Brian Rudman: Moore beats war drums from shaky ground

Hands up everyone who thinks the sooner the Switzerland-based expats go home, the better. If the havoc Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth are creating out on the Hauraki Gulf is not bad enough, now we've got Mike Moore trying to march us off to war.

You might have thought that with him living in Geneva for so long, the merits of Switzerland's long tradition of neutrality might have rubbed off. But not a bit of it.

Up he pops at the Knowledge Wave conference - which I thought was about improving economic performance - and declares a jihad on Iraq, accusing critics of America's impending war of moral inconsistency.

Well, before he starts firing off his thunderbolts from the moral high ground, perhaps Mr Moore should breathe in for a moment and consider the firmness of the sands he's preaching from. He could also declare who is at present providing the butter on his bread.

After all, doesn't his new employer, New Zealand dairy foods giant Fonterra, stand to recover a small fortune if the invasion of Iraq, which Mr Moore is so keen on, takes place?

It was wonderfully ironic that Mr Moore's call to arms in yesterday's Herald shared the page with a story about how Fonterra was revving up the milk tankers, ready for the triumphal ride behind the American troops into Baghdad.

The dairy men, it seems, are after a debt of $24.6 million owing to Fonterra's predecessor, the Dairy Board, since the Gulf War of 1991 locked Iraq out of world trade.

It's an old debt, said Fonterra senior counsel John Kennedy-Good, "but we just won't let it go".

And who better to help them recover the lost treasure than Mr Moore, the company's recently appointed "senior counsellor on trade and global strategy".

In announcing the appointment last month, chief executive Craig Norgate declared that Fonterra "stood to benefit greatly from the strategic advice offered by Mr Moore", who would "work closely with the members of the Fonterra leadership team and international trade strategy staff".

Now I might agree with those who think the idea of Mr Moore drumming up support for a war to recover his employer's debt is a bit far-fetched. A bit too machiavellian, even for that master-plotter, Mike Moore. But it's no more far-fetched than the ridiculous reasoning he is using to try and drag us into the abyss of a new desert war.

Mr Moore has long had a tendency to become an apostle of the last book he's read. This time he's fallen hook, line and sinker for the nonsense, no doubt picked up from his American free-trade mates, that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are in bed together in the same ideological war.

He's wackily Old Testament in his claim that "a battle is being played out between modernism and those who seek a return to a religious order not seen since the Middle Ages, those whom the Reformation and the Age of Reason passed by".

I'm presuming he's referring to bin Laden in the above quote, but it could also describe the ideas of some of President George W. Bush's scarier advisers.

What it doesn't do is relate in any way to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, except, perhaps, when referring to his means of torturing opponents. But when it comes to torture and imprisonment, medieval methods didn't end with the Middle Ages. They continued to flourish during the Reformation and the Enlightenment and through to the present day.

Far from seeking a return to "a religious order not seen since the Middle Ages", Iraq is one of the most secular and "western" of the Arab states. It also treasures a history and civilisation going back many thousands of years.

Mr Moore says: "I'm not frightened by American unilateralism. I'm more frightened by isolationism."

If he'd spent more time in this country, it might have sunk in that that's not what the debate is about.

Certainly, many of us fear American unilateralism. And sensibly so, given the excesses of unbridled power that major states have exercised in the recent past. But the alternative is not isolationism, as Mr Moore claims, but multilateral decision-making through the United Nations.

As a former Labour Prime Minister - if only for a brief two months before the November 1990 election - he must be aware that this is a consistent thread of Labour politics dating back to the first Labour Government, which enthusiastically helped set up the UN after the last world war.

Our leaders saw collective security as the best safeguard for small countries against the unilateral actions of the powerful. It still is. Mr Moore betrays the past by mislabelling it "isolationist".

Our former Prime Minister has lived abroad for some time now. And plans to continue doing so.

He'd be wise to bone up on his history before tripping back "home" for his next pep talk.