PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES, CENTRE FOR INDEPENDENT STUDIES: No, it was my feeling. I think it was an unnecessary war, I opposed it from the beginning and to make things worse it was appallingly fought and handled after the fighting stopped.

GEORGE NEGUS: In your article you refer to the White House being, or quoted Chuck Hagle, an American Republican senator, saying the White House is completely disconnected from reality, it's like they make it up as they go along. The reality is we are losing in Iraq, is that your assessment?

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: I think that in a sense America's already lost in Iraq in the sense that its prestige has suffered enormously. The war has been fought badly in the short term initially brilliantly, but the whole handling of the post fighting situation has been terrible.

GEORGE NEGUS: Does that mean it's utterly unwinnable?

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: I think so.

GEORGE NEGUS: A clogmire as people refer to it.

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: How do you define winning? If you define winning in, in the terms the President wanted to define it as introducing a viable, workable democracy in Iraq then it's certainly unwinable.

GEORGE NEGUS: Where does that leave us?

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: Australia's faughted not for the sake of Iraq, it has fought for the sake of the alliance and one has to say so far it's done rather well out of this. It's come out of it as a good ally at a time when good allies were scarce.
We suffered very little in the way of casualties. So John Howard, I should think, is feeling pretty good about the way things have gone for him and for Australia's interests as he sees them.

GEORGE NEGUS: So does that mean from John Howard's point of view at least, being a good ally to the US is more important than anything else? More important than being a good global citizen.

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: In the short run. It depends on how you define good ally. I'm afraid Australia has been too keen to define good ally as being doing everything that was asked of it. I think a really good ally would be one that was more independent and critical.
Let me make it clear, I think the alliance is necessary and important and is so built into the Australian system that it's indispensable.

GEORGE NEGUS: They made a decision and they managed to live with it.

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: There's a basic problem here. Australia is a status quo country. We're a satisfied country. We've got more goodies than our share in the world. Any rapid change in the world is going to be detrimental to us rather than improve our situation even more than it is now.
Now, the alliance was based on the fact that the United States was also a status quo country so that the interests of the two countries fitted very well. The problem for us now is that by its own declaration, the United States is becoming a revisionist country that wants to change the world radically.

GEORGE NEGUS: In its own image.

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: Yeah, to actively promote democracy, to change regimes, to interfere actively. Now the question is what does this mean for Australia? We've suddenly find ourselves as status quo country allied to and working closely with the most revolutionary country in the world.
The official position is that America wants to remake the world, as you say, in its own image, as a liberal democratic world. Now such a world would be admirable and lovely if we could get it but the process of getting from here to there is likely to be a very unsettling, a very destabilising and a very violent process.

GEORGE NEGUS: Where does that leave us in the longer term future though? Will our reputation internationally be tarnished?

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: We alienated a lot of the world by going in so strongly with the United States. It would probably be a mistake to alienate the rest of the world and get out early.

GEORGE NEGUS: Take a situation like Guantanamo Bay and the Hicks case, seems to be a defining factor in our relationship. How do feel about something like that? Is the fact that we’re going along with what appears to be a contravention to international law, what does that say about our position in the world, that we are prepared to go that far with an Australian in captivity, in a place like that is.

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: I think we could have been more assertive than that and followed the British lead and have some results the British have had in having their own prisoners, citizens returned to them and I think that there was no need to be as compliant.
Being liked is not the game in Washington, it's being respected and the fact that Howard is as liked as he is, that he's on such good terms with this president This president is going only going to be there another 2.5 years. In 1.5 years he'll be a lame duck.

GEORGE NEGUS: Do you believe our involvement in the coalition of the willing means, like most people are now resuming, that we are a target, that we could be the next terrorist target?

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: Yeah, I don't understand - I frankly don't understand the prime minister's argument that it hasn't made us more of a target. Of course we would have been a target to some extent, a possible target in any case, but that doesn't mean we're not more of a target because of the course our policies have taken.

GEORGE NEGUS: How do we deal with it though? Where do we draw a line between stopping people from expressing their views as radical as they might be, as extremist as they might be? It's a fine line - between protecting our own security and suppression?

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: I think you've got to put your money where your mouth is and be true to your democratic principles on this. The worse thing you could do is to give the extremists the glamour and the prestige that would come from suppression.
In a sense, the more the extremist views are voiced and heard, I think the more likely they are to be discredited. They're much more dangerous when they're whispered or when they're muttered in closed rooms to limited audiences.

GEORGE NEGUS: Donald Rumsfeld has said that the war against the insurgents, as they're now called in Iraq, could go on for 10 years. Do you see the war on terror itself going on for even longer than that?

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: I don't use the term "War on terror". I don't believe in war on crime and war on drugs, it's a misuse of terms and it is a term that can cause you to justify things that would not otherwise be justified.
Because in war you can do all sorts of things that you can not do otherwise, and you've seen this in recent year, habeas corpus set aside, the Geneva convention set aside, torture justified, secrecy increased in leaps and bounds. All those things are standard in war, but otherwise not.

GEORGE NEGUS: After Bali there was a reaction but after London there seems to have been an even more obvious reaction. That's got to be a good thing that we're at least now talking openly about the problem, but do we know what the problem is?

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: You know, it's the old problem that people talk about the world having changed and changed utterly, it strikes me much more that the world is still itself.

GEORGE NEGUS: We haven't learnt anything from history except we've learned nothing from history.

PROFESSOR OWEN HARRIES: Something like that.