You make the decision: Jim Molan's war

Such as the Operation Sovereign Borders refugee policy that he and Scott Morrison wrote for the 2013 election.

That never-set-foot-in-Australia approach unquestionably stopped the boats, but what of the human disaster that remains?

There are only 600 left on Papua New Guinea and Nauru and the vast majority could go home tomorrow, although they refuse, the retired major-general and now Liberal senator counters.

"That's not bad, is it."

To what extent this is true is difficult to determine. Home Affairs won't release the data, but the refugee council says about three-quarters of the people in Papua New Guinea and on Manus Island have been recognised as refugees. Which would suggest they don't have a home to go to.

But Molan is adamant: "It was very, very tough policy; very, very hard policy, but it was good policy, and it was well executed and it saved lives."

Molan, a retired major-general and since November a Liberal senator, has a long association with Canberra.

He and his wife bought a 20 acre country property near Royalla to be near her family. Their children are grown up - a teacher, a journalist, a director at KPMG, and a commercial pilot, who shares his father's love of flying.

"They all own homes, pay taxes and have children. What more could you want from young Australians," Molan jokes and on this we are on common ground.

Molan was set on a military career as a child and at 17 headed straight into Duntroon, where he had Vietnam in mind. Vietnam was not to be but he had experience instead with Australia's local deployments and had quick success.

In 2004, John Howard sent Molan to Iraq as Australia's most senior representative in the command centre. It was a job that even he, judging by his book on his year in Iraq, had difficulty defining. Without a clear role, he carved out a job for himself securing vital infrastructure, where he did well enough to earn the Americans' respect and was made chief of operations.

That included planning the the assault on Fallujah, widely considered the most brutal of the war. He was also responsible for targeting and managing attacks against "high-value targets".

Which brings us back to the vicious side of war, as Molan himself describes it. Urban fighting, he says, is "ugly, violent in the extreme and often tragic".

So how does a military leader call a strike in a built-up area when he knows there will be collateral damage?

"Easily," Molan says. These are daily decisions.

What you do if there are children? Make the decision, he replies. Which is?

"It depends on the circumstances, if a terrorist leader is having a meeting in a house which may have other people in it - depending on the danger to the rest of the population of allowing those people to walk away from that house and the balance of casualties that they cause - you may decide to strike that and accept the collateral damage."

But how do you live with that? "The number of people that are alive in Iraq because of what we did is very very large," he says, looking at his inquisitor with benign good-nature.

"Just explain to me which world you live in?" he asks.

Jim Molan is big. He's rangy. The ease, almost the cheerfulness, with which he bats away questions about the roughest edges of war is unnerving. He insists, even, that the war had no lasting emotional impact on him - although in his book, he deals with it in more reflectively.

In conversation, he volunteers an account of the moment in March 2005 when a hostage rescue went horribly wrong. It happened at an checkpoint when the Italians had rescued a journalist who had been held hostage and were heading for the airport.

"The Italians came through in very old cars, didn't tell us, didn't tell us that they were coming through," Molan says. "And I'm running the centre."

An American soldier fired on the car, killing the Italian rescuer, and sparking a cascade of recriminations.The Italians, who rejected the American account, saying they had alerted the US to the rescue and the car had not been speeding at the checkpoint, charged the soldier with murder.

That, I venture, must have been a bad day.

"No. A day in the life," Molan with a laugh, unperturbed.

He strikes you as a man who values clarity, resolve and strength above pondering what-ifs. In his book, he says he wasn't in Iraq to "join a debating society on the rights and wrongs of the original invasion".

"I was, and am, a practical man committed to solving problems," he writes.

He doesn't dismiss the ethical questions - intriguingly he was head of the St James Ethics Centre after he left the military - but they come in the framework of a job to be done.

He says that to maintain his "ethical framework" in Iraq, he kept a list near his computer of appalling terrorist attacks - car bombs in the middle of a crowd, bombs hidden in gas bottles that were carried into a marketplace on the top of a car for maximum effect.

"Battlefield ethics is absolutely critical," he adds. "I practise battlefield ethics in every fight that I've been involved in. People have a view that if you obey the laws of armed conflict you can't win wars. Well, you will lose wars guaranteed, if you don't obey the laws of armed conflict."

What then, of the ethics of the American soldiers who in 2007 hovered in a helicopter above people in a square in Baghdad, shooting them, then watched as someone came to drag a wounded man into a van before shooting the rescuers as well. This was the video exposed by Chelsea Manning and published by Julian Assange. Where do the ethics of this one lie for Molan?

"I gave my view Assange on 60 Minutes earlier this year, nothing more to add," he says.

I look it up. "In my opinion, he's a villain," Molan told the program.

Molan's ability to see his world clearly without being bedevilled by doubt and shades of grey presumably played a part in his rise to the very senior role, and in his good fortunes in the Liberal Party since he joined five years ago.

He doesn't make friends everywhere he goes. He entered the Senate the first time, in 2018, straight to an assault from the Greens, partly for the "humanitarian catastrophe" of Iraq. And at this year's election, he was relegated to an unwinnable spot on the Liberal ticket. He didn't go quietly, instead running an insurgent campaign telling voters to vote below the line and put him first in defiance of the ticket, a campaign that not only annoyed his colleagues, it also failed.

But Molan has the friends that matter. He got his first stint in the Senate after taking on a seat vacated in the citizenship debacle in late 2017, and this year was once again handpicked for the job despite missing out in the election. When Arthur Sinodinos left the Senate in October, Molan was given the seat with the backing of Howard and Morrison. In their references for Molan, both men referred to his energy, an energy that's obvious in person, just as his size and strength strikes you. Howard added, "There is nothing grey or bland about Jim Molan."

Evidently not. Molan's good humour becomes tetchy later, when you try to tackle controversial questions, like the reported use of white phospherous (was legal and in any case only used once to his knowledge). As his patience runs out, you can see this military man has his limits.

"The fact that journalists don't understand anything we do invariably results in them saying silly things," he says. War "doesn't translate to simplistic statements".

And yes, of course, he understands the asylum seeker policy has a human cost.

"But I also have a feeling about 1200 who died at sea," he says. "I have a friend ... who pulled the bodies out of the water, the children's bodies out of the water as a member of the Australian navy, who saw the results of shark attacks on those people. 1200 as a minimum. And those who say we should weaken our laws must take responsibility for what happens next."

The key was "resolve".

"Not one single person to my knowledge outside of the government considered that we could do it. And we did it in a year," he says.

He speaks of this with such conviction that you are left with the impression of a very hard man. Not so, he says.

"I am a person who understands the world with all its beauty and all its faults. And as we act in the interests of Australia and we act in the interests of good people throughout the world - I've put my life on the line for this on any number of occasions - the activities that we took for the people of Iraq, for the people of East Timor, for the people of the Solomon Islands to give them a decent life, is very very important. That's the contribution that I can make and I've made it."