I did but "C" her passing by

The most powerful woman in the world was in Australia this last week. So was the Queen of England, Australia, etc.

It was not an isolated event. US Secretary of State Rice also stopped off in Indonesia, and as previously posted, it was not all about Indonesia, nor Australia for that matter. Repeating from my prior post:

"It is a triple play of fostering higher economic growth and income in Indonesia, jobs and growth for America, and maintaining America's influence in the region, which is being undercut by powerful Chinese economic diplomacy. In fact, we need to pay more attention to Indonesia than the Chinese do."

To push home the importance of China as the topic of the Australian get-together, Rice and Australia's Foreign Minister Alexander Downer also sat down with Japan's Foreign Minister Taro Aso. It was big enough news that those three bothered to get together in Sydney.

But the really big, and broadly unreported business, was the "C" words. China and Containment. What we got by way of reportage, given the lack of substance, was a look at the two non-Australian players in this game of footy.

Peter Hartcher took a squidge at Condi (Soft face of the hard line):

CONDOLEEZZA RICE represents some of the very best of America, and some of the worst. Her own life demonstrates the extraordinary possibility that America's great meritocracy offers.

She told her story to 300 university students in Sydney, who had turned out with evident scepticism to listen to the US Secretary of State, on Thursday. "I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in the south of the United States at a time when my family couldn't go to a restaurant or stay in a hotel, when I went to segregated schools," she told them.

"I didn't have a white classmate until we moved to Denver when I was in the 10th grade. I was born into the Birmingham of police dogs and church bombings and of white supremacists and of the Ku Klux Klan and crosses burned on lawns." And when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was bombed in a racist attack in 1963, two of the four girls killed by the blast were Rice's friends.

Her father taught her to use a gun at the age of eight, for her own protection; in the same year Rice decided she would one day work in the White House.

To have emerged from these origins to realise her dream and work in the White House as a Soviet specialist in the administration of George Bush snr at age 34 was extraordinary; to have become a multilingual concert pianist and provost of ivy-league Stanford University at 38 was stunning; to have become the first black woman to serve as America's chief diplomat at 50 was astonishing.

Her story moved her audience, as it does wherever she tells it. But Rice wanted the audience to take a larger lesson from her experience, not just that America is a place of rare opportunity and openness, and not just that America itself had transformed for the better. She continued: "It was a time when it was perhaps hard to believe in democracy in America, let alone democracy any place else in the world.

"But in my lifetime Birmingham transformed, America transformed and I stand before you as a black Secretary of State, something that I think 30 or 40 years ago would have been thought to be impossible."

This is the sort of transformation that Rice tells us is possible in Iraq, in Iran, throughout the Middle East, everywhere. With the third anniversary of the invasion this weekend, she repeatedly urges us to look beyond the violence in Iraq to see the democratic evolution, the three elections and the quest for a new national unity government.

"I would therefore ask you to think about what might happen in your lifetime," Rice urged the students in Sydney. "Think about, in your lifetime, where freedom may spread … And think about, in your lifetime, what you can do to make that world a reality."

Rice offers herself as the metaphor for the democratic transformation that US foreign policy seeks to engineer in the Middle East, as the validating proof for idealism inherent in America's foreign policy. And she appeals to us all to join her cause. But if you should happen to get the impression that she might represent a kinder, gentler means to achieving those idealistic ends, then you are under a serious misapprehension.

Rice is a brilliant, even charismatic, saleswoman for the Bush Administration's foreign policy. But she is not an alternative to it, and she is not any sort of moderating influence on it. Bush has said that, in weighing up whether to invade Iraq, he asked the direct advice - yes or no - of only one of his many officials. That official was Rice. She said yes.

And, when a student asked Rice whether human rights abuses by the US Government undermined America's cause, she did not disavow the ugliest of US policies or apologise for them but robustly defended them.

"Rendition" is one example. This is a euphemism for the US practice of kidnapping people from the streets of other countries and sending them abroad to Egypt, or other client states, on secret CIA planes so that they can be interrogated and, frequently, tortured.

Rice, who, in the morning had demanded that China abide by the international system of rules, went on to defend "rendition" with these words: "The practice of rendition is something that's been practised way before September 11th when extradition isn't an option, because sometimes you have to take people off the streets."

To a neo-conservative this may be called American exceptionalism, but in ordinary human discourse this is called hypocrisy. It is in this way that Rice represents some of the worst of America.

In sum, Rice does not represent any gentler foreign policy than the President she serves. In the most important ways, Rice is the policy. Where she differs is that she is a better salesperson for US policy than anyone else in the Bush Administration.

When Ronald Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as evil and lauded America as the global champion of democracy, the young Rice cringed. She didn't believe it. "Like most Americans, I listened with some scepticism to the Cold War claim that America was a 'beacon of democracy'," she later said. "When American presidents said that, I chalked [it] up to bad speechwriting and hyperbole."

Rice, no longer a sceptic, is now the high priestess leading the prayers for the democratic transformation of the world. Condoleezza Rice is now the one making the speeches.

Meanwhile, Deborah Cameron (Man who speaks his mind, whether you like it or not) and Hamish McDonald (In Japan's ruling party, a perverse mindset lives on) took an equally critical look at the Japanese participant, while McDonald also speculated on what might be going on behind those closed doors.
Cameron:

EVEN by the standards of the country that invented sudoku, he is complicated. Japan's Foreign Minister, Taro Aso, is a crack shot, the former manager of a family diamond mine, brilliantly educated - and an obsessive reader of comic books. From the way he acts, he is also bursting for a rumble with the neighbours.

When Mr Aso, 65, lands in Australia this morning, there is no telling what he might say, especially on China, the topic that Condoleezza Rice has put at the top of the agenda. Judging from his retractions and clarifications - most recently after outbursts about the Emperor and Taiwan - there are times when Mr Aso surprises himself.

Unflinching is one word to describe him, but there are others. The New York Times, in an editorial widely read in Japan, said he was "inflammatory" and "neither honest nor wise" and accused him of "disserving the people he has been pandering to" and "going out of his way to inflame Japan's already difficult relations with Beijing". In December he called China a "considerable threat", provoking immediate anger in Beijing.

The Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, overseeing the wreckage of Japan's regional relationships and persistent tensions with the US, has given Mr Aso free rein. Moderates, business people, political opponents, newspaper editors, international commentators and the governments of China and South Korea do not like his tone. He does not seem to care.

"I don't know of many people who are prepared to express honest views to China about how other countries, particularly neighbouring countries like Japan, really feel about China," Mr Aso said in a BBC interview. "That is unfortunate if no one is telling China what they truly think. I believe that we must represent Japan's true feelings and it must be done by someone like myself."

Mr Aso's grandfather, Shigeru Yoshida, was a former prime minister and patriarch who, horrified that young Taro had an American twang and wore sloppy T-shirts, yanked him out of Stanford University in California. Mr Aso's humiliation was complete when, as he was trying to reason with his parents by phone, they hung up on him and cut his allowance, forcing him to make his way back to Japan, third class, on a passenger ship.

He was sent to England, where he enrolled at London University and developed an eye for fine clothes and cultivated his plummy fluent English. What his grandfather would make today of the scion's lifelong devotion to manga comic books - he reads 10 or 20 a week - is anyone's guess. "It is to get rid of stress," Mr Aso said in a 2003 interview. It is an interest he shares with his son and daughter.

Mr Aso is ferociously competitive, said an occasional golfing partner, and putts with the dead-eye accuracy that got him a place in the 1976 Olympic shooting team.

He is a member of Japan's Christian minority, but is also a Shinto shrine-going patriot.

He stole the show at a dinner with the African diplomatic corps last week with a speech that recalled the hardships of Sierra Leone 30 years ago where he was sent to run a family diamond mine.

Months ago, Mr Aso declared that he wanted to succeed Mr Koizumi as prime minister. Though polls give his candidacy only 7 per cent public support, his experience and pedigree mean he cannot be dismissed.

McDonald:

WHEN Alexander Downer and Condoleezza Rice sit down with Taro Aso at a Sydney naval base today, a lot of sinister history will be hovering around.

Aso is Japan's Foreign Minister, and this August he may well become its prime minister, if the ruling Liberal Democratic Party stays with a rotation of leadership despite the incumbent Junichiro Koizumi's huge election win last year.

But whether Aso or his main rival, Shinzo Abe, represents new blood is another thing.

Both men have lineage back to the darker side of the LDP and prewar Japan.

Aso's family company ran coalmines in Kyushu where thousands of Korean men worked in slave-like conditions during the war years. Abe's father, Shintaro Abe, later a senior LDP figure, was training as a kamikaze pilot when the war ended.

Aso is a grandson of Shigeru Yoshida, Abe of Nobusuke Kishi - two of the early postwar LDP prime ministers who forged a new role for Japan as the US's forward base off the Asian mainland, despite the limits on military activity set by its postwar constitution's article nine.

Acceptance of figures like Kishi - wartime Japan's munitions minister and arrested by the Allies as a war crimes suspect - must have been eased for many Americans by the expectation that generational change would clean out the wartime taint in the LDP.

Yet, partly thanks to hereditary succession in the party's Diet seats, a perverse mindset lives on. Koizumi, Abe and Aso have been out to stir Japanese nationalism by invoking wartime symbols and stirring bitter memories in China and Korea through offensive remarks.

The effect of Koizumi's theatrical visits to the Yasukuni shrine - dedicated to Japan's war dead, including executed leaders, and housing a museum justifying its sweeps across Asia - is well known.

In less than a year as Foreign Minister, Aso has shown a particular bent for stirring up the neighbours: 'Taiwanese are better educated than Chinese mainlanders thanks to the Japanese occupation'. 'Koreans liked to adopt Japanese names and abandon their Hangul script'. 'A visit by Emperor Akihito to the Yasukuni shrine would be the best'.

How deep this runs is anyone's guess. Aso and Abe are intelligent men. They went to American universities. They show no sign of ultimately wanting to break free of the American embrace.

According to some reported private soul-baring by LDP leaders, twisting the dragon's tail is consciously aimed at creating a threat psychology about China in the Japanese population, to let the LDP put through a revision of article nine [the provision in the Japanese Constitution, strongly influenced by the US after WWII, that restricts Japan's military might to "defense"].

Australian foreign policy has long been working in parallel with the US's to bring Japan out as a "normal" nation. In 2001 the Howard Government took things forward by getting the new Bush Administration to agree to a new linkage between the US-Japan and ANZUS military treaties, an annual security dialogue between officials from the three countries. Last year it was agreed to lift this to ministerial level, and today's talks are the first occasion.

Of course Downer is insisting that this is not about countering China, but Rice makes it clear this is what she is about.

If anyone is the father of the trilateral security dialogue, it is Ashton Calvert, head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for most of the Howard years until illness forced him to retire early last year. A Japan specialist, Calvert went out of the way to seek Japan's input on world problems, and insisted Tokyo's importance be remembered in the rush to build up relations with Beijing.

In a Curtin memorial speech last June, Calvert expressed this clearly. "While welcoming China's active participation in regional and international forums, and while accepting that its influence is likely to increase steadily, we should not soften our support for a more active and responsible role for Japan in international political and security affairs. As part of this, we should maintain our firm support for Japan's bid to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council."

Australia continues to nudge Japan further out of the article nine box. Our main troop deployment to Iraq even has this collateral objective, being assigned to protecting Japan's military construction team, the first dispatch of Ground Self-Defence Force (army) personnel into a foreign conflict outside a United Nations mandate.

When they sit down with Aso, Downer and Rice might encourage more Japanese assertiveness. But does it have to be achieved by stirring up wartime animosities among three great East Asian nations, and perhaps starting a new Japan-China strategic rivalry?

Will the American and Australian ministers urge Aso and his LDP colleagues to cut the provocative Yasukuni patronage, the evasive school textbook references, the needling remarks, the half-hearted non-apologies? One suspects that this side of things won't be raised much at all.

In the spirit of transparency and disclosure of interests, the whole Guambat family holds dual US/Austalian citizenship, Baby Bat is besotted by things, and a young man in particular, Japanese, and Son of a Guambat is entranced with things, and a young woman in particular, Chinese (heading back to Beijing for his third time in a few days to represenent his Uni in a model UN conference). So we're anxious that all of this posturing by the 3 attendees and the absent elephant in the room doesn't end up in a game of mad-musical chairs.
Peace and love, man.