The Rule of Law loses twice: in Iraq and at the Cole Royal Commission

Shock and Awe

And so it has begun, the cartoon caricatures are locked in: the cowboy and the tyrant his father created, locked in an endgame that will trash more than the infrastructure of Iraq.

As we get our nightly fix of the war, more like a video game if you can get past the fact that people die when the fireworks hit their target, an overwhelmingly sense of doom descends.

It comes from the witnessing of the juggernaut in action: all the divisions of the US Empire combined - the military, the media, the government - to smash the rogue tyrant and give the world a taste of The Way Things Will Be From Now On.

The doctrine of pre-emption, risk assessed and addressed by one nation's leaders, will take our world into a new era of domination and subjugation.

There are two scenarios that can now unfold and neither of them is very pretty.

In the first, the USA and its conscripts do not have the quick and decisive victory they expect. Ground fighting leads to casualties among the soldiers and the civilian Iraqis they purport to liberate. Refugees starve on the Iraqi borders; those that remain are cannon fodder.

In the second, the war does go according to the Pentagon's script, Saddam's army is overwhelmed, casualties are kept to minimum and Iraq is "liberated". A US regent is put in place and American companies flood in to rebuild the nation's infrastructure.

For those who detest bloodshed this is probably the preferred outcome - but the long-term consequences could be just as damaging.

A quick victory would leave George Dubya vindicated and ready to spread his doctrine of pre-emption to promote American interests everywhere.

In the long run, this scenario scares me more than the current war. A world with one power exerting its will is a recipe for excess.

The United Nations is compromised, perhaps fatally, trampled over by its strongest member,leaving a void in mediating the differences based on culture, affluence and creed that all global conflicts boil down to.

In its absence, it will be American values and American interests that will define what is right and wrong; power will become its own morality. Who will then be the next target: North Korea? Iran? Pakistan? The only certainty is that it will be for Bush's advisers to decide.

And this new dynamic will beggar a response from Europe and China and create its own dynamic of global instability.

Meanwhile, Australia, now linked to the USA to the extent that our Parliament does not even have a say in whether we go to war, will find itself adrift and exposed in its own region.

Those of us marching for peace do not do so in the expectation that our troops will now be sent home or that our misguided leader will reassess his blind adherence to this Extreme White House.

But we must continue to march to indicate to the world that we do not accept that this should be the New World Order. Our presence on the streets sends this message: our government does not speak for us, it does not listen to us and it is barely prepared to talk to us.

Let's pray for a short war; but let us also pray that the doctrine that has brought this war upon us does not become a template for managing all affairs. For if it does, Iraq could be but a brief skirmish in a war that may consume us all.

Vale: Rule of Law

As the US attack on Iraq continues, the Howard Government fires a $60 million shot at the CFMEU and bemused onlookers begin to wonder what the 'Law' means any more.

There was a time when the Law was an absolute: in jurisprudence they called it Natural Law. The equation was simple: the law reflected what was right, therefore the law was, in and of itself, a good.

This principle reached its zenith in the years leading up to World War II before the horrors of Hitler and the Nuremburg Principle broke the link between law and justice for all time.

Since then, the use of civil disobedience in struggles as diverse as India and the southern states of the US further blurred the lines, with just causes given extra weight by their supporters' preparedness to break the law in their name.

Meanwhile, an international legal consensus had developed over the past 100 years, attempting to erect a universal framework to overlay the sovereignty of individual nation states.

Nations had the right to opt into international agreements on security, health, the environment and labour relations and when a critical mass did so, they had a moral force of something approaching law.

Now something different is happening to the Law.

At an international level, the United States has rendered this network of global laws impotent by defying the UN Security Council to declare war on Iraq. It follows hot on the heels of Bush's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases.

Ironically, as the US acts with the sole authority of the force of its Coalition of the Willing, it is still happy to cite the Geneva Convention to complain about the totally unjustified treatment of its invading forces.

Through its actions and the selective appeal to international conventions the US is writing a new legal doctrine of convenience: the Law as Rhetoric.

Alongside strategies like embedding journalists, continuous polling and selective release of information, the Rule of Law has become just another tool in the battle for the hearts and minds of the people.

This approach takes legal relativism to a new level, with the authority of Law directly linked to one's power to ignore it or invoke it as one sees fit.

And what does this have to do with this week's Cole Royal Commission? Well, behind the headlines of widespread illegality by building unions are two underlying truths.

First, the overwhelming bulk of illegal acts were breaches of the Howard government's industrial laws, specifically designed to prevent industry-wide bargaining. The illegality Abbott flays at the CFMEU is illegality entirely of his own making.

Second, the findings are a direct product of a process that set out to catch union officials, discount evidence against employers and sideline the genuine concerns with safety and employer rorts. Sixty million dollars to fulfil a specific, political, brief.

My point? There is nothing absolute about the findings against the CFMEU; rather they are the expected outcome of a process based not on law, but on raw political power.

And the outcome is yet another law-enforcement agency, protecting the Monk's political friends and harassing his enemies.

The righteousness of Bush and of Abbott have a common flavour, it is the certainty of the powerful. Any notion of 'The Law' is an ass in their hands. Maybe the Anarchists have won after all.