I hope to have some expert commentary for you next week about what this major US offensive in Afghanistan really means in strategic terms. One observation I would make is that the Marines' strategy seems to be very much in line with the new wave of counter-insurgency thinking popularised by David Kilcullen and his Small Wars Journal colleagues, which emphasises the protection of civilians rather than pursuit of the enemy. From the Washington Post:

"We're doing this very differently," Nicholson said to his senior officers a few hours before the mission began. "We're going to be with the people. We're not going to drive to work. We're going to walk to work...Our focus is not the Taliban," Nicholson told his officers. "Our focus must be on getting this government back up on its feet."

This is clearly a nation-building strategy, but is that really what Obama asked for? His statement in March after a two-month review of Afghanistan strategy seemed to have precisely the opposite emphasis: go after AQ and the Taliban. What gives?

I'll have something to say later today about the substance of former Prime Minister Keating's foreign policy remarks in Perth yesterday, and maybe others will too. For now, though, I just wanted to note the consistent theme that leads the media's coverage: the 'conflict' between Keating and Rudd.

To an extent, this is understandable. If it bleeds, it leads, even when the blood is metaphorical. And the fact that Keating questions elements of the Rudd Government's foreign policy is news.

But here's the paradox: journalists routinely and justifiably complain that our political leaders won't speak their minds. They are trained to speak in poll-tested talking points and refuse to say anything spontaneous or original. Yet when a politician (or former politician) occasionally breaks that mold, it's not the substance of their remarks that makes headlines, but the 'conflict' they are creating within their own party.

Both major parties are broad churches and it is not in the least remarkable that its members disagree about policy. That politicians should have to pretend, for public consumption, that such disagreements do not exist impoverishes our political debate. Yet by its actions, that seems to be what the media demands.

Among Westminster democracies, Australia's political parties have some of the tighest party discipline of all. This is largely a function of how those parties choose to operate. Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that, in day to day politics, the toughest enforcer of party discipline in Australia is the media.

The true significance of events is sometimes not known until well after their time, because immediacy often impairs objectivity. This not an absolute, as it is often possible to get a real sense of an event's significance through an understanding of historical context. In the case of Iran, for instance, I can't agree with Greg Sheridan's description of the recent election as 'one of the pivotal events of our time'.

Twelve years ago, the surprise election of Khatami (with over 70% of the popular vote; in excess of 20 million votes) against parliamentary speaker Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, who was endorsed by the Supreme Leader, was heralded as a 'landmark' event. It showed how despised the ruling clerical regime was and promised a new era of liberalism. Four years later, Khatami gained 78% of the vote (over 21 million votes). But after eight years of his presidency, little if anything changed. Despite the people sending the system an unmistakable message, the system triumphed.

While the Iranian political system will eventually crumble, the 2009 elections will not be the cause of it. Rather, like the 1997 and 2001 elections, it demonstrates how disliked the regime is and widens pre-existing fissures in the system. The security forces stood firmly behind the Government, which made meaningless concessions but sent an unmistakable message to the demonstrators that the time for public foment was over. The public eventually acquiesced. read more

Peter McCawley is a Visiting Fellow at the Indonesia Project, ANU, and former Dean of the ADB Institute, Tokyo.

You would hardly know it from the Australian media, but 2009 is the 'year of politics' in Indonesia. Hotly contested elections were held in April for the national and for dozens of regional parliaments. And on Wednesday of next week, a vital election will be held for the biggest prize of all – the presidency of the Republic of Indonesia.

The parliamentary elections two months ago set the scene. The incumbent president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), stole the show. He was not up for election himself, but his Democrat Party was. 

Support for the Democrat Party jumped remarkably — from around 7% in the last elections five years ago (in 2004) to nearly 22%. Support for the other two main parties, Golkar (formerly associated with President Soeharto) and the Indonesian Nationalist Party of Struggle (currently associated with former president Megawati) slumped sharply. The parliamentary elections two months ago were a triumph for SBY.

However, there's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip in political life. It was not clear whether SBY's triumph in early April would translate into a win in the second big race for the presidency in early July. The last two months have therefore been a period of hot political manoeuvring in Indonesia.

(Part 1 here; part 2 here.)

In the last of these posts, we look at the situation for women in politics in the most conservative area of the Arab world, the Gulf. In many instances only urbanised in the 20th century, maintenance of strict implementation of Islamic dress codes for Muslim women and the conservative nature of the societies have led people to believe that women here enjoy the least political freedom in the Arab world. As with all generalisations this is only partly correct — in some circumstances it is true, while in others, women's political development is more advanced than many assume.

The nature of Gulf politics, with its emphasis on hereditary male rule and polygamous marriage, ensures there are fewer high-profile female political role models than in other Arab countries. The only equivalent in the Gulf to women like Syria's Asma al-Assad and Jordan's Queen Rania would be Qatar's Sheikha Mozah (pictured), the second of three wives of the Emir of Qatar and his consort. Not only does she have her own stylish website, but she has forged a public role for herself as a social activist and education advocate, with her chairing of the cashed up Qatar Foundation for education giving her the power to put her advocacy into practice.

While Mozah's high public profile as a Gulf leader's wife is unique in the region, a few others have been able to make their mark in politics. One who will be known to Australian audiences is the UAE's Minister for Foreign Trade (and formerly for Economics and Planning) Sheikha Lubna. Appointed as the first female minister in 2004, she has engaged closely with Australia on the proposed Australia-UAE (and now Australia-GCC) Free Trade Agreement. Another is Sheikha Haya in Bahrain, a former ambassador to France, who became the second ever female chair of the UN General Assembly on Bahrain's accession to its presidency in 2006.
 
While accomplished in their own right and laudable as role models, these women owe their status to their links (either through marriage or birth) with ruling families. The ability of other women to advance politically through parliament or cabinet is constrained by a combination of cultural norms, the lack of political parties (or associations) willing to place women on electoral lists, and a lack of organised female lobby groups. 

• A new World Bank survey of information technology in the developing world.
• Pakistan has started production of a Chinese-designed fighter aircraft.
• Matt Yglesias punctures some American cultural triumphalism, and notes that soft power works both ways. He might have mentioned the rise of cricket in New York.
• Speaking of soft power and cultural influence, France may revise its Sunday trading laws, thanks to Michelle Obama.
• Just like Lego: in Shanghai, a most unusual building collapse (more photos here).

The Lowy Institute's new Executive Director, Michael Wesley, used his Wednesday Lowy Lunch address yesterday to survey Australia's international challenges ('the most difficult diplomatic milieu we've ever faced') and to argue that think tanks have a vital role to play in meeting them.

Below, a short interview with Michael, who gave The Interpreter a nice plug in the Q&A of his talk, and who will no doubt be making many more appearances here.

Major Gen (Retd) Jim Molan is author of Running the War in Iraq.

One of the few things I can agree with Malcolm Fraser on in his op-ed of 29 June is his observation that the Defence White Paper is depressing.

Sam addresses the inconsistencies in his article in his post, but what strikes me is the naïve belief that our ultimate security lies in promoting stable and peaceful relationships with our Pacific and Asian neighbours through cooperative efforts to improve shared regional and global security for all.

This is certainly one method of trying to achieving security, but for many reasons, as a policy based on hope, it fails in application. Promoting stable and peaceful relations is best done from a position of responsible strength. Mendicants are not the most effective promoters of anything.

If Australia does not intend to run a totally independent foreign policy backed up by all the tools of national power (including an adequate military) then it will (unfortunately) be dependent on allies. I would rather be independent than have to depend on allies, but is our society prepared to bear the cost of independence or is Malcolm Fraser talking disarmament?

Fiji’s interim Prime Minister, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama, gave an address to the nation on 1 July setting out a strategic framework for change for the next five years. Although Fiji’s media is heavily censored by the interim Government, the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation at least has a live streaming facility, so I was able to listen to the speech live right here in my office in Sydney.  

The address was expected to establish a detailed roadmap for reform and a return to democracy in Fiji. But it was essentially a blueprint for economic reforms to entice international financial institutions and donors to re-engage with Fiji, with only vague promises of political reform.

For those sceptical of Bainimarama’s commitment to democracy, the speech offered little to persuade them otherwise. Bainimarama renewed his commitment to hold elections in September 2014 and outlined a new promise – the preparation of a new constitution by September 2013. While this was inevitably the consequence of the abrogation of the 1997 constitution on 10 April this year, it is not clear why he decided public consultations on the drafting of a new constitution cannot commence until September 2012. 

Commodore Bainimarama said the new constitution would derive its impetus from the recommendations of the People’s Charter for Change, Peace and Progress. That document has been in the public domain for at least six months and has already been subjected to a consultative process. It is therefore strange that Fiji’s citizens have to wait another three years for an opportunity to participate in the process of determining their own future. If there are to be public consultations, why not start now? It would have cost the interim Government little and demonstrated to the region and the international community that Fiji was serious about political reform.

• Vanity Fair's Sarah Palin profile is getting lots of attention on the US blogosphere.
• The best piece I've read on the cultural and political subtext to the global grief over Michael Jackson's death. Evidently, Jackson's death was big news in China.
• Malcolm Gladwell on the digital economy.
• China's Xinhua news agency spreading its wings...into European supermarkets?
• A small victory for the environment and enemies of domestic clutter: we're getting closer to a global standard on phone rechargers.
• The Ute-gate saga from start to finish, as told by lolcats. (Here's a definition of that term.)

Terrific column by The Age's diplomatic editor, Dan Flitton, today (disclosure: Dan and I were colleagues in ONA), which can profitably be read alongside Graeme Dobell's two-part mid-term assessment of Foreign Minister Stephen Smith. If Smith would like to be something more than (as Graeme dubbed him) 'the Prime Minister's foreign minister', taking up Dan's suggestion of an annual parliamentary statement on foreign affairs might be a way to carve out an agenda of his own.

Dan also has a point when he criticises Smith for not conducting a regional diplomatic tour to allay some of the concerns raised by the Defence White Paper. Increasingly, I tend to the view that the White Paper was intended for a domestic audience. The then-Opposition's promise to go along with the Howard Government's Defence funding boost was enough to keep national security out of the election spotlight in 2007, and this White Paper will serve a similar purpose.

National security is traditionally a strong issue for the Coalition, but when the next election rolls around, most voters will recall that Rudd 'got tough with China', and perhaps that the Opposition Leader criticised him for it. Issue neutralised; job done.

Still, even if that interpretation is the right one, it should not have stopped the Foreign Minister from soothing any regional concerns.

Within weeks, the US will reveal how close it is to signing ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC). The Secretary of State is due to head to Southeast Asia in three weeks for the annual Asia Pacific foreign ministers’ meeting hosted by ASEAN. The hints are that Clinton will either sign the TAC or announce a signature timetable.

If a timetable is unveiled, the obvious way to do the deed would be for the US to accede in November, when Barack Obama makes a triumphant return journey to Indonesia and goes to Singapore for APEC.

Either way, the TAC progress represents nifty footwork by Clinton and suggests Defense Secretary Robert Gates really is having an impact on the culture of the Pentagon. Gates is following through with his warning about 'creeping militarization' of US foreign policy and the need for diplomacy to lead.

And he's delivering on the promise made in his Singapore speech that the US is ready to embrace new norms in seeking security in Asia: ‘We are beginning to negotiate accession to the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation – which demonstrates our willingness to take regional norms into account as we consider our relationships across the globe.’

During questions after his Shangri La speech, Gates said the US would take a ‘step by step’ approach to the issue of moving from the TAC to membership of the East Asia Summit. ASEAN logic says signing the TAC is the prerequisite for being invited to the EAS.

Yesterday the Lowy Institute was honoured to host prime ministerial speechwriter and historian Graham Freudenberg, author of Churchill and Australia, due out soon in paperback. If you have time, listen to Graham's full speech here. If you have less time, listen below to the interview I conducted with him.

If you have even less time than that, fast forward to the last question at the 5:08 mark. According to Freudenberg, Churchill insisted that if Australia was to make America its primary security partner, this would be more than a defence arrangement; it also involved a change of loyalty from Britain to the US. Australia accepted this bargain, with profound consequences for our foreign policy to this day.

Lydia Khalil, a non-resident fellow in the West Asia program and international affairs fellow in residence at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations has an interesting take on the unrest in Iran in the Christian Science Monitor. 

Lydia makes an important point, namely that we should not view the current unrest as isolated from what has been happening in Iran since the revolution. Nor indeed should we view what has happened as the end of any prospect of reform or even of more dramatic change, even if the reformers have probably lost this round. 

As I said in my post a couple of days ago, even the more conservative members of the regime will be uncomfortable with the growing power of the Revolutionary Guard. More or less since the revolution, a key job of the Supreme Leader has been to balance the various ideological currents and interest groups within the regime. Khamenei now seems to have decided that this doesn’t matter, and the balance may now have shifted more decisively in a more hardline direction. The big question is whether, in doing so, Khamenei has now sown the seeds of the regime’s own unravelling.

Photo by Flickr user yish, used under a Creative Commons license.

An interesting poll of 20 nations came out today on confidence in leaders around the world. Obama was way out ahead with an average of 61% across all nations saying they had a lot or some confidence in him 'to do the right thing regarding world affairs'. Not surprisingly, Ahmadinejad came last on the list when it came to overall confidence, with only 28% of people on average expressing a lot or some confidence. Prime Minister Putin has the confidence of the public in just five countries —the lowest of any leader tested. 

Perhaps most interesting was the confidence levels in Hu Jintao: overall he scored low, with just 32% of people on average expressing a lot or some confidence in him doing the right thing in world affairs. But the picture was more nuanced; in China's immediate neighbourhood, people expressed more confidence in Hu than further afield. As the study put it:

In most nations in the West — including Europe, the US and Mexico — President Hu receives low confidence scores. Low scores are also common in the Middle East including in Turkey, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq. However, in Asia, the publics in most nations express confidence in the Chinese leader such as in Pakistan (80%), India (50%) and in South Korea (by a narrow margin, 51% to 47%). Overall, seven nations express confidence in President Hu, 10 lack confidence, and two divided. 

On another China-related note, President Sarkozy has suffered a big drop in public support there:

The Chinese public, however, expresses sharply lower confidence in Sarkozy in 2009 (23%) than in 2008 (42%). This fall in confidence was not evident for other Western leaders. The protests in France in April 2008 related to the Olympic torch and Tibet policy, and Mr. Sarkozy's threat to boycott the Beijing Olympics seems to have soured the Chinese public.  

Photo by Flickr user F Secco, used under a Creative Commons license.

Last week I visited Singapore and was quite surprised by what I found. With Singapore in the grips of its worst ever economic downturn, I expected to see and feel a downbeat country with empty hotels and shopping promenades, property markets in free-fall and stirrings of popular disenchantment with the government.

Instead, partially aided by the Great Singapore Sale, the city centre was humming as usual, people were scratching their heads over why real estate prices seemed to be on the rise, and there was widespread support (which seemed to go well beyond self-censorship) for the government and its fiscal responses.
 
The best explanation I came across for why Singapore (with a resident population now estimated at 4.8 million, of which Singapore citizens make up about 3.5 million) appeared much more at ease than its worst-ever economic numbers would suggest is that Singapore has a dual economy.

Following Hillary Clinton’s successful first international foray – which she wisely chose to make to Asia – Kurt Campbell’s confirmation by the US Senate on 25 June as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama Administration is more good news for Australia and for other US allies in the region. As I’ve said before, Campbell’s formidable CV, influence in Washington, energy and familiarity with Australia make him a big asset.

For further evidence, it’s interesting to read the tea leaves of his nomination statement. Ignore the silly media flurry about whether Campbell dissed Kevin Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community proposal (he clearly didn’t – he’s too smart a diplomat for that). But he had some illuminating – and from an Australian perspective very welcome – things to say.

Campbell ‘gets’ the profound geopolitical changes under way in the region, describing ‘a moment of enormous consequence and opportunity for the United States in Asia’. But there is no whiff of newly fashionable American declinism or of disengagement. On the contrary, Asia is ‘a region that still relies upon strong American leadership...the United States itself is a Pacific nation, and in every regard – geopolitically, military, diplomatically, and economically’. No backward steps there.

• John Quiggin alerts readers to the construction of the new ASIO headquarters on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin.
• Another reason North Korea's provocations are not in China's interest: it pulls South Korea into the embrace of America's missile defence shield.
• ASI Blog points out that South Asian nations feature heavily in the new Failed States Index.
• How to convince right-wingers to support public tranport.
• Further to my post about inteligence and social media, Andrew Selth sends through a link to a paper he co-authored with new Lowy Institute Executive Director Michael Wesley on the role of intelligence analysis in the age of terrorism.
• This would have made a great Friday Funny, but it really couldn't wait. Via Sullivan, here's a compilation of The Daily Show's reports from Iran. The highlight:

I know this post is a little self-indulgent, but this is my last day as Executive Director of the Lowy Institute and therefore (although Sam will attest to my lightness of touch in the job) as Editor in Chief of this blog. 

Soon after the Institute was set up six years ago, we talked about establishing a scholarly journal. The view in some quarters was that every self-respecting think tank should have one. I was opposed. I thought there were already too many journals, with too few readers, and that we needed a more dynamic way of contributing to the international policy debate. 

A serious, well-edited blog seemed to me the best way of doing this, and of reaching a new audience for our work. Australia has some very good journalists working on international issues but they serve a broad audience and work for editors who generally do not  share our interest in, say, the latest developments in the strategic arms reduction talk or the impact of the global financial crisis on Asia’s poor. 

I was lucky to find in Sam Roggeveen a passionate believer in the contribution the new technologies can make to public debate. I persuaded him to drop out of a successful job in Canberra to enter this largely uncharted new world as one of the first paid blog editors in Australia.

Since it began in November 2007, The Interpreter has broken stories, encouraged debate, drawn attention to overlooked issues, and provided an opportunity for Lowy staff and contributors to comment on breaking events. 

Cross-posted on the ABC's opinion page.

Complaints about the barrage of confusing and contradictory Twitter messages emerging from Iran's upheavals are predictable. We've heard similar complaints for years now about the sheer volume of information available on the internet. How on earth are we supposed to make sense of it all?

Such concerns are both entirely understandable and pretty pointless. There is no solution to the increasing complexity of our information environment, and in a free society, we should not want to reduce the amount of information available to us. All we can do is develop new and better tools for coping with that complexity.

One such tool the public has at its disposal is a community of knowledgeable and well-connected journalists. They follow leads, weigh information and assess the credibility of sources in a concentrated and detailed way that few others can match. And so one of the ironies of the information age is that while the structure of the internet makes it harder to turn a profit by doing quality journalism, the increasing complexity of our information environment creates an ever greater need for it.

Not much, if official reactions have been anything to go by. While France's President Sarkozy labeled the election a fraud, Gulf Arab states have been careful to avoid criticism of the election and subsequent protests and violence.

The Gulf Kingdom of Bahrain's foreign minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa, allegedly called for a halt to foreign interference in Iran's affairs, echoing a favourite rejoinder of Iran's ruling regime. The UAE's foreign minister also expressed concerns about external interference in Iranian affairs.
 
The Qatari Emir reiterated the importance of Iranian stability to the Gulf and referred to the demonstrations as a normal outcome of democracies. Such comments are not likely to please the US, if this report is anything to go by. Sultan Qaboos was due to visit Iran yesterday but it appears this visit has been cancelled or postponed despite the sultanate's very good relations with Iran. In Iraq, the dominant official reaction has been muted, if not silent.
 
Such reactions are testimony to the triumph of national interest. As geography has made Iran a permanent neighbour of these countries, their pronouncements are dictated by pragmatism. With the US and Europe leading the charge in criticising the electoral outcomes and the UK in particular providing the external enemy du jour for the Iranian regime, Arab Gulf states see little sense in putting their heads above the parapet.

Discretion is certainly the better part of valour for these states when they need to factor in bilateral economic links, energy security (particularly access to Iranian gas reserves), border disputes, large resident ethnic Iranian populations, in some instances significant Shi'a populations and the general sense that there is no need to upset the Iranian regime unless you really have to.

Photo by Flickr user .imelda, used under a Creative Commons license.

There are rich pickings in this op-ed from former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Although Fraser is sometimes mocked for having become a rather squishy small-l liberal, his foreign poicy realism is apparent from the beginning of the article ('Great powers do not act as a consequence of goodwill. They act in their national interest.')

Yes, there's a pretty strident anti-American tone to the piece that will upset many on the right, but that view seems to be informed by Fraser's unromantic vision of the world, in which states never act out of loyalty.

There are a few claims in the piece that I would question. First, this:

Readers interested in the debate about Australia’s resource-starved diplomacy generated by the Institute’s report on Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit: Reinvesting in Our Instruments of International Policy might be interested in a couple of recent contributions from retired international statesmen.

The first is an article written by no fewer than eight former Secretaries of State from both sides of US politics. Among the points they make are that:

• Sending diplomats abroad without language skills is like deploying soldiers without bullets (that's one our Prime Minister would agree with).
• 20 per cent of regular positions in US embassies and in the State Department are unfilled.
• Despite the pressing need to deploy technical experts in important reconstruction and stabilisation tasks, USAID has fewer staff today than it had in Vietnam alone in the 1970s.
• Rebuilding these critical US capabilities would cost in the order of $US3.5 billion spread over a number of years; this would equate to less than half of 1 per cent of defence spending (not even including the cost of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq).
• Avoiding a single war or defusing a major crisis through diplomacy would save many times the increase in funding and relieve strain on the military.

Maybe Alexander Downer, Gareth Evans, Bill Hayden and Andrew Peacock should put pen to paper to throw their weight behind Stephen Smith when he faces the ERC razor gang to argue the toss for the next DFAT budget?

The second is an article by former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark arguing that the running down of Canada’s diplomatic and development budgets is undermining its traditional vocation for middle-power diplomacy and its capacity to address significant international challenges. Sound familiar?

Jim Della-Giacoma is the South East Asia Project Director for the International Crisis Group.

Some Islamic schools have a magnetic quality for radicals in South East Asia, but this does not mean that all such institutions, teachers, and students are the problem. The relationship between the place and the people is often misunderstood.

Schools are places where young men, at the most reflective and passionate time in their lives, congregate in large numbers. Like any high school or university in the West, this makes them good conductors for the flow of radical currents pulsing through these societies.

Two recent International Crisis Group reports from Indonesia and Thailand have shown links between educational institutions and radicals. In the Indonesian regional city of Palembang, for example, radicals met in Jemaah Islamiyah schools to plot, but most were neither students nor teachers. A misplaced sense of duty or loyalty oaths meant that school administrators felt the radicals could not be turned away, even though the school’s director was opposed to violence.

• Why governments shouldn't subsidise clean energy.
• Mobile phones are reaching the Mongolian countryside.
• Two regional maritime stories via Nosint: deepening cooperation between Beijing and Islamabad; and Singapore launches the first of a new class of submarine. 
• The UN and WTO have released a report on free trade and climate change.
• Further to Andrew Selth's post below, New Mandala has a round-up of links on Burmese nuclear issues.
• A university student tries to make a toaster from scratch (h/t Marginal Revolution). The project echoes this famous fable about modern economics: I, Pencil.
• Arms Control Wonk (and its readers) assembles the best one-liners about nuclear weapons. Dr Strangelove features heavily.

Andrew Selth is a Research Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and author of Burma’s Armed Forces: Looking Down The Barrel.

On security-related issues, Burma and North Korea are well known as information black holes. Also, both are at the centre of emotive and highly politicized debates about human rights, nuclear weapons and regional security. It is particularly important, therefore, that reports of developments involving these two countries are carefully researched, intellectually rigorous and analytically objective. At times, however, these requirements seem to be overlooked in all the excitement generated by current events.

At present, there are three issues that tie Burma and North Korea together in the news media and the public imagination. All have the potential to create much more heat than light.

The first issue is the recent publication of a series of photographs showing tunnels and other underground facilities in Burma, apparently built by North Korea or with North Korean expertise (see Al Jazeera's report on the photos below). Activist groups have cited these photos as evidence of nefarious dealings between the military governments in Naypyidaw and Pyongyang.

The second issue is the departure from North Korea of a cargo ship reportedly carrying missiles and nuclear components to Burma, despite UN embargoes on such exports. This vessel — the Kang Nam 1 — is being shadowed by a US Navy destroyer. There is the likelihood that it will resist inspection when it stops to refuel, probably in Singapore.

Sixteen days of turmoil after Iran’s presidential election, senior regime figure Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has finally spoken publicly about the poll and its aftermath. His long silence gave credence to rumours that he was working behind the scenes in opposition to regime hardliners, including Supreme Leader Khamenei. But the fact that he has now, grudgingly, endorsed regime measures for resolving disputes over the election suggests that internal regime dissent has been quashed – for now.

On the streets, too, the security forces seem to be on top of protests, though according to this account they are still occurring sporadically. 

So where does this leave Iran?

First, it leaves Iran with a regime that is much more intertwined with the Revolutionary Guard than it once was. The election result and its aftermath reflect the consummation of a process over recent years where members of the guards have been, largely through Ahmadinejad’s patronage, seeded strategically throughout different levels of government and society. This process has also seen the Guards become a major player in Iran’s economy.

Second, it leaves Iran with a regime that will also need the Guards, and its paramilitary adjunct, the Basij, a lot more. The protests were never just a middle class, educated elite, ‘North Tehran’ phenomenon, but the fact that even the twittering classes were prepared to risk life and limb (and their relatively comfortable economic status) means that the state will have to be on greater guard. Iran will look a lot more like North Korea than it once did.

While I’m sold on the need to understand the human dimension to conflict, I’m equally convinced that the military has to be an ‘early adopter’ of new technology. One area that has accelerated at a truly awesome rate is the field of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), and the counters to them. Thanks to IEDs and landmines, untold hectares of the world are rendered too dangerous to inhabit, but there are new ways to come to grips with this problem.

Haptics is a technology that can keep munitions disposal crews away from such lethal devices while leaving human judgement firmly in control. Haptics applies tactile sensation via computer applications, so that users receive feedback in the form of felt sensations. Touch screens are the most familiar haptics application in daily life, but research and limited fielding has had successes in not one, but multiple degrees of freedom – that is, the operator can ‘sense’ touch in three dimensions remotely.

Until fairly recently, actually picking up objects remotely has been limited to a two-hand grasp (a bit like Frankenstein’s monster), but as ABC viewers might have seen, some bright lads from Geelong have developed a lightweight way to singlehandedly manipulate objects with an opposable grip in a virtual environment, while also feeling the forces generated by that environment. 

When assessing whether the Obama Administration should have adopted a more aggressive stance against Iran, there is only one question that needs to be answered: would it have helped?

Andrew says bluntly that the Obama Administration's Iran policy is a failure, but he's more equivocal when it comes to recommending an alternative policy. He will only say that a more assertive rhetorical stance against the mullahs and security forces 'might' have made a difference.

It is too much to demand certainty from Andrew on this point — nobody can say for sure what the effects of an alternative US policy might have been. But by the same logic, Andrew ought to be slightly more charitable toward Obama's actual policy. How can he be so sure that it failed? Isn't it equally likely it had very little effect at all, and that it was actually beyond Obama's powers to decisively influence events?

But, says Andrew, whether it had any material effect or not, at least his preferred policy would have been 'in keeping with (America's) longstanding values and idealism'. Sure, but it's not as if Obama betrayed those ideals; it's more that he made a judgment about how much good it would do to trumpet them to the world in these circumstances.

Clearly he decided that it wouldn't do the Iranians much good for him to interfere, so to speak out in those circumstances would have been an empty gesture that might have made Obama feel virtuous but to no concrete end. That he resisted this impulse (to which John McCain succumbed) shows some maturity.

Stephan Fruehling responds to Graeme Dobell post on the Asia-Europe Meeting:

What has been little noticed in Australia so far is that the tone in Europe towards China in particular is changing noticeably in the last year or so. For example, this study was widely discussed in Europe, but not picked up here at all. And the EU Council’s guidelines for policy towards Asia have also come a long way since the arms embargo fiasco.