This time it’s different, apparently. Another aggressive Republican president, another confected case for military action against an Islamic country, another demand for Australia to be a “good international citizen” and join a military taskforce to preserve international rules. This time the target is Iran.
“Brazen Iranian tanker piracy in the Strait of Hormuz underlines the need for international action to ensure freedom of navigation in the world’s most important oil supply passageway,” The Australian insisted today, oblivious to the News Corp role in cheering on the greatest strategic blunder of the recent decades, the Iraq War.
The Australian Financial Review wants Australia front and centre in any military action against Iran:
An international force to police the Straits — similar to the long-running international anti-piracy scheme off the Horn of Africa — is the right response. Australia, as a good international citizen, should be willing to join in.
It’s only four years since the AFR cheered on Tony Abbott’s dispatch of more troops back to Iraq. There’s no Middle East conflagration that the AFR doesn’t want us in, it seems.
The AFR at least acknowledged there was a wider dimension to the current escalation of tensions with Iran by the Trump administration. The Australian is pretending it is all a matter of Iran and its “aggression”, without bothering to note the UK’s US-instigated seizure of an Iranian oil tanker, let alone the Trump administration’s strategy of punishing Iran for complying with the JCPOA nuclear deal with savage sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy.
But according to the AFR, “trying to use international waters as leverage in an unrelated row with a third party is on principle not acceptable”. Go looking for an AFR editorial condemning Trump’s breaching of the JCPOA and illegal imposition of sanctions, however, and you’ll find nothing. It’s OK for the US to unilaterally withdraw from agreements, breach international law and engage in economic war, but Iran must be held to a higher standard.
The perspective of The Australian, however, is simply that the Iranian people — already victims of a brutal regime — must be further punished by intensified sanctions. A failure to impose even tougher sanctions “will further embolden the ayatollahs”. Of course, the opposite is true: Iranian regime hardliners have been completely vindicated by Trump’s aggression toward Iran and moderates and pragmatists disgraced and humiliated (source: the raving lefties at the American Enterprise Institute, backed by the pinkoes at the National Review).
But this isn’t the standard sloppy thinking that characterises editorials in Murdochland. The error is quite deliberate: intensifying sanctions will further strengthen the fundamentalist hardliners in Tehran and encourage them to use aggression as a means to strike back at Western interests, increasing the risk of war, which is exactly what fundamentalist hardliners in Washington and other capitals want.
This is the history of the “war on terror” — an endless cycle in which hardliners in both the west and among Islamic fundamentalists have a basic common interest in perpetuating conflict, in which the West attacks Islamic countries, stoking outrage and swelling the ranks of terrorist groups, which in turn attack Western interests and provoke further intervention. And it all provides marvellous fodder for Western media outlets.
What’s different this time compared to Iraq is that there is now intense hostility to the perpetuation of the war on terror — and its current phase targeting Iran — from within conservative ranks in the United States. The foreign policy outlet National Interest, aligned with the Kissinger “realist” school, has attacked Trump for deliberately provoking Iran, which has shown “remarkable patience”. The American Conservative is almost obsessively hostile to the US military state and has been lashing Trump’s Iran policy in the most ferocious terms for more than a year. The idea that the United States has engaged in a deliberate policy of endless war has moved from a fringe conspiracy theory and rhetorical trope of Gore Vidal to the entire basis for a new cooperative project of the unlikely pairing of George Soros and Charles Koch.
As The Australian and the AFR demonstrate, however, in Australia it’s as if we’re still in 2003, with no lessons learnt or wisdom gained from the colossal folly of Iraq, as the media encourages us to plunge into another military adventure in the Middle East. All in the name, of course, of being a “good international citizen”.
There should be no deployment of any ADF personnel until all investigations into the unlawful killing of civilians in Afghanistan has been concluded.
Until that time the ADF ought to be considered, internationally, as unfit for deployment amongst civilian populations.
How does that fit with the BS ANZAC myth?
TRH, be glad you’re not brown and born in Sudan. The Murdoch press and the microphone monsters would spend the next six months crucifying you for that remark.
I know Rais. I’m a 50 something white male who is sick to death of the ritualistic use of armed uniformed killers in my name. If we stopped genuflecting to the individuals involved then maybe they might stop killing people 3,000 miles away who’ve done us no harm.
As I’ve said a thousand times before, I’ll more than happy to support Australia’s participation in any foreign military adventure on behalf of our “special Friends” the day that our politicians legislate requiring them & their children to lead from the front.
As Rupert Murdoch’s wicked rags have demonstrated ad nauseam for decades, talk is cheap, in particular when it comes to spilling the blood of others.
Or the rule should be that the oldest, say under 65 to be fair, go first.
We’ll happily wave them off from the shore.
Good international citizens respect human rights and don’t detain genuine refugees in Australia, or pay other countries to do so on our behalf.
Just out of interest, can anyone tell me why PNG doesn’t just quietly put 150 Manus refugees on a plane and fly them to New Zealand? They are a sovereign country so I don’t see how Australia could stop them.
Legally Australia can’t stop them but PNG is heavily dependent on subsidies from Australia that might dry up if they tweak Canberra’s nose at all. That might change as Canberra realises that any gap it leaves by a reduction in money to PNG will be replaced by China.
Trump has no knowledge of history, so no motivation in his thinking, such as it is, to pressure Iran over the insult of undoing the interference inherent in installing the Shah. The only explanation which accords with Trump’s known thinking (as to Trump thinking refer above) is that he withdrew to destroy the treaty because it was an accomplishment of his predecessor Obama. the involved European nations involved, to their credit, are busily trying to preserve the treaty, thank goodness. I believe Iran before the USA or the Australian government for that matter both the latter have not restored their credibility lost over the Iraq deception. (Andrew Wilkie is owed a big apology from those politicians who ridiculed him over his stance: a British scientist was reported to have taken his life in protest at the “sexing up” of British intelligence reports.)
So it is likely that the CIA or similar planted limpet mines and an American drone flew over Iran territory: generally provocation of Iran hoping for a war. Seizures of ships is tit for tat: to Iran’s credit. How do we tolerate the USA acting as judge and jury to instal sanctions and demand others follow. Sanctions are a matter for the UN Security Council.
An interesting synopsis Warwick, more detail would have been useful.
For starters the US has form in interfering in the internal affairs of other countries where it perceives its economic and political interests don’t agree with its own. History has shown where the US has undermined governments & installing its own puppets, even to the extent of fomenting a war to do so.
Prior to installing the Shah, in 1953 the CIA / US with help of the UK instigated the of the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mosaddeh.
With regard to the late British scientist David Kelly, as asserted in Norman Baker’s book “The Strange Death of David Kelly”, Kelly was driven to a fragile mental state by which he was found to have inconclusively suicided after being made the scapegoat by Blair and his press secretary Alastair Campbell. Campbell’s “sexing up” Kelly’s report which made no such claim the Saddam Hussain’s rockets could reach the UK in 45minutes.
See also
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-role-1953-iranian-coup
I would interested to hear, in light of the above, what Campbell says tonight on Q&A with regards to mental health issues.
I omitted this link to my comment above :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Dossier
I’m a tad confused. In the sludge that remains of my brain I have a memory.
That memory is the western media going all out to vilify the Shah and wanting him gone. No doubt with the connivance of the seppos and brits.
However the Ayatollah ended up as boss instead of who the seppos wanted. Then the biowaste hit the rotary air transport device.
My money is on the Israelis planting the limpet mines. This is a country that has no scruples about using false Australian and New Zealand passports for its agents to do its murders, I mean assassinations, I mean liquidations.
I lurve the tautology of the appellation “targetted assassinations” which is only ever applied when the killer is the West.
If it were not targetted, then it would be random murder.
And that’s naughty.
Well said. Thank you.
As always that pernicious fucking media.