Defence and Security
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DAVID STEPHENS. Lest We Forget again: Anzac Day is an opportunity to confront our violent frontier past and its shadow today.
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a young Somali-Australian Muslim woman, was driven out of Australia last year after she implied that the Anzac sacred cow might be ready to graze new territory. ‘Lest. We. Forget.’, she said, ‘(Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine …)’. I thought she was on the right track and I said so, copping some of the Continue reading »
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HENRY REYNOLDS. Remembrance Day in New York: Anzac Day in Tasmania.
I was in New York during May last year. At the end of the month, there was a public holiday. It was their Remembrance Day. Not that much happened in New York. There were no flags, no marches or processions. Apparently, it is a tradition for a naval ship to come into port for the Continue reading »
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SUE WAREHAM. Honouring the war dead means learning from the horror.
This Anzac Day, as on every other, we will hear of the horrors of war to which many of our service people have been exposed, horrors that certainly call into question any notion of us assuming the title “homo sapiens”. We will “honour the fallen” and utter the hallowed words “lest we forget”, as we Continue reading »
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Anzac Day: From respectful remembrance to festival of forgetting
Are our war memorials becoming sites for mere flag-waving? Should they feature exhibition halls boosting national pride in our military prowess? If so, Anzac Day itself risks descending into a Festival of Forgetting. Continue reading »
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DAVID JAMES. The big, bad business of America’s war industry.
The spread of militarism does not just involve creating the specific apparatus of war. As the Western allies flirt with starting World War III in Syria, it is worth examining some of the financial and business dynamics behind the United States’ ‘military industrial complex.’ Continue reading »
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Anzackery and the preening peloton.
When John Kenneth Galbraith was Kennedy’s Ambassador to India in the early 1960s, he reported that he had inspected a guard of honour and they seemed to him to be fine. His dry wit was lacking when the Murdoch media reported the safe return from Afghanistan of Pauline Hanson, her colleague Brian Burston and Labor’s Continue reading »
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RICHARD FLANAGAN. Freedom means Australia facing up to the truth of its past. (Part 2 of 2)
We should, of course, question these things more. We could ask why – if we were actually genuine about remembering patriots who have died for this country – why would we not first spend $100m on a museum honouring the at least 65,000 estimated Indigenous dead who so tragically lost their lives defending their country Continue reading »
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RICHARD FLANAGAN. Australians in WWI didn’t die for Australia. They died for Britain. (Part 1 of 2)
And so, the Monash Centre, for all its good intentions, for all the honour it does the dead, is at heart a centre for forgetting. It leads us to forget that the 62,000 young men who died in world war one died far from their country in service of one distant empire fighting other distant Continue reading »
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MICHAEL PASCOE. The reality of our ‘scary’ China confrontation.
Fresh on the heels of the Chinese invasion of Vanuatu that wasn’t, febrile minds have been seized by the headline-grabbing story of a Chinese navy “confrontation” with the Royal Australian Navy. The Prime Minister was quickly ready in London to assert Australia’s right to freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Well, I suppose that’s more fun for Continue reading »
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GREG HAMILTON. Dying for nothing, a-la-Australienne.
According to the oldest surviving veteran of The Great War, Sgt Ted Smout, dead at 106, our war dead died in vain. In his words, ‘they died for nothing’. He must have known something most of us don’t know for him to make such a terrible claim. What could he possibly have known? Continue reading »
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ANDREW FARRAN. Stalemate and Lawlessness over Syria.
On ABC News Radio (Monday 16th April) Paul Barrett, a former Deputy Secretary of DFAT and former Secretary of the Department of Defence was asked in an interview whether the military actions over the past weekend in Syria by the United States, the UK and France were legal in both international and domestic law. He Continue reading »
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RICHARD BUTLER. Hypocrisy and Sanctimony: a Poisonous Brew.
The arguments advanced to justify the illegal US/French/UK attack upon Syrian CW related facilities incorporated buckets of sanctimony and numbing hypocrisy. There has been no serious discussion of the justification given by the three; because it was known to be patently false. And, worse, by setting themselves above the law, these three permanent members of Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. The Coalition and media myth about stopping the boats.
With the appointment of Angus Campbell as the new Chief of the General Staff we have witnessed again the repetition of the nonsense that the Coalition and Operation Sovereign Borders stopped the boats. As if the media farce over a Chinese military base in Vanuatu was not enough the media has climbed aboard again to Continue reading »
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MORTON HALPERIN, PETER HAYES, LEON SIGAL. Options for denuclearising the Korean peninsular
A critically important part of assembling the Korean peninsula-wide denuclearization jigsaw puzzle is the institutional and legal form of North Korean commitments on the one hand, and the nuclear negative security assurances by the NPT-Nuclear Weapons States (NWSs), especially the United States, on the other. In Nautilus Institute there is a special report ‘A Korean Continue reading »
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Was DT Mouse-Trapped Into Attacking Syria?
Those of us of a certain age will remember the phrase ‘DTs’, short for delirium tremens: a rapid onset of confusion caused by an alcoholic’s immediate abstinence. Is the world suffering from a different set of DTs: the rapid-fire onset of domestic and global crises by a confused president revelling in his role as the Continue reading »
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GEOFF MILLER. Korea: a comprehensive and step-by-step solution?
That is the phrase that senior South Korean officials are using for what they hope to see resulting from coming summits, which they now envisage as involving, after the North Korea-US meeting, a tri-partite summit between the two Koreas and the US, in turn to be followed by a four-party summit of those three plus Continue reading »
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ANDREW FARRAN. Parliamentary inquiry on proposal for a Bipartisan Defence Agreement to govern future procurements.
Currently the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade is inquiring into the benefits and risks of a Bipartisan Australian Defence Agreement, as a basis of planning for, and funding of, Australian Defence capability. A comment on this reference by Richard Tanter, based on his submission to the Standing Committee, was posted Continue reading »
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SUE WAREHAM. Parliamentary debate on going to war is long overdue.
This week marks the 15th anniversary, on March 20, of one of Australia’s most disastrous foreign policy decisions – our involvement in the invasion of Iraq. To characterise this as “our” involvement, however, does a great disservice to the millions of Australians who were vehemently opposed to the decision that was made by just one Continue reading »
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BRIAN TOOHEY. Teresa May’s rush to judgment on nerve agents
The British Prime Minister Teresa May failed to produce any evidence that the Russian state used a nerve agent called Novichok before she announced measures to punish the Kremlin. At least Tony Blair famously produced a “dodgy dossier” claiming Saddam Hussein possessed a deadly arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. The Bush White House peddled Continue reading »
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PAUL BARRATT: Time to involve Parliament in decisions about sending the ADF into combat.
Today 20 March is the 15th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” which was led by the US and included the UK, Australia and others. Far from making the world safer, and establishing Iraq as “a shining beacon of democracy” as its proponents proclaimed it would, the invasion Continue reading »
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MELISSA PARKE. Arms Export Goal Risks The Standing Of A Good International Citizen.
Five years ago Australia played a key role in drafting and negotiating the UN Arms Trade Treaty in order, as the government announced at the time, “to reduce the impact of armed violence on communities around the world”. Five weeks ago Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced his “vision” for Australia to become one of the Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. The ASEAN Summit in Sydney this weekend.
The meeting this weekend will highlight for Australia the importance of our relations with regional countries. It will also highlight the importance of our relationship with the US and China, and how that rivalry can best be managed in association with regional countries. As background to this weekend’s Summit meeting, I provide links to five Continue reading »
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NANDINI PANDEY. Rome’s “Empire Without End” and the “Endless” U.S. War on Terror (Replaying the Roman Civil Wars in Reverse Since 9/11)
That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by Continue reading »
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RICHARD BUTLER. The US/DPRK Summit: War or Peace?
The planned Trump/Kim Summit has a clear choice between a negotiated solution, or war. There is a choice, whatever both sides may say. War is not unavoidable and if it were to occur it would be devastating. Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. When will we wake up to the risks as well as the benefits of the US alliance? (Repost)
We are a nation in denial that we are ‘joined at the hip’ to a dangerous ally. Apart from brief isolationist periods, the US has been almost perpetually at war; wars that we have often foolishly been drawn into. The US has subverted and overthrown numerous governments over two centuries. It has a military and Continue reading »
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Returning To The Edge Of The Nuclear Cliff
The two leaders most responsible for bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end were U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet head of state Mikhail Gorbachev. They also kick-started the dramatic reductions in nuclear arsenals with a mix of unilateral measures and bilateral agreements. The driving force behind this was acceptance of Reagan’s affirmation in Continue reading »
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GEOFF MILLER. The ASEAN meeting in Sydney and the Quad – same same but different.
Singapore and Australia are having to deal with the same set of problems and relationships as the strategic situation in the Asia-Pacific changes. Singapore isn’t a contender for an expanded “Quad” but, as next year’s Chairman of ASEAN, it will have an important role to play in one of the Turnbull Government’s major foreign policy Continue reading »
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ROSS GWYTHER. Our nuclear chickens come home to roost
Popular TV personality Mike Higgins addressed a packed Brisbane City Hall gathering on a rainy November night in 1983. As chair of the meeting he was joined on the podium by later-to-be Governor General of Australia, Quentin Bryce, retired US Army colonel David Hackworth, Anglican Dean Butters, the president of the Qld Trades Hall council Continue reading »
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GRAHAM FREUDENBERG. American Malaise and Malice.
The key to the Trump presidency is its malice. Trump daily mocks Lincoln’s noble intent: “with malice toward none”. There is now not a country or region in the world untouched by Trumpite malice, defined as the irrational desire to do harm or mischief, fuelled by a sense of imaginary grievances.Australia cannot expect to be exempt. Continue reading »
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JOHN MENADUE. Afghanistan – the graveyard of empires and the opium poppy.
They have all failed to conquer Afghanistan – the Greeks, Indians and more recently, the British in the mid 19th Century and the Soviets in the late 20th Century. And now the US empire is failing to subdue the tribes of Afghanistan despite enormous cost of people and treasure. What has not received much attention Continue reading »