Category: Defence

  • DOUGLAS NEWTON. ‘A 100 Per Cent Ally’ – ‘Utterly Dependable’ – conscience washing.

     

    The Chilcot report should prompt much heart-searching, and not only about Australia’s commitment to the Iraq War in 2003. It should prompt us to think about two long-standing problems: the use of the ‘war powers’ by the Executive, without any requirement to consult parliament; and the broader issue of balancing Australia’s interests in her alliance relationships. In essence, two questions should haunt us. First, should our decision to go to war be made by handfuls of people at the centre of power? Second, do we as a people so crave the approval of powerful allies that we should plunge our military forces into faraway deployments without carefully weighing costs and objectives? (more…)

  • GARRY WOODARD. Chilcot and Australia

    Tony Blair is the most flamboyant and contentious of the trio who took the coalition of the willing into war in Iraq.

    Attention focuses on what the Chilcot enquiry has concluded about his role, and equally importantly on what are the lessons, which it promised from the outset it would draw.

    The British enquiry naturally wished to protect the confidences of Blair’s co-conspirators, who have managed, unlike Blair, to preserve an image of dignified statesmanship and confident resignation that they did, properly, what had to be done. (more…)

  • Chilcot Report and the ‘patsy from Down Under’.

    The Chilcot Report on the UK involvement in the invasion of Iraq has just been released. In a commentary on the report, Paul McGeough in the SMH refers to John Howard as the ‘patsy from Down Under’.

    The Chilcot Report concurs with the widespread view that the invasion of Iraq set in hand the awful devastation and death that we now see continuing in the Middle East.  the rise of ISIS can be attributed to the dreadful mistakes of Bush, Blair and Howard.

    For Paul McGeough’s commentary on the Chilcot Report, see link below.

    http://www.smh.com.au/world/chilcot-report-the-mindboggling-incompetence-of-bush-blair-and-howard-laid-bare-20160707-gq06hy.html

    In the next few days, we will be carrying i Pearls and Irritations, further commentaries on the Chilcot Report and implications for Australia.  John Menadue

     

     

     

  • JOHN MENADUE. What the major parties ignored in the election?

     

    The election seemed more about avoiding some key issues than a contest of values and ideas.

    Because so many key issues such as refugees were avoided, it is not surprising that so many voters, about one third, turned their backs on the major parties. Some issues like the NBN were widely canvassed in social media but largely ignored in the public campaign. (more…)

  • PAUL BARRATT. Attorney-General’s move to control access to Solicitor-General

    On 4 May 2016, the last sitting day before Parliament rose for the forthcoming election, Attorney-General Senator Brandis tabled new guidelines in the Senate which ruled that no one in government, including the Prime Minister, could seek the Solicitor-General’s advice without getting permission from Senator Brandis. (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE: ‘Plan for a strong new economy’

     

    As a voter in the prime minister’s electorate of Wentworth, I have received two letterbox drops from Malcolm Turnbull on a 5-point plan for economic growth and jobs.

    This 5 point plan is the centre piece of Malcolm Turnbull’s national campaign. It is a very flimsy plan which the media has not seriously examined. (more…)

  • RICHARD WOOLCOTT. Foreign policy issues during and after the July 2 Election

     

    The Turnbull Government and the Shorten Opposition have focussed on domestic issues in the election campaign.  This is understandable but in the longer term the Government elected on the 2nd of July will need to address the greatly changed world of 2016. (more…)

  • ALISON BROINOWSKI. The silence is deafening.

    We learn belatedly that Prime Minister Abbott tried to persuade the Army to send to the MH17 crash site in Ukraine, were more like 3000, a full brigade! 

    In this long election campaign, the major parties are debating anything and everything that will affect votes. Everything, that is, except refugees, foreign policy, and – as if it is a minor matter – the war. Australians who haven’t been paying attention may well be unaware that we have military in Afghanistan (still), Iraq (again), and Syria. In spite of retired generals Peter Leahy and Peter Gration repeatedly questioning the strategy and prospects of their deployment, the Government says nothing, and the Opposition keeps whatever it is confidentially told to itself. (more…)

  • CAVAN HOGUE. Australia and its relationships with US and China.

    According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the US Studies Centre at Sydney University has produced a study which showed that 8 out of 10 Australians were only mildly concerned about the fact that, as they saw it, China already dominated Asia and they did not think China would go to war with the USA. They thought that the USA had peaked and was on the way out. This situation did not greatly concern them and their attitude was described as neutral. James Brown of the Centre described these attitudes as naive and said that Australians did not understand the importance of the American presence in the region. The head of the Centre, Professor Jackman, said he was going to get on a plane and go to Washington to tell them to ramp up their soft diplomacy because China was doing it better. (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. Best we forget. We commemorate Australians who died in foreign wars in foreign lands, but not Australian aborigines who died in defence of their own country.

    Yesterday, in a moving ceremony, the remains of 33 Australians who were buried in military cemeteries in Malaysia and Singapore were returned to Australia. Our Governor General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, and Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, were at Richmond airbase to witness the repatriation of 33 Australians who had died in foreign lands.

    What a contrast this is to our refusal to acknowledge the 30,000 aborigines who died, not in wars in foreign lands but in defending their homelands where they had lived for hundreds of generations. (more…)

  • MUNGO McCALLUM. Malcolm Turnbull and NBN leaks.

    Malcolm Turnbull is all very holy about the independence of the Federal Police following last week’s raid on ALP offices and homes over embarrassing (to him) NBN leaks.

    Why, the government had absolutely nothing to do with the cops, the Prime Minister asserted virtuously. Bill Shorten should be ashamed of even thinking such a thing.

    Well, perhaps, in 2016. But there was a time when Turnbull knows very well that the government of which he was a minister leant on the AFP, and leant very hard indeed. (more…)

  • RICHARD BUTLER. Obama and Nuclear Weapons

    It is widely acknowledged by those who have had anything substantive to do with nuclear weapons that as long as they exist they will, one day, be used, either by accident or decision. Equally, it is acknowledged that any such use would be a catastrophe. Thus, the logical and human solution is to eliminate them.

    Three months after he assumed his office, President Obama publicly joined those who accept these truths when, in Prague on April 9th, 2009, he said: “ I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”

    Further, he said: “ as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”

    He said the US could not succeed alone in seeking the objective of a secure world without nuclear weapons, but would lead the process and include all nuclear weapons states in it.

    The Nobel Peace Prize Committee reacted to his Prague pledge by awarding him the 2009 Peace Prize. To some that seemed to represent a hasty judgment by the Committee, but the terms of Obama’s attitude towards the elimination of nuclear weapons seemed to constitute a major new policy commitment. In fact, there have been precedents.

    In his farewell speech in January, 1961. President Eisenhower had warned against the influence over US policy of a “military industrial complex”, and stated, above all, that nuclear disarmament was essential. His warnings came to nought and at the height of the Cold War, in the 1980s, some 70,000 nuclear weapons had been made, over 90% of which were held by USA and USSR.

    In October 1986, USSR President Michael Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan met at Rekjavick. They agreed, initially, to seek the elimination of all nuclear weapons because of their conviction that the danger they posed was unacceptable. Reagan had famously asserted that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. Their initial agreement foundered however, on Reagan’s refusal to suspend his proposed missile defense shield. But, they did agree to eliminate their intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe and the resultant INF Treaty became the first instance of the elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons.

    On May 27th, 2016, seven years after his speech at Prague, and eight months before he will take his farewell from office, President Obama visited Hiroshima becoming the first US President to do so, 71 years after that first use of a nuclear weapon.

    In his remarks there he said: “among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them…persistent efforts can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles.”

    Somewhat characteristically, President Obama injected a philosophic reflection: “The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of the atom requires a moral revolution as well”, and, “ … what makes our species unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose”.

    Two key nuclear arms reduction treaties were negotiated between the US and Russia, after the Prague speech, the Start I and New Start Treaties and today, the number of deployed warheads allowed under those agreements is: 1780 and 2080 for Russia and the US, respectively and the same figures for “other” warheads are 5720 and 5180.

    Overall, arms control agreements have led to a reduction by two thirds, in the number of nuclear weapons in existence, globally, from that figure of 70,000 of the 1980s.

    Clearly, there has been progress in nuclear arms control, a step back from the profound insanity of the nuclear arms race, which was the hallmark of the Cold War.

    But, there remains at least three Key problems, which have not been addressed, nothwithstanding Obama’s statements and commitments.

    First, in order to secure consent by the US Senate to New Start and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Obama has authorized a $1 trillion 30 year upgrade of the US nuclear arsenal. It is impossible to reconcile this action with his stated posture of wishing to lead the way to a secure world without nuclear weapons, and the consent he sought on CTBT has not been given.

    Russia has also embarked on an expansion of the size and quality of its nuclear arsenal. Nuclear analysts have suggested that, in fact, Obama’s legacy upon leaving office will be a “second nuclear age”. Whether that perspective will prove to have merit, the postures and actions of Russia, on one side and the US and NATO on the other supports the apprehension that a new Cold War is underway.

    Secondly, there have been widely supported calls for the US and Russia, which together still hold at least 90% of nuclear weapons in existence, to take them off hair trigger alert. This would significantly reduce the possibility of accident or miscalculation, without eliminating their alleged utility in terms of deterrence.

    Thirdly, while Obama has spoken of the need for action with respect to all nuclear weapon States, of which there are 6 others (and an active contender in North Korea), there has been inaction. He seems not to have exercised the leadership on this that he promised. And, apart from the issues with Russia, there is the reality of the frightful dangers posed by the nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, and by Israel’s nuclear weapons capability, in the miasma of Middle East politics.

    The International Court of Justice, unsurprisingly has pointed out that any use of nuclear weapons would violate customary international law, and with virtual certainty would constitute a crime against humanity. It has called attention to the fact that the Nuclear Weapon States identified in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (the Permanent Members of the Security Council) are obliged, under that Treaty to negotiate reductions in their weapons, without any further delay. And, some two thirds of the member States of the UN have called for the negotiation of a global Treaty banning nuclear weapons.

    In recent times Australian coalition Governments have sided with the US in voting against this proposal. Its neighbors, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand have supported it.

    Where is the debate in Australia about the reality of the threat to our life, nation and environment caused by the continuing existence of nuclear weapons? Is it within our character and values to accept that the only way our survival, our life, is allegedly guaranteed is by the US being prepared to use, against others, weapons of mass destruction and radiation?

    Some say that to ask this question is hysterical. They assert that, clearly the US would never use its weapons but only threaten to do so, as a matter of deterrence. The notion of deterrence is, at best, a chimera, the failure of which would be a more than academic experience.

    President Obama resisted calls that he should apologize at Hiroshima, presumably because of the current dominance in the US of militant nationalism. But at Hiroshima, he did mention “mistakes”, and suggested that it is not necessarily in our human genus to be condemned to repeat them.

    The part of his remarks and reflections on which Australian leaders should act are those in which he acknowledged the need for the US to lead in efforts to end the servitude of nuclear weapons. That’s where we could and should help, politically and diplomatically. This would, of course, require us to demonstrate the “courage to escape the logic of fear”, to stand on our own feet, with a principled, aware, and independent foreign policy.

    Richard Butler AC, is former Ambassador to the United Nations and was appointed by PM Keating, in 1995, Convenor of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

  • ALISON BROINOWSKI; Wisdom in hindsight.

     

    Leaders who have presided over policy disasters typically respond in one of three ways. Some of them leave office and retire to their well-feathered nests, where they hibernate in silence. Others spray the blame around, including at those who advised them against the original folly, refusing to admit responsibility for it, and yet still claiming that the outcome was better than if they had not committed it, and claiming that now, things have changed. Others again adhere to the ‘never apologise, never explain’ school of public policy, refusing to admit they were wrong, and suggesting they would do the same again, given the opportunity. (more…)

  • Obama and the absence of apology in Hiroshima

    ‘As President of the United States of America, I express my profound apologies for the sufferings inflicted on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bombings.’ These, of course, are the words that we are not going to hear Barack Obama speak in Hiroshima on 27 May, when he becomes the first sitting US president to visit the city since the atomic bombings in August 1945. It is sad that we will not hear at least a version of these words. A simple but sincere apology might bring some peace of mind to the survivors and their families, and could have a profound effect on Japanese society. (more…)

  • Did the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki end the war?

    Today, President Obama is visiting Hiroshima. He will be the first US President to do so since the bombing in 1945. He said that he will not be apologising for the dropping of the bomb and will not try and second-guess President Harry Truman’s decision.

    The widely accepted moral justification for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they brought a quick end to the war which if continued would result in more widespread deaths and destruction.

    There is an argument that what the Japanese military feared most of all was not the bombing of civilians but the threat of Soviet occupation and perhaps partition of Japan. (more…)

  • DAVID STEPHENS. A review of Douglas Newton’s five articles that take us behind the scenes in the Great War.

    Douglas Newton confronts the really important questions about war

    David Stephens reviews five articles by Douglas Newton that take us ‘behind the scenes’ in the Great War (more…)

  • DAVID STEPHENS. Honest History’s Alternative Guide to the Australian War Memorial

    Questioning the received view: Honest History’s Alternative Guide to the Australian War Memorial

    Which word should we use to describe what happened on 25 April 1915: ‘landing’ or ‘invasion’? Why do we refer to dead soldiers as ‘the fallen’? Does the ‘freedom’ we are said to have fought for in our many wars include the freedom to have awkward views about how we should commemorate these wars? (more…)

  • Warwick Elsche. If words were deeds.

    If words were deeds – or even credible policies – Malcolm Turnbull might already have joined the company of Australia’s pre-eminent Prime Ministers.

    All three of Malcolm’s pre-politics callings, journalism, law and banking, have involved the extensive used of the words medium. But none of these also involved the commitment, the enduring exposure, or the threat of damaging public refutation as mere words do, coming at a critical political time, from the country’s most senior political figure.

    However, in the short journey Turnbull’s eight-week election campaign has travelled so far, it seems that, from his side at least, words only will provide his and his Government’s principal armament. Perhaps this is because his Government has little else, either in terms of political stability, or actual political accomplishment to serve the purpose.

    While Labor has been noticeably slow in picking apart Turnbull’s maiden campaign efforts in early days, Malcolm would be optimistic indeed to expect this neglect by the opposition to last for the near-record 56 days of the current campaign.

    In the writer’s experience, long electoral campaigns have not been kind to incumbent Prime Ministers who initiate them.

    In 1969, for example, a super-confident John Gorton, sitting on a then record parliamentary majority, set a 60+ day campaign which he hoped would see the end of the up-and-coming new-style Labor leader, Gough Whitlam. Whitlam whittled away the record majority to within 5,000 votes in critical seats, of an improbable victory. Ministers’ seats were among 18 lost across the country.

    Again in 1984 another over-confident Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, deliberately chose a long campaign during which, he assured colleagues, the longer it went the further ahead of this opponent, Andrew Peacock, he would be. Hawke’s soporific campaign speeches over the long period again saw significant reversals – and again not for his opponent.

    Malcolm therefore seems to be taking a considerable risk seeking to see out successfully an eight-week campaign armed principally only with his eloquence.

    During his return trip to the top of the Liberal Party, Turnbull was critical of Tony Abbott’s seeming attempts to govern in slogans. “Kill the taxes”, “Stop the boats”, “Lifters and Leaners”, “Team Australia”, “Death Cult” and a handful of others did not serve Tony well. Remember the polls and his ultimate fate.

    Malcolm has chosen to start his campaign with a flurry of loud self-laudatory promises and assessments – and a slogan. And the slogan it seems has already been forced on most of his team. So far those exposed in the infant campaign like Malcolm himself, Mathias Cormann, Julie Bishop and others are peppering their electoral offerings with the boring repeated chants of “Jobs and Growth’.

    Noble objectives unquestionably. But it would be remarkable if, over the eight weeks it is not pointed out that nothing in his recent budget – virtually his election manifesto – is likely to guarantee either – nothing other than something to talk about.

    In his war of words Turnbull has already found it convenient, even attractive, to refer to the economic problems he says were created by the preceding Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Governments. Indeed, the shouts of “Debt and Deficit Emergency” from his side of politics helped propel him and his colleagues into Government.

    By election day , July 2, Turnbull’s Liberals will have been in office nearly half as long as Labor, 2007-13.

    In that time his government has increased debt beyond $150 billion. The deficit has trebled. His party has not had to grapple with the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression that plagued more then three of Labor’s six years in office. Strangely, with these inflated problems, there is now no longer an emergency. Given the performance so far, there is, however, surely some risk in doing, as Malcolm urged addressing the media to announce the election last Sunday, “Keep your commitment to our economic plan”. Can this exhortation, given his Government’s performance so far, possibly last eight weeks with both Opposition and media on the job.

    There are several other areas where it would take a rather profound optimism to believe there will not be, at least, further intense scrutiny.

    Malcolm refers repeatedly to previous Labor Governments, particularly the last three, comparing them unfavourably with his own. If he is really upset by the internal disruption, which helped destroy that show, he does not need to go back even that far. Tony Abbott lasted as Prime Minister a shorter period than either Rudd or Gillard whose sackings Turnbull continually derides. And supposed Liberal stability in the first term has been additionally racked by ministerial scandals involving Ministers Robert, Brough, Sinodinis, Briggs, and speaker Bronwyn Bishop. Labor never matched that. Again Turnbull is surely limited in talking much more about this, one of his favourite topics, over another 50+ days.

    In one of the few areas of positive thinking – rather than merely reflecting on Labor’s inadequacies – Turnbull urges support for his party on the grounds of national security as if there was some historic backing for the claim. His party committed Australia to involvement in the Vietnam War and in 1967 double the commitment with a loss of more than 500 young Australian lives. No one anywhere now argues the wisdom of those decisions.

    Far more recently John Howard blindly followed Dick Cheney and George W. Bush in a futile bid to “sow seeds of democracy” in the Middle East. The picture throughout the whole region attests the error of that judgment. A similar decision to outsource Australia’s defence and foreign policy to one of the universally acknowledged worst-ever presidents, George Bush, in entering Afghanistan is yet to be evaluated as anything but a failure (not yet the disaster of Iraq) – but a failure nonetheless. Again, if words are your only weapon a focus on his party’s security record would hardly seem to be a winning campaign topic.

    Malcolm, speaking to the press in his electoral announcement last Sunday, spoke of the excellence and importance of Australian science. As a senior Cabinet Minister he sat in mute support as Tony Abbott ripped $120 million from Australia’s world-class scientific organisation, the CSIRO – most of it coming from the climate research section. Despite his claims, Malcolm has done little to repair the damage. Eminent scientists, locally and around the world, have condemned and lamented the wanton destruction of this organisation. The propositions on which Malcolm seems anxious to build his marathon election campaign are beginning to look flimsy.

    On an earlier day Malcolm, as opposition leader in 2009 declared that he did not want to lead a party, that did not want action on the world’s No1 problem, climate change. He again watched silently as Tony Abbott tried to damage or destroy every single government agency with any direct involvement in climate science. And, he produced a budget (election manifesto) without a single reference to climate change – another issue best avoided over a long coming eight weeks.

    To the media on Sunday he described his proposed tax arrangements as ‘the best in the world’. Unless he’s at the Australia Club or the Melbourne Club, he might be wise to keep this also off his electoral agenda.

    And on another popular Liberal line against Labor leader Shorten regarding his alleged role in the downfall of both Rudd and Gillard, Malcolm might also be more than somewhat restricted. Whatever Shorten’s involvement in either or both, immediate benefit to himself was nil. Malcolm’s own role in plotting the destruction of his leader, Tony Abbott, for his own considerable benefit has now been well documented and uncontested not only in the popular media but in several books.

    Having chosen (or been compelled) to fight this election campaign largely on words rather than performance, Turnbull faces a long and hopefully not too inquisitorial media and more importantly Labor Opposition.

    If he wanted a guide as to how it might play out, last Sunday’s meeting with the media at Parliament House after his visit to the Governor General at Yarralumla was hardly encouraging.

    Questions largely ignored the issues Malcolm sought to promote. The first four questions were inquisitive – Malcolm might have deemed them hostile – they were certainly disregarding his hopeful message.

    Malcolm – not his press officer called a halt to the conference.

    He faces another eight weeks of this. While current figures in national polls indicate a win for his Liberals, Malcolm does not have the comfortable poll margins that Gorton and Bob Hawke enjoyed when they last sought to demolish opponents with a long election campaign.

    There are risks involved – BE CAREFUL MALCOLM. Slogans and questionable assertions can be made to appear dangerously fragile to the electorate over a full-on eight week political stoush.

    Warwick Elsche, Canberra correspondent.

  • Douglas Newton. The Centenary of the Great War – and Anzac

    The Great War. What we fought for and why were peace initiatives resisted for so long.

    Many of those promoting the Anzac Centenary appear to believe that there are certain essentials the Australian people must learn about the Great War: that Australians fought exceedingly well; that they fought even better when led by Australians; that in fighting so well they gave birth to our national consciousness; that we owe them so much because they fought for our freedom; that in serving our country they displayed the values of the Anzac Spirit that define the Australian character – a fierce egalitarianism, contempt for privilege, democratic instincts, and mateship, that is, a generous solidarity inspiring a collective spirit, never shrinking from support for each other through thick and thin. Sadly, it must be said, many of those rhapsodising upon this Anzac Spirit show not the remotest faith in this kind of egalitarianism or solidarity in their public policy.

    Much of this may serve to distract the Australian people from deeply significant questions arising from our plunge into the Great War. How did Australia get into this catastrophe? For what objectives, precisely, did the Australian government commit our forces to the fighting? And why were they still fighting there in 1918?

    Some see the Anzac Centenary as a stand-tall moment. It is milked as an opportunity to tell see-how-great-we-are stories, and to raise our national self-esteem. Surely the centenary of a cataclysm such as the Great War, that took tens of millions of lives across the world, by acts of state policy, is not a moment to blow our own small trumpet. This is unworthy and provincial. It is the acts of state policy that led to and prolonged the disaster of war that should focus our attention, not just the courageous acts of one small fragment of the men caught up in the quagmire.

    What are the real lessons of the Great War, for Australians, and for all? That war is a blunt instrument, unleashing all manner of evil. That unqualified loyalty to big and powerful friends means being trapped in their misjudgements. That the war aims declared to the people, and the war aims for which wars are prolonged, are seldom the same thing. That war is never a simple choice between victory and defeat. That peace by negotiation is the live, innovative and often the most courageous alternative to gambling again and again with the blood of the young. That wars are so destructive that victory itself can be impotent, providing no lasting peace and no vindication for the mechanised killing.

    The articles linked below are an attempt to sketch out these neglected aspects of Anzac. What did we fight for? What opportunities for a negotiated peace were lost along the way? They are an attempt to interleave two real stories of Australia’s Great War that took place largely behind the scenes – the escalation of war aims by those to whom the lives of Australia’s men were entrusted, and the choices that were made to shun peace by negotiation and keep Australia’s men in the firing line. Those who perished there demand respect. True respect demands a deep inquiry into why they died.

    Douglas Newton. What we fought for from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916.

    Douglas Newton. What we fought for from Bullecourt to the Armistice 1917-1918.

    Douglas Newton.Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War from 1914-1916, Part 1.

    Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War from 1917-1918, Part 2.

  • Greg Wilesmith. Guantanomo Bay: Obama’s big failure.

    Good news on Gitmo. There are just 80 prisoners left in their cramped, high security cells in a small, far off, scrubby peninsula on Cuba.

    That’s about 160 fewer than when Barack Obama became president in early 2009 promising to close Guantanomo within a year.

    So not exactly Mission Accomplished! as President Bush trumpeted after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Obama’s presidential promise won’t be fulfilled and amounts to another big political failure.

    Having filmed at Guantanomo two years ago, under strict military censorship, for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program, reported by Lisa Millar, www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2014/s3991385.htm I’ve been keen to see what would happen to the prisoners, many of whom having been interrogated numerous times, were cleared for “transfer” (Pentagon code for release) years ago.

    The Yemenis have been dispatched to Saudi Arabia, where all have family connections. None were charged with any crime let alone attacking New York or Washington. All have called Guantanomo home since 2002.

    You’ll remember the shackled, shambling orange-suited inmates of Camp X-ray which proved such a US public relations disaster; bent over, sometimes hooded, being frog-marched along the wire.

    We were assured by Vice President Dick Cheney they were the “worst in the world”. Some were but the truth was that many just happened to be the wrong place at the wrong time.

    One of the more notorious of the men and boys swept up in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the post 9/11 period – like many he says he was “sold” to the Americans by Pakistani police – and labelled an “enemy combatant” is Tariq Ba Odah. He was 23.

    Ba Odah, now 37, is notorious not for any alleged crime but for his extraordinary persistence as a Guantanomo hunger striker.

    He’s been refusing solid foods since 2007. Being strapped down twice a day and force fed by a tube up his nose seemingly failed to quench his spirit even when by last year he had lost close to half his normal body weight and was down to 36 kg.

    His lawyer Omar Farah quoted Ba Odah in an essay for Rolling Stone, saying, “My method of delivering my message is through hunger strike. You can cut me to pieces, but I will not break it. I will stop on one of two conditions: I die, or I am freed and allowed to return to my family.”

    One can only imagine Ba Odah’s feelings, now aged 36 and having been incarcerated for more than a third of his life.

    Along with the other former prisoners his confinement is not yet over. Saudi Arabia, waging a largely hidden but bloody insurrection, has a “rehabilitation” program for alleged jihadis and the Guantanomo 9 will have to enter it. A few months, maybe longer, but ultimately most will be free.

    The Saudis have taken their time; they were first approached close to a decade ago to take Yemeni prisoners, some who had been born in the Saudi kingdom or had been long term residents.

    Obama’s rhetoric on Guantanomo is familiar. And so again in February, this year, Obama launched a new effort to persuade Congress to close Guantanamo saying, “It’s counterproductive to our fight against terrorists, because they use it as propaganda in their efforts to recruit…Guantanamo harms our partnerships with allies and other countries whose cooperation we need against terrorists.

    “Americans, we pride ourselves on being a beacon to other nations, a model of the rule of law.  But 15 years after 9/11 – 15 years after the worst terrorist attack in American history – we’re still having to defend the existence of a facility and a process where not a single verdict has been reached in those attacks – not a single one.” *

    Congress wasn’t convinced. For many Republicans and some Democrats, the political downside to allowing non-convicted “terrorists” to be relocated to mainland American prisons is too high.

    Or put it another way there’s more political kudos in proclaiming the dangers of bringing “terrorists” to maximum security prisons on the mainland than worrying about whether some innocent men languishing at Guantanomo will remain there indefinitely without trial – until they die.

    Of the 80 men left at Guantanomo the bulk are from Yemen. The US maintains that the civil war raging there, in which Saudi Arabia is an active participant, using US supplied weapons, makes it impossible to return them, particularly given the growing power base of AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula).

    And yet it’s vital to remember that of the remaining 80, 26 were cleared for release years ago. In any conventional US judicial system they would have been enjoyed years of freedom by now.

    Of the rest 49 are categorized as “forever” prisoners – labelled so dangerous they can’t be freed – and 10 are on trial before the stop/start military commissions held at the military base; which as Obama noted acerbically haven’t yet handed down a single verdict.

    These figures were compiled by the remarkable Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald who has been reporting Guantanomo intensively since January 11, 2002 when she watched the first 20 prisoners arriving.

    Without her constant probing over the past 14 years – and an outstanding commitment to the story by her newspaper – the military censorship cloaking Gitmo would have been much more effective.

    Rosenberg’s editor in 2002 asked her to cover the Guantanomo beat until it was over. It isn’t over.

    Greg Wilesmith is a freelance journalist and was an ABC foreign correspondent and producer.

     

  • Michael Keating. The Government’s Plan for Jobs and Growth. Part 2 of 2.

    On Tuesday night the Treasurer announced that this year’s Budget was like none other – this Budget represents the Government’s Plan for Jobs and Growth. Presumably the Government hopes that its Plan will represent such a compelling narrative that it can then sail to victory in the forthcoming election. Accordingly, in this article I propose to assess how the Government’s Plan measures up in terms of its probable impact on jobs and growth.

    As stated in the Budget the Government’s Plan for jobs and growth is based on:

    1. A ten year enterprise tax plan
    2. Continued investment in the national innovation and science program
    3. Securing an advanced local defence industry
    4. Opening up more export opportunities through trade agreements
    5. Its plan to get more than 100,000 young people into jobs.

    According to the Government’s own Budget forecasts, however, the growth in output over the next four years is expected to be relatively poor, and notwithstanding its Plan. In fact the forecast growth in GDP has been revised down yet again, and is now expected to continue growing by less than its potential in the next 2016-17 financial year. Indeed it is precisely because of this weak economic outlook, that the Reserve Bank took its decision on Budget Day to reduce interest rates to the lowest level ever for the cash rate of 1.75%. Of course, the Bank and the Government attributed the timing of this decision to the recent low inflation numbers, but those numbers only provided the opportunity to reduce interest rates. The need to reduce them was occasioned by the inadequate level of aggregate demand, and especially the poor rate of business investment in the economy.

    The good news, as the Government keeps reminding us, is that around 300,000 jobs have been created in the last year or so. But these new jobs are predominantly due to the very low rates of wage increase that have pertained in the last few years. Furthermore, according to the Budget these low rates are expected to continue, with nominal wages forecast to increase by only 2½ per cent and 2¾ per cent in the next two financial years, representing a forecast real annual increase in wage rates of only ½ per cent each year.

    No wonder employment is growing rapidly, but this has little to do with the Government’s strategy for growth and jobs. Rather what we are experiencing is how, following the reforms of the labour market by the Keating Government, the labour market is now much more flexible and how the price of labour is now much more responsive to economic conditions. But the counterpart of this success in creating jobs is that the rate of productivity increase has dropped to around only ½ per cent in each of the last two years, and is not expected to increase by much more in 2016-17.

    In that context, what is surprising and disappointing about this year’s Budget Statement on the Economic Outlook is that there is no section dealing with productivity, and this despite productivity having been at the centre of all discussion about economic reform for the past couple of decades.

    In addition to our poor productivity performance, what is also worrying about the economic outlook is that non-mining investment is projected in the Budget to continue to remain sluggish. To some extent both phenomena may be related. But this non-mining investment is precisely the area that one would expect the Government’s Plan and especially its innovation agenda to have an impact on if that Plan is to succeed.

    So what is the problem with the Government’s Plan, that its own forecasts do not seem to provide much evidence that it will be successful?

    First, one would have to be extremely sceptical about the claim that ‘the tax and superannuation plan can be expected to lift the level of GDP by just over one percent in the long term’. Frankly it is difficult to see how this claim could be modelled given the shortage of empirical evidence. Furthermore, it is most curious that this modelling was not done by the Treasury, but by private consultants, who too often assume what they have to prove. Perhaps it is therefore no accident that it is still not possible to find out how this modelling was done. But what we do know is that whenever the company tax rate has been changed, it has never made a perceptible difference to investment, either here in Australia, or anywhere else. And even if we were to accept this dubious self-described “modelling”, a one percent difference over twenty years is next to imperceptible, and Australia needs a much faster pick-up in non-mining investment than that.

    Instead the required pickup in investment will mainly depend upon the demand for each firm’s products. The profit share and the rate of return on investment is high enough, but the lack of demand is why so many firms are engaging in share buy-backs and acquisitions of existing assets, rather than expanding through new investments to create new assets. In this regard a credible path to accelerate the restoration of a sustainable budget surplus would make more difference than these tax cuts. A Budget surplus would reduce the relatively high real interest rates in Australia and would probably also lead to some further reduction in the exchange rate over time. Therefore the ten-year funding for the tax plan should be progressively re-deployed to bring the Budget back into surplus quicker.

    Second, there is the issue of what can realistically be expected from the innovation and science package. The most important elements of this package aim to improve:

    1. the collaboration between industry and researchers which according to an OECD study is worse in Australia than in any other advanced economy, and
    2. Australian business attitudes to risk and experimentation, and the incentives for early stage investment in start-ups.

    These are worthy aims, but how much difference can government make, especially when the funding largely comes from a re-arrangement of existing programs, and overall the funding has been cut for business assistance, and cut significantly.

    The third leg of the Plan is the support for an advanced local defence industry. Readers of this blog will have seen previous articles querying the suitability of the submarines to meet our defence needs and their cost. (The mistaken decision on submarines and A more efficient submarine solution.)  In brief, building the wrong boats at a cost at least a third higher than purchasing them off the shelf, is not the future for a competitive manufacturing industry. Australia does need to, and I believe can, have a future in advanced manufacturing which produces high value added products based on technological leadership. On the evidence, however, building these submarines in Australia does not meet these criteria and cannot be expected to ensure our industrial future.

    The other legs of the Government’s Plan identified above – opening up exports through trade agreements and the plan to get 100,000 young people – are also worthy endeavours, but again cannot realistically be expected to have a large impact on the economy as a whole.

    Instead having a comparative advantage in skills is the most critical element if Australia wants to pursue high value added industries based on technological leadership. The Prime Minister’s Innovation Statement did in fact recognise the importance of skills, but unfortunately his words haven’t been matched by action. Instead the funding for education and training, along with research, has been cut.

    A second critical element in improving Australia’s comparative advantage in high value industries is to make better use of the skills that are available. This is also the key to enhancing future productivity growth. But unfortunately there is considerable evidence that most firms in Australia are not at the frontier of best practice when it comes to making the best use of the skills of their workforce. What is needed is a renewed management focus on achieving improvements in the organisation of work, a principle source of innovation, and less focus on cost cutting, which at worst can lead to lower productivity.

    Closely related to this second element, and its focus on improving the organisation of work, is the scope to improve the effectiveness of education and health services, and consequently their productivity, by re-organising how they are delivered. This means breaking down some of the silos, developing teams, and particularly in the case of health it will require changes in the payments systems and consequent incentive structures.

    Finally, a good plan for jobs and growth would require much more carefully targeted infrastructure investment, based on the introduction of proper pricing signals and proper evaluation. While the use of infrastructure continues for the most part to be free, we should not be surprised if there is over-demand. Instead in future infrastructure investment (which is a huge drain on the Budget) should be guided by what will deliver the greatest economic returns, having regard to the value that users are prepared to pay for, and not in response to political whims.

    In sum, one can applaud the Prime Minister’s enthusiasm for innovation and his efforts to encourage the embrace of new technology. However, the agenda for jobs and growth needs to broadened as there is much more to do, and the funding is inadequate to support many of what the Prime Minister himself has identified as priorities.

     

     

  • Jon Stanford. French submarines and the East and South China Seas. – why?

    A response to Richard Broinowski. 

    While the government might emphasise the roles for the new submarine that may be regarded as defensive – “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” – Richard Broinowski ignores perhaps the most important role, namely power projection in the East and South China Seas.

    This role was perhaps most graphically illustrated the Rudd government’s 2009 White Paper, which first made the case for 12 powerful new submarines. Rather extraordinarily, that White Paper mooted the possibility of unilateral action by Australia against a ‘major adversary’:

    “But we do assume that, except in the case of nuclear attack, Australia has to provide for its own local defence needs without relying on the combat forces of other countries. The Government considered such contingencies because although they are unlikely, they are not so remote as to be beyond contemplation. …In such circumstances, in order to defend ourselves we might also have to selectively project military power beyond the primary operational environment described in this White Paper, for instance in maritime Southeast Asia.” (Page 65)

    Lest there be any doubt, the 2009 White Paper (Page 59) suggested that “we will use strategic strike if we have to”. (Page 59) It stated that:

    “The Government places a priority on broadening our strategic strike options, which will occur through the acquisition of maritime-based land-attack cruise missiles. These missiles will be fitted to the AWD, Future Frigate and Future Submarine. …The incorporation of a land-attack cruise missile capability will be integral to the design and construction of the Future Frigate and Future Submarine.” (Pages 70 and 81.)

    Although the 2016 White Paper dropped all references to strategic strike, this does not mean that the aspiration has been discarded. Certainly, the requirement for 12 powerful, long range submarines has not changed since 2009. This is not the first time that Australia’s defence strategy has required the acquisition of a unique military platform. In 1963, the Menzies government ordered a special version of the American F-111 aircraft with the range extended so as to allow it to reach Jakarta.

    In any case, it seems clear that one of the reasons that Australia requires a unique conventional submarine is so that the RAN could undertake operations that most navies would leave to nuclear submarines, namely power projection against a ‘major adversary’ in contested waters far from home. For example, Rear Admiral Ray Griggs, former Chief of Navy (2011-14), defined the most significant operational task for the future submarine as “sinking hostile ships and submarines” and said that the area of most interest is the South China Sea. [1] Also, the new submarine will have the ability to launch either American or French cruise missiles through its torpedo tubes.

    It is difficult to build a logical strategic case for the acquisition of twelve large submarines with a very long range unless this power projection role plays a central part. Yet, as Australian Strategic Policy Institute has pointed out, it is not clear that the Americans would welcome Australian submarines playing such a role in the case of a conflict in which we were part of a US-led coalition. We can only hope that any Australian aspirations to take on a ‘major adversary’ unilaterally have, like a former sabre-rattling American general, “simply faded away”.

    [1] Peter Layton (2015), “Australia’s next submarine – will it be the Soryu”, Defence Today, Vol 11, No 4, page 8.

  • Alison Broinowski. Who decides when we go to war?

     Setbacks for democratic reform of war powers.

    Having taken one step forward, Australia’s major allies have now taken two steps back from reform of their war powers.

    In the UK, the Defence Minister has set aside years of bipartisan promises of legislation that would require British governments to consult the Parliament before committing forces to war, and has rejected what he now calls this ‘artificial’ constraint. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/18/ministers-abandon-plan-war-powers-law-mps-troops

    Prime Minister Gordon Brown sought legislation to bring to an end the exercise of the war powers by a prime minister under executive privilege. He hoped to transfer the decision for war to the Parliament, but abandoned the attempt in 2007. A bipartisan committee secured support of both houses in 2011 to enshrine in legislation the convention of executive consultation with MPs before committing armed force. Having asserted, in Opposition in 2006, that public trust depended upon MPs having the final say in troop deployments, David Cameron in government allowed the initiative to drift, but his plan to send RAF planes to Syria was defeated in the Commons in 2013. Cameron then secured a majority in favour of a similar deployment this year. Cameron has now reversed himself and rejected the prospect of legislation to change the war powers, even though the convention that governments should consult Parliament apparently remains in place.

    In the US, following several attempts to revise the 1973 War Powers Act, President Obama requested Congress in February 2015 (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/us/obama-war-authorization-congress.html?_r=0) to authorise him to dispatch forces against Islamic State, and to repeal the 2002 authorisation for President G.W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. He offered to limit the new deployment to three years, and to restrict ground combat to Special Forces. The measure was opposed by some Democrats and rejected. Obama subsequently sent US planes and troops to Iraq and Syria regardless, relying upon the authority granted by Congress in 2001 to his predecessor to fight Al Qaeda, which remains law. Then, in January 2016, in Obama’s final year as president, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican majority leader, introduced a Bill for the ‘Authorisation for Use of Military Force’, for which Obama had signed an executive order in September 2015. If it passes, the Act will take effect in August 2016. What the Bill appears to seek is virtually unlimited power for the President to deploy US ground forces anywhere in the world and for any length of time, including in the United States, without having to provide legal or strategic justifications to Congress.

    These US and UK developments set a dangerous example for Australia, where politicians have in recent years begun to see the risks of allowing ‘captain’s picks’ to decide the dispatch of Australian forces to war. When democratic processes are bypassed, the restraints of international and domestic legality are overridden. When accountability for war and its outcomes is not shared with the people’s representatives, the executive can do as it pleases, can withhold from the public the details of what is being done in their name, and can repeat its past errors with impunity.

    ‘Australian governments’, historian Henry Reynolds has recently written, ‘find it easy to go to war’ (Unnecessary Wars, 2016: 238). Reynolds calls Iraq an episode of military adventurism for which Australian leaders suffered no opprobrium nor inquiry; made no public expression of regret; and showed no sense of culpability or responsibility. ‘Calls for a formal investigation into the circumstances of Australia’s entry into the Iraq war,’ he adds, ‘have met with official silence’. We and many others live with the consequences of the Iraq disaster, and the prospect that our governments may repeat it.

    Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

  • Alison Broinowski. Losing ‘our’ Uruzgan.

    Most Australians live in cities where the only newspapers are owned by Murdoch. So unless they found Fairfax on line, they were spared the sorrowful report on 3 May that Afghan government troops have pulled out of more ‘strongholds’ in Uruzgan province. http://www.smh.com.au/world/australian-troops-fought-and-died-in-uruzgan-now-afghan-troops-are-pulling-back-20160302-gn7z1i.html To the surprise of no-one who read it, Taliban are back.

    The withdrawal, Reuters reported mournfully, followed ‘many years of work and much blood shed by Australian troops to maintain peace and stability in the province, before the last Australians left in 2014’. After Australians spent thirteen years in Tarin Kowt, 41 died, and many more were injured, the Afghan authorities have made ‘a tactical decision to deploy forces more effectively’. So many Afghan soldiers and police have deserted or been killed, they say, that the province is short of its ‘assigned strength’. (One thing they appear to have learnt from years of US/NATO training is Western management-speak).

    The sombre announcement stirred barely a ripple of interest in Australia, for three possible reasons.

    First, Australia is over Afghanistan. Only a fortnight ago those at Anzac day services swore not to forget our past wars, which include several egregious disasters, but we do forget them. Many of us forget, for example, that Australia has not declared or won a war since 1945, unless East Timor and Gulf War I count as victories. Since well before Federation, Australians have habitually and repeatedly gone to fight in distant countries, which are then forgotten as we prepare for the next one. As Henry Reynolds says in his new book Unnecessary Wars (2016), most Australians don’t ask why we fought or what resulted, only how we fought, as if war was a game of football.

    Second, Afghanistan can’t be occupied. The British learned this to their cost in the Afghan wars of 1839-42 (‘Auckland’s folly’), 1878-80, and 1919, after which the rulers in Kabul took control of their country. The USSR fell into the Afghan quagmire in 1979 and was forced to withdraw ten years later by the United States’ proxies, the Mujahideen and the Taliban. In 2001 America attacked Afghanistan in revenge for the 9/11 attacks (in which no Afghan took part). The invasion made even less sense after Osama bin Laden fled al-Qaeda’s Afghan headquarters and was allowed to escape to Pakistan. Iraq was top on Bush’s list of target countries: Afghanistan was merely low-hanging fruit on the way to the invasion. Starting as a counter-terrorist war, the conflict in Afghanistan became a counter-insurgency, in which the only local support the US/NATO could expect for their objectives was what money could buy, and only for as long as they kept paying.

    Third, Uruzgan is not Australia’s province. It can no more be claimed as uniquely Australian than Nui Dat or Kapyong, the Kokoda track or Gallipoli could. As the junior ally of Britain and the United States, our troops have always gone where they tell us to go, fought who they tell us to fight, and left when they leave (with the honourable exceptions of Curtin bringing Australian forces back to defend Australia in 1942 and Whitlam pulling them out of Vietnam in 1972). Uruzgan meant no more to Australia than it did to our Netherlands predecessors there, who gave it up as a bad job. Australia was stuck in Uruzgan at the United States’ pleasure, as a consequence of John Howard’s unilateral globalisation of the Anzus Treaty.

    If anything can be learned from the current collapse of ‘strongpoints’ in Uruzgan, it is that invasion rarely defeats insurgency, that neither invasion nor occupation can last forever, and that Western invasion of Islamic countries attracts Muslim hostility like a magnet. Australia, learning nothing from Vietnam, repeated its errors by invading Iraq in 2003 and again in 2015, and by bombing Syria in 2015-6. The sooner the decision to commit Australian forces to these futile wars is taken out of the hands of an ill-advised prime minister, the better.

    Dr Alison Broinowski is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform and Vice-President of Honest History.

  • Richard Broinowski. French submarines for RAN – Why?

     

    The 2016 Defence White paper asserts that Australia’s future acquisition of 12 French submarines costing around $50 billion is the largest defence procurement program in Australia’s history. The first vessel is to be delivered ‘in the early 2030s’, the twelfth in ‘the 2040s or 2050s’. They are said to be for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, not only in Australia’s maritime zones, but in our maritime approaches and further afield. They are to be ‘regionally superior, with a high degree of interoperability with the United States’.

    No doubt the boffins in Defence put much expert thought into submarine selection, but given their enormous cost at a time of financial stringency, we groundlings are entitled to candid and detailed explanations about the choice of these vessels and the uses to which they will be put.

    First, why French? Apart from its small fleet of nuclear-powered and armed ballistic missile submarines, France operates six attack submarines, currently being phased out and replaced by the Barracuda class boats also being chosen by Australia. But compared to the submarine industries in Japan and Germany, France’s is small and relatively inexperienced. Japan began its submarine industry in 1904 and its main factories at Mitsubishi and Kawasaki have designed and built a huge variety ever since. Both Japan and Germany made enormous technical strides in submarine design during World War Two when France was occupied by Germany. German submarine technology has an equally long history. Its Dolphin-class attack boats currently built by ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems and used by the German and Israeli navies are just as sophisticated as the Sōryūs.

    One suspicion worth ventilating here: Direction des Construction Navales Services (DCNS) that makes Barracudas at Cherbourg, predominantly builds nuclear-propelled submarines. Is the Australian government, which favours an international spent fuel nuclear dump in South Australia, surreptitiously planning to widen Australia’s nuclear industry by dropping nuclear power plants into its Barracudas at some later stage of their development? How would Australian punters feel about that?

    Second question: precisely how will our French boats be ‘regionally superior’? Compared to which other fleets? A cursory look at Jane’s Fighting Ships shows that a dozen Royal Australian Navy Barracudas won’t hold a candle in numbers to 15 Korean, 18 Japanese, an unknown number of Russian and nearly 60 Chinese diesel electric boats currently operating in the Western Pacific, let alone new ones constantly being built and added to these nations’ fleets.

    What about local fleets? Indonesia has had a submarine force since 1960. Its current fleet comprises five attack submarines with five more being planned. Singapore has two Swedish Vastergotland boats with more on order. Malaysia has two French-built Scorpene class boats based at Kota Kinabalu. Thailand is planning to acquire two German boats. More potent than any of these, Vietnam plans to take delivery of six Russian Kilo-class submarines between 2013 and 2020. The Chinese have considerable experience with these boats, and will be very concerned if the Vietnamese manage to operate them competently.

    These acquisitions do not represent a flat-out arms race, but add a sudden and significant new maritime sea-denial capability to littoral states in the South China Sea. Inevitably, these states will also acquire anti-submarine warfare counter measures, such as surface ships equipped with helicoptors, drones, sonars, mines and depth charges. The area will suddenly becomes a very crowded space indeed.

    According to the 2016 Defence White Paper, the Australian government hopes to be able to operate its Barracudas in these contested waters ‘with a high degree of interoperability with the United States’. But, my third question: why should we be interoperable with the US alone? Our submarines won’t even be available for deployment for another decade and by then may not be regionally superior. And is interoperability what Washington wants? Radical thought though it may seem, wouldn’t it be more productive for us to operate our boats in cooperation with those of Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia? After all, their desire for a ‘rules based’ maritime environment is geographically more urgent than the perceived needs of a great power which is finding itself manoeuvred out of its customary position as top dog in the western Pacific.

    A footnote on Japan’s failed bid to sell us Sōryū submarines. On 16 April 2016, the Japanese Ambassador hosted a reception in Sydney for crews of three MSDF ships which had just engaged in exercises with RAN ships. One of them was Hakuryu, a Sōryū submarine. Amid speeches and toasts, Australian and Japanese guests were aglow with goodwill and the optimistic expectation that the imminent announcement of Australia’s next submarines would be for Sōryūs. In his short speech, Harukyu’s skipper said this was the first visit by a Japanese submarine to Sydney since 1942. There were quiet smiles at his unintended solecism. A photograph of Hakuryu heading home through Sydney Heads the next day coincided with newspaper headlines that France, not Japan, had secured the bid. The poignancy of the situation was palpable, and those of us who have had a long association with Japan felt it. The bilateral relationship is strong enough to withstand the decision, but the healing will take some time.

    Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico. He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW. 

  • Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War: from 1917 to 1918. Part 2.

    During 1917-1918, the Australian divisions in France endured casualties far worse than at Gallipoli. There were huge losses.[1] New evidence shows that ‘four out of five’ of the AIF who survived were affected by disability of some kind.[2] Yet, for contemporary Australians, it is battle-honours that leap to mind, especially Villers-Bretonneux. This is scarcely surprising, considering the money being spent.

    The lesson hammered home in the Anzac centenary is quite simple: war is a bad but necessary thing – so it is just as well that Australians are so good at it. This is to keep Australians locked in a kind of protracted adolescence with regard to war.

    Missing almost completely from speeches and from many books on Australia’s Great War is the history of alternatives to the appalling loss of life. 

    In fact, from 1917 to 1918, across Europe there were rising popular pressures to revise war aims, to democratise, and to resolve the war – by negotiation. The war was kept going only by authoritarianism, propaganda, and censorship. Promising opportunities to end the cataclysm were stifled.[3] 

    1. Emperor Karl’s peace initiatives (December 1916-June 1917)

    Following the death of Franz Josef in November 1916, the new Austrian Emperor, Karl, pressed for peace. He used his French brother-in-law, Prince Sixte de Bourbon, in secret negotiations with France. In March 1917, Karl accepted the restoration of Serbia and Belgium, and the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France. Lloyd George and French premier Ribot were interested, but the Italians hostile, fearing that territory promised in the Treaty of London of 1915 might be sacrificed. The Italians stonewalled.

    1. Anglo-German negotiations on POWs (June-July 1917)

    A British delegation, led by Lord Newton, negotiated with a German delegation, at The Hague. British diplomats and politicians opposed the extension of these talks from POWs to peace. 

    1. Stockholm Socialist Conference proposal (May-August 1917)

    Planned by Scandinavian and Dutch socialists, a conference for European socialists was promoted by the new Russian government. They hoped to hammer out a compromise peace. The USA, France, and Britain sabotaged the plan by refusing passports to their socialist and labour representatives. 

    1. Russian proposal for an Inter-Allied Conference (May-June 1917)

    Russian Foreign Minister Tereshchenko proposed a conference to revise war aims and prepare for negotiations. The Entente and the USA dragged their feet, then ignored the proposal, following the failure of the Russian offensive of July 1917.

    1. Morgenthau Mission (July 1917).

    Henry Morgenthau, the ex-US Ambassador to Turkey, undertook a mission to test a negotiated peace with the Ottomans. In Gibraltar, he met with a British mission. It dissuaded Morgenthau from continuing, arguing that any peace was impossible without gains for the Armenians, the Arabs, and British control of Palestine (a prospective homeland for the Jews). 

    1. Reichstag Peace Resolution (July 1917)

    The Reichstag’s Centre-Left majority pronounced in favour of a non-annexationist peace guaranteed by a League of Nations. This was scorned by the Entente nations. Attempts to mount matching resolutions were defeated in the parliaments. The western allies made no coherent response to this breakthrough by the future Weimar Coalition, favouring peace and democratisation. 

    1. Papal Peace Note (August 1917)

    Benedict XV proposed a territorial settlement close to the status quo before the war, plus a League of Nations and disarmament. Wilson dismissed the note, bizarrely calling on the German people to revolt. The Entente powers hid behind his answer and made no reply. Chancellor Michaelis then spoiled the effort, refusing a public commitment to Belgian independence. Private assurances were not revealed.

    1. Armand-Revertera talks, Switzerland (7, 22 August 1917)

    These French-Austrian talks showed Austria ready to moderate terms; this prompted the Kühlmann offer. 

    1. Kühlmann Peace Feeler (September-October 1917)

    German foreign minister Kühlmann privately contacted both the British and French. The deal was for a territorial compromise: the restoration of Belgium in return for western concessions: territorial integrity for Germany and Austria-Hungary, colonies, and a disavowal of commercial war. The plan was weakened by French political infighting. Kühlmann then dodged and weaved, vowing to keep Alsace-Lorraine (9 Oct.), and Lloyd George announced unequivocal support for France (11 Oct.). 

    1. The Lansdowne ‘Peace Letter’ to the Daily Telegraph (29 November 1917)

    Lord Lansdowne went public, pleading for war aims revision in the Daily Telegraph. The ‘knock-out blow’ press rubbished him. The government cut him adrift. The USA failed to support him.

    1. British-Austrian talks, Switzerland: Smuts-Mensdorff (18-19 December 1917) and Kerr-Skrzynski (March 1918)

    British secret talks luring Austria-Hungary away from Germany, while avoiding general peace – failed. 

    1. Brest-Litovsk talks (December 1917-January 1918)

    Lenin’s new Bolshevik-led Russian government issued a six-point program for a general peace in December 1917. The Germans, under Kühlmann, made an offer accepting a non-annexationist peace. The Allies censored all news of these approaches for a general peace. Fearing domestic repercussions, the Allies rejected peace brokered by socialists. 

    1. Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ and ‘Four Principles’ speeches and the Central Powers replies (January-February 1918)

    Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points Address’ (8 Jan.) marked a significant moderation. Promising public speeches followed from Austrian and German leaders, Czernin and Hertling. Lloyd George and Clemenceau sabotaged this with a belligerent statement, rejecting all negotiations, at Versailles on 4 February 1918.

    1. Archbishop Söderblom’s international Christian conference, Sweden, (December 1917 and February 1918).

    Some British Christians pressed for acceptance of Swedish Archbishop Söderblom’s plan for church leaders to discuss peace in Uppsala in December 1917. But most Anglican bishops opposed the meeting. Söderblom called a second conference for February 1918. Balfour, British Foreign Secretary, warned that British delegates would not be given passports.


    Reflections at Villers-Bretonneux

    The Tasmanian-born Radical MP, Leonard Outhwaite, warned the House of Commons in February 1916 what a disaster it would be ‘to hoist the flag of victory over an international graveyard.’[4] And so it was. Visitors to Villers-Bretonneux will reflect upon the dead – German, British, and Australian. We should reflect also upon the many lost opportunities to make peace, before these men were ordered to turn the machines of industrialised slaughter upon each other.

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records that 10,738 missing Australian servicemen are commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial. http://www.cwgc.org/find-a-cemetery/cemetery/93000/VILLERS-BRETONNEUX%20MEMORIAL

    [2] See David Noonan, Those We Forget: Recounting Australian Casualties of the First World War (Melbourne, 2014), 194. ‘Of the total of 255,800 men [of the AIF] who survived the war, some 206,500 were either discharged medically unfit (130,500) or applied for pension assistance (76,000) before they turned sixty.’

    [3] For sources on the search for a negotiated peace in 1917-18, in addition to those cited in an earlier post, see Rex Wade, The Russian Search for Peace, February-October 1917 (Stanford, 1969), V. H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914-1918 (Oxford, 1971), Arno J. Mayer, The Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917-1918 (New York, 1979), F. L. Carsten, War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War (London, 1982), David Kirby, War, Peace and Revolution: International Socialism at the Crossroads (London, 1986,) David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics (Oxford, 1991), Daryl Le Cornu, ‘Bright Hope: British Radical Publicists, American Intervention, and the Prospects of a Negotiated Peace, 1917’, unpublished PhD thesis (Western Sydney University, 2005): http://researchdirect.uws.edu.au/islandora/object/uws:801

    For German sources see Wilhelm Ribhegge, Frieden für Europa: Die Politik der deutschen Reichstagstagsmehrheit, 1917-18 (Essen, 1998) and the major document collections assembled by Wolfgang Steglich.

    [4] R. L. Outhwaite, HC Deb 23 February 1916 vol 80 c773 (23 Feb. 1916).

  • Douglas Newton. Lost opportunities for a negotiated peace during the Great War: from 1914 to 1916. Part 1

    A big centenary is approaching: the battle of Villers-Bretonneux, April 1918. Right now $93.2 million is being spent on the battle site to build the Sir John Monash Centre, ready for Anzac Day 2018.[1] Villers-Bretonneux is irresistible. It simplifies everything: German invaders, liberating Australians, grateful French. But it will provide a mere pinhole on the war, obscuring the big picture.

    No one at the opening ceremony is likely to ask: Why were millions of men, including Australians, still struggling on the Western Front in April 1918?

    The centre is likely to teach one lesson: the war was awful, but a dire necessity. Our political leaders frequently say so. On Anzac Day 2014 Prime Minister Abbott asked rhetorically, ‘But what was the alternative, in Britain’s time of need, and when Europe was at risk from Prussian militarism?’[2]

    The governing assumption clearly is that there was never an alternative to the carnage. In fact, there were many lost opportunities for a negotiated peace.[3] 

    1. Woodrow Wilson’s deathbed cable (4 August 1914)

    On 4 August 1914, US President Woodrow Wilson, from his wife’s deathbed, cabled all the major belligerents, offering to take the Balkan dispute to The Hague. All made excuses, protested their innocence, railed against the enemy, and pretended war was irrevocable.

    1. Danish initiatives 1914-15

    The Danes began shuttle diplomacy in late 1914 between Berlin and St Petersburg, seeking a compromise peace. Loyal to the Pact of London (September 1914), Tsar Nicholas slammed the door.

    1. Ambassadorial mediation, Washington (September-December 1914)

    In September 1914, prompted by German Ambassador von Bernstorff, William Jennings Bryan, US Secretary of State, launched British-French-German ambassadorial talks in Washington. The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who was negotiating to bring Italy, Greece, and Rumania into the war, and to give the Straits to Russia in order to keep her in the war, closed the talks down. 

    1. Christmas truce (December 1914)

    Inspired by Pope Benedict XV’s suggestion (supported in the US Senate), soldiers on the Western Front began a spontaneous truce on Christmas Eve. Horrified, the Entente was careful to include ‘Article 15’ in the Treaty of London (April 1915), agreeing to shut down all Vatican peace diplomacy. 

    1. The first Colonel House Mission (January-May 1915)

    House travelled to Europe as special US emissary. He found both sides coy on disclosing war aims. US proposals for a simultaneous end to both German submarine warfare and the British blockade of Germany were then derailed by the Lusitania crisis. 

    1. The International Congress of Women, The Hague (April-May 1915).

    Female suffragists met to promote the liberal internationalist alternative to the bloodshed: neutral mediation, a diplomatic settlement, and a new rules-based order with stronger international institutions. This boosted new like-minded pressure groups, the League of Nations Society in Britain, the Dutch-sponsored Central Organisation for a Durable Peace, the League for a New Fatherland in Germany, and the League to Enforce Peace in the USA. 

    1. The Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation (1915 to 1917)

    The American peace movement urged America to lead neutral mediation. Wilson was reluctant, preferring private diplomacy. US peace activists then set-up the Neutral Conference for Continuous Mediation in Stockholm in February 1916 and later at The Hague. There were successes: a delegation to Berlin persuaded German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to announce Germany’s acceptance of international arbitration and a League of Nations on 9 November 1916. 

    1. The second House Mission (January-February 1916)

    House encouraged both sides to moderate war aims and compromise. But London and Berlin preferred to gamble on coming battles (Verdun and the Somme). House and Grey did sign a memorandum: Grey agreed to invite US arbitration at a favourable moment; House agreed that, if Germany refused a reasonable settlement, the USA would ‘probably’ enter the war. Grey refused to initiate US mediation. 

    1. Wilson’s speech to the US League to Enforce Peace (27 May 1916)

    Wilson committed the USA to enter a League of Nations, based on collective security, thus offering the ‘guarantees of security’ all claimed to be fighting for. Responses were cool.

    1. Emily Hobhouse’s ‘peace mission’ (June 1916)

    Emily Hobhouse journeyed to Berlin from Switzerland, and obtained an interview with von Jagow, German Foreign Minister. He declared a readiness to respond to a peace offer from Britain. Grey refused to see Hobhouse on her return to Britain. 

    1. Asquith Cabinet discussions and Lansdowne Memoranda (November 1916)

    In September, British Prime Minister Asquith invited his Cabinet to reconsider war aims. Lloyd George told the US press there must be a fight to the finish, a ‘knock-out blow’. In November, Lord Lansdowne opted decisively for negotiations. With the support of the ‘super-patriotic’ press, Lloyd George then rolled Asquith. On 5 December, he headed a Tory-dominated government, shunning peace by negotiation. 

    1. German and American Peace Notes (December 1916)

    Bethmann-Hollweg offered a Peace Note on 12 December. However, the new High Command hobbled it by insisting that no terms be specified. The new Lloyd George government condemned the offer as a ruse of war. An American Peace Note followed (December 18), urging peace terms. This evoked an incomplete response from the Entente (10 January 1917). The Germans offered to enter talks, but were silent on terms. Wilson then lifted the pressure. In his ‘Peace without Victory’ speech (22 January 1917) he argued that a negotiated settlement would be more durable. Peace hovered. He had stopped loans and supplies to the Entente. But Wilson’s efforts were wrecked by the German elite’s decision to reinstate unrestricted submarine warfare (1 February 1917) – much to the relief of ‘knock-out blowers’ everywhere. Here, typically, the wild men on one side came to the rescue of those on the other. And peace was snuffed out.

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Report 6/2015, Referrals made May and June 2015.

    [2] Prime Minister Tony Abbott, ‘Address to the Anzac Day National Ceremony, Canberra’, 25 April 2014, https://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-23446

    [3] For sources on the search for a negotiated peace, see Kent Forster, The Failures of Peace: The Search for a Negotiated Peace During the First World War (Washington, 1941), Laurence W. Martin, Peace Without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the British Liberals (New Haven, 1958), Z. A. B. Zeman, A Diplomatic History of the First World War (London, 1971), David S. Patterson, The Search for a Negotiated Peace: Women’s Activism and Citizen Diplomacy in World War I (New York, 2008), Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (New York, 2011), Neil Hollander, Elusive Dove: The Search for Peace During World War I (Jefferson, 2014).

  • Douglas Newton. What we fought for: from Bullecourt to the Armistice, 1917-1918

    From 1916 to 1918 on the Western Front, the Australian divisions suffered 181,000 casualties, including 46,000 dead.[1] Some 10,892 of these dead have no known grave.[2] They died mostly from shrapnel and high explosive shells designed to tear people to pieces, or bury them alive. Pulverised, or ploughed under, their remains were unidentifiable.

    So, more terrible centenaries loom from 1917-18. Bullecourt, Passchendaele, Villers-Bretonneux, the Hindenburg Line. For what did Australians die?

    To repel the German invader? It is simplistic to see in the German enemy a singular evil, a complete explanation for the protracted war, or a vindication of all that was done to resist German aggression. In this imperial bloodbath, all sides clung to territory conquered, all planned more conquest, all became more authoritarian, and all had their wide-mouthed politicians and generals insisting on more war.[3] The plague was on all houses – and they reinfected each other.

    For democracy’s sake? Enthusiasm for war and enthusiasm for democracy were at opposite ends of the political spectrum in every belligerent nation.

    What then were the Entente’s war aims for which the war was prolonged?[4]

    The Entente Reply to President Wilson’s Peace Note, 10 January 1917 (PUBLIC)

    In January 1917, while Australian soldiers on the Western Front endured a severe winter, Britain and her Entente partners, after 29 months of warfare, at last published war aims. They issued a formal reply to the German and American Peace Notes of December 1916. It ruled out a negotiated peace. It promised the Entente was ‘not fighting for selfish interests.’ It proclaimed moderate aims: ‘reparation, restitution’ and ‘guarantees’ against aggression. The war was to liberate Belgium, France, and Serbia, and get ‘indemnities’ for them. Grand aims followed: ‘the reorganisation of Europe’ along lines of nationality, the liberation of the oppressed inside Austria-Hungary, and the ‘expulsion’ of the Turks from Europe. The insincerity was stunning. There was to be self-determination, but only for enemy empires. There was silence on the secret treaties of 1915-16, and silence on plans for economic war.

    The Franco-Russian ‘Left Bank of the Rhine’ Agreement (or the ‘Doumergue Agreement’), 14 February and 8 March 1917 (SECRET) 

    Oblivious to imminent revolution, Tsarist Russia and France still played grab. Russia agreed to support France’s claim to the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, the Saar, and the seizure of the Rhineland. In return, France gave Russia ‘complete liberty’ to fix her borders with Germany and Austria. In short, France winked at Russian grab in the east, and Russia winked at French grab in the west.

    Agreements on German colonies and other territories, 1914 to March 1917: (SECRET) 

    The German colonial empire was carved up in a dozen agreements from 1914. Britain and France split German Togoland and the Cameroons (while Britain confirmed her annexations of Turkish territories, Egypt and Cyprus). In July 1916 Japan and Russia agreed upon their claims in China. By March 1917 the Balfour-Motono agreements were confirmed: Britain, France, and Russia granted Japan the German North Pacific Islands, and the German lease on the Shantung Peninsula, in China (Qingdao).

    The Imperial War Cabinet Committees, April-May 1917. (SECRET)

    While Australians endured hell at Bullecourt in April 1917, various Imperial War Cabinet sub-committees redrew maps of the colonial world. Louis Mallet’s ‘Committee on Territorial Changes’ recommended colonial seizures and swaps. Two imperial nabobs, both reactionaries, headed more powerful committees. Lord Curzon’s ‘Territorial Desiderata Committee’ insisted on Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) for Britain, Germany’s elimination as a colonial power, and British territory running Cape to Cairo. Lord Milner’s ‘Committee on Economic Terms’ wanted more protection: ‘imperial preference’, ‘Control of Imperial Resources’, and indemnities to pay for the war. A League of Nations was ‘impracticable’.

    St-Jean-de-Maurienne Agreements, 19 April 1917 (SECRET)

    At the St Jean de Maurienne conference, France, Britain and Italy agreed to more annexations in Turkey, adding to Sykes-Picot. Italy was to gain a vast share, the ‘green’ area, that is the southern third of Anatolia (now Turkey) including Smyrna, and an area of indirect control to its north, on the Aegean coast and hinterland.

    The Caxton Hall speech, 5 January 1918 (PUBLIC)

    After the disaster of Passchendaele (38,000 Australian casualties), and facing pressure from both revolutionary Russia and President Wilson, Lloyd George shifted ground. At the Caxton Hall in London he espoused moderate aims. He disavowed annexations. Britain was fighting above all for Belgium and France. There was ‘no demand for war indemnity.’ Germany’s colonies were ‘held at the disposal of a conference’. Alsace-Lorraine deserved ‘a reconsideration’. Soaring ideals prevailed: the ‘sanctity of treaties’, ‘self-determination’ for all, and ‘some international organisation’. So, after 41 months of terrible war, Britain’s Empire at last had moderate war aims. But Lloyd George’s rhetorical slithers were everywhere.

    True respect for Anzac 

    Thus, from Bullecourt, through the quagmire of Passchendaele, and on to the armistice, Australians continued to die on the Western Front – for all these war aims, known and unknown, sincere and insincere.

    Contemporary speakers on Anzac often indulge in sacrificial fantasies – young blood spilled to bring our nation to birth. They shower praise on the dead, imagining this is respect. It is not respectful of the dead to shun knowledge of the dubious causes smuggled into their heavy kits. It is not respectful of their generous instincts to gloss over what comes of empire. Catastrophes – such as the mechanised slaughter on the Western Front – demand the most searching inquiries.

    To what war aims were the diggers sacrificed in 1917-18? Did the Australian government carefully weigh costs and objectives? Did it try to prevent the steady enlargement of war aims? Sadly, the truth is stark: our inexhaustible loyalty to our great and powerful friend saw our government marginalised and our soldiers left fighting largely in the dark.[5]

    Therefore, was this horrific war truly a national awakening for Australia, or was it the high point of our imperial subservience?

    Assoc. Prof. Douglas Newton is a retired academic. He has taught history at Macquarie University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and Western Sydney University. He is the author of a number of studies of war and peace, including most recently, The Darkest Days: The Truth Behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London, Verso: 2014) and Hell-bent: Australia’s Leap into the Great War (Melbourne: Scribe, 2014). He is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, Ending Armageddon: The Search for a Negotiated Peace during the Great War, to be published by Scribe in 2017.

    [1] ‘WWI The Western Front’: http://www.army.gov.au/our-history/history-in-focus/wwi-the-western-front

    [2] Peter Pedersen, The Anzacs: Gallipoli to the Western Front (Camberwell, 2007), 411.

    [3] John Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007), see Ch. 4 and 158: ‘It would be quite incorrect to speak of a German singularity of destructiveness…’ Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa, 1985), 194: ‘Wilhelmine Germany was not the only country to possess this sort of lunatic fringe.’ David Welch, Germany and Propaganda in World War I: Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London, 2014) p. xii: ‘This work reaffirms that German Society was a highly complex hybrid of competing groups and interests and that to compare the Kaiser’s war aims in 1914 with those of Hitler in 1939 (as some British military historians have attempted to do) is far too simplistic.’ Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, 2011), 50: ‘Yet Imperial Germany was not Nazi Germany. Despite the horror of the German wars in Africa, the Imperial German suppression of colonial revolts did not differ significantly from the violent campaigns of other colonizing powers during the nineteenth century….’

    [4] In addition to sources listed in an earlier post, ‘What we fought for: from Gallipoli to Fromelles, 1914-1916’ (https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=6275), works with a special focus on Britain, the Entente, and US war aims include Paul Guinn, British Strategy and Politics 1914 to 1918 (Oxford, 1965), Lloyd C. Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, 1913-1923 (Oxford, 1987), John Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict (Yale, 1992), David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918 (Oxford, 1995), Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, 1992), Brock Millman, Pessimism and British War Policy 1916-1918 (London, 2001), and Peter Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (Cambridge, 2013).

    [5] Neville Meaney, one of the most prominent historians of Australia’s Great War, has written that regarding Gallipoli Australia was ‘neither consulted nor informed about the British plans’; that on Japanese entry into the war London ‘was not disposed to consult Australia’; that in the formulation of war aims during 1917-18, Prime Minister Hughes ‘had had no part in making British policy’; and that Lloyd George simply ‘took the Dominions’ assent for granted.’ See Neville Meaney, Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923 (Sydney, 2009), 44, 59, and 247-8.

  • Richard Woolcott. Australia/China and Barracuda submarines.

    It seems that one of the important roles for the new Barracuda submarines that we are to purchase from the French is for the submarines to be able to operate at long-range in the South China Sea. Quite apart from the cost of the submarine purchase, is this a wise strategy for Australia to pursue. I have reposted extracts below from an earlier article by Richard Woolcott in which he warns of an adversarial attitude towards China based mainly on Japanese policies and US support. John Menadue.

    Extract from earlier article by Richard Woolcott ‘The Burning question – should Australia do more on the South China Sea‘ 9 March 2016.

    Australia must develop a more balanced approach to its relationships with the United States and a rising China.

    There is a danger that adversarial attitudes towards China, based mainly on Japanese policies and US support, could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The present debate on China seems mainly to assume that Australia has no choice but to support American primacy in Asia against what is perceived as a rising Chinese hegemony.  This is a simplistic approach which has been challenged by Hawke, Keating, the late Malcolm Fraser and most of our former Ambassadors to China, as well as a number of well informed academics, including Hugh White at the ANU. While China can be expected to resist American hegemony in the Asian region, it does accept a continuing and constructive US role in Asia.

    Australia should not take sides on China/Japan or Vietnamese, Malaysian and Philippine disputes within ASEAN, on rival territorial claims in the South China Sea, as the United States has done. Australia’s focus should be on the unimpeded passage to the mainland of China through international waters in the South China Sea, as the United States insists on in respect of its access to its ports. There is no reason why China cannot rise peacefully if it is not provoked.

    China maintains it is simply protecting its regional interests from the US “pivot to Asia “, or “rebalancing “as it is now called. Although President Obama has not defined this policy in any detail, two senior US Admirals have recently said, in public, that it is directed at restricting China’s influence in the South China Sea.12

    Richard Woolcott was previously President of the United Nations Assembly, Head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Australian Ambassador to Indonesia and many other countries.

  • Richard Broinowski. Australia’s maritime espionage

    According to The Australian’s defence editor Brendan Nicholson, an Australian submarine twice penetrated the Cam Ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam in 1985. Nicholson’s claim appeared in an article in the newspaper on 27 April 2016 analysing Canberra’s decision to build French Barracuda submarines in Adelaide. HMAS Orion’s first intrusion resulted in ‘brilliantly clear’ footage of sonar and other hull fittings on a Soviet Charlie-class nuclear submarine. On the second, it shadowed a Soviet Kirov-class nuclear-powered cruiser and monitored its communications.

    In 1985 I was Australia’s Ambassador to Vietnam, resident in Hanoi. I knew nothing of Orion’s activities. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden had instructed me to repair relations with the country, damaged by the war and by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s over-reaction to Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia in December 1978. I was to encourage bilateral trade, re-start an aid program halted by Fraser, formally hand back to the Vietnamese our extensive embassy properties in Saigon, initiate a missing-in-action mission for Australian soldiers, facilitate a Royal Commission into Agent Orange, and generally re-build trust with Hanoi. I was to engage the Vietnamese in a dialogue on Cambodia and find out specifically if and when they intended to leave.

    At the time, the Cold War was at its height and Vietnam was commonly and quite mistakenly regarded in the West as a Soviet colony. Mr Hayden’s initiatives were strongly criticised by China, and five of the then six members of ASEAN (Indonesia, distrustful of China, and wanting a strong Vietnam to stand up to China to its north, was the exception). The Thais were particularly incensed, certain that the Vietnamese army would soon invade across the Cambodian border. Still smarting from their pull-out from Vietnam in June 1975, the Americans thought Hayden naive and foolish. Trenchant critics of Hayden’s initiative towards Hanoi also existed in Canberra, particularly in the Office of National Assessments and parts of Foreign Affairs.

    Despite the static, I was getting on with my job. We began an aid program and hosted a trade mission from Australia. I handed back our embassy properties in Saigon. With Vietnamese cooperation, we conducted the first MIA mission by any participating country in the Vietnam War and gathered evidence for the Royal Commission into Agent Orange.

    And I was also getting somewhere with Vietnamese officials on Cambodia. During meetings over several months, Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach became increasingly frank with me. Since reunifying the country in 1975, Hanoi had been doggedly trying to pull the place together. By 1978, China, which had been unhappy with unification, was making threatening noises from the north. And that ‘madman’ Pol Pot persisted in attacking Vietnamese villages across the border from the south west. Vietnam had insufficient military strength to challenge China, but could certainly put a spoke in Pol Pot’s wheel. So on Christmas Day 1978, the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh. Vietnamese forces would leave when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had been neutralised. Thach ridiculed the suggestion that Vietnam would stay in Cambodia or had territorial designs on Thailand.

    I reported our conversations to Canberra, along with my view that Thach and his colleagues were telling the truth.

    Meanwhile, if Nicholson and The Australian are to be believed, Orion was busy in Cam Ranh Bay. At the least, its activities were contrary to customary international law and the newly promulgated 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention. If detected in Vietnam’s internal waters, the consequences would have been horrific. Orion could have been depth-charged or captured, its complement of 63 crew interned, its armaments including its Mark 48 US torpedoes and Harpoon anti-ship missiles stripped. Bilateral relations could have come to a grinding halt. I could have been recalled or expelled from Hanoi. The increasing goodwill and understanding created through Hayden’s initiative and my activities would have been lost, and our sceptical western and ASEAN allies would have glowed with schadenfreude.

    In spite of its appalling baggage, this spying hubris appears not to have given either the Australian government or opposition cause to reflect. Indeed, it resonates in at least two respects with Australia’s recent decision to build at enormous expense a dozen French Barracuda submarines. First is range. The government says it wants long-range subs, a capacity the German and Japanese boats lack. This is presumably to enable us to spy on Chinese assets in the South China Sea. But 1960 British-designed Oberon-class boats costing a mere $10 million a copy (triple that in 2016 terms) had the capacity to reach the same neighbourhood in Vietnam. What is so special about the range of the vastly more expensive French Barracudas?

    Second, why is the Australian government so fixated on submarine espionage outside our immediate maritime neighbourhood? The consequences of discovery by China are more appalling than by Vietnam or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It’s one thing to sail on the surface through waters claimed by China in the interests of reinforcing ‘rules-based’ freedom of navigation, but quite another to penetrate coastal waters by submarine and conduct maritime espionage. If that’s not the purpose, why spend such colossal amounts on new submarines? To sustain the South Australian economy, keep Christopher Pyne in parliament, catch up with our neighbours? All of the above? I will explore motives and consequences in a following article.

    Richard Broinowski is a former diplomat and Ambassador to Vietnam, Korea and Mexico.He is currently President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in NSW.