White noise, red anxiety, Rudd bumbling

You may have come across yesterday's article in the Sydney Morning Herald on the case of two Australians arrested in Dubai.

This sort of thing is not new. A few years ago, when al Qaeda started making itself known in Saudi Arabia, the spate of bombings were blamed on westerners feuding over alcohol imports. A number of British and American accountants and engineers, working for international oil companies, were arrested, tortured and held without trial for months before their governments could arrange for their release.

Equity Private captures the phenomenon associated with being in these places well:

I have spent quite a bit of time in Dubai and seen a number of sides of the "Middle Eastern Shangri-La," not least of which being the experience of a female expat in the jurisdiction. I can only describe this last as characterized both by the constantly disconcerting presence of an ill-defined malice (perhaps best understood as a sort of ambient white noise of potential danger) and the occasionally terrifying and instant materialization of real, even mortal danger from this shapeless white snow of audio. (This last I know only second hand, having watched the arrest of a friend without accompanying her into custody).

Sad as it is to say, much as these places - Dubai, Shanghai, Beijing, Moscow, Kuala Lumpur - look like western cities, the resemblance is only skin deep. Behind the facade lie ancient prejudices, colonial-era hatreds and hurt feelings, delusions of cultural superiority and deep anxiety about relations with the west and its power to overthrow illegitimate ruling cliques.

Stern Hu and his colleagues are victims of just such feelings. And Australia is now feeling - and will continue to feel, for some time - the anger of the paranoid inadequates in Beijing.

It is greatly to his credit that Kevin Rudd has perceived the nature of the communist regime in Beijing. He is under no illusions about them, as is clear from his writings and his speeches.

Unfortunately, his diplomatic skills are nowhere near as developed as his Mandarin. It has been his mishandling of Chinalco's audacious and completely unacceptable bid for Rio Tinto, the provocative defence white paper, his mentioning of human rights in Tibet to a roomful of Chinese students, his bumbling over the dinner with the propaganda chief, and the slight given to the otherwise unremarkable Madame Fu on Vritish television, which has landed us in the mess that we find ourselves.

The officials in Foreign Affairs are tearing their hair out in frustration.

But it's all of a piece with St Kevin's fantasy of himself as a peerless diplomat, and his desire to control everything while at the same time being unable to focus sufficiently on a task to deal with all the Hard Questions and produce both realistic goals and viable strategies.

Witness the Asian diplomatic community that he is pushing for - an unrealistic goal, given that it is something which no-one in the region actually wants - and his strategy for achieving it - sending 80-something Dick Woolcott out to spruik its benefits.

No surprises for guessing how this is going to turn out.

Meanwhile, the 'white noise' atmosphere of menace from the Red Kingdom will keep intensifying.