By Robert Fisk
All I can do is try to do what Amira Hass, that very fine Israeli journalist told me I should do. We were discussing in Jerusalem a couple of years ago, What is a foreign correspondent’s job, and I said, ‘Oh, it’s to report the first pages of history’, very pompous Robert, very English. And she said, No, Robert, you’re wrong, she said, Our job is to monitor the centres of power, to challenge authority, especially when they want to go to war and especially when they’re going to kill people with lies.”
By Frank Brennan
A government which is less constrained by the Senate, the High Court and international tribunals is a government which risks thwarting more readily the rights and entitlements of minorities and those who hold an unpopular view of the true and the good. With party machines that enforce tighter discipline than in other countries such as the United States and the UK, we Australians then become more dependent on the magnanimity and vision of the prime minister and his advisers. In the long term, this is dangerous for democracy.
By Ivan Krastev
Many intellectuals saw the post-cold-war world as the dawn of a new era of freedom and democracy. The war on Iraq is forcing a rethink and a retreat. Two new books — Paul Berman’s “Power and the Idealists” and Francis Fukuyama’s “America at the Crossroads” — attempt to make sense of what went wrong. Ivan Krastev assesses them.
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