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:
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.
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
… 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.”
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.
This is mainly about China, but more. We have excluded ourselves in many ways from the engines of modernity in Asia and more widely by our recalcitrance on so many issues and our unwillingness to engage with the new. We are not of such weight for others to care. We demonstrate an incapacity to maintain a progressive society in Australia. That fact and its consequences for our standing are the greatest threats to our national security. We need to be aware of and sensitive to large issues affecting China.
Recent events in Hong Kong may have serious impact in China. The news will not fail to arrive throughout China. It is difficult to know what the consequences will be.
A break-up of the Chinese state would be dangerous for the world, destructive of peace, the environment and climate, destructive of the world economy. Many of those who speak ill of China these days seem to have attachment to fissiparous causes that would eat China from the edges or in social fabric. Some are caught in the disease of military competition. Some seem driven simply by psychological impulses, apprehensive of Yellow Peril.
A lot of interpretation of China and future China is projection by people from inside their heads, imagining China in their own form or that of other great powers, such as the US or Russia. This is naive and dangerous. It is also odd to consider the future in terms of a zero-sum game, a world in which there is no gain, just a win-loss between competitors.
There are lots of accessible facts which could illuminate the perspectives of the willing.
To begin, a simple comparison of Chinese life in the winter of 1978-9 with the winter of 2018-9— see these two videos.
—Xi Jinping’s New Year Address, 2018-9. To whatever extent one discounts such a presentation as government propaganda (like the Queen’s Speech) it’s impressive and reflective of what is officially labelled Xi Jinping Thought. I am not and have never been an apologist for China; I am an advocate of looking and thinking, starting from facts.
Xi Jinping comes from a family notably progressive in perspective, his father Xi Zhongxun known for seeking political rather than military outcomes in the stabilisation of China’s west seventy years ago, purged first by Mao when Vice Premier in the early 1960s, important to the world for having pioneered China’s opening to the world in Guangdong and its Special Economic Zones in the early 1980s, and for having supported Hu Yaobang’s liberalism that led to Hu being purged by Deng in 1987 and the Tiananmen situation of 1989, Xi Senior purged then again. The family home invaded and smashed and a daughter murdered by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution in1966, Xi Junior sent to the countryside and thereafter held back for a time as a ‘princeling’, a child of a former leader.
It is useful to look back at President Xi’s 2014 visit to Australia. After addressing the Australian Parliament, Xi went to Tasmania, to complete having visited all Australian states. The Hobart Mercury’s banner headline read “Welcome Mr President” and at Constitution Dock a Chinese icebreaker, decked out in red bunting, was docked near a visiting Australian submarine. Mostly the hysterical shift reflects US perspectives and shoves and the internal momentum of Australian Defence Force integration into US operations and perhaps the Yellow Peril mind state, which has been with us throughout Australian history. I note that the countries of Southeast Asia have adopted more subtle approaches to the issues in the South China Sea which directly concern them.
Nothing comparable in recent Chinese history stands between the events of 1989 and those recently in Hong Kong. Beijing has created ill-will and fear in Hong Kong by kidnapping writers and publishers from Hong Kong. That overshadows the relevance of an extradition arrangement to deal with major crime and corruption. (I suggest the changes at Sydney’s Barangaroo development, caused by decline in the big Chinese gamblers, can also be sheeted home to Xi’s anti-corruption machine.)
Look in that text for the ‘Three New Dreams’. The ideas exist, now as in the 1980s. They will not be allowed to well up in China. I note recent surveys indicating that an increasing number of Australians are fed up with politics and just want to get on with their lives. So also a high proportion of people in China.
The peril in contestations, in Hong Kong, the UK Conservative Party and too many other current turbulences is that the headline focus is on the swirl, rather than outcome. Whether the ruckus is generated by the leaders, the media, social media, or popular restlessness is not clear, they intertwine. But because of this state of affairs we are surrounded by great inefficiencies in the way of achieving economic decency, social equity and environmental survival.
From 1980, as mentioned in the essay to which I linked above, we sought to assist China create systems of government and regulation to enable transition to modernity. Those efforts in retrospect were modest pieces of string compared with the extraordinary tapestry of infrastructures being built under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). See this statement from the April 2019 leaders meeting:
And yet media and public discussion focuses simply on the assertion that China is seeking to push countries into a debt trap—without dignifying such discussion with comparison with US or European colonial entrapment of poorer countries, even though perhaps subconsciously, expectations of China are driven by those more familiar bastardries.
We have excluded ourselves in many ways from the engines of modernity in Asia and more widely by our recalcitrance on so many issues and our unwillingness to engage with the new. We are not of such weight for others to care. We demonstrate an incapacity to maintain a progressive society in Australia. That fact and its consequences for our standing are the greatest threats to our national security.
on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s speech at Peking University in 2008 is a more extensive and eloquent discussion of my concern expressed previously that we should as friends be able to speak about things that are of concern; discordant notes in relations. But we have now taken ourselves away into a corner from which we yell: from friendship to a place without influence or basis for good engagement.
There has been feverish interest in the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen incident, in Australia with some focus on repression in China, fuelling antagonism towards China. In this essay I want to provide context that is lacking: in the evolution of economic reform and liberalism in China, in the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations and regional strategy and China’s united front with the US (and Australia) against Vietnam and the Soviet Union.
On the morning of Sunday 4 June 1989 I was woken early in Canberra by a request from the Sydney Morning Herald to write their editorial page background article on why this event was happening right then in Beijing, focused in Tiananmen Square. So I did, for the 5 June issue, setting out background of the enormous transformation under way in China, indebted for perspective to a comment made to me some days earlier by a middle level Chinese official, a friend from Beijing, trailing behind a senior visitor, buttonholing me to press upon me not to be complacent as in his view (which in the SMH I adopted as my own view) the leadership in Beijing did not have the capacity to comprehend or manage the situation.
On 5 June, in my Parliament House office as head of the research service, I received a call from Stephen FitzGerald, first Australian ambassador to the Peoples Republic of China, to discuss holding a memorial service. I said it must be in Parliament House and presided over by the Prime Minister and that it would be best if the approach came from him, not from me working in the building. And so we found ourselves seated behind Prime Minister Hawke at that extraordinary memorial event.
I offer that personal story to affirm my deep awareness of it all, on the day. But nothing happens just in a day, ever.
Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party
and Bob Hawke, Australian Prime Minister
in Western Australia, 1985, at the Channar site,
where China's first overseas resources joint venture would be. Source, The Age.
The upwelling of protest and demand for freedom in Beijing in the months leading to 4 June followed the death of Hu Yaobang, purged by Deng Xiaoping in 1987 from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party because of his projects to advance political and creative liberalism. Hu Yaobang visited Australia in 1985, accompanied by the head of the party secretariat Hu Qili. It was my great privilege to spend quite a lot of time with the two Hus before during and after that visit.
Years before, the two Hus became known to some senior party members in Beijing as the erhu literally meaning ‘two hus’ but also the name of that two-stringed traditional Chinese instrument that can dominate any concert performance.
Before the crackdown, there was a meeting of heavyweight leaders on 25 May.
Hu Qili attended that meeting and was alone or only one of two to vote against martial law, He was pushed into obscure work. Zhao Ziyang, who like Hu had made his first western country visit as Premier to Australia in 1983, had succeeded Hu as general secretary. Zhao had met with the protestors and pleaded for patience; he did not attend the 25 May meeting. He spent the rest of his days under house arrest. His memoirs Prisoner of the State are important reading for understanding the times. See also the Wikipedia entries for these three leaders to get a sense of the scale of history and struggle.
This from YouTube is Zhao Ziyang at 4.51am on 19 May,
in Tiananmen Square, surrounded by and addressing students.
A Chinese vice minister said to me one night in 1984 as we endured a cultural performance together in Beijing that despite the battering days of the Cultural Revolution the very worst time was not then but after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai in January 1976, when leadership was uncertain and at risk of falling into the hands of the so called Gang of Four, drivers of the Cultural Revolution. We had come out of hell, he said, just for a few years…and here in front of us was very real prospect of falling back into it again. When Mao died in September 1976, the Gang of four were arrested and later tried.
Zhou had held the country together during and despite the Cultural Revolution. The death of this beloved leader, China’s ‘first son’, had been followed by an upsurge of popular feeling, quickly suppressed. A precursor to events in 1989.
It was Deng Xiaoping who, secured from prison after the death of Mao, led the often-ruthless push for reform that followed and continues. I had in an annex to a 1980 cabinet submission that shaped the modern relationship with China expressed the view that Deng was the second most divisive figure in modern Chinese history, after Mao.
My time as ambassador in Beijing was cut short by illness not to be diagnosed properly for decades. Lots of visitors got sick in China in those days. On my last day in Beijing, August 1985, I had lunch with Hu Qili. Sitting beside him among a few others I said it seemed that he was making progress with organising his special party conference that I knew was to deal with difficult issues. In his impeccable English and with his wry humour he asked: “why would you think that?” Lamely, I said I thought I had read something in the paper, whereupon he said with a grin, for all the table to hear: “Oh well, I suppose you could say I’m making as much progress as would be possible under the leadership of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.”
Emboldened, I ventured to compare him with Gorbachev, with this observation: “A year ago with the USSR stuck and China proceeding with reform, the question for any ambassador here was what would Sino-Soviet relations be like in ten years. But now China has its young leader and the Soviet Union also has its young leader and new questions arise as both pursue reform policies.” I had expected a gentle push-off at my comparison but no, he said this. “Your question is important. It is very important for the world that Gorbachev succeed. But I am concerned that whereas I have support from senior leaders, I am not sure whether Gorbachev has such support”.
Not quite as events would unfold.
That gives you a sense of the times. We were one evening Hu Yaobang’s guests at dinner in Mao’s sumptuous former rooms, a thank you for hospitality in Australia. The Hus were endeavouring to process and work out what to do, in the wake of an unprecedented outburst of English-style soccer hooliganism at the Beijing stadium the night before. Their only thoughts were in the direction of trying to understand and manage, none of the style of the Australian state premier riding with President Johnson in motorcade in Sydney, confronted by demonstrators, allegedly shouted “run over the bastards!” in 1966. Every day and evening in Beijing, dealing with senior people discussing very complex issues positively; to wake in the morning to the Radio Australia news which I described as mostly bottom-pimple comparing, feuding and unconstructive.
Gorbachev had launched two programs, glasnost meaning political and cultural liberalism and perestroika, economic reform. Deng was in charge of economic reform in China, as supreme leader above party and state structures, with Zhao as premier, he who pioneered the ‘responsibility system’ in agriculture in Sichuan in 1978, a shift from every brick, chook and egg belonging to the state and the peasant world of 900 million eating from the iron rice bowl, to a system where the farmer met a quota for the state and everything else he produced was private property. Hu Yaobang as party general secretary sought to command a program of liberalisation, or as the Hus were to style it in 1986, sankuan, the party’s three [san] principles for ideological-cultural affairs, development of “generosity, tolerance and relaxation.” [see an explanation of how this evolved in a document I have pasted here: http://cephalophoria.blogspot.com/2019/06/political-thought-in-china.html ]
As Hu had experienced in 1984 at a conference of writers and artists, and as Zhao Ziyang was to experience at Tiananmen, the lively response from the proponents of liberty to this sankuan was a chorus of don’t be absurd, you are not speaking of liberty, you are speaking of lengthening our chains. You have no right to define and limit liberty. As encountered in other societies, idealists grasping defeat from the jaws of victory by fervent adherence to rigid principle. On the other side of the situation, in 1986 as in 1989, dinosaurs in the party did not want to be disadvantaged by any favours to the liberal crowd and brought their venerable and disgruntled case against Hu to Deng, who removed Hu from office in 1987.
In the land of the hardnosed, especially in Washington, Hu was just Deng’s puppet anyway and Deng was the one to open the economy and deliver business opportunity. This perspective, while commonplace in uglier dynamics of international relations ignored the real volatilities in China, the rising urban ambitions as the economy rose but rose more slowly than in the countryside. Historical family aspiration for the “two things that go round and the one that stands up” (sewing machine, bicycle, transistor radio) were no longer enough. From around 1984, children had been swung higher, walking with parents. The sea of uniform blue and green Mao jackets were modified by coloured socks. Couples cuddled on the Bund, by the river in Shanghai, in the evening. Young people asked to practice English they had learned on the radio. The China Daily, first English language paper, whose editors had trained and whose first dummy issue had been printed at The Age in Melbourne, with scepticism printed material to support Radio Australia language programs; sold instantly. Radio Australia conducted calligraphy contests, one for China, one for Japan. 200 entries arrived in Melbourne from Japan. Ten thousand from China, posted airmail. An artist in residence at the ACTU knew that modern art would unfold much more vigorously in China than Japan. He dreamed of murals on the Beijing subway, but we never got to that. A society coming alive. I said to a senior person, a friend that I would believe China safe, the people unbruised, when the apples in the Friendship Store were not bruised, which they always seemed to be. Care, respect, safety, society, culture, warmth, confidence.
Deng had form as ruthless with force against party ructions in the mid-1970s. In 1978-79 he first encouraging the Democracy Wall movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Wall to achieve leverage among his party opponents: to get to Washington, get relations with the US normalised (the US embassy from Taipei to Beijing), get a united front with the US (and Australia) against Vietnam and the USSR… then to smash the Democracy Wall movement and launch a small invasion of Vietnam.
In early 1989, Deng and others in the leadership were confronted by unmanageable pressures created by the frustration of social demand, gagged with the purge of Hu Yaobang—old leaders, with their fibres and fears shaped by other great upheavals, times of war and destruction, including the struggle with the Gang of Four mentioned above.
Deng had been working to normalise relations with Moscow but that was now running in difficult directions. They were aghast at what Gorbachev had done. Gorbachev was coming to Beijing in mid-May 1989. Gorbachev, whose country was obviously about to fall apart. Gorbachev: whose empire in Eastern Europe was about to evaporate. Gorbachev: who was about to lose his job. Gorbachev who thus represented everything that China historically and now fears most, disintegration of a giant and diverse nation… and everything dinosaur party leaders fear: disemployment, disentitlement and retribution.
But above all else, the states of affairs in other big places (the US, USSR, India, Japan, etc.) provided no leads, no pointers; no models for running a giant country through dramatic change. China was on its own and at grave risk.
Gorbachev could not be given the normal welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square, occupied by demonstrators. But he did go out to meet the demonstrators. Then he went home, to lose job and country in half a year. Then three US warships made a friendly visit to Shanghai and departed. Then the bunch of most powerful in the party met on 25 May, declared martial law and set in train what was to happen on 4 June.
Our Cabinet-approved policy framework for relations with China from 1980, when China’s reforms had begun, was to assist China to build institutions to establish civil society and responsible government. Lots of practical things were done. But…it is in the nature of Australian political leaders that they do not like difficult issues on the table in discussions with the mighty. The elephant in the room was that warm public opinion in Australia would, as relations became more complex, depend upon people-to-people relations and evaluations and especially how Australians saw the rights of people in China. My suggestions that this be gently flagged were not entertained.
At that time Australians were per capita the most numerous visitors to China. There was warmth of substance.
Our desire was to build a relationship valued by whatever prospective government in China. But then, just as Chinese leaders could not cope with the 1989 rebellion, so we could not, government-to-government, cope with the aftermath. Except that when Howard became prime minister all the broad scope of relations launched by Fraser in 1980 disappeared from view in preoccupation with the money, the waterfall of income from resources sales to China, thrown largely into tax breaks whereas it could have modernised infrastructure. From which time the absurd mantra: we have a great ally over there, a great trading partner over here. How inadequate and disrespectful.
In the absence of Australian leaders building wider understanding of China and the importance of our relationship with China, and in the absence of leaders articulating an independent Australian view of the world, we arrive now at a point where public opinion seems driven by ancient hostilities and shallow current affairs reports.
Before appointment as Australia’s ambassador to China in 1984, Dennis Argall was from 1970 variously, among other jobs, China desk officer, head of the China and Korea Section, head of the North Asia Branch and acting head of the North and South Asia Division of Foreign Affairs.
There is no sign of political enthusiasm to grasp the need for coherent national strategy, but basic principles need to be put in place and three particulars need urgent attention.
Australia’s international strategy has somehow slipped to mean, in political and public minds, military strategy. This is wrong and needs to be corrected. It should be central to Australian strategy that we seek war avoidance and pursuit of Australian interests by non-military means. This should be obvious but it’s not how things stand. Resort to the use of force needs to be put back in its place as an instrument of policy, bearing in mind Clausewitz’s admonition that statesmen need to be aware that this instrument of policy, having been embarked upon, tends to drive out policy and pursue its own ends. The question must remain “what are we trying to do here, what do we need?” rather than “what will we do with these submarines that will be irrelevant to security before they slide into the water?” (substitute aircraft, other weapon systems and the overall comprehensive integration of Australian defence forces into interoperability with US forces.) Which is the brain, which is the tail of this dog?
I should perhaps stop there. If focus goes towards that kind of thinking all else should fall into place.
But there are three urgent needs.
1: The United States Government needs to be told clearly that Australia will not go to war with Iran. One needs to say such things while they are hypothetical. Leaving aside arguing this way and that on issues, such a war would not work. Some basics:
Iran area 1.6 million square kilometers. Just a bit less than the combined land area of the UK 240,000, France 640,000, Germany 357,000 and Spain 506,000.
Iran culturally complex. They already had very complex societies and governance, agriculture, industry and defence capacity long before the brave English King Richard the Lionheart paid to use the flag of St George of Genoa to sail safely along the scary Mediterranean to whack Muslims. To go to war now with Iran, leaving out of the equation the use of nuclear weapons, would be like the old joke about Russia attacking China: “on day 1 the Russians advanced and took a million prisoners; on days two and three they did the same again… and on day four they surrendered.” Ludicrous, foolish to contemplate…but inasmuch as Bolton dreams about it, we need to say “no, not us, not this time” even before thinking through the Iran issues which do not compel to violence. It is a curious situation to have Trump as best hope against madness.
2: US and China. Interesting that while Jeff Bezos who made Amazon owns the Washington Post, Jack Ma, his China equivalent, who established Alibaba, now owns the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. A better paper since Murdoch gave it up.
On 21 May 2019 the SCMP gave substantial coverage to President Xi Jinping’s speech commemorating the Long March, in which for a year, in 1934-35, the Chinese Communist Party walked away from conflict to survival and a future.
A Long March in which Bob Hawke’s great friend. General Secretary Hu Yaobang, was once left on the battlefield triaged to die, and on another occasion was sentenced to death — Hu, whose purging and later death in 1989 precipitated the popular push for freedom in Tiananmen Square, after the crushing of which Hawke wept at a service in Parliament House in Canberra and granted residence to a host of Chinese in Australia at that time, the second wave of Chinese to shape Australia. I am old enough to have seen the anti-Chinese yellow peril advertising by conservatives in the 1950s, wise enough to recognise the old-as-Australia hysterical nonsense in the tide of anti-Chinese sentiment being whipped up now in Australia. We have to get back to the values in the Australia-China relationship as they were before they vanished under money and thoughtlessness in the Howard years. We don’t have to agree with China on everything, just as we should not have to agree with the US on everything. The mark of a valuable country, a valuable friend, is possession of clear mind, with confidence and ability to express views that are fair, clear and directed at positive outcomes. Views that add, not just mimic. A vice foreign minister in Beijing, one night as we politely endured a long cultural event together in 1985, said: “we have always appreciated the way you have dealt with difficult issues. You have made Australia’s interests clear and Australia’s views are seen by us in that light and unlike the United States Australia has dealt with issues calmly, unlike our situation with the United States, where issues too often are inflamed and insoluble.
We tell, or we should tell, our children such principles. Easy. Can we get back to that sort of practical decency. Back from in the immaturity of social media and the general rubbish of much mainstream news in Australia about the region, our attention dragged to saucy margins. Can we focus on the fact that China’s population is 56 times greater than Australia’s population; that China has land borders with fourteen other countries; that the fifty five ethnic minority populations in China number around 120 million, about five Australias. Imagine our border security chiefs dealing with all that!
China is positioning itself for likely failure of sensible negotiation with the Trump Administration. Xi Jinping has called on China to undertake another Long March. We do not know to what extent China may need to discard its western financial assets. China holds over a trillion dollars in US Treasury Notes. The prospect is not of flamboyant shedding of such assets, but we should expect China to continue as now to pick apart dependence on the dollar in international finance. There is a measure of hysteria about the BRI, China’s Belt and Road Initiative. As noted above China is a continental state, with borders with fourteen other countries and long traditions and modern practical advantages in rail and other ground connection with the world. White globalism has a history of talking down to China. China now expects others to understand its five principles of peaceful coexistence. This is a useful little paper from Columbia University on that.
Contrast with the dominant meme in US strategic thinking, as first articulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan, first commandant of the US Naval War College. Thousands of metres of writing and doctrine-building about that but at its core, the idea that there can only be one dominant navy, one dominant power. As articulated not least by former president Clinton to the 2012 Democratic Party nominating convention: “We can and we will be great again.” That’s a dream, a problem-building dream, not a basis for strategy that works unless for example you really just want to be National Security Advisor to the President and have a big horse.
There is a big clash between how China and the US see the world. We need to be focused on defining Australian interests and the weight we give to negotiation and dispute resolution on the one hand and violence on the other. In a letter to then Foreign Minister Downer in 2003, I wrote:
I have become increasingly of the view… that it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else – certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ – to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading.
I also said then that
I am … of the view that since September 2001 we have been watching events and strategic responses unfolding as at the outbreak of war in 1914:
Delusions of moral rectitude.
Defence of imperial status quo.
Nothing but narrow military options.
Resort to alliances, hostility to thought.
Vilification of the enemy, climate of fear and promotion of paranoia.
Simplistic notions of victory, expectations of speedy end.
Failure to address real wider issues.
Enveloping sea of violence.
Alex didn’t reply. The problems still swell. We are so stuck that we have lost track of how permissible vocabulary and attitude have shrunk since 2001 as also we fail to see that the diverse horrors around the planet as they proliferate are directly comparable to the out-of-control mental frameworks and eruptions of WW1. As a nation we shut up fifteen years ago, as told to do. But the wrongs against which people spoke in 2003 are there still and are larger, smothered though they may be by downloadable pap projectable on finer and finer TV screens, far from reality.
3: Indonesia
Somehow we have to have a brain-reset about Indonesia. Away from cheap holidays to understanding that this country next door with ten times Australia’s population has a GINI coefficient (measure of inequality) not far from Australia’s. Its GDP will very soon pass Australia’s. Its affluent consumer class will soon be eight times Australia’s population. Had Indonesia at any time pursued adventurist power projection policies like Australia’s we would have fainted long ago and gone home to mamma. It is amazing that sensible nearby countries dealing with huge problems in development have continued to take seriously almost all Australian leaders, or at least receive them politely. If we cannot advance in prosperity with Indonesia then we will as a medical professional suggested to me some time ago, be the white trash of Asia. Many of us in the foreign service from the 1950s and 1960s, when national perspectives were too often disrespectful and harmful sought to advance Australian interests in the world positively, avoiding the manner and style of Apartheid era South Africa in arrogance and ignorance. We have to make up for lost time.
Dennis Argall’s career in public service was cut short by illness. For a time he was head of the parliament’s research service, before that in domestic, defence and foreign affairs departments and overseas postings including as Counselor and Acting Minister in Washington and as Ambassador to China.
This was published on John Menadue's blog, having been written on 19 May 2019, the day after national elections delivered an unexpected and severe loss for the Australian Labor Party.
DENNIS ARGALL. Lessons and thoughts for Labor’s future
There is a lot of emotion in the wake of disaster for Labor in the federal elections on 18 May 2019. There will be forensic examinations and recriminations. There is good prospect of a Labor Government after the next elections… if…
Labor must go steadily and clearly and must look like a government in brief exile.
In retrospect the massive plate of reforms on offer from Labor was too big. Not just because it was a big target for Morrison to slander requiring a reverberation of detailed responses, but also because people just don’t cope with a lot of change and new ideas at once. That should have been a lesson from Whitlam, whose fall derived to a significant degree from his creation of visions, plans, programs creating whirlwinds and vortices. There should have been a lesson there from Hawke, who in success nearly always had just three points or three objectives and often enough did not get to the third.
It did not help that Keating, making points of importance about China and the state of China policy and perception in Australia, did not remember that his own electoral failure was in good part contributed to by his love of ad hominem excess. Which obliged Shorten to rebut what Keating said, placing Shorten in a potential difficult situation when in government. It was not Keating’s election.
There was a problem for the supporters in the campaign, at least in NSW, in that an online team in the NSW Labor office was allowed for a time (as throughout the state election in March) to write frequently, impolitely and less than coherently with money demands. Apparatchiks are to be invisible and unheard; and should be polite. Mercifully the leaders took over the message and wrote intelligently and informatively.
There will be much mulled over within Labor. A leader needs to be appointed without rancour and a shadow ministry needs to be a sensible and orderly force. As experience of being in government retreats, potential for disorder grows. It will be important for the new caucus to be orderly and disciplined. Review and refocus will take time. The team must not be baited and tempted by the 24 hour news cycle. Let the Morrison ‘team’ be embroiled in that.
Morrison shares some qualities with Trump, but he does not possess a tyrannical capacity to sack people right and left. Carry this thought into the problems governing in minority, with cross bench people some of whom could eat Morrison for breakfast when Morrison has more to do than bluster. First also, there is a coalition agreement to renegotiate.
I hope that the nation may realise that they did something less than best. A disciplined Labor caucus will surely have more sense than to suggest that Morrison supporters have been a ‘basket of deplorables’, but it will be generally important to leave it to people to review and rue. In 75 years I have come to realise that I have rarely met anyone who thought his or her opinion was wrong. People won’t be badgered not least because they won (Bob Brown may now understand this).
In its sea of policy papers, the Labor party lost identity with community at large, despite opposite intentions. Ours is a many-ways-divided nation. Finding a coherent package of policies going forward is difficult, but there will need to something better than rubbery mumble on the hard stuff.
We can review the calamitous issues in this very recent election, but that has to be put behind; the next war will be different.
As a particular point, there was absent from this election any show of statesmanship and leadership on international issues. Despite dogmas to the contrary, it seems to me that major elections that elect important governments in Australia have had international vision and inspiring leadership woven into them. That was at the core of our period as a positive multicultural society, admired in many places including China. Who would regards us now as an exemplary civil society?
Try to run a better parliament. The adversarial rowdiness is at the core of public disdain and of course is contributory to adversarial rowdiness and violence in society. With Morrison willing to spout irrelevance and distortion, it’s not easy, but standards are essential to be seen as a decent alternative.
There is real possibility, given the velocity of everything these days, that Labor could form government after the next elections. But Labor must go steadily and clearly and must look like a government in brief exile.
Dennis Argall’s career covered domestic departments and foreign service, overseas postings including Washington and as ambassador to China. After the disastrous (for Labor) 1977 elections, Dennis returned from Washington to head the office of the new deputy leader of the Labor Party, Lionel Bowen, who later became Deputy Prime Minister to Hawke.
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
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.
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.
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).
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?
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).
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
Cumings The Korean War. The Modern Library 2010
O’Neill The Ongoing Disaster of Australia’s Policy in Afghanistan johnmenadue.com 16 May 2017
O’Neill Trump and Afghanistan: a Hidden Agenda journal-neo.org 25 August 2017.
Tanter Australia in America’s Iraq 3.0 Nautilus Institute 2014
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?"
