If you’d like a prison wall built for nothing, invite President George Bush and other leaders of the so-called Free World to a meeting in your town. The citizens of Sydney have just discovered that magic formula.

Five kilometres of concrete and steel were erected to protect important visitors, there for a meeting that will produce nothing but more global warming, more conflict and more empty rhetoric. Australian taxpayers foot the bill for this feeble but expensive grandstanding and (while nobody voted for it) they will all have to put up with it, because barriers and protests mean headlines.

So why build the Sydney Wall?

New South Wales police suspected drastic action from a hitherto unknown group of violent protesters they allegedly found on the internet. They said that, by building a little fortess in the inner city of Sydney, they would protect loathsome invaders from Australians, or loathsome Australians from invaders.

Anyone can post a threat on the net: it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s usually not worth investigating. Such “threats” are about as credible as Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.” The trouble is, governments are using unsubstantiated threats to strike fear in the people who elected them. It’s getting to the stage where people will not visit an airport, let alone check in. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Osama Bin Laden had won.

Sydney’s wall is the result of paranoia. It sits on the same faulty information that misled Britons and Americans into the invasion of Iraq, an artificial country created by Western oil interests and a nation that, at this stage of its development, is now entirely suited to be ruled by a ruthless, secular dictator.

Western world leaders do not seem to realise that the methods they use to combat terrorists result in precisely what the terrorists seek: increased fear, loss of confidence in governments and further restrictions on personal freedom.

Ask any surviving Iraqi: they’d have Saddam back tomorrow, because he kept everyone in order and he kept the lights on. And we cannot easily export our idea of democracy to countries such as Iraq or Saudi Arabia. Or Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos or South America, and all the other places where ignorant Westerners have failed to control other people’s lives.

So what happened in Fortress Sydney? Pragmatic protesters, opposed to climate change, the Iraq war and the unacceptable behaviour of world leaders, decided to leave these mindless politicians in their gilded cage and instead chained themselves to railings elsewhere in Australia. Perhaps a smart move, but it will probably be lost on simians like President George Bush, who is creating further trouble via Iran and illiterately describes his latest initiative as opposing “nuke-you-lear” threats.

Australians in general, and traders in Sydney’s CBD in particular, might ask themselves if this much-hyped disruption to their lives will lead to better things for the oppressed people of Zimbabwe, Myanmar (Burma) and others suffering under dictatorships that are of no economic or strategic interest to the United States.

The key lesson is that, if your leaders need to erect razor wire around your town centre to protect dangerous visitors from you or your beliefs, you don’t live in a free country.