Australia is sending a frigate, an aircraft and headquarters staff to the US led task force notionally to protect tankers in the Gulf.
I have just made this comment on a paper at The Conversation entitled "Infographic: what is the conflict between the US and Iran about and how is Australia now involved?"
This is what I wrote:
This is what I wrote:
The biggest problem is that they indicate no awareness of regional issues, they seem to have no understanding of ‘the enemy’, no idea of the impossibility of a conventional war with Iran. No sense that escalation is likely to get out of control.. and in no circumstance will we have full control of this deployment.
The deployments of US forces in the middle east are much greater than this suggests and in no way focused on escorting tankers.https://news.usni.org/2019/08/19/usni-news-fleet-and-marine-tracker-aug-19-2019#more-68879[Red Sea, North Arabian Sea, Carrier Strike Group 12]
Under the heading “What is the conflict between Iran and the US about?” the author neglects to mention the long historical rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, thus between Sunni [Saudi] and Shia [Iran]. The headlong rush by Trump to embrace the Saudis in 2017, and sell more weapons, while threatening violence on Iran. The unilateral US disruption of the nuclear agreement (approved by the UN) and threats to allies who trade with Iran. Saudi as the home variously of Al Qaida, IS and the Taliban and guilty of astonishing war crimes in the civil war in Yemen, which is a proxy war with Iran, Saudi and partners supplied in that war by the US and UK. Australia, having been one of the illegal invaders of Iraq in 2003, an act of naive folly that rendered Iraq ungovernable and handed Iraq to Iran, with continuing air force deployments in the middle east, strike aircraft and tanker aircraft to refuel US aircraft in the air. But we shouldn’t mention all that, shouldn’t mention our complicity in the disastrous destabilisation of the middle east in the last two decades.
Israel, not Iran, is the middle east country with a formidable nuclear weapon force, never mentioned by nice people; the US currently assisting Saudi Arabia with nuclear capability. Iran the only country ever to defeat Israel, via proxy Hizbollah, 1982-2000 and 2006. Iran geographically bigger in size than Germany, France and the UK combined. Iran with close relations with Russia and China and with millennia of experience in strategy, the most skilful inheritor of the terrorist fervour begun by Lawrence of Arabia.
The US has a large base in Qatarhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Udeid_Air_Base… which deserved mention, as does also the fact that after Trump’s visit Saudi Arabia and the UAE and cohort broke off relations with Qatar and closed the border and sea and air space to Qatar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9319_Qatar_diplomatic_crisis
… whereafter Qatar, host to the major US presence, has steadily built relations with Iran and Turkey (other things aside, for food), Turkey buying missiles now from Russia despite US protests. Turkey currently advancing again into Syria against US interests. So the big US base in the middle east is in a country mainly linked to ‘the other side’.
Can someone in office explain all that to the smiling people at the top of the article. Or if they know all that they should explain it all. Explain it better than did Minister Reynolds in the presence of the US Secretaries of State and Defense recently
“The request that the United States has made is a very serious one and it is a complex one. That’s why we are currently giving this request very serious consideration. We will ultimately, as we always do, decide what is in our own sovereign interests, and we certainly discussed this issue during our ministerial consultations. But again, no decision has yet been made.”
http://cephalophoria.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-pompeo-view.html
The concept of and description of this intervention by Australia as in the article and as apparently in the minds of the worthies in the top photo is utter folly and very dangerous. The prospect of finding ourselves in a wider war, far beyond the nonsense argument offered, is high.
The reality is that government and parliament have for too long relegated strategic thinking to the defence force. The Australian Defence Force is largely embedded in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. We are not an independent country.
