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NATIONAL
- TIMOR ACTION
To correct a situation permitted by Whitlam & exacerbated by the secretly made treaty of Paul Keating, four thousand Australian troops are leading an international peacekeeping force in the former Portuguese colony of East Timor.
The situation fraught with the hazard of a second Iraq. The Indonesian people are hostage to their generals, just as were the Iraqi people. When criminals are amok, hostages suffer.
The Indonesian equation requires skill and sensitivity. Negotiations must be public, and accepted by the populations of both participants.
In the days of the Roman Empire, men of power who were guilty of treason and similar serious crimes against the state would commit suicide by running onto their sword. This penance assured the continuance of their dynasty and preserved their estates against forfeiture.
Such is not the mettle of Indonesian generals.
INTERNATIONAL
- ANTI ICBM (ABM) TOYS
The ABM test carried out in the pacific is seen by Aussie Spin as a blunt warning to the Chinese and north Korean leadership. Programming a chip to intercept a ballistic missile with decoys might seem tricky to the average computer illiterate, but any of the top dozen games wizards in the world could probably knock out an acceptable beta version algorithm for the software in (figuratively) a Sunday afternoon. What else is new? Guided rocket technology has been around for decades, the radars & visual software have been available for years.
Of course, if the Chinese hadn't been listening to their own competent engineers, this might have come as a rude shock. What it means is, ICBM's are about to become useless. ABM's are lots cheaper than nuclear ICBM's, and they can be mass produced very quickly.
It also means that the highest tech will win any set piece war in the near future. Only an open society can overtake the US technology advantage. The only hope for the Chinese mainlanders to rival the US technology and become a world military power is to engineer a reverse takeover by Taiwan.
Back to the drawing board, fellahs.
This page published 4 October 1999.