June 2nd 2003
EMERGING from their high-powered pow-wows, top government officials usually present a united front on issues ranging from drug trafficking to terrorism.
At a top security conference yesterday, however, delegates saw a bout of verbal jousting between the defence chiefs of Australia and Malaysia.
The issue: Whether countries are justified in attacking another state if they felt so threatened by the other.
While Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill argued that pre-emptive strikes were legitimate, his Malaysian counterpart, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, said such strikes could lead to dangerous precedents.
The issue was first sparked off by the announcement of a controversial defence strategy by United States President George W. Bush in September. It envisaged a 'fire first, talk later' strategy against states with weapons of mass destruction.
Yesterday, Mr Hill stirred up the waters further by saying that the United Nations Charter did not ban pre-emptive strikes if a country felt threatened by imminent attack.
'There will be limited circumstances in which self-defence will require anticipatory action to pre-empt adversaries unleashing massive destruction,' he said.
He pointed out that the more controversial issue was preventive action - where a country attacks another country which has, say, intentions of acquiring nuclear weapons.
Seated at the opposite end of a table from Mr Hill, Datuk Seri Najib told delegates that he agreed with the former on the logic of pre-emptive attacks for self-defence.
However, citing the case of Iraq, he said that preventive actions were 'much more controversial'.
'Preventive action is something we find very hard to come to terms with because it really opens up a Pandora's Box in terms of how you define the need to act on a preventative basis,' AFP quoted him saying.
A wider debate at the conference was over the issue of a nuclear-armed North Korea. Giving a glimpse into a closed-door debate on North Korea between top officials on Saturday, Professor Francois Heisbourg, the chairman of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), acknowledged the rift.
He said the international community needed to choose between two options: Whether the regime should fall or whether its suspected nuclear arsenal should be left alone and deterred by other nuclear arms.
But Washington had not quite decided which way to go, he said.
IISS senior fellow Gary Samore, who was also at the closed-door session, said he saw North Korea relenting on its previous opposition to multilateral talks. Such talks, which could involve Japan, China and South Korea, could pave the way for a negotiated settlement, where Pyongyang retains some nuclear weapons for some time in exchange for aid and security guarantees.
There is another problem: the US believes that North Korea already has nuclear weapons - something viewed with some scepticism by China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.
There seems to be no easy way out of the North Korea situation.
Said Mr Samore: 'Everybody agrees that North Korea is a tough nut. There's no silver bullet.'
