John Howard should follow Thabo Mbeki if he wants to show leadership

It knows that an Iraqi war is disastrous for the fragile African economy. South African Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, Aziz Pahad, warned last week that the focus on Iraq meant that developed countries were not focussing on the newly formed New Economic Development Partnership, or NEPAD, that involves the G8 countries plus African states. ''All these programmes will be placed on the back burner if there is a war against Iraq,'' Pahad said. And Mbeki himself put it more bluntly, noting that Iraq is moving "Africa off the radar screen of the entire world".

But Australia seems beastly careless about the impact of the war on the Asia-Pacific region, instead focussing its efforts on a controversial bilateral trade agreement with the US, that despite the protestations of the Prime Minister, seems to have been accelerated as a result of the Howard government's haste to make up the trio of countries in the Coalition of the Willing.

The impact of the Iraq war on the Indonesian economy alone, let alone the remainder of south-east Asia, will impact adversely on President Megawati Sukarnoputri's capacity to keep that nation from fracturing, according to the Jakarta Post.

In an editorial on March 18 The Jakarta Post noted that the depressing impact of the war on the Indonesian economy - an economy highly reliant on the US and Australia - "would further weaken security. This could take the form of increased terrorist attacks also targeting Indonesian government and non-Muslim facilities".

It is not suggested that South Africa's Mbeki is a saint - his refusal to invest heavily in alleviating the chronic AIDS epidemic in that country has led to countless deaths among his people - but on the issue of Iraq his stance is exactly the one that a middle-ranking power should be taking if it is serious about showing leadership in its region.

Mr Howard, on the other hand, has behaved as though south-east Asian concerns were firmly in the bottom drawer as he has nailed himself to the American mast from day one of this crisis.

Australia might have shown their World Cup hosts a thing or two about how to play cricket but on the foreign-policy field South Africa has won hands down this time.