On March 23, federal ALP leader Mark Latham told Sydney radio station 2UE that a Labor government would bring back the Australian troops currently in and around Iraq, as soon as possible after the planned June installation of an interim Iraqi government.
Government MPs immediately started accusing Latham of capitulating to the al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden, which has claimed responsibility for the March 11 terrorist bombings in Madrid.
A week before, foreign minister Alexander Downer accused Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty of reflecting al Qaeda propaganda after he said: "If it turns out Islamic extremists were responsible for this bombing in Spain, it's more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq."
Prime Minister John Howard, his ministers and staffers do not want the great majority of Australians to draw the fairly obvious conclusion: that Islamic fundamentalists are only able to get angry young Muslims to wantonly kill civilians because of the continuing injustices committed by the US and allied governments.
The backing that the US and its allies have given to Israel's forcible dispossession of Palestinian people and brutal occupation of their homeland — in violation of international law — is only one of those injustices. The 13-year economic embargo imposed on Iraq in 1991 — which caused the deaths of at least 500,000 Iraqi children — is another.
In a 1996 television interview, then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright justified the deaths of those Iraqi children, saying, "We think the price is worth it". In carrying out the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians to achieve their political objectives, the Islamic terrorists are only emulating — on a much smaller scale — the methods repeatedly used by the US rulers and their allies.
In an October 2001 videotaped interview, bin Laden hailed the 9/11 terrorist attack that killed thousands. He warned of further mass murders unless Washington and its allies stopped supporting Israel's occupation of Palestine, withdrew US troops from Saudi Arabia and ended the US-enforced embargo against Iraq.
Washington, along with its British and Australian allies, responded by using the 9/11 atrocity as a pretext to slaughter tens of thousands more in Iraq. The US-British-Australian invasion of defenceless Iraq — utilising completely fabricated claims about "weapons of mass destruction" and links to al Qaeda as a means of gaining control of Iraq's vast oil resources — has left hundreds of millions throughout the Middle East deeply embittered.
The illegal US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has provided the al Qaeda terrorists with an enormous potential pool of sympathisers and recruits. Even Albright now admits this.
In her March 24 statement to the congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, Albright acknowledged that "Iraq is a rallying cause for al Qaeda. It's allowed them to attract new recruits. This was an organisation that was under enormous pressure. Iraq has put new wind in its sails, definitely."
She noted that in the "Arab and Muslim world, the bottom has indeed fallen out of support for the United States" and this has enabled bin Laden and his followers to present themselves as the leaders "of all those who harbour anti-American sentiments whether for specific policy reasons or out of more general feelings of resentment".
Of course, as an architect of the death and destruction in the Middle East, Albright cannot bring herself to acknowledge that this resentment is justified. Nor can she acknowledge the obvious conclusion — taking the wind out of the sails of the terrorists will require a complete abandonment of the policies that have bred "anti-American sentiments" throughout the Middle East.
The withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq and neighbouring countries would be a positive step in that direction. But an even more significant step would be for Canberra to end its alliance with Washington and to publicly campaign for the US to immediately withdraw its own troops from Iraq.
From Green Left Weekly, March 31, 2004.
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