September 9, 2004 - 4:29PM

A bomb blast outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta was a terrorist attack on Australia, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said.

A bomb exploded outside the embassy about 10.15am local time (1.15pm AEST).

"It is clearly a terrorist attack, it was outside the Australian embassy, you would have to conclude that it was directed towards Australia," Mr Downer told reporters in Adelaide.

Mr Downer said all Australian-based staff were safe, but six Indonesian nationals who worked at the embassy remained unaccounted for.

"All of the Australians based at the Australian embassy are safe, two of them I think suffered very minor injuries, scratches, but nothing serious," Mr Downer said.

"There are six locally engaged staff who haven't been accounted for, that is Indonesians employed by the Australian embassy.

"That's not to say that in any way we would conclude they've been caught up in the explosion.

"We think, though, that there is a certainty of casualties amongst the local security forces who are providing protection for the Australian embassy."

Mr Downer said he would travel to Jakarta, along with heads of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), ASIO and seven AFP officers.

Mr Downer said the specifics of the explosion remained unclear.

"At this stage we don't know who was responsible for the explosion, it could take a bit of time to establish that, as is often the case," Mr Downer said.

"Naturally enough our suspicions turn to Jemaah Islamiah (JI).

"We had some advice a few days ago of a possible terrorist attack in Jakarta focussing on western style hotels ... but we didn't have any information of a specific attack on the Australian embassy."

Mr Downer said the explosion occurred "very close" to the embassy, adding "it was a very large explosion".

"We assume it was a vehicle-borne explosion but whether it was a suicide bomb or whether the vehicle somehow was abandoned and then the bomb let off, we don't know the answer to that," he said.

"The perimeter wall of the embassy have been very severely damaged, windows of the building on the side where the explosion took place have been blown out."

Mr Downer said the Australian embassy had been evacuated, with workers congregating on an embassy tennis court immediately after the explosion.

He said it was "dangerous" to speculate on whether the attack was purposely timed for during the Australian election campaign.

"It's quite an important point I think that we had some information which came from the Americans at the end of last week that there could be a terrorist attack against western hotels," he said.

"Whether this (explosion) has got something to do with this information, we clearly don't know, but there was no suggestion that that particular piece of information ... had anything to do with the Australian election.

"There was just no reference to that in the intelligence and I haven't seen anything in the intelligence which suggests anybody is trying to intervene in the Australian election.

"But I can only say to you, I simply do not know.

"We have to find out a great deal more about this yet, as we will do."

Iranian Defence Minister Ali Shamkhani warned today that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against US forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.

"We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly," Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV when asked if Iran would respond to an American attack on its nuclear facilties.

"America is not the only one present in the region. We are also present, from Khost to Kandahar in Afghanistan; we are present in the Gulf and we can be present in Iraq," said Shamkhani, speaking in Farsi to the Arabic-language news channel through an interpreter.

"The US military presence (in Iraq) will not become an element of strength (for Washington) at our expense. The opposite is true, because their forces would turn into a hostage" in Iranian hands in the event of an attack, he said.

Shamkhani, who was asked about the possibility of an American or Israeli strike against Iran's atomic power plant in Bushehr, added: "We will consider any strike against our nuclear installations as an attack on Iran as a whole, and we will retaliate with all our strength.

"Where Israel is concerned, we have no doubt that it is an evil entity, and it will not be able to launch any military operation without an American green light. You cannot separate the two."

A commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards was quoted in the Iranian press earlier today as saying that Tehran would strike the Israeli reactor at Dimona if Israel attacks the Islamic republic's own burgeoning nuclear facilities.

"If Israel fires one missile at Bushehr atomic power plant, it should permanently forget about Dimona nuclear centre, where it produces and keeps its nuclear weapons, and Israel would be responsible for the terrifying consequence of this move," General Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr warned.

Iran's controversial bid to generate nuclear power at its plant being built at Bushehr is seen by arch-enemies Israel and the United States as a cover for nuclear weapons development.

The latest comments mark an escalation in an exchange of threats between Israel and Iran in recent weeks, leading to speculation that there may be a repeat of Israel's strike against Iraqi nuclear facilities at Osirak in 1981.

Iran insists that its nuclear intentions are peaceful, while pointing at its enemy's alleged nuclear arsenal, which Israel neither confirms nor denies possessing.

Dimona, in the Negev desert, is allegedly where Israel produces weapons-grade plutonium for its estimated 200 nuclear warheads.

A meteorite reportedly the size of a house fell on the NSW south coast overnight, exploding in a bright flash, police said today.

A driver on the Hume Highway shortly after 9pm (AEST) near Menangle reported an object the size of a house falling from the sky.

The object fell east of the Hume Highway, possibly in an escarpment near the top of a hill at Bulli, police were told.

The meteorite was described as glowing silver in colour and similar to an artillery shell when it exploded with a bright flash on impact.

Workers at the Sydney Airport Tower said they saw a meteorite about 9pm, police said.

No other reports were received by police and extensive police patrols of the area did not turn up the space debris.

What a story this would make with some imagination - you could certainly write a book about this ... and as I write are they burying themselves deep ...

Why has the United States coped so badly with the aftermath of the Iraq war? How could it have been so apparently unprepared for the chaos that followed Saddam Hussein's defeat? And why, on the most concrete level, did it have no "exit strategy" to follow the invasion?

Those who opposed the war recite these questions with delighted sanctimoniousness, believing that their simple iteration proves the justice of the original anti-war case.

But for those of us who supported (and still support) the American action, these are not rhetorical matters. It is urgently important to understand what followed the collapse of tyranny in Iraq, and why the American strategy seemed to have no plan for dealing with it.

The American "mistake" - if mistake it is - is a generous and well-intentioned one: it assumes that, because freedom is a natural right (a belief that is fundamental to American political culture), then it must also be a natural condition.

To Americans of all persuasions and parties, personal liberty is an absolute and inviolable good: it is the state to which all human beings instinctively strive.

When George Bush describes the forces he is fighting as "the enemies of freedom", he means that they are the enemies of all that makes life worth living. What follows from this is that, given a choice, all peoples in all places and times will choose freedom over oppression. And so it was assumed that, in Iraq, liberation would be enough.

To be released from a murderous tyranny would naturally result in an embrace, not necessarily of smooth-running modern democracy, but of the possibilities of emancipation and individual opportunity.

It is worth remembering that - given the existence of an educated Iraqi political class, much of which had been living in exile but affirmed its desire to return - this idea seemed particularly credible.

Indeed, America had seemed to be taking a much greater gamble on this philosophy in Afghanistan, for which it received far less criticism, perhaps because countries such as France and Russia did not have the same vested interest in the survival of the Taliban regime as they had in Saddam's.

Richard Perle, an influential Washington neo-conservative, said last week that it had been an error to "allow liberation to turn into occupation". In other words, America never wanted, or intended, to run the place.

Contrary to left-wing myth, America is not a neo-colonialist country: it has no interest in creating a new imperium. The national temperament is, if not always isolationist, at least chronically inward-looking and self-absorbed.

Few things could appeal less to the American populace (and consequently to its populist political leaders) than conquering foreign lands and administering remote territories.

The American predilection is overwhelmingly for tending its own garden - getting on with its favoured domestic pastimes of creating wealth and cultivating private satisfactions.

This disinclination to run, and exploit, far-flung bits of the world is difficult for Europeans, who were historically addicted to colonialism, to comprehend.

That is why they so often make fatuous assertions about American intentions: that the US wanted to invade Iraq to "grab the oil", for example.

To misunderstand the fundamental idealism - and perhaps naivety - of American foreign policy is to miss any chance of influencing it.

The American belief that freedom is the ultimate human goal - and therefore that all men everywhere must want it - arises from a failure to understand the extent to which America as a nation is unique in its historical and philosophical roots.

The American population consists of people who are themselves, or are descended from, individuals who made a personal decision to accept the risks of freedom (with the notable exception of the African slaves, who did not enter the country of their own free will and whose descendants have had tragic difficulties in benefiting from the American dream).

Oddly enough, considering that its population is more cosmopolitan then ever, America has become even more insular over the past 30 years, to an extent that I find deeply shocking whenever I visit. Most Americans now have very little comprehension of how unlike the rest of the world they are.

They do not appreciate that their willingness to submit all their hereditary baggage - ancient tribal hatreds, extended family loyalties, religious commandments - to the rule of secular democracy is an exceptional, not a natural, condition.

But though they may have difficulty in comprehending why everyone does not want what they have - the great secret of individual self-determination and fulfilment - they do know that what they have has been bought at a price.

Giving up all the old securities of authoritarian faith, clan loyalties and homogeneous local cultures, which place such limitations on life in the old countries of the world, has created huge social unease and chronic anxiety.

The disruption and dislocation of American life makes it violent and perpetually unstable in ways that less free societies can never know.

But whatever the delusions and mistakes, the American experience has produced one important truth: the two conditions most conducive to peace and prosperity are liberal, democratic government and free-market economics.

The challenge of this century will be to extend those things to the parts of the world that do not have them.

Whatever its blunders, America is, at least, trying to do that. We would have to be deeply cynical and selfish not to support that intention.

Even former enthusiasts now generally acknowledge that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is the greatest disaster in the recent history of US foreign policy. It took almost a decade for the folly of Vietnam to become clear. In Iraq it has taken only a little over a year. Nothing is more important than to try to understand how this catastrophe occurred.

When George Bush came to power there were four genuinely significant influences on the Administration's foreign policy future - Vice-President Dick Cheney; Secretary of State Colin Powell; Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, the dominant neo-conservative foreign policy thinker of the age. Bush had hawkish instincts but no policy thoughts.

There are two clear camps. On one side were the neo-cons: Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. On the other the more realist hawk, Colin Powell. The neo-con power base was the Pentagon; the realists' the Department of State. Because in theory they neutralised each other, the Vice-President gained exceptional leverage.

Cheney was a natural extremist and alarmist. In disputes between Rumsfeld and Powell he threw his weight behind the Pentagon. In addition, he used his influence to colonise the Bush Administration with zealous neo-cons. Cheney emerges as the key figure in the Bush Administration. He calls Iraq "Cheney's war".

What were the core elements of the neo-con foreign policy faith?

They believed above all in the need for massive US military spending. Their pet project was missile defence. Colin Powell once joked that after the Cold War he was out of plausible "demons". "I'm down to Castro and Kim Il-sung."

This proved no impediment to the neo-cons. They were interested in such massive military spending because of the conviction that, in what was called "the new American century", the aim of US foreign policy should be to develop such overwhelming military predominance - the preferred euphemism was "strategic depth" - that no other great power or combination of powers would ever again even consider challenging the United States.

The neo-cons also believed in what they called the role of "morality" in foreign affairs. The origin of neo-con interest in morality was their opposition to the post-Vietnam realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and in his sponsorship of the policy of detente with the USSR.

At first for the neo-cons morality was concerned exclusively with anti-communist causes. They despised Jimmy Carter's injection of a principled human rights agenda into international affairs, believing it left communist regimes intact while destabilising pro-American dictators like the shah of Iran.

After the collapse of communism, however, morality became the justification of a more general neo-con program for the application of American ideals - free markets and elections - on a universal scale.

During the 1990s another neo-con obsession was the determination to destroy Saddam Hussein. The neo-cons saw this as the unfinished business of the first Gulf War. They were concerned about the geopolitical influence of Iraq as possessor of 10 per cent of the world's oil reserves. They believed Saddam's removal might aid the strategic interests of Israel or even bring about a Palestinian peace. And they fantasised that if only Iraq could be democratised it might provide a model for the entire Middle East.

During the late 1990s Paul Wolfowitz was the most influential advocate of US military action in Iraq. At this time a fateful alliance was established between the neo-cons and the leader-in-exile of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, a convicted criminal whom the neo-cons described as the future George Washington of Iraq.

Following the election of Bush, Wolfowitz made only a little headway with his Iraq plans. With the September 11 attacks on the US, his chances grew.

After September 11 both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz favoured attacking not Afghanistan but Iraq. On September 16, as Bob Woodward shows, the war question was debated at Camp David. Sniffing the wind, Rumsfeld retreated. Only Wolfowitz now favoured an immediate Iraq war.

Two months later Bush changed his mind. On November 21 he authorised Rumsfeld to prepare a new war plan for Iraq. Rumsfeld worked closely with General Tommy Franks. By late December the outlines of a war plan had been devised. War with Iraq was possible as early as April 2002, although Franks' preferred timetable for invasion was between December 2002 and February 2003. The planning took place in greatest secrecy. As Woodward discovered, as early as March 2002 Franks believed that war with Iraq was almost inevitable.

To go to war a reason was required. As Wolfowitz later explained, for "bureaucratic" purposes the Administration concentrated on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda. The threat of WMDs and terrorism was far easier to sell to the British and, later, at the United Nations, than "regime change".

One trouble with this argument was that the traditional intelligence agencies were sceptical or uncertain. To compensate for their weakness, the Pentagon created a neo-con intelligence outfit, the Office of Special Plans, whose role was to "cherry-pick" from raw intelligence data and to prepare assessments suitable for use in the Bush Administration's prewar scare campaign.

Until recently the source of this false intelligence was suspected but not known. Last week the Baghdad office of Ahmed Chalabi was raided after discovery of his delivery of secret US intelligence to the security service of Iran. The New York Times now felt obliged to apologise to its readers for the many sensational pre-war WMD reports it had published as a result of Chalabi-inspired help. It was clear that a Western-wide, INC-disseminated disinformation campaign, on Saddam Hussein's weapons and links with al-Qaeda, had provided the neo-cons inside the Bush Administration - unwittingly let us hope - with the casus belli for the war they had long desired. The last piece of the Iraq puzzle now finally fell into place.

Far from being crippled by the US-led war on terror, al-Qaeda has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks, a report said today.

al-Qaeda is probably working on plans for major attacks on the United States and Europe, and it may be seeking weapons of mass destruction in its desire to inflict as many casualties as possible, the International Institute of Strategic Studies said in its annual survey of world affairs.

Osama bin Laden's network appears to be operating in more than 60 nations, often in concert with local allies, the study by the independent think tank said.

Although about half of al-Qaeda's top 30 leaders have been killed or captured, it has an effective leadership, with bin Laden apparently still playing a key role, it said.

"Al-Qaeda must be expected to keep trying to develop more promising plans for terrorist operations in North America and Europe, potentially involving weapons of mass destruction," IISS director Dr John Chipman told a news conference releasing "Strategic Survey 2003/4".

At the same time it was likely to continue attacking "soft targets encompassing Americans, Europeans and Israelis, and aiding the insurgency in Iraq," he added.

The report suggested that the two military centerpieces of the US-led war on terror - the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - may have boosted al-Qaeda.

Driving the terror network out of Afghanistan in late 2001 appeared to have benefited the group, which dispersed to many countries, making it almost invisible and hard to combat, the report said.

And the Iraq conflict "has arguably focused the energies and resources of al-Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition that appeared so formidable" after the Afghan intervention, the survey said.

The US occupation of Iraq brought al-Qaeda recruits from across Islamic nations, the study said. Up to 1,000 foreign Islamic fighters had infiltrated Iraqi territory, where they were cooperating with Iraqi insurgents, the survey said.

Efforts to defeat al-Qaeda would take time and might accelerate only if there were political developments that now seem elusive, such as the democratisation of Iraq and the resolution of conflict in Israel, it said.

It could take up to 500,000 US and allied troops to effectively police Iraq and restore political stability, IISS researcher Christopher Langton told the news conference.

Such a figure appeared impossible to meet, given political disquiet in the United States and Britain and the unwillingness of other nations to send troops, he said.

The United States is al-Qaeda's prime target in a war it sees as a death struggle between civilisations, the report said. An al-Qaeda leader has said four million Americans would have to be killed "as a prerequisite to any Islamic victory," the survey said.

"al-Qaeda's complaints have been transformed into religious absolutes and cannot be satisfied through political compromise," the study said.

The London-based institute is considered the most important security think tank outside the United States. Its findings on al-Qaeda's expanding structure and growing support by allied terrorist networks around the world track with similar assessments from governments and other experts.

The IISS said its estimate of 18,000 al-Qaeda fighters was based on intelligence estimates that the group trained at least 20,000 fighters in its camps in Afghanistan before the United States and its allies ousted the Taliban regime. In the ensuing war on terror, 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters have been killed or captured, the survey said.

al-Qaeda appears to have successfully reconstituted its operations by dispersing its forces into small groups and through working with local allies, such as the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front in Turkey, the report said.

"al-Qaeda is the common ideological and logistical hub for disparate local affiliates, and bin Laden's charisma, presumed survival and elusiveness enhance the organisation's iconic drawing power," it said.