Free Republic

THE beheading of Nicholas Berg, an American civilian in Iraq, is more than an evil act of barbarism against an innocent man. It is also part of a conscious strategy to drag Iraq into endless anarchy. The videotape of the killing is reported to show the murderers claiming they are taking revenge for the photos of the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners, some shown with bags over their heads, which have appeared around the world. It is a justification as morally corrupt as it is spectacularly stupid. The humiliation of Iraqi prisoners is unforgiveable but there is no comparison between forcing...

The Federal Government has strongly rejected the Opposition's claim that Australian troops remain in Iraq for "symbolic" reasons. Labor says many of the troops should be brought home, because they are not performing essential services. The Opposition's defence spokesman, Chris Evans, says the Government is keeping the troops in Iraq as a symbolic gesture. He says Prime Minister John Howard originally said the nation's commitment would last months, not years. "I'm concerned John Howard is just keeping troops there as part of a symbolic commitment," he said. "We're not providing peacekeepers, we're not helping protect the Iraqi people but John...

JOHN Howard has declared during a lightning trip to Iraq that Australian troops will be serving in the strife-torn country for at least a further 14 months, and probably longer, under a Coalition Government. During a secret George Bush-style trip to Baghdad for the Anzac Day dawn service, the Prime Minister revealed that next month's budget would include additional funds for the Iraqi campaign – a recognition that Australian troops "are not going to be home quickly". On the streets of Baghdad the violence continued during Mr Howard's visit, with a US Army Humvee destroyed by a roadside bomb and...

APRIL 2003 was a great month for those who believed the people of Iraq should be freed from the grip of tyranny, and that if they were it would make the world a safer place. April 2004 has so far been a great month for those who believed they shouldn't, and that it wouldn't. In the former camp are the governments of the US, Britain, Australia, Poland and the other nations who form the coalition of the willing - along with the majority of Iraqis, who still tell pollsters their lives are better now than under Saddam Hussein. In the...

AN Australian trained with Spanish al-Qa'ida militants in a camp in war-torn Poso, central Sulawesi, according to intelligence reports. Security expert Ken Conboy told The Australian the terrorist training camp was set up in an abandoned Christian village about 10km east of Poso. There was some al-Qa'ida funding for the camp, he said, but he was unsure whether it was for food, transport or buildings. At least one photo exists of militants in the Poso camp. Mr Conboy said the Spanish militants abandoned the camp late in 2001. He speculated that the September 11, 2001, attacks in the US had...

Australia is to increase its military presence in Iraq, sending 12 sailors to help rebuild the Iraqi Navy. The Australian sailors will be deployed to the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr next month to help establish a coastal defence force. They will work with British and US Navy personnel in training Iraqi sailors and navy personnel in patrol boat and small vessel operations. Defence Minister Robert Hill has also announced that Australian air traffic controllers deployed at Baghdad International Airport in the wake of the Iraq war will now stay until May. But 61 members of the security team that...

The United States Army has awarded commendation and achievement medals to three Darwin soldiers who served in Iraq. Sergeant Steven Attlier, Corporal Carl Connell and Corporal Damien Woolfe are among 61 personnel who are on their way back from Iraq and will arrive in Darwin tomorrow night. The three were members of the security detachment in Baghdad that provides protection for Australian Government personnel. Their mission was to clear unexploded ordinance and discarded ammunition found near the Australian Representative Office in Baghdad and transit routes used by diplomats. US Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Baker awarded the medals for clearing large amounts...

Saddam Hussein - the man who butchered his daughters' spouses, sprayed deadly chemical poisons that peel human skin, and chopped off the tongues of potential critics - was anything but a cog in the machine. He was the machine. A machine that chewed up and spat out its cogs. But, as it does with most of those who end up in chains and certainly with those who spend months cohabiting with mice, imprisonment has a way of making even the once petrifying and mighty seem small. Hussein's frail, dazed visage was a mesmerising, potent analgesic for US and Iraqi nerves...

The Arab and Muslim world stands at a crossroad. One direction indicates dictatorship. A mixed bag of absolute rulers and Islamists have different aims, but a common belief in their right to be wielding power and killing anyone in their way, with weapons of mass destruction if they can acquire them. Taken together, they are condemning their own and other people to permanent violence and regression. And in the other direction, reform. A different mixed bag of Arab and Muslim oppositionists, intellectuals, dissidents and exiles are trying to devise the sort of pluralist or open society that alone is able...

Muammar Gaddafi's decision to give up his weapons of mass destruction earlier this year was an astute move and one that recognised how much the world has changed, particularly since September 11. The old Gaddafi brings to mind his past support for terrorism; Gaddafi as the most radical Arab leader and supporter of radical causes; Libya as a revolutionary nonconformist state; and Gaddafi's support for Islamic extremists in other parts of the world, including in the Asia-Pacific region. Like Saddam Hussein, he particularly supported the Palestinians, notably the Abu Nidal Organisation that was based for many years in Libya. At...

The photograph of a defeated Saddam Hussein with Ahmed Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, reproduced in The Weekend Australian from a Baghdad newspaper, is a great end-of-year gift for the dictator's long-suffering subjects and people around the world. Hussein's capture signals the end of three decades of tyranny in Iraq, and marks the sure end of a terror regime with a track record of using weapons of mass destruction against its enemies. Critics of the war who say the failure to date to find operational WMDs demonstrates the war was unnecessary should consider the jubilation with which...

had just returned to my motel room in Port Augusta at 8.30pm on Sunday after a long working day in the power station. My wife rang me from Sydney: "Hadi," she said, "today is the day, they captured Saddam. May my father and young brother be comforted in their graves now." And she began to weep, remembering her father and brother, both assassinated by Hussein's regime. I wept, too. The joy was overwhelming. I danced and danced by myself. I wanted to share this moment with someone so I rang my colleague Tony Hodge in his room and told him...

Without the capacity to inspire terror tyrants fail. The pictures of an old, dishevelled Saddam Hussein the Iraqi people have now seen mean they will never fear him again. For dictators, image is everything. From Hitler on, totalitarian rulers have obsessively managed the way they are presented on film and and in photographs. And when they lose power over the way they are presented to their subjects, they are doomed. The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and his partner in tyranny, wife Elena, were captured on video before being executed in the popular uprising that destroyed their regime in 1989. They...

I was driving into work and on the radio they had this syndicated columnist saying that Hugh Jackman was close to being the next James Bond since Pierce Brosnam has indicated he will retire after the next film in 2005. So the next film would be sometime after that. (2 years?)

The anti-Americanism of the Australian Left is one of the great certainties of political life: it never goes away, and it never gets any easier to understand. The US is not perfect, but if one looks at the broad sweep of human history since the beginning of last century, can one really doubt that the influence of the US on world affairs has been beneficial? Would the anti-Americans really prefer fascism to have conquered the world in the 1940s, or communism to have triumphed in the Cold War? Would Australia be a better place now if it had been invaded...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - After months at sea and unwanted by dozens of nations on health grounds, the African nation of Eritrea has agreed to take a shipment of 52,000 Australian sheep, the Australian government says. The sheep were being unloaded at the Eritrean port of Massawa on Friday after the Dutch-owned ship carrying the sheep, the Cormo Express, was secretly turned around in recent days during a trip back to Australia. "It's all signed, sealed and delivered," a spokesman for Australian Agriculture Minister Warren Truss said on Friday. "It's a huge relief". Eritrea issued an import permit for the sheep...

President George W. Bush came a long way to deliver a speech that did not address the issues that will shape the future of the alliance between Australia and the United States. The President's address to parliament yesterday failed to deal in any detail with the free trade agreement now being negotiated between ourselves and the US. Nor did he set out a grand vision of how the US and Australia can co-operate to advance the cause of democracy and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific. Instead, Mr Bush focused on Iraq and the war on terror. It was a speech that...

When President George W. Bush addresses parliament today, he speaks to a nation that is in some ways typical and in other ways exceptional. If one were to take seriously the opinions of most Australian media pundits, one would conclude that Australia's close alliance with the US runs counter to the worldwide trend of anti-Americanism. It does not. Moreover, the popular impression of massive global anti-Americanism is an exaggeration, and where it does exist it is sustained by ideological myths. True, anti-Americanism exists everywhere. But it's both widespread and deeply rooted only in the Muslim world. For the time being,...

Evidence of Iraq's pre-war weapons of mass destruction program would emerge, John Howard maintained yesterday, despite a new report that found no trace of chemical or biological weapons. The Prime Minister was responding to a BBC report that suggested the body searching for evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had so far found little or no evidence. An interim report by the Iraq Survey Group, which involves 1400 weapons inspectors, found no evidence of weapons laboratories, any means of delivering WMD and little infrastructure, according to the BBC. This is despite pre-war claims that Saddam Hussein could deploy...

The 20th century was not especially kind to France's dream of greatness, which may be why President Jacques Chirac appears intent on recreating the 19th-century diplomatic idea of the balance of power - when one or two countries become too powerful, all the others gang up on them. Thus, he and German chancellor Gerhard Schroder blocked attempts by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to win European support for a larger United Nations role in Iraq on the weekend. Mr Chirac appears determined to use Iraq as a pawn in a plan to reduce the power and authority of the...