Category: Defence

  • Annette Brownlie. No new war in Iraq.

    Both major political parties are once again standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the US, in support of what amounts to a new military intervention in Iraq.

    The process began with the dropping of humanitarian aid supplies to the Yezidi. It has now moved on to the delivery of weapons and munitions to Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Meanwhile, Defence Minister David Johnston has indicated that Australian armed forces (Super Hornet warplanes and C130s) are to be made available to support whatever action the US decides upon.

    All of this has happened with scarcely any discussion – in or outside of the parliament. No questioning or dissent has been heard in this drive towards intervention and, possibly, eventual war. (However, a recent poll shows that 78% of the population opposes having Australian ‘boots on the ground’ in Iraq.)

    Even the proposal that there be a parliamentary debate about the intervention, so that the government could make its case to the Australian people, has been opposed by both major parties. There is no possibility for the parliament to take any part in the decision to send Australian forces overseas.  Nor has the Abbott government explained the sudden need to switch from aid to arms. And it has certainly not explained what Australia hopes to achieve.

    The horror in Iraq today is a direct consequence of the war on that began with the invasion of 2003. John Howard’s government joined that invasion on the basis of falsehoods and against the opinion of the majority of the population. It appears that the present government is eagerly waiting for a request to follow the US once again.

    The massive “shock and awe” bombing and the 11-year occupation of Iraq created huge numbers of civilian casualties – including more than 1 million dead – and massive internal displacement of people. The West’s propping up of the repressive regime that followed, laid the basis for the emergence of the Islamic State (IS) fundamentalists. IS has become the latest reason for intervention. Ironically, it is using weapons captured from the Iraqi army and originally supplied by the US.

    The lesson that should have been learnt from Iraq is that military meddling in the affairs of the Middle East does not work. There was a disastrous outcome last time and no evidence to indicate anything different this time.

    Australia and the US do not recognise Kurdistan as an independent state. Sending arms to the Kurds means that Australia is continuing to meddle – in this case within the movement for Kurdish self-determination.

    If the Australian government was serious about helping the Iraqi minorities, rather than following the US into military intervention, it would immediately:

    • Expand the refugee program and offer sanctuary to the displaced and traumatised
    • Send humanitarian aid – food; engineers; doctors and constructions workers. 

    Sending yet more armaments to the area, which is already wracked by years of warfare, will not reduce the level of violence it is experiencing. The area needs less weaponry, not more.

    Annett Brownlie is a member of IPAN (The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network)

  • John Tulloh. Canberra’s fork in the road – the humanitarian way or the warpath?

    What interesting, fraught and changing times we live in. This month marks the 75th anniversary of the start of World War Two. Britain and France with little ado told Germany to get out of Poland or else. Three days later King George VI made a radio speech to the British nation that good must prevail. Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, did his ‘melancholy duty’ via ABC radio and without further ado off went the men of both countries to war again. It all seemed so straight forward.

    But today we face another fearful dilemma about another occupying force:  how to handle the Islamic State (IS) insurgents whose barbaric behaviour in Iraq has been as evil as that of the Nazis. The need for humanitarian assistance by the West for IS’s victims required no debate. But then what? Another invasion was out of the question, of course. But clearly, IS cannot be left unchecked when its followers roam elsewhere in Iraq like primitive bandits imposing their brutal rule in the name of Islam.

    Other Arab countries have shown little or no interest in intervening, while Iraq’s own army appears not up to the task despite the billions of dollars the U.S. spent in training them. That leaves the West. In fact, it’s the West’s biggest and most acute predicament: how do what are essentially Christian democracies deal with Islamic extremism?

    Tony Abbott has been characteristically cautious in discussing any plans beyond the humanitarian air drops in conjunction with other Western countries and now the delivery of military supplies to friendly forces. But he has confirmed what is obvious: that he has already discussed with Washington a wider military role.

    Mr Abbott might care to refresh himself about what happened in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq invasion. Neither conflict incurred Australian casualties as a result of warfare. The Gulf War was a UN-sanctioned operation to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait which they had invaded the previous year. Bob Hawke, the Australian Prime Minister then, restricted our involvement to helping patrol the Persian Gulf and demining operations.

    In 2003, Mr Abbott’s mentor, John Howard, was in charge and more accommodating of Washington’s interests., He kept the public and the media guessing right up to the last minute. Once he had decided or rather confirmed that we would join President George W. Bush’s plan to invade, Australian SAS troops were operating in western Iraq with considerable success two days before the bombing of Baghdad began.

    Our intention to be part of the coalition of the willing was never in doubt despite all the ducking and weaving by Mr Howard. A few weeks before the invasion, the Sydney Morning Herald, ran a memorable cartoon showing an enthusiastic George Bush waving his Stetson and a grinning Tony Blair aboard a rocket bound for Baghdad with an alarmed-looking John Howard sitting on the tail and saying something to the effect of ‘Seriously, though, we haven’t decided yet’.

    Greg Sheridan, the well-connected foreign editor of The Australian, is in little doubt in the current case. He says Canberra is ‘considering deploying SAS soldiers, F18 Super Hornet jet fighters and sophisticated airborne early warning and control aircraft as part of a military contribution to US-led efforts in Iraq’. Here we go again.

    Our military involvement to date has been the delivery of weapons to the Kurdish militia, the peshmerga (‘One who faces death’). The U.S. are looking to these fierce fighters as a kind of first line of defence in Northern Iraq where IS followers have been rampant.

    Then what? How will the West deal with IS units terrorising communities elsewhere in Iraq? The era of ground troops is over. The new battles are being fought from the sky by warplanes and drones. As the Americans discovered 40 years ago over North Vietnam during that war, relying on just bombing is a futile exercise.

    The most the West could hope for is to drive IS followers back into their original sanctuary, Syria. Then what? You can almost imagine President Obama saying ‘I wish I knew’ when to date he’s had no idea how to deal with Syria and its nasty Assad regime. It would widen the conflict with who knows what consequences for Australia as well as the other participants.

    James Brown, a former Australian military officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now a fellow of the Lowy Institute, claims that Mr Abbott is using the military as ‘a tool of international policy’. He cited not only the Iraq developments, but now Australia’s startling involvement with faraway Ukraine. He told ABC radio that staff in the Prime Minister’s office are talking about an Abbott doctrine. ‘It’s a doctrine that’s reactive, it’s a doctrine that leads with the military and it’s a doctrine that’s very values driven’.

    For now Abbott’s biggest worry is the possibility of jihadists slipping through the cracks with the potential to cause mayhem to our safe and comfortable way of life. There is also the unthinkable: a fellow Australian – a media person, an NGO or even a soldier – being taken prisoner and beheaded. However, Mr Abbott can take some comfort from the fact that the overwhelming Moslem community in Australia feel the same way about IS as he does.

    The conflict has thrown up some developments which future historians will pore over.

    One is that the Kurds, having been ignored by the West for years, cannot believe their good fortune in finally being the centre of favourable attention and in such demand. But they know there will be a limit to the West’s attention lest their long-held ambitions for an independent homeland lead to the break-up of Iraq.

    Another is the steady exodus of Christians from the Middle East where they have existed since the first century. Many are fleeing brutal oppression, such as from IS. Others see little future when sectarian differences and hostility dominate daily life. It is estimated that the region’s 12 million Christians will drop to 6 million by 2020.

    For Mr Abbott, he now has more rapidly changing developments than ever before to take into account in determining Australia’s future direction in foreign matters. While still playing a humanitarian role anywhere, it might be safer and more practical to focus on where our future really lies – East Asia.

    FOOTNOTE: In late 2002, the notoriously secretive Defence Dept in Canberra called a meeting of all media representatives to discuss accreditation in the event of a potential conflict, i.e. the looming Iraq invasion. The rules had been drawn up by a leading Australian legal company for some bizarre reason. They included censorship of all news reports. So much for ‘live’ reporting. The location of the UAE base where RAAF jets might be stationed was never to be mentioned despite them presumably being visible to passers-by. Violators of the rules would have their accreditation revoked. All this was part of what was code-named ‘Operation Chad’. As the RAN was also involved, the brigadier in charge of the briefing was asked why such a name was chosen. ‘Why not?’ he replied as if this were a stupid question. Chad is land-locked, he was informed. He still look puzzled. Needless to say, the media were unanimous in rejecting the terms of accreditation.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

  • Tony Smith. The failure of imagination

    Australia has rushed to despatch even more armaments into the already troubled areas contested by men of violence across Iraq and Syria. It is clear that once again, our national government has assumed that this action is necessary and unavoidable. In reality, there are always choices and it is disappointing that the Coalition has failed to imagine any alternative to an escalation of warfare.

    The Government line is reminiscent of the disastrous entry to the invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Minsters argued that Australia had to do ‘something’ about the regime of Saddam Hussein, but the only thing on their minds was military action. We went to war then with inadequate information, and in some respects totally inaccurate information, particularly about the so-called ‘weapons of mass destruction’. The intelligence services are expensive financially and their cultural threats to civil liberties both here and abroad make their failures doubly tragic. Why, if we make such sacrifices of national sovereignty to be kept well informed by the big players in the USA and Europe, did we not see the need to take some lower level of action over the rise of ISIS during the last two years?

    There are several unpalatable possibilities. First, Australia has not been informed of the rising threat posed by ISIS. Secondly, we were informed but the Government deliberately chose to ignore this advice so that it could eventually resort to the action it has now deemed ‘necessary’. Thirdly, we just did not have the imagination required to address the rise of ISIS using other means. All three possibilities suggest that Australia does not have skills in this area and that we would be better off to vacate the field and not try to be important players in the ‘war on terrorism’ being conducted by the USA and Britain.

    Exactly what is likely to happen to arms dropped to those under threat is anyone’s guess. Some will almost certainly be captured by ISIS guerrillas. Some will no doubt be turned against the people we have professed to be helping, but we will suggest this is an unfortunate consequence, something like the acceptance of thousands of child deaths in Baghdad in the earlier conflict. After all, ours is a country which can put our hands on our hearts and export uranium to India, despite India’s refusal to sign the international conventions relating to nuclear non-proliferation. We delude ourselves by asserting that ‘our’ uranium’ will not play any role in India’s nuclear weapons program so perhaps we can just as easily pretend that weapons dropped in the path of the rampaging ISIS forces will not be used by them.

    In earlier attempts to disperse land mines across South East Asia, western forces made the same assumptions. Yet those land mines created numerous innocent victims. Now arms manufacturers and military strategists have turned to other means of killing; they now maim remotely by using cluster bombs and drone missiles. It is time that all those members of parliament and other commentators who support this weapons drop faced the reality that a world bristling with armaments will continue to experience instability. The availability of lethal weapons makes small problems into larger ones.

    In the invasion of Iraq ten years ago, some people of conscience, including some Australians, attempted to stimulate the imaginations of the strategists by offering themselves as ‘human shields’. They attempted to make it clear that some civilian targets such as schools and water supplies should be avoided. They risked death by positioning themselves near these sites so that the bombs and missiles of the forces of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ would not damage them. For their pains they were vilified and condemned by the Australian Government. There is no opportunity for such an action in the present crisis. However, there remains an urgent need for creative thinking to avoid what will almost certainly become yet another humanitarian disaster. Millions of dollars will be spent daily on the campaign that is now unfolding. It is appalling that a Government which claims to be so careful of the taxpayers’ dollars will spend this money without any prospect of achieving a positive outcome. Where are the alternative visions for peace across Iraq and Syria?

    In 2014 the world began remembering the centenary of the outbreak of the war of 1914-1918. The propaganda of the time assured those who suffered that their sacrifices would not be in vain because this would be a war to end all wars. The century since 1914 has been a time of almost constant warfare. No war can end war. No amount of killing and violence can establish the principle that killing and violence are wrong and should be eliminated from world affairs. It really is time to imagine some other way of achieving our legitimate aims.

    Tony Smith is a former academic and regular contributor to Eureka Street, The Australian Review of Public Affairs and the The Australian Quarterly.

     

     

  • John Menadue. The ANZAC Myth.

    The four-year and well-funded carnival celebrating Anzac and WWI is now rolling. The carnival will depict WWI as the starting point of our nation, as our coming of age!

    It was nothing of the sort. It was a sign of our international immaturity and dependence on others. What was glorious about involving ourselves in the hatreds and rivalry of European powers that had wrought such carnage in Europe over centuries? Many of our forebears came to Australia to get away from this. But conservatives, our war historians and colonel blimps chose deliberately to draw us back to the stupidities and hatreds of Europe.

    It seems that the greater the political and military stupidity of wars that we have been involved in, the more we are encouraged to  hide behind the valour of our service people at Gallipoli, the Western Front and elsewhere.. The ‘leadership’ of Winston Churchill and General Ian Hamilton were catastrophic both for the British and for us. Australian and New Zealand forces at Gallipoli were commanded by a British General. No hiding behind the sacrifice of troops can avoid the facts. We should not have been there and it was a disaster.

    Unfortunately the more we ignore the political and military mistakes of the past, the more likely we are to make similar mistakes in the future. And we keep doing it. If we had a sense of our calamitous involvement in wars in the past like WW1 we would be less likely to make foolish decisions to involve ourselves in wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

    Our history is littered with tragic military adventures, being led by the nose by either the UK or the US.  And it goes on through the Boer War, the Sudan War and more recently, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. In all these cases, and just like WWI, we have desperately tried to hide behind the valour of our service people.

    The most important and justified war in which we have fought as a nation was WWII, in defence of our own people and land. But WWII is rated by the Australian War Memorial and so many others as of much less significance.  WW1 Is the Holy Grail.

    On April 25 each year we are told by tongue-tied people that the great sacrifice of WWI was in defence of freedom and the right. But I don’t think that they even believe it themselves. It just does not ring true. Tony Abbott says it was a ‘just war’. But he is yet to explain what was ‘just’ about it. It is claimed that it united this country, but it divided us in a way that we had never been divided before or since with Billy Hughes exploiting the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in the country. Only 30% of eligible men chose to enlist. WWI was a great divider. It was not a unifier despite the platitudes of Anzac Day.

    Some claim that WWI was to bring peace to Europe. But the war and its aftermath laid the ground for even greater death and destruction in WWII.

    In relation to our population, our greatest loss of lives was in the Frontier Wars where over 30,000 indigenous people died in defence of their own land. But we ignore it in favour of the myths of Anzac. Best we forget the Frontier Wars.

    The first time Australians and New Zealanders fought together was against the Maoris in New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s. The ANZAC connection was not forged at Gallipoli but half a century before in the Maori Wars.  It’s best that we forget that too. It doesn’t do our self-respect much good to recall that we fought together with New Zealanders in a race war to quell the Maori people.

    The early and remarkable achievements of this young country at the turn of the century and early in the 19th Century are blotted out by the blood and blather of WWI, ANZAC and Gallipoli.

    Federation in 1900 was a remarkable achievement, pulling together our six colonies into a nation. We led the world in universal suffrage, the rights of women, industrial democracy and the minimum wage. The ‘Australian ballot’ or secret ballot was progressively adopted in the Australian states in the latter half of the nineteenth century. We were a world leader. Our ballot was adopted in New Zealand, Canada, UK and US

    In 1904 we had not only Australia’s first Labor Government. It was the first in the world. The rights of working people as expressed in the Harvester Judgement of 1907 put Australia as a leader on the world stage. We were an advanced social laboratory. Before WWI there were two decades of remarkable nationhood and advancement for ordinary people.

    But conservatives were frightened of the future. They wanted to drag us back to the heart break of the past. And they succeeded with the help of Billy Hughes and other Labor renegades

    In the process we broke our own heart – or as Marilyn Lake has expressed in a blog on April 23 this year ‘WWI fractured the nation’s soul’.

    It is time we were honest with ourselves and discounted the myths of WWI, ANZAC and Gallipoli.

    Instead we should celebrate the two remarkable decades of progress before the catastrophe of WW1.

     

  • David Stephens. The children suffer.

    Osbert Sitwell’s The Next War, published in 1918, depicts some plutocrats deciding what would be an appropriate war memorial. The senior plutocrat puts a suggestion which his colleagues eagerly take up.

    “What more fitting memorial for the fallen
    Than that their children
    Should fall for the same cause?”

    Rushing eagerly into the street,
    The kindly old gentlemen cried
    To the young:
    “Will you sacrifice
    Through your lethargy
    What your fathers died to gain?
    The world must be made safe for the young!”
    And the children
    Went . . .

    Are we in Australia just as keen on roping children into war as Sitwell’s plutocrats were? We do not explicitly say to them, ‘you must fall for a cause’ but we sanitise and normalise and proselytise ‘sacrifice’ in war in a way that cannot fail to be attractive to some children, even while we protest that we abhor war and wish to save future generations from it. Teaching children about war can so easily become teaching war to children.

    Politicians keep track of the involvement of children in war remembrance. The then prime minister, Julia Gillard, said last year that she always looked for the number of children at Anzac Day services and noted there were ‘more and more’ and that parents admitted they had been ‘dragged’ along by their children.

    So it’s actually the children who are driving the next level of engagement and I think that that means that for all of time, we will commemorate Anzac Day and think about who we are as Australians on that day.

    This attitude is bipartisan. The current Minister for the Centenary of Anzac, Senator Michael Ronaldson, said to the New South Wales Branch of the RSL earlier this year that

    2014 to 2018 means that you and I have another opportunity to teach another generation of young Australians what their obligations are. And if we do not do so ladies and gentlemen, then we have failed them and we have failed ourselves.

    When I asked the Minister’s office what sort of obligations he was referring to (social? moral? legal?) the answer was non-committal. More recently, the Minister told Sydney Legacy that he wanted by the end of 2018 to have

    the next generation of young Australians doing what you and I are doing at the moment. They will be carrying the torch …

    And when they hop on a school bus, or they walk home, or they go shopping, or they go out at night with relative freedom – that they realise in many instances that freedom has been paid for in blood. And they must understand that.

    The Minister’s department, Veterans’ Affairs, runs an extensive education program, with booklets, posters and teaching aids flowing to schools or downloadable without charge. Marilyn Lake and others have questioned the appropriateness of this activity and have suggested it is government-sponsored indoctrination. Some teachers, nevertheless, say the DVA material is ignored, thrown away or balanced with other resources. Honest History’s research suggests that another flagship commemorative program, the Simpson Prize, is very much a minority activity and is, in any case, tentatively moving from civics education with a military flavour towards a genuine history activity.

    On the other hand, children are referred to the jingoistic tosh of retired Colonel Arthur Burke OAM, who wrote of the torch of freedom being passed from dying hands on the beach at Gallipoli to children today, or they sit through Anzac services with scripts downloaded from the Australian Army website. The Australian War Memorial encourages primary school age children to write messages on little crosses to be planted in the graves of dead soldiers in war cemeteries in France and Belgium. The Memorial has also commenced the Roll of Honour Soundscape project, where thousands of children are being invited to recite names from the World War I Roll of Honour for replaying in the Memorial’s cloisters continuously for the next four years. Questions about whether this is a sensible activity for 12 year-olds are brushed aside with rhetoric about helping children ‘connect’ with the dead.

    Meanwhile, school visits to the Memorial continue to be subsidised and perhaps half a million children a year visit. The Memorial continues to offer its mini-theme park ‘Discovery Zone’ (‘touch, listen and smell’ but no corpses in the imitation World War I trench), its Memorial boxes, and various other resources and activities, at minimal charge. Projects in schools feature prominently in the Anzac Centenary Local Grants Program and schools compete for the Commonwealth’s Anzac Day School Awards and many similar Anzac-themed competitions and events in the States and Territories.

    When you question teachers or resource providers about the ethics of teaching children about war, the answer is often along the lines of ‘we give the children something that is appropriate to their age’ or ‘they get a nuanced view when they are younger and then more details later’. That this process may never work its way towards honesty is indicated by the continuing tendency of adult, official spruikers of war commemoration to use euphemisms like ‘fallen’ and ‘sacrifice’ in relation to dead soldiers, to avoid terms like ‘eviscerated’, ‘decapitated’, or ‘blown to bits’ to describe the circumstances of those deaths, and to continue to peddle overblown rhetoric about ‘dying for freedom’. What is involved in the rather nebulous concept of ‘connecting’ with the dead is never really spelled out. Connect with what purpose?

    We adults are champions at ‘nuance’ in relation to war so it is no wonder that children are fed loads of it. The essential message that war requires soldiers to kill or be killed is lost in nonsense about connecting or ‘understanding’ or smothered by sanitised collections of war memorabilia and dress-ups.

    I saw the Anzac Day march in Lismore, New South Wales, this year. There were lots of school children there in uniform, some of them marching in step, like soldiers. I wrote to the local RSL afterwards, suggesting it was wrong for children to imitate military practice. Had the gentleman replied, I’m sure he would have said something about ‘not glorifying war’. He would also have avoided the question of whether relentless, ubiquitous, sentimental commemoration gives children a rosy impression of war. He would have skirted the implications for future generations of their ‘obligations’ to carry the torch of remembrance.

    This torch carries many messages – has many ‘nuances’ – including the usually unspoken one that freedom, allegedly ‘paid for in blood’, may have to be redeemed in similar fashion in the future. Meanwhile, there is a club in Lismore, a club where old Diggers go after the Anzac march. It has a neon sign, ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance’ The vigilant are getting younger every year.

     

    David Stephens is secretary of Honest History (honesthistory.net.au). Honest History is a broad coalition of historians and others, committed to frank debate and expressing a diversity of opinions on specific issues. Views in this article are the author’s own. The Honest History website contains a version with links.

     

  • Tony Smith. Dubious celebrations of war.

    On 28 July 1914, the world was thrown into a terrible conflict. On that day, a Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian archduke and his wife. Because European states belonged to alliances which were heavily armed and many countries on other continents belonged to their empires, the war spread until it had consumed over a million lives. Between 2014 and 2018 those terrible events will be remembered in various ways. Some of those commemorations might be regarded as neutral, but inevitably, many will be matters of controversy. While Australia’s events will start in earnest around the centenary of the Gallipoli landing next year on 25 April, the screening of a television series on Anzac nurses suggests that one theme will be the evocation of sentimental responses in admiration of those who enlisted.

    The Anzac legend has been exploited cynically by politicians over the last 100 years. In all conflicts, there is a distinct pattern that most of the population opposes Australia entering a war until such time as troops are committed. Then people understandably feel an obligation to support the ‘diggers’ as they engage in their dangerous tasks. There is a desire to get the fighting over with and then return to normal politics.

    This leaves opponents of war in a difficult situation. During times of conflict, the expression of any doubts about the wisdom or correctness of engaging in military action is construed as disloyalty to the troops and to the country. At other times, however, the issues do not have the urgency to grip the popular imagination and so opportunities to discuss matters of war and peace are limited. It is understandable that people do not want to be forced to discuss such matters when they are enjoying peace. They want to get on with the ordinary everyday things that help them to develop their lives – work, play and building relationships.

    Over the next five years the nature of the commemorations could mimic either war or peace. It is important to discuss the issues critically. As the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine shows, the world is over armed today, and the situation is more serious than it was in 1914. Alliances still cause blind responses to crises. Russia has been reluctant to condemn the Ukrainian separatists and the USA has been weak in its response to Israel’s military actions in Gaza. The international agencies which could assist to ameliorate the problems are weakened by states which refuse to compromise on matters of national sovereignty. The archduke’s assassination may have been the spark which ignited a conflagration in 1914, but the background conditions of war are just as dangerous in 2014. This suggests that merely contemplating earlier tragedies has not enabled the world to progress in its thinking over the last century.

    An alternative explanation for the failure to learn from the 1914-18 war is that discussion has been stifled by cynical forces. Patriots have been reluctant to allow a focus on the folly, waste and evils of war because they are afraid that our veterans might be dishonoured. They fear also that if killing in war is condemned as evil, then the stories of Australia’s wars might be revised. By most popular interpretations, Australia has prevailed in its wars because its cause has always been just and its engagement reluctant. The controversy over the Vietnam conflict shows that veterans can indeed be hurt when the political motivation behind a commitment is questioned. We do however have a duty not to despatch the military for dubious reasons such as the call by a powerful ally.

    Recently deceased Tasmanian Governor Peter Underwood caused some controversy in an Anzac Day address this year when he questioned the importance of studying Simpson’s donkey rather than scrutinising the reasons for Australia’s lengthy involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the election campaign, the Coalition suggested that Gallipoli was not studied enough in schools and critics immediately argued the desire to include more about the Anzac legend in education programs was a part of the broader ‘history wars’. Formerly this cultural controversy has focussed in on the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Despite some positive statements about Indigenous policy, the Prime Minister recently attracted the criticism of Labor’s first female Indigenous parliamentarian when he suggested that Australia was undeveloped until the British arrived in 1788.

    Over the next five years, all thinking Australians should regard it as their duty to look critically at First World War commemorations. They should be very sceptical about any events which could make it easier for a future Australian Government to commit the military to conflicts overseas. In particular, they should scrutinise the statements of current politicians who, unfortunately, are likely to cynically exploit every occasion to enhance their popularity.

    Tony Smith is a former academic and regular contributor to Eureka Street , The Australian Review of Public Affairs and the Australian Quarterly

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Anzac and hiding behind the valour of our military.

    For those who may have missed this. I have reposted this earlier piece about Anzac and hiding behind our heroes.  John Menadue

    There is an unfortunate and continuing pattern in our history of going to war- that the more disastrous the war the more politicians and the media hide behind the valour of service men and women. We will see this displayed again on April 25.

    The Director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, drew attention to this well-honed way of distorting and excusing our strategic and political mistakes. In the SMH on October 5 last year, he said ‘The more obscene the war, the more inexplicable it seems for us today, the more many [young people] admire those men and women who went in our name’. (See my blog October 11, 2013, ‘The drumbeat grows louder’.)

    It is not only young people who have been drawn into this distortion of history. Governments and the media have encouraged us to ignore the disastrous wars that we have been engaged in and learn from our mistakes. Rather than face the consequences of acknowledging those disasters, governments and the media then change the subject to the valour of our heroes. We refuse to face the fact that these heroes have often died in vain

    By any measure our involvement in the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been disastrous. So what do our governments, the Australian War Memorial and the media do? They avoid examining how we got into such disastrous wars. They do this by dwelling on the heroism of our service people. VC winners are an ideal way to change the subject from a disastrous war to an Australian hero.

    There is no doubt that they are heroic, but the wars they fought in were anything but heroic. These three wars were disastrous but we refuse to acknowledge that fact. The consequence will be that in the future we will continue to make foolish decisions about getting into war. That could occur over the dispute between Japan and China over the islands in the East-China Sea.

    In this cover up of failed policies, prime ministers, ministers, opposition leaders and the media have attended almost every ship taking Australian service personnel to or from war zones in the Middle East. I don’t think the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition have missed any funeral of a veteran of those wars. There was even a fly-over in Gippsland for an Australian soldier who had accidentally shot himself.

    Our involvement in WWI was disastrous in every way. We acted like a colony at the behest of England But we didn’t spend time dwelling on the catastrophe as a result of our strategic and political mistakes. That hopefully would discourage us from repeating them in the future. Instead we deluged ourselves and continue to do so in the valour of those who served and died in WWI.

    WWII was much more a war we had to fight in our own national interest and for the freedom of our region. But the recall of that war and the sacrifices of our military personnel is quite small at the Australian War Memorial compared with the coverage of WWI. We had a strong case for involvement in WWII but not WWI. Yet the coverage at the Australian War Memorial does exactly the reverse. Strategically Kokoda was more important to Australia than Gallipoli.

    In his excellent new book ‘Rupert Murdoch’ – a re-assessment” Professor  Rod Tiffen draws attention to the way that News Ltd in the UK covered its mistaken  support for  the appalling  wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . It just changed the subject. News Ltd never attempted to seriously  examine the fiction and mistaken policies which it supported and which led the UK into those wars. It changed the subject by attacking PM Gordon Brown for not looking after the veterans. Rod Tiffen put it this way.

    ‘In one of the last issues of The Sun edited by Rebekah Brooks, the front page consisted of the faces of the 207 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, with a large headline across the middle, reading “Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on”. The strap at the top said “Message to politicians failing our heroes” … The multipage splash was accompanied by a cartoon of a wounded soldier with the caption “abandoned”.’

    Tiffen added ‘Responsible newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times reflected publicly on their journalistic failings during the period [of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars]’.  

    But not News Ltd and Rupert Murdoch.

    What the Murdoch papers did in the UK is common amongst governments and media generally. They refuse to acknowledge their complicity in disastrous wars. To cover their tracks they focus on the heroism of service people.

    It is unpatriotic and cowardly to refuse to examine and publicly acknowledge decisions about going to war. That is surely the most momentous decision that any government can make. But by focusing on the story and the valour of service people, like successive Australian Prime Ministers, Rupert Murdoch and the Australian War Memorial, we are discouraged from looking honestly at our history.

    If we don’t learn from our mistakes we will keep repeating them. We must stop hiding behind our heroes.

     

  • Graham Freudenberg on ‘The Making of Australia – A Concise History’ by Robert Murray

    When I was a teenage Tory in Brisbane in the early Fifties, Bob Murray, a bright young spark from the Melbourne Argus was the most persuasive of my newspaper contemporaries who led me gently towards the light.  In Sydney a couple of years later, at the end of 1954, in midnight to dawn sessions at the old Phillip Street Journalists’ Club, we debated the coming of the Labor Split, unwittingly laying the foundations for his classic account The Split – Australian Labor in the Fifties (1970).

    In the halcyon early Seventies, as one of the few people I knew who had actually been behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, he helped me keep Ostpolitik and  Détente in the perspective of the continuing awfulness of regimes like the East German. This clarity of views, sharpness of insights, balance and common sense abound in his octogenarian opus The Making of Australia – A Concise History (Rosenberg Publishing).

    This is the first single-volume general history of Australia since the ‘history wars’. To some extent it complements from a more conservative perspective the monumental Cambridge History of Australia edited by Stuart Macintyre, at less than a tenth of the price. Both works show how the ‘history wars’ have transformed our approach, especially about the relations between the Aborigines and the occupiers after 1788.

    For the first time, the relations between the aborigines and settlers form an integral part of the whole narrative. In the index, there are 196 entries, with substantial references, by my count, on 103 pages – one third of the book. The aboriginal story is woven into the ongoing narrative. This inclusiveness is unprecedented in Australian general histories.  We have come a long way from the great flowering of Australian historiography in the 1950s and 1960s, when Manning Clark subsequently apologised for his comparative neglect of Aborigine studies and Gordon Greenwood, in the first post-war general history Australia, ignored them altogether.

    In dealing with Australia’s military history, Bob Murray has taken a very different approach, and I think less successfully. He has chosen to lump the First and Second World Wars together in a single chapter entitled ‘The Call of Khaki’. This approach may emphasise the continuity of the two wars, at least in their European and imperial context. But, besides wrenching the chronology of the narrative somewhat, this treatment understates what I believe to be the centrality of the wars to our political, social and economic development.

    There are signs that the Anzac Centenary is going to spark another round of ‘history wars’ in much the way that the Bicentenary set in train the debate that led to the ‘history wars’ about Aboriginal Australia. Perhaps John Menadue’s blog last year about the political manipulation of the Anzac tradition was a first shot.

    This time around, I hope we are mature enough to avoid some of the nastiness that accompanied the last round. In his book on the Split, Bob Murray memorably noted ‘the absence of goodwill’ as a major factor in Labor’s self-destruction. There was a notable absence of goodwill in the waging of the first ‘history wars’.

    It would be ironic if the renewed debate on Australia’s military history came down to competing slogans of ‘best we forget’ versus ‘lest we forget’. After all, ‘best we forget’ was a sentiment often used to discourage the quest for truth about the Aborigines.

    When it comes to Anzac (as shorthand for all our wars) I uphold ‘lest we forget’ in the sense that the author of the phrase, Rudyard Kipling, used it in his poem Recessional, written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. Kipling meant it as a warning against the pride and arrogance of imperial power and that even the mighty British Empire would one day be ‘as Nineveh and Tyre’.

    Bob Murray and I belong to the last Australian generation for which the British Empire was still a going concern. This fine book can stand as the testimony of our generation and our understanding of what it means to be Australian.

    We were the depression babies, formed politically in the Chifley-Menzies era, with our adulthood dominated by the Cold War in all its manifestations. Despite this tumultuous and often menacing background, we have been an exceptionally lucky generation of Australians. Perhaps because the low birth rate in the Depression made our path to education and employment so easy, we were optimists. Fittingly, Bob Murray ends his book on a high note, quoting the ‘other half of Malcolm Fraser’s (and George Bernard Shaw’s) ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy.’ – ‘But take courage, it can be delightful.’ Both halves of the quotation apply to the writing of books about Australian history. And in this case, the second half certainly applies to the reading of it.

  • John Tulloh. The French at Gallipoli – Lest we not Forget

    A popular myth is that the Gallipoli landings were all about the Australian and New Zealand troops – the Anzacs – with the British somewhere involved, having concocted the unfortunate military adventure.

    But what is so often overlooked is the participation of France in the Gallipoli campaign. It may surprise a lot of people to learn that France suffered more deaths than Australia and New Zealand combined.

    France contributed over 40,000 troops. About 15,000 were killed as against 8141 Australians and 2721 New Zealanders. France has its own war cemetery aptly named Morto Bay, meaning Death Bay.  It has 3236 individual graves and several large ossuaries containing the unidentifiable remains of thousands of militaires. It is maintained with the same devotion and attention as the Commonwealth war graves.

    But France’s participation features only briefly in the comprehensive website of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs dedicated to Gallipoli. It is understandable when the department is there to serve Australian interests. But as an educational instrument it is lopsided in the broad view of Gallipoli.

    That is a pity when the Australian government has budgeted millions to create public interest like never before in recent peacetime to commemorate the centenary next year of Gallipoli and the birth of our most solemn anniversary, Anzac Day.

    The French participation was the result of its politicians rather than its military – hard pressed by the Western Front stalemate – being enthused by opening a new front. This was the British idea of attacking Germany through ‘the back door’, Turkey and its tottering Ottoman empire. They thought it would be a simple exercise to tackle Berlin from there and they could divide the spoils. What’s more, France thought such participation would help maintain its Middle East interests after the war and counter any undue additional British influence in the Mediterranean.

    Needless to say, given the historic enmity between Britain and France, there was much bickering of who would be in charge and who would do what.  From the very start, it was an unequal partnership, wrote Eleanor Van Heyningen, a historian for the Imperial War Museum in London. The British made the decisions under the overall commander, Sir Ian Hamilton.

    In the end, the task of the French troops was to neutralise the Turkish presence on the Asian or eastern side of the narrow Dardanelles Strait to ease the threat to the British-led forces on the European side where Gallipoli is. In fact, of all the Allied objectives on April 25, only one was secured when the French took the the town of Kum Kale, close to the ancient city of Troy.

    But thereafter the French forces encountered fierce resistance in rugged terrain and suffered  casualties on a scale which disturbed their commander. They were not helped by the fact some of their soldiers wore brightly coloured uniforms with red trousers and white hats, making them an easy target, according to Van Heyningen.

    The French troops consisted of Foreign Legionnaires, settlers from North Africa, Senegalese and those from metropolitan France. They met some of the greatest Turkish opposition at Kereves Dere, a place they later called Le Ravin de la Mort, the Valley of Death. This was a ravine which the French had to cross to advance except the Turks had control of the high ground.

    A French medical officer wrote: ‘‘We laid the poor fellows in rows…groans were piteous to hear…bandages soaked in blood, clothes torn to ribbons…ever more wounded arriving’.

    As with the other Allied forces, the French had some later success, including at Kereves Dere, but it proved to be a doomed campaign. It led to embarrassment and unhappiness back in France. Within five months, the French realised the folly of it all and pulled out. It came as no surprise that their new commander did not bother to secure the approval of Hamilton.

    After the war, France did not forget the Gallipoli campaign easily. Van Heyningen writes:

         ‘Gallipoli was the subject of frank public debate and resentment in France. The French had clearly been under the command of the British in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign and so were quick to criticise its organisation, execution and cost. For a time, it was seen as typical British incompetence and willingness to shed Allies’ blood’.

    It should be noted that the British themselves suffered 21,000 deaths at Gallipoli. It should also be remembered that the Indian Army also came ashore there and suffered heavy casualties.

    It is unclear how France will commemorate the Gallipoli centenary, if at all. Given its long history of military victories and losses, especially on its home front in WW1, what happened on the distant shores of the Dardanelles may be regarded as little more than just another bloody chapter in centuries of French military campaigns.

    De peur que nous les oublions. Lest we forget.

     

         John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news, including 15 as the ABC’s first international editor for television news and current affairs.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Mid-east Journey to Nowhere. Guest blogger: John Tulloh

    I read Marcus Einfeld’s response to my blog regarding Israeli settlements posted on October 16 with both interest and incredulity. It seems that he has grasped my piece as an opportunity to voice his own musings on the question of Israel/Palestinian relations.

    Mine was based on my own personal bewilderment why Israel on one hand says it wants peace, but on the other insists on aggravating the Palestinians by building settlements in disputed land when it has five times as much undisputed territory of its own. To a distant outsider, it doesn’t make sense.

    Mr Einfeld suggests I have come up with ‘instant judgments and simplistic solutions’. Excuse me? I have made no judgments let alone been so naive as to offer solutions. He goes on to claim that for me ‘the only or principal cause’ of the current problems is the question of settlements. I wrote it was ‘one reason’ (my italics).

    He then accuses me of ‘one-sidedness’. I do not understand this when I was merely laying out what were mostly indisputable facts about just one of the many factors in this endless conundrum. The question of settlements has been a recurring theme in news reports for years. An international journalist friend, having read my blog, wrote to me to say: ‘I would like to see you give (your) opinion’.

    Mr Einfeld seems to believe I was – or should have been – writing an overview of the entire Israel/Palestinian question because that was the thrust of his tortuous response. My interest was simply the question of settlements.

    He views it all through rose-tinted glasses, possibly based on his own involvement there in the 80s and 90s when there was a real chance of a deal. Indeed I recall assigning ABC coverage of his much-lauded aid visits to help the Palestinians. He says the overwhelming majority of Israelis want a peace treaty which would involve the ‘evacuation of…the settlements’. In such a case, ‘most of the settlements would be no more than a passing phase of history…’ That may have been an idealism in his late 20th century world when there were far fewer settlements, but the reality in the 21st century is different. After all, why would so many settlers today – 350,000 at the latest count – invest their long-term future in the West Bank if they seriously thought they would be forced to move elsewhere and lose most of their money in return for a two-state settlement? Again, it doesn’t make sense.

    John Lyons in the Weekend Australian of November 2-3 has an article, quoting a Palestinian official, which says 15,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem will be left homeless because their apartment blocks are to be demolished by order of the Jerusalem Council. Meanwhile, the newspaper Haaretz reported that ‘Israel was about to advance construction plans for 5000 new housing units in Jewish settlements’. These are hardly the actions to enhance the prospects of a peace deal which Mr Einfeld says the overwhelming majority of Israelis want.

    In fact, the same article also says: ‘Reports in the Israeli and Palestinian media suggest the talks are collapsing. Both sides are facing strong internal opposition. On the Israeli side, right-wing elements in the Knesset, led by the Minister of the Economy, Naftali Bennett, have made clear their opposition to any Palestinian state’.

    Two other statements in Mr Einfeld’s response require an explanation:

    What was Netanyahu’s ‘shameless role in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination’? This is a rather extreme accusation.

    Also, what does he mean by ‘They (Palestinian leaders) know that the so-called “right of return” of Palestinians to Israeli coastal areas is a hoax and a cruel play on words used to save Holocaust survivors, with no chance of fulfilment’? I do not understand what he is trying to say.

    I am surprised that a man who has a distinguished reputation as a jurist could be so loose with his claims and statements. I hope you can find room on your blog to note the above

     

     

  • The Wars we would rather forget. John Menadue

    Aboriginal Wars

    The Australian War Memorial records as follows:

    “When it became apparent that the settlers and their livestock had come to stay, competition for access to the land developed and friction between the two ways of life became inevitable. As the settlers’ behaviour became unacceptable to the indigenous population, individuals were killed over specific grievances. These killings were then met with reprisals from the settlers, often on a scale out of all proportion to the original incident. … It is estimated that some 2,500 European settlers and police died in this conflict. For the aboriginal inhabitants the cost was far higher: about 20,000 are believed to have been killed in the wars of the frontier, while many thousands more perished from disease and often unintended consequences of settlement. Aboriginal Australians were unable to restrain – though in places they did delay – the tide of European settlement; although resistance in one form or another never ceased, the conflict ended in their dispossession.” (www.awm.gov.au/atwar/colonial.asp)

    Where are the memorials to this tragic war?

    Maori Wars

    The State Library of South Australia records these wars as follows:

    “Between 1845 and 1872 just over 2,500 Australian volunteers saw service in New Zealand. The majority of these volunteers came from the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.

    The cause of all conflict between whites and the Maori people was land. … British forces were sent from Auckland to defeat and capture Maori Chief Hone Heke but the Maori chief and his warriors were skilled in the art of war, but it took [many steps including] a local militia and troops rushed in from Australia … to conclude the first Maori war.

    By 1860, the grab for land again sparked conflict between whites and the Maoris, this time in the Waitara River area. … Again, the Australian colonies were asked for urgent assistance. The colonies rallied and sent troops. The colony of Victoria even sent its entire navy which comprised the steam corvette HMVS Victoria. New South Wales also sent gun ships to support the troops.

    Only later war broke out again, this time in the Waikato area. And again Australian troops came to the aid of local British forces.

    Soon after the Waikato war, the New Zealand Government decided to form a more permanent force and actually recruited troops from among the Australian colonies. They were offered land in exchange for service in the armed forces. Some 3,600 Australians took up the offer. They were formed into the Waikato regiments.” (www.guides.sisa.sa.gov.au/content.php?pid=76180&sid=594745.  The Australian War Memorial has a similar account of Australian participation in the Maori Wars)

    Some may claim that all this occurred before Australia was federated and we were still colonies. I do not think that this can obscure the fact of Australian participation in the Maori wars. The first association between Australian and New Zealand forces was not at Gallipoli in 1915. It was in the Maori wars 70 years earlier.

    John Menadue