BY ALISON DELLIT
Australia's Prime Minister John Howard has to be the only person in Australia prepared to argue that the government has not yet decided to participate in a war on Iraq.
While Howard keeps right on claiming that "no decision has been made" to commit Australia to a war on Iraq, another two fighter planes have left to join the 600 Australian navy and air force personnel already in the Persian Gulf. This will increase to more than 1500 defence force personnel in the next few weeks.
Howard has said this "forward deployment" will be on the same scale as the Australian military participation in the 2001 war against Afghanistan. However, unlike in that war, Australia will be contributing a fleet of 14 FA-18 fighter jets, as well as the two spy aircraft that departed for the Gulf on January 15. Another ship will join the two ships already policing the US blockade of Iraq.
As expected, the Australian troop commitment is "niche" — a polite way of saying token — but still politically important. Australia is one of just three countries to openly send troops to the area around Iraq. It joins Britain and the USA: the same three countries that Thomas Friedman described as the "new NATO" in a November 13 column in the New York Times.
Amazingly, Howard has been claiming to be a man of peace. "I haven't lost hope", he told A Current Affair's Tracy Grimshaw on January 10. "The last thing I want is a military conflict, but in the end, the world may have no alternative."
But this is just a lie. War on Iraq is completely avoidable. There is no evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction — even after more than 380 inspections the UN weapons inspectors have failed to find any. Iraqi officials have bent over backwards to assist the inspectors so as to prove that they have no such weapons.
If Iraq had them, there is little likelihood that it would use such weapons against a neighbouring state knowing the consequences involved. Certainly, there is no chance that Saddam Hussein would use them against the US or Australia. The US has failed to produce evidence that Iraq supported the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001.
There are half a million reasons to oppose Howard's war: that is how many Iraqi civilians are likely to be killed or injured in the planned US attack — just so the US can set up a puppet dictator of its own to replace Saddam Hussein and take control of the second largest oil reserves on the planet.
Howard's close support for Bush's war is nothing more than joining the bullying kid in the playground. As a junior partner of the US in exploitation of the Third World, Australia's business elite wants to support the US in imposing its military, political and economic might on the entire globe. Howard wants to assure Washington that he is fundamentally on Bush's side so that the Australian ruling class can share the benefits of US domination of the world's key energy supplies.
Anti-war sentiment strong
Australian newspapers, particularly those in the pro-war stable owned by Rupert Murdoch, have started to plaster pictures, of stoic soldiers holding small children, liberally across their pages. There have been few pictures of, and even less comment about, the small Iraqi children whom these soldiers are being sent to help kill.
An ACNeilson poll published in the Sydney Morning Herald on January 18 showed that: 6% of Australians supported Australian involvement in a war on Iraq without endorsement, 62% believed Australia should only be involved in a war backed by the UN and 30% opposed Australian any involement.
"When campaigning against the war in [the Sydney suburbs of] Balmain and Rozelle, the response is overwhelming", Leichhardt Anti-War Group campaigner Paul Benedek told Green Left Weekly. "People are queuing up to sign petitions and make banners. Many people have told me that they have never been involved in political protest before, but now they want to take a stand."
"They can see this war is unjust and won't solve anything", added Benedek, who is the Socialist Alliance's candidate for the lower house seat of Port Jackson in the March NSW election. "The Australian government is not listening to what people want. There's a lot of anti-Howard anger."
Even the Fairfax-owned newspapers have been warning of the dangers of Howard ignoring the strong opposition to the war. A December 27 Sydney Morning Herald editorial, headed "Australia's role in a war about oil", concluded, "Support [in Australia] for such a narrowly based war is inconceivable". Melbourne's Age newspaper has also published anti-war editorials.
Labor Party
The Australian Labor Party's position has been every bit as disgraceful as the Coalition's. After maintaining a confusingly vague position for some time, shadow foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd and opposition leader Simon Crean have managed to come up with a confusingly specific policy.
On January 10, Crean announced that the ALP would support an attack on Iraq if that was what the United Nations Security Council decided to do. "Clearly, you can't say we want the UN to determine a course of action and then ignore what it comes up with", he told the ABC radio program AM. This was the same day that Rudd released a media statement entitled "The case has not yet been made for war".
On January 15, Crean told the media he was "hardening" his position: which he may have done, but he certainly didn't change it. Once again, he reiterated that if the Security Council endorsed military action, the ALP would support a war on the Iraqi population.
Crean also "clarified" that the ALP's "opposition" to a US-led attack without UN endorsement would not apply if a Security Council motion failed because one permanent member — such as Russia — used its veto. Now it's clear: the ALP will support a unilateral US attack on Iraq.
The Australian Greens have taken a much more principled position, opposing any Australian involvement in a conflict on Iraq. "News of the UN assessment than an attack on Iraq will cause 500,000 causalities with up to 900,000 fleeing the country and another 2 million being internally displaced highlights the massive human tragedy George Bush is prepared to accept in return for control of Iraq's oil fields", Greens leader Senator Bob Brown said in a press statement on January 10. "The Greens totally oppose Australian forces going to Iraq."
"The Socialist Alliance believes it is possible to stop this war", Benedek told GLW. "But we have a way to go yet. What we have now is mostly passive opposition to the war. The majority are against it, but they don't think we can stop it.
"What we need is an anti-war movement that has confidence in its own power: that is capable of mobilising hundreds of thousands in a range of different protest actions. Howard thinks he can send troops to fight, against the wishes of the Australian people because he thinks they won't take political action to stop it. We have to show him that he is wrong."
From Green Left Weekly, January 22, 2003.
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