I believe this is a fight for freedom. And I want to make it a fight for justice too. Justice not only to punish the guilty. But justice to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round the world.

"The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.

"This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us. Today humankind has the science and technology to destroy itself or to provide prosperity to all. Yet science can't make that choice for us. Only the moral power of a world acting as a community can."

Read Tony Blair's speech

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In this section

How Australia abandoned its pathways to security
Labor's expensive coast guard plan doesn't hold water

No end in sight to a highway of horrors

To join a world cause we must rise above provincialism

US and Pakistan have to deal with a prodigal son

Mrs Johnson's invisible millions could be music to our ears

Source: geocities.com/sun_day1080110801