When the ‘war on terror’ was only seven years old, an Australian former Ambassador to Beijing pointed to its risks and costs for Australia. Garry Woodard warned that rather than protecting ‘national security’, such an open-ended war could widen our obligations to the US and narrow our options in dealing with China.
Alison Broinowski
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The military-industrial-intelligence-security complex
In 1961 President Eisenhower warned that a vast and permanent ‘military-industrial complex’ could produce ‘the disastrous rise of misplaced power’. Earlier, US Senators Robert La Follette and J. William Fulbright also foresaw the dangers of militarisation. Now we have a military/industrial/security/intelligence complex, and it is dangerous. (more…)
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What else have the Archives got?
Jenny Hocking’s persistence has revealed the ‘Palace Letters’ between Canberra and London which the National Archives didn’t want Australians to see. If there were other exchanges with Washington and Langley they may be even more reluctant.
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Australia-‘The most oppressive of the Western Democracies’
When there’s a concerted attack on the interests of the Australian mainstream media they will rise in joint defence of journalists’ freedom. But they are slow to support five other Australians who have already lost their freedom.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. The crisis is political too.
In his almost daily televised updates, Scott Morrison’s successive rescue packages turn conservative orthodoxy on its head, and without resorting to Trumpian monologues. Yet his response to the international questions shows no new thinking. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Outstaying our welcome in Iraq.
As US installations in Iraq come under increasing attack, the message that they are no longer needed is clear. Camp Taji near Baghdad, where a few hundred Australians are still based, has been hit by missiles in recent days. How much longer before they get out?
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Organised violence: the US and China compared
The world has seen the rise and fall of some 150 empires. That number doesn’t even include the United States, whose unacknowledged empire includes more than 800 military bases in some 70 countries.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Quiet Australians wait for the truth
Forty-four Australian servicemen have been killed in action or have died in accidents since our forces went to Afghanistan in 2001, and since the deployments to Iraq and Syria. But in that period, at least ten times that number of Australians serving or no longer in the military have died of suicide. This week, former Commander Kevin Frost was the latest.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Friends of Assange, at last.
Influential Australians are suddenly stirring in support of Julian Assange, who will face extradition to the US and several life sentences unless political intervention heads it off. Is it too late?
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. October and a discontented world
This is the October of our discontent. Suddenly, its manifestations are everywhere. Unless the few in power heed the shouts, slogans, and strikes of the many demanding change, worse may occur.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI Iran: Maximum Falsification
Step by predictable step, President Trump has been tempting Iran to come out and fight. Most of the mainstream Western media have obliged him by suggesting that every recent hostile event in the Gulf is Iran’s doing, and have dismissed protests from Tehran that these reports are lies. But so far, the US hasn’t got a coalition.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Julian Assange – ‘Find Justice and Make It Quick’ (American Herald Tribune 28-9-19)
With the US on the warpath and Australia sending military, air, and naval support for American activities in the Gulf, three Australian and British nationals are being made an example of in Iran, where they are in solitary confinement on charges of espionage. British politicians have been quick to accuse Iran of ‘hostage diplomacy’, saying the allegations against the academic and two tourists are ‘clearly false’. Australia, which still has an Embassy in Tehran, is making representations on their behalf. But Iran’s response is unlikely to be magnanimous or quick. (more…)
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Julian Assange One case dismissed: one to go
From the Australian mainstream media most readers won’t know it, but on 29 July a Federal Court in New York dismissed the Democratic National Committee’s case against Julian Assange for publishing leaked internal emails in 2016. (more…)
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‘Australia agrees to everything’
Australia and the United States see the world through the same eyes, Scott Morrison told sailors on USS Ronald Reagan during the Talisman Sabre war games on 12 July.But after hearing what Mike Pompeo and John Joseph Mearsheimer had to say in Australia in recent days, we might conclude that if our eyes are the same, the world we see is different.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Who are the terrorists, Iran or the US?
In April 2014 John Howard surprised an audience in Sydney by saying that war with Iran would be next. He didn’t know then about Syria but his alarming prediction about Iran looks like coming true.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. How long to extradition for Assange?
WikiLeaks watchers had been expecting it for weeks, but when news came on 11 April that Ecuador had revoked Julian Assange’s asylum, a collective shudder went around the extended community. Next day the pictures appeared, and they made it worse. Images familiar to everyone of a young man waving from the Embassy balcony were suddenly replaced by the sight of a puffy-faced, balding, white-bearded victim of seven years on the inside. It was rather like when instead of the early Osama bin Laden, the world saw the new reality – a stooped, grizzled invalid, soon to be shot down by Navy SEALS. ‘I told you so,’ Assange quipped. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI Integrity ,initiative and imposed ignorance
The US and UK are still fighting the cold war in new ways about which Australians know little.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI Beware the Ides of March in Christchurch
It is better when a terrorist is not shot dead but arrested. So we eventually learn what is his – usually male – motivation, and governments and the courts are then able to respond rationally. But Brenton Tarrant made his motivation quite clear, documenting his crime in Christchurch with a 74-page manifesto, as well as filming his running online commentary. Few would care if police had shot him, taking to 50 the total who died on the Ides, Friday 15 March.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Australian values in free fall.
What Australians value and what they fear are not, apparently, clear to the latest Prime Minister. Scott Morrison’s election campaign, which began at the National Press Club on 11 February, failed to assure voters that his government understands either what they resent or what they want.Two days later, the Coalition lost a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives. ‘Thisis historic’, Labor was quick to email its supporters. ‘No Federal Government has lost a vote since 1929. An election could be called any second. This is a Government in full free fall’.
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Most favoured notions just take time.
There are said to be no votes in defence or foreign affairs in Australia. Years of bipartisanship on both, and an Alliance that is unquestionable, have disempowered debate. The time for change may be in 2019. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. The latest hobgoblins.
On the eve of an APEC meeting, with impeccable timing, Australia’s lack of foreign policy independence was once again on display for our Asian neighbours: mimicry of US decisions, militarism abroad, securitised borders, containment of China, and fear of Islam. Indonesians and Malaysians recognise the pattern from long experience. Another terrorist event in Melbourne could not have been better timed to reinforce it. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Whose rules? What order?
As baby diplomats we learned always to vote in good company. Countries, we understood, were judged by the company they kept. Not any more. The countries Australia rubs shoulders with now, and the hips we are joined at, make people who used to represent Australia overseas wonder how much worse it can get. Other Australians who come back after a decade abroad say they can’t believe what we have become. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Afghanistan: Set And Forget.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. (Sun Tzu, The Art of War) (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. ‘Truth isn’t truth’
While Australia was transfixed by the events of 21-24 August, troubles for another leader were mounting in Washington. Turnbull lost the Lodge, and Trump has not yet lost the White House, but a common actor in both dramas remains the Murdoch media. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Many happy returns of al-Qaeda.
On 11 August 2018 the members of what became al-Qaeda met in Peshawar, Pakistan to form the movement which is now 30 years old. With Osama bin Laden’s money, political vision, religious fervour, and capacity as a modern communicator, it changed the course of the 21st century. Even though Its profile is lower now, there is still a lot below the horizon. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. A law to end all wars?
Hamlet was depressed about the law’s delay. To this day, legal processes take a notoriously long time, and international ones take even longer. International lawyers, and the world, have been waiting at least since 1998 for the crime of aggression to be activated. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. The conference season begins, in denial.
On the last weekend in June, the ALP will hold its NSW Conference. The agenda is packed with items including indigenous, community and country issues, education, health, and social justice. Right at the end is ‘Australia and the World.’ This is to be expected, as State governments aren’t responsible for foreign affairs and defence – although they do have to consider treaties. But resolutions from the NSW ALP will go forward to Labor’s National Conference in December, where they could influence the more vigorous debate you might expect about the growing list of problems facing Australia. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Banks wake up to their responsibilities: will governments be next?
Australians are watching transfixed as the Financial Services Royal Commission gives a running report on a reactive, insular, complacent, greedy culture which has broken its own rules and failed its customers for years. With the people’s verdict looming at the next election, Ministers who last year resisted holding the Royal Commission now proclaim a ‘wakeup call for every director, particularly those who are the custodians of the savings and shareholdings of Australians’ (Scott Morrison, SMH 2 February 2018: 1). The salaries and bonuses their top executives receive put politicians’ remuneration in the shade. The billions Australia spends on defence and on war, huge sums as they are, don’t compare with the combined turnover of Australia’s biggest financial institutions. (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Anzackery and the preening peloton.
When John Kenneth Galbraith was Kennedy’s Ambassador to India in the early 1960s, he reported that he had inspected a guard of honour and they seemed to him to be fine. His dry wit was lacking when the Murdoch media reported the safe return from Afghanistan of Pauline Hanson, her colleague Brian Burston and Labor’s Senator Kimberley Kitching. There they had inspected a Bushmaster MR6 multi-role armoured vehicle (built in Australia by the French company Thales, which makes a counterpart in Canada) and a Chinook helicopter (made in the US by Boeing). They were briefed on the ‘security situation’ and took a three-day intensive training course, including instruction on how to ‘handle firearms’ (The Australian, 20 April 2018: 5). (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. War on demand
The UK and the US moved closer this week to enabling their governments to bypass legal and democratic processes in committing forces to war, virtually anywhere, at any time and continuously. Australian politicians and the mainstream media seem to assume that this has nothing to do with Australia and we are not interested. (more…)