Not so scary under Korean skies: the things that happen while the world yells.

as published just now at John Menadue's blog

and republished at Crikey, under the title "South Korea seems to be the only country reacting sensibly to Pyongyang."

DENNIS ARGALL. Not so scary under Korean skies

2 October 2017

Australia has had yet another high level former US defence official breeze in, this time to warn that we might be attacked by the DPRK. Whether there is or is not a concerted plan to all this, the visits of the grave and famous and warnings about improbable threat serve a purpose of keeping us from wandering away from Uncle Sam’s skirt in these strange times. It is useful to step away from speculation and look at some things actually happening, taking the last few days as a slice of life. 

On 1 October the US Secretary of State, visiting Beijing, told journalists “…the United States is in direct contact with North Korea and is looking into whether Kim Jong Un is open to talks.” [Washington Post]

I think it’s a perilous business to tell journalists you may have a fish biting. On the same day a DPRK spokesman “called on the United States…to halt what it claimed to be a hostile policy toward Pyongyang, threatening to turn America into a “sea of flames.” [Yonhap, Seoul]. On 28 September Choe Son-hui, director general of the North American department at the DPRK Foreign Ministry, at talks in Moscow, “stressed that it is necessary for the U.S. to stop its hostile policy toward the DPRK in order to defuse tension and ensure peace and security in the Korean Peninsula and the Northeast Asian region.” [KCNA]

If Secretary of State Tillerson claims he’s winning something in this contest, he won’t.           [I wrote that yesterday before Trump told his Secretary of State via Twitter not to waste his time.]

On 28 September on ROK Armed Forces Day, ROK President Moon awarded a “the highest unit-level award given by the ROK government … to all the Sailors of CNFK [US Combined Naval Forces Korea] for “outstanding contribution to the defense of the Republic of Korea” [Stars and Stripes]. Since the Korean War ROK forces have remained under US control in wartime. In his speech on the same occasion President Moon called again for transfer of ‘OPCON’ from the US to the ROK: “It’s only when we regain wartime operational control of our military that North Korea will fear us more and the South Korean public will trust the military more. The goal of this administration is to accelerate the transfer of wartime operational control,” [Hankyoreh]

Then President Moon and Mrs Moon went to have lunch with ordinary seamen on an ROK naval vessel, the Yonhap photo showing happy laughter.

On 1 October, the ROK monthly trade figures showed a year-on-year increase in exports of 35%. In September “outbound shipments came to US$55.1 billion for the month, up from $40.8 billion tallied a year earlier…Imports also rose 21.7 percent on-year to $41.4 billion.” Petrochemical exports in the wake of hurricane damage to the US oil industry were a significant component.

Another round of discussions on the US ROK Free Trade Agreement will take place in Washington on 4 October.

Also on 1 October the Korea Resources Corporation published an estimate of the value of DPRK mineral resources at approximately USD2.8 trillion, fourteen times those of the ROK. Modest joint ROK-DPRK minerals projects have been suspended for some time. Sanctions exist, prospects remain.

Again on 1 October in response to the decision of the ROK government to extend electrical vehicle subsidies to Tesla cars previously excluded because they take more than ten hours to charge, Tesla announced plans to extend its network of charging stations in South Korea.

Also on the same day, President Moon released a video wishing everyone well for travel home over the Chuseok (Harvest Moon) holiday break… and separately congratulated DPRK figure skaters on their qualification for the Winter Olympics in the ROK next year.

Meanwhile in the wake of the trilateral summit between heads of state of the US, ROK and Japan in New York (at the Korean Lotte hotel, not a Trump hotel), “[t]he Blue House and White House have reportedly shared concerns that “distorted” reports from the Japanese press could “cause fissures” in trilateral coordination.”

This report does not implicate Prime Minister Abe in the shaping of the news items attracting concern, but anxious Prime Minister Abe has been using articulation of tension and criticism of the ROK as well as the DPRK and China (plus a USD18 billion education and aged care package, to be paid for by a GST increase of 2% in 2019) in support of his campaign for re-election on 22 October.

On 27 September, at an event to mark the tenth anniversary, on 4 October, of the meeting in 2007 between then ROK President Roh Moo-hyun and the DPRK President Kim Jong-il, President Moon said: “Many of the matters agreed upon in the Oct. 4 summit statement can be implemented even now. I hope that both North and South Korea will declare that the Oct. 4 summit statement remains valid,” He once again called for the restoration of military talks, humanitarian cooperation and the reunions of the families divided by the Korean War. Restoring military talks was particularly urgent, Moon said, “to relax inter-Korean tensions.” [Hankyoreh]

In his address to the UN General Assembly in New York on 21 September, President Moon quoted former US President Ronald Reagan: “Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.”

This ROK Government demonstrates a flexibility and skill in dealing with all sides in the current difficult situation. Many domestic supporters were alarmed by President Moon’s siding with President Trump on issues relating to the DPRK, but had Moon been strident rather than flexible, troubles would abound domestically and perhaps more dramatically in the trade relationship with the US. Nothing would have been gained strategically by antagonism, just as nothing is gained by being joined at the hip with a major power.

Dennis Argall, a former Australian Ambassador to China, has been an observer of North Asian affairs since 1970

meditations on art and cultural bridges

With a little help from Kaurismaki.

[1] dialectics (with a little Italian lesson in subtitles)

[2] If Finns and Russians can have so much fun, Finland being the last country to swiftly repulse a Russian invasion, indeed the last country to repel swiftly a superpower invasion... why can't we have such as this below between Australia and Indonesia or Vietnam, or China and Japan? Some background on the Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir here.

And for those who fear Arabs as a class of people, meet Yasmine Hamdan.

and if you have time enjoy the movie in which that scene takes place, near the end

Jim Jarmusch made the film, surely America's answer to Finland's Kaurismaki

— Everyone speaks slowly, so the Spanish subtitles are an excellent language lesson

With Tilda Swinton and John Hurt, not really your average vampire movie,
but a voyage into the jadedness of world-wandering people who live a very very long time...

 

on dreams and sleep

The Conversation runs a series for 'Curious Kids'. Today an answer to a question about dreams.

I thought the answer was a bit limited, in focusing on the history of psychological interpretation of dreams. So I ventured into the physiology:

Dennis Argall

logged in via Google

I think it’s important to connect dreaming with the state of our whole body. While we sleep, it is normal for the sugar level in our blood stream to decline. Towards morning this process reaches a point where the body responds by lifting adrenalin llevels. Adrenalin, more scientific name epinephrine, is what gives us a charge to run away from something or chase madly after something when challenged when we are awake. It has broad roles like that in body systems and as we sleep and sugar levels fall adrenalin’s rise wakes us… But along the way it churns up other things, bladder alerts, appetite alerts and brain alerts which can mean dreams of better or worse kind. We may dream at other times, unaware. The dreams remembered are those just before waking.

I think there are a couple of things that flow from this. First is the need to maintain healthy levels of protein, sugar and caffeine (chocolate, tea, coffee, cola) without big spikes. And to treat sleep with respect, allowing it to happen and not getting too caught up in dramatic phone or tablet games in bed.

A recent news story suggested that billions of dollars would be saved in the US if schools began later…in the case of the US meaning not 8am but a bit later, because adolescents need to sleep in a bit and there would be better school results and fewer teenage car accidents if that were respected. Which suggests to me also that adolescent sugar-adrenalin cycles are different. Perhaps most young people sustain blood sugar levels better. Perhaps parents should just envy the capacity to sleep in! But perhaps also adjust bedtimes to get enough sleep altogether. Because…

During the day we yank minerals out of muscle and bone to do all kinds of work, including brain work. When we sleep those resources have to be put back. These processes are called catabolic and anabolic. Modern society with its levels of stress put people into problems because they may not get their resources restored in sleep. Crash. And nightmares.

So my thought is that we need to think very broadly about the importance of sleep, not as a dead zone but critical to life. I had sleep and nightmare problems for decades but eventually did a sleep test and found that my nightmares were not caused primarily by brain ruckus but because my breathing was stopping (sleep apnea) and the adrenalin rush to keep me alive, as we normally have gently in the morning, was violent in the middle of the night. Good habits of sleep when younger may have avoided that nonsense.

Korea, hysteria, self-examination

It was pleasing to read this morning that the leader of the opposition Labor Party here in Australia, who, according to polls, should be elected prime minister, will be visiting Seoul and Tokyo, not hanging on Trump's words as Prime Minister Turnbull does at the moment.

From The Guardian

V Putin has also spoken sensibly on Korea.

An article at The Conversation this morning talked about what 'sniffer aircraft' can tell us about the DPRK's nuclear explosion the other day.

I offered these thoughts:

Maureen Todhunter, a writer at John Menadue's blog offered wisdom on finding ways forward to sanity:

...Exposing ourselves to others’ ways of seeing life and its crises, and revealing our own ways to others, may seriously challenge most of us. But I think it’s an important step in developing empathy, capacity and will for collective remedial action. This is action that rejects war and cultivates peace, that nurtures the irritations of resistance and civil disobedience into pearls of civic-minded behaviour caring for all people and planet. Importantly then, a 21st century update on Marx: imaginations of the world, unite!
An exciting place for learning, thinking and imagining collectively is the IPAN (Independent and Peaceful Australia Network) National Conference 2017 in Melbourne on 8, 9 & 10 September 2017. Its theme: War, Peace & Independence: Keep Australia out of US Wars. http://www.ipan.org.au/#/To register for the conference www.trybooking.com/286873
Maureen Todhunter is an academic copy editor and member of Just Peace Qld

In reply I drew on the comment I'd made at The Conversation, adding a note at the end about past difficulties in endeavouring to walk down the middle between the left and the right.

The weekly scribbles

My writers group sets homework. This feels irritating at times but does drive the brain down interesting unexpected holes. Here I past 500 word-ish pieces from the last two weeks. I seek to get down to 400 words which is an easy paced three minutes reading, beyond which listeners have difficulty, but it's hard when ideas flow.

The first item here then is an attempt to be inside the mind of a person with some dementia, the black hole many of us are to be sucked into, but out from which we don't get news. This is perhaps the beginning of a longer story to be written.

The second item, below, is about moments in life, arguing that there are no momentous moments which do not alter space.

1

The assignment: to create a character using name of school friend and name of place where the school was; story to include “if he can find her in enemy territory”.
I’m not good at boys’ own adventures. My work is introspective. This comes solely from my mind. Third person didn’t work, I have tried second person.

The difficulty is remembering your name. Cover that with an air of disdain. Unfriendly; but don’t let them think you’re demented.

They asked about your early life but that was private, not for strangers. You look back to childhood and remember no names, too many schools.

But there was a girl back in Queensland, in the place where we sat on a kindergarten bench in blue shirts and shorts – and short skirt – and bare legs and feet and wrote on slates with slate pencils at a shared desk. How did that end, was it just that you left? You remember mood and warmth. And she seems the only person back there now. She seems to be Greek, her skin olive. Was her name Mary... Mary Borough. No, that was where we were. Would she still be there?

After that time, way back, the years after that, later in schools, one, two, at least three of them, there seem mainly a sense of bitterness and distances from people.

Is ‘remembering’ what you’re to do now? Is that what life was anyway?

“Where are my shoes? Did I take those tablets? Am I hungry? I want my kitchen.” Hang on cobber, you’re talking to yourself, and watch it, they’ll see you laughing...

Had you thought of being a spy? Maybe you hadn’t. But this tunnel of existence is a bit spy-like: hidden in enemy territory, tongue locked from saying who you are.
Yesterday they asked you who the prime minister was. You smiled sardonically. If they didn’t know who the bastard was they had no hope. Why should you tell them?

Yesterday they said to each other that you were ‘disinhibited’. They needn’t feel threatened: scrawny scratching shrink and miserable nurse. On the other hand that person who takes you to the shower and is just a tiny bit indecent with you...

OK! Retreat to remembered sensation. Keep your news to yourself. 

News, news! Hello, here comes an afternoon edition... The Dutch art student. Also with exceptional skin but she was fair. Funny to think how she and you ran out of words then and in this enemy territory they say you have no words now. You might not have a lot of time ahead; this is not a territory for having time ahead. Instead, better, now in this tiny news moment conjure up time past, exceptional-skin past, moments-innocent past. You were both so innocent, but so much intense feeling from such tiny moments. Can you resume conversations you didn’t know how to have so long ago... if you can find her now in this enemy territory. 

2:

"Write about your moods and emotions from a memory of a moment of your life." But I did something a little different. This is a personal reminiscence, of many moments. As with the previous short essay, this is written in a form to be spoken, read aloud. Which requires cadence and rhythm, and turns and angles to keep the audience alive.

I went away last time thinking of momentous moments, times when sudden events shifted space.

Such as picking up brain MRI scans for my wife in 2000, opening the envelope straight away and seeing the impossible, the size of a peach, in a frontal lobe. Bigger than any other moment in life. Whereas I thought I’d had an equal relationship, suddenly the biology sneered at us.

I drove out of the carpark next moment, to head home. I realised I was in a strange state when I saw a woman looking at me with an expression of horror as I went by. I can still see her face now.

Or ... when long ago I put a friend on a plane in Rome after a couple of days wandering the city, he going on to his first overseas posting in Nigeria... then to get a call from Mac in the High Commission in London asking did he get on the plane, did he get the plane... because it landed a kilometre too early at Lagos. The call was the moment, the plane departure was just... plane.

Intense conversations, so many kinds, pressures in head, all moments remembered or hidden: with close people and people you really need to convince... shifting your world in some way. Later remembering mainly moments of being stupid.

The milliseconds that last a very long time when you crash a car.

The strange sensation of knowing that you are about to be dead when you roll sideways through 600 degrees on a tractor. Then to watch it continue downhill, while lying on the ground after it throws you safely away into the largest and driest scotch thistle in eastern Australia. I can still hear it roar with anger at me. And feel my own anger and annoyance at my stupidity, plus shame: a childish expectation of getting into trouble.

I suspect that the biggest, most-remembered moments that alter our worlds are the negatives. The ones ‘for the good’ more often creep up... unless you have serendipitous eye-locking wonder-moments. More often we guard against nice surprises.

Sex.

That's a three-letter paragraph wanting not to be just four letters.

In between the sex and the other jolts, so many interminable moments, long drawn out phases of physical, spiritual, mental, or emotional homelessness. We may wish they were over in a moment. With what drug do we try to shorten them?

In physics, moment is what swinging objects have, weights heading for hitting something. There is no comprehended time-moment that does not connect with space; that does not hit.

Captain Oates dramatically, gangrenously, septically and with dysentery said to hapless Captain Scott of the Antarctic that he was just going outside for a moment.

We say: “I won’t be a moment” and that’s a lot more honest than “I’ll just be a moment” when you walk out the door. Through how many moments have we wished we could just walk out, alter the planet, alter life, start afresh. 

What moments, in the physics sense, hold us back? We cling to pendulums. 

Aaron Sorkin on writing

Just one minute, no, almost two minutes of your time...

or one hour in conversation with David Brookes about character and much more

James O'Neill on the need for Australia to change strategic direction.

Link to articles at
Independent Australia
See articles also at
New Eastern Outlook 
and New Matilda

James O'Neill, barrister at law and geopolitical analyst has been writing about the urgent necessity for review of Australian strategic policy.

I commend to readers to go and read other entries at James's website, including also about Korea. There much wisdom there, also consistent with and more powerful than some things I have been writing.

With permission, this is the most recent of his essays, which is here at James's web site also at John Menadue's blog.

It is important that arguments for serious review of Australia's strategic direction are posted far and wide.

AMERICAN BLUEPRINTS FOR WAR POSE AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO AUSTRALIA

Standard

James O'Neill 

25 August 2017

See Elizabeth Farrelly's excellent article,
from which this image borrowed

The recent statement by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to the effect that on defence issues Australia and the United States were “joined at the hip” raises the serious question of how far Australia will actually go in support of the United States as it embarks on one foreign policy misadventure after another? A possible change of government in Australia after the next election will not make any appreciable difference. The Labor leadership is always quick to ensure minimum daylight between themselves and the Coalition whenever yet another pledge of fealty to the Americans is made.  

There are two useful tests to employ to gauge an answer posed to the above question.   The first test is one of history. There have been at least five major conflicts since World War 2 where Australia has followed the Americans when a vital national security issue was either difficult to discern or was invisible.

useful further reading

The Korean War 1950-53 has always been justified to the Australian public as a UN based “Police action,” with American led forces responding to an invasion of South Korea by the North. That explanation was never adequate. It ignored a large number of relevant factors, including a history of American interference in that country since at least the 1880s.

It further ignored American acquiescence in the brutal colonization of Korea by Japan after 1910 in exchange for Japan not interfering in America’s colonization of the Philippines (600,000 Filipinos died resisting that colonization.) With Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea was divided in two along the 38th Parallel, a line drawn by the US State Department without consulting the Koreans. Contrary to international maritime law, that boundary line then turned north, thus depriving the North Koreans of access to their own maritime exclusive economic zone.

Between 1945 and 1950 the promised national elections were never held. South Korea’s US installed military dictator made repeated forays into the North, killings tens of thousands of North Korean citizens. The “invasion”, more accurately a civil war, has never been resolved. (1) Several opportunities to steer North Korea away from nuclear weapons were squandered and there is now a level of belligerence that poses the risk of a further outbreak of war. Australia’s willingness to become involved has repeatedly manifested itself, although a rational basis for doing so remains elusive.

Useful further reading

The second great conflict was Vietnam, again a civil war initially and again a country divided artificially after the defeat of the former colonial occupiers. Another similarity with Korea was again, the Americans refused to allow an election as provided for in the Geneva Accords, no doubt because the “wrong” man would have won.

Australia’s involvement in the war was prefaced by Harold Holt’s infamous “all the way with LBJ” although the internal Vietnam conflict posed no national security threat to Australia, the blatant “red scare” propaganda notwithstanding. In common with so many American invasions, this one was justified on the basis of a blatant falsehood; in this case the alleged attack on an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Afghanistan, the third major conflict we entered at the behest of the Americans was similarly based on a number of lies, which have continued unabated in the nearly 16 years of subsequent occupation. The real causes of that intervention and continuing occupation have been well documented. (2) Trumps most recent speech on the topic (21 August 2017) was similarly an exercise in concealing the real purposes behind the continuing American occupation (3).

In 2004, my thoughts on Iraq war here
the 'cost of war' counters are still running.

Iraq in 2003 was a similar lie-based invasion and occupation, the disastrous consequences of which continue to this day. Australia’s presence there is so tenuous that there is no Status of Forces Agreement signed and all Australian military personnel carry diplomatic passports (4).

The fifth illustration is Australian participation in the US led “coalition” currently attacking Syria. Notwithstanding the nonsensical claims of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter, the American and Australian presence in Syria is in blatant breach of international law. It is worse than just being illegal. Australia is a party to the commission of war crimes, most notably at present in the current assault on Raqqa with an horrendous civilian death toll that even the UN was drawn to criticize (5).

With this history we should not be surprised that more wars are looming in which Australia will assuredly be involved unless there is a radical change in foreign policy.  [my emphasis added] This brings us to the second test that can be applied: what do the protagonists themselves say about their intentions?

text here

To assist in predicting future wars, the Americans have helpfully produced a document that might reasonably be described as a blueprint for future wars. These documents have valuable predictive power, as we have seen demonstrated with the PNAC document, Rebuilding America’s Defences (1997).

This 90-page document served as a blueprint for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.   It promoted policies to “preserve and extend” the US’s position of “global leadership” by “maintaining the preeminence of American military forces” that would better enable them to fight and win “multiple simultaneous major theater wars” which themselves provide a framework within which to “spread American principles of liberty and democracy.” That last phrase was used without a hint of irony.

We then had General Wesley Clark’s revelations that he was shown a document at the Pentagon in September 2001 that was a blueprint for war with “seven countries in five years.” (6) In the light of subsequent events, the list is instructive: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, and Sudan.

Of the seven, only Lebanon and Iran have escaped direct US military intervention. Lebanon has suffered invasion and occupation by Israel before being driven out by Hezbollah. The US armed, financed and politically supported Israeli aggression, while Australia has always been slow to find fault with Israeli foreign policy and is one of a literal handful of countries that vote with Israel in the UN General Assembly on resolutions critical of Israel.

Iran has been the victim of hybrid warfare through sanctions, massive propaganda assault, US sponsored terrorist activity through their proxy group the MEK, and drug warfare through the US controlled heroin production and distribution from Afghanistan (7).

Text here

In 2012 the US published another Defence Department document entitled “Operational Environments to 2028: The Strategic Environment for Unified Land Operations. To the best of my knowledge its existence, let alone analysis of its contents, has never appeared in the Australian mainstream media.

The plan, written in 2012, foresees the economic and social collapse of Europe caused by massive immigration from Africa and the Middle East. It also predicts that Ukraine will become a NATO member. This was written two years before the US financed coup in February 2014.

There have been a range of events that have occurred since 2012, all of which were “anticipated” in the document. The whole document is worth reading, but some highlights illustrate the wider point.

• The Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) transferring nuclear technology to North Korea, but blaming the Russians. (The CIA runs the SBU).
• Blaming Pakistan for “WMD proliferation, being a direct threat to the Homeland, supporting terrorist organisations, and causing regional tensions with India.” All of these points appeared in Trump’s 21 August speech).
• A cold war with China and a proxy military conflict using India’s military. This is currently being played out on the Bhutan-China border.
• Azerbaijan is named as a future war zone. Azerbaijan not only shares borders with Iran and Russia (two prime targets for the Americans) but it is also a key link in the North South Transportation Corridor that is a key component of the Eurasian geopolitical transformation that is underway. That transformation, spurred by China’s massive One Belt One Road program, is in turn a fundamental threat to US hegemony.
• A plan to trigger war between Russia and China. This is one of the major strategic miscalculations in the document. As a direct result of US policy in Europe and Asia, Russia and China have been driven into a closer strategic embrace than at any other time in their long history. Together they have the capacity to destroy US hegemony.
• According to the 2012 plan, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen will continue indefinitely and can be used as launch pads for wars in Azerbaijan, China, Iran, Korea and Pakistan.

The arrogance implicit in these plans is astonishing. They are also exceedingly dangerous. Can it seriously be argued that Australia’s national interest is served by being a party to any of these plans? Does Australia really want a war with any of the named targets, several of whom are nuclear armed?

The history of the past seventy years demonstrates the folly of Australia’s blind fealty to US imperialism. A serious rethink is urgently needed before it is too late and we are dragged into yet another war, the results of which would be terminal in every sense of the word.

*Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst. He may be contacted at joneill@qldbar.asn.au

References

1.  Cumings The Korean War. The Modern Library 2010
2. O’Neill The Ongoing Disaster of Australia’s Policy in Afghanistan johnmenadue.com 16 May 2017
3. O’Neill Trump and Afghanistan: a Hidden Agenda journal-neo.org 25 August 2017.
4. Tanter Australia in America’s Iraq 3.0 Nautilus Institute 2014
5. telesurtv.net 23 August 2017
6. Global Warfare. globalresearch.ca 30 January 2017
7. Shoring Up a Flood of Drugs unodc.org 19 July 2011; Afghanistan’s Role in Iran’s Drug Problem www.cfr.org 13 September 2006.

On Pine Gap and problems of the Australian-American alliance

This is a re-post from John Menadue's blog.

DENNIS ARGALL. Pine Gap and national strategic independence.

Posted on 24 August 2017 by John Menadue

For a long time people have focused concern on Pine Gap.  But Pine Gap is but an element of our entanglement with United States strategic policy, which is the big thing to be addressed and turned around. 

Recently Andrew Farran wrote (http://johnmenadue.com/andrew-farran-we-should-discuss-pine-gap/)  expressing concern about the increased capabilities of the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap.  It is a big and impressive cart but nothing can be done about it without dealing first with the horse of strategic entanglement with the US.

Pine Gap: near Alice Springs in central Australia.
click on image to enlarge
Source google map

For the record… I am the surviving participant in the negotiations between Australia and the US from December 1972 to February 1973 in relation to Pine Gap, after the election of the Whitlam Government.  I reported directly to Sir Arthur Tange, Secretary of the Defence Department.  The Department of Foreign Affairs was not party to those discussions.

Andrew wrote:

“Initially Australian authorities did not know as much as they would have liked about the…  operations [of defence facilities with the US in Australia, particularly Pine Gap] and saw this as a diminishment of national sovereignty.   Through negotiations in the 1970s, the Whitlam Government obtained the agreement of the US that it would be informed of and required to assent to all operational activity on the part of the facilities to ensure that nothing would be done there that would complicate or prejudice our own diplomatic relations or national interests.”

Governments prior to the Whitlam Government did not regard the bases as diminishing sovereignty, perhaps because they didn’t give it much thought, or had a sense of being joined at the hip to the US.

Prime Minister Whitlam [left] and
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence
Lance Barnard, December 1972 [source]

The Whitlam Government’s position on Pine Gap and other US bases in Australia was set out by Lance Barnard, Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, on the second sitting day of the parliament at the end of February 1973.  http://historichansard.net/hofreps/1973/19730228_reps_28_hor82/

That statement was more slender than it would have been had Whitlam submitted the draft to the whole Cabinet and not to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of Cabinet.  By Whitlam’s account, Senator Lionel Murphy, chair of that committee, had snarled “you can have your bloody bases but I’m not wearing your bloody argument” — the ‘bloody argument’ being that Pine Gap and Nurrungar contributed to war avoidance and strategic balance, an argument extracted from the US with as much ease as wisdom tooth extraction without anaesthesia or consent.  It was my sad duty, having fought with Sir Arthur to get a big part of our text to cover strategic perspective, then to chop the guts out of the text.

I remain on the Pine Gap ‘silent list’ but I can say that the American judgement at the time was that the USSR did not distinguish between big bases and little bases and they did not want to attract attention to Pine Gap and Nurrungar.  For that reason alone there was no mention in the draft speech, contrary to our desires, of the place of Pine Gap and Nurrungar as elements of the National Means of Verification at the core of the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT1) between the US and USSR.

The latter part of the quote from Andrew’s text, above, is not quite correct.  Dealing especially with issues related to the North West Cape communications facility, with very low frequency capability of communicating with and sending commands to submerged nuclear missile submarines, one comes to Article II of the NPT: “Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices OR OF CONTROL OVER such weapons…” [emphasis added].

Time cover 11 February 1974

So we needed something other than ‘control’ and, when Barnard later visited Washington, the accord reached with Defense Secretary Schlesinger was that, as Australia associated itself with United States strategic policy, there arose an entitlement for Australia to have a consultative relationship on strategic policy.  As this process of consultation developed, it vanished on the Australian side down some hole in Defence with which I am only tangentially aware –  though recently looking at US archives for record of the Barnard-Schlesinger meeting, I find that there is nothing mentioned in their record of conversation of a significant new accord having been reached.

Leaving aside the quality, or not, of ongoing strategic consultation, we are now in a very different world from the days of strategic balance between two nuclear superpowers.

Now we have a world of one hyper-power, a hegemon that creates more conflict than it resolves and – by chauvinistic ambition and force structure and deployment momentum – seeks to denude other nuclear powers of security based on possession of second-strike capabilities.  This situation is now complicated by erratic and social discord in the US, though with a Clinton Administration the same hegemonic ambitions would likely be being pursued with greater efficiency.

Of course a clear minded strategic consultation process with the United States would have made that evident and perhaps enabled independent policy judgement by Australia…

Pine Gap is a very substantial element in, but best regarded as part of, a network of capabilities entangling us with the United States. Our involvement in all that network can only be altered by political resolve:

• first to take back command of strategy from the Australian defence force to civilian government leadership,
• second to enter into serious thoughtful strategic discussion with the US about the future of our region and
• third to find our way to more overt and coherent public enunciation of a decent place for Australia in the region as an independent country among peers.

I have doubts about our capacity to do those things, not least given the drift into domestic militarism and continuing thoughtless international adventurism.

The keys must be the commitment of younger people to a democratic system that many of them think is broken, and the capacity of younger people to work to rebuild the system from within.

Korea, next week critical

click to enlarge....source

This, below, was reasonable concern at the time, but the worst did not come about.
The US and the DPRK remain competitive in huffing and puffing and as usual the testing of three minor missiles by the DPRK is more news than this Ulchi Freedom Guardian, see box.

Some more coverage here, here and here. 

Geoff Miller, former ambassador to South Korea, Director-General Office of National Assessment, etc, etc, wrote a piece for John Menadue's blog this morning pointing out that critical moments, determining war or peace on the Korean peninsula, are from Monday 21 August 2017.

I added comment on other sides of the situation, tidying up this version a little from my scrappy writing earlier:

One Response to GEOFF MILLER. Korea: Missiles or exercises or both?

1. Dennis Argall says:

   18 August 2017 at 9:53 AM

   Yes indeed. And while calculated order at the top in Pyongyang, not so in Washington.

   The problem arising is that the asserted objectives of the UN Security Council, others involved with non-proliferation, the US, Australia, the EU, etc… are not going to be achieved. The DPRK is on the threshold of nuclear weapon state status, as much as India, Pakistan and Israel and their certain conviction is that their (regime, family) survival can only be assured by nuclear weapon state status. The NPT has failed in this case, the apparati of non-proliferation now well over 40 years old have failed. The exponents of non-proliferation need now to focus on motivation to nuclear weapon state status, which is an expensive buy for most states. Getting big heads around that will not be easy, harder than getting Australian leaders to read Article 1 of the ANZUS Treaty. Viz: “The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

   Ulchi [the very large US-ROK exercise to which Australia is adding something] begins on Monday 21 August. Trump (and many more) will be focused on his going to a divisive rally in Phoenix Tuesday evening (11am Wednesday, Seoul time). Kim knows that, one hopes.

   General Kelly, White House Chief of Staff was reported to have difficulty finding perspective over the weekend of developments at Charlottesville and was then a distraught bystander during the Wednesday rant at Trump Tower.

   There are three generals in conclave on Korea at this moment, Kelly, Defence Secretary Mattis and National Security Advisor McMaster. McMaster author of a book scathingly critical of civilian ‘interference’ with command decisions at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. Mattis is a marine general and despite his ‘Mad Dog’ labelling reportedly has a history of some ethical concern, presence among soldiers in hard places and relieving of dishonest or less than upright officers. Kelly seems to have been brought into the administration for his unblinking toughness, characteristic of the US Southern Command and perspective towards Latin America. Present at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, Wikipedia records that: “During the initial assault on Baghdad, Kelly was asked by a reporter for The Los Angeles Times if, considering the size of the Iraqi Army and the vast supplies of tanks, artillery and chemical weapons available to Saddam’s forces, he would ever consider defeat. Kelly’s archetypal response was “Hell these are Marines. Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t shit.”

   Timeline and cast.