Oil and money collide again as Tony Abbott carries Australia back into the Middle East conflict for the third time in three decades. Rodney E. Lever reports.
IT IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE that Tony Abbott knows what he is doing in committing Australia to a third war in Iraq. How does one read into the mind of a man who has been a serial liar all his life?
Joan Abbott (no relation as far as I know) tweeted this comment to me:
‘A war without definition pursued by a man who defies definition. Welcome to Australia, land of the Great (un)Defined.’
Prime Minister Abbott has pegged his place in history to a leaking vessel and it raises many questions and many doubts.
When, for example, did Barack Obama ask Australia to send our squadron of Hornets? Did I miss something? America has its own much more powerful air force. When did Obama request Australian troops? He has declared that his own army will be restricted to training Iraq forces again to meet the threat of ISIL (or ISIS, as America calls it).
From the beginning, this has been Obama’s war. He was elected to end the first mess in Iraq started by George W. Bush simply because the American power elite no longer trusted Saddam Hussein, who had previously been an ally to the US but had outlived his usefulness.
With pressure from Rupert Murdoch, both John Howard in Australia and Tony Blair in Britain agreed to supply troops to support the Americans in a war that was conducted only by fogging the truth to obtain support from the United Nations. Both Howard and Blair acted without any enthusiastic support from the citizens of both their countries.
The first Iraq war ‒ the Gulf War ‒ launched by U.S. President George H.W. Bush, was a humanitarian disaster, with half a million dead babies not enough to fill the West’s ravenous maw.
The second Iraq War, launched by George Bush Jnr early this century, was based on outrageous lies about “weapons of mass destruction” that were clearly shown not to exist — before or after the war.
After it was "won", Baghdad occupied and former dictator Saddam Hussein hanged, it was the Americans who had to clean up the mess and establish a new government for Iraq — a government that failed in its job.
The result was the emergence of the bloodthirsty murderers who had moved into the oil country north of Baghdad. Part of Iraq now is occupied by the Islamic State of al-Sham (ISIL).
The problem could only be solved by another American intervention and Obama acted reluctantly in the only way he could, given the horrors being spread around the world by videos of ISIL’s bread knife throat-cutter.
Abbott’s decision to take Australia into this war has no real justification — except for an ugly suspicion that his collapsing government is his driving concern and, perhaps, will help to change the subject in a nation still in fury over his unsaleable Budget and his uninspiring cabinet members.
Now we are facing internal developments that nobody in Australia wants: the events of the past week, when the police made dawn raids to collar some suspects. Interestingly, only the mainstream media was pre-warned, with reporters and cameramen on the spot to record the actions of the police.
But even more interesting, the police have revealed that of the men arrested only one has been kept in custody and all the other suspects were released by the weekend.
As Shakespeare wrote in a certain Scottish play:
“... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Certainly, there are foreign-born citizens in Australia who have aligned themselves to the side of extreme Islam. They have been dragged into the open by police and will, in due course, appear before the courts.
Islam has existed from about the sixth century and for 600 years it survived as a potent force against western Christianity. Then the Mongols invaded Baghdad and swamped the whole region with an army led by Haluga Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan.
Now, this unpleasant ISIL branch of Islam has expanded out of the mists of time to challenge Western civilisation in an ugly exhibition of terror that has certainly attracted our universal attention and invited retribution.
The Australian media is no help at all.
Screaming headlines, horrible photos and unlimited exaggeration produce no real understanding or explanation of what is really happening.
In the Second Iraq War, the Americans lost more than 4,000 soldiers and another 30,000 were wounded. Britain’s casualties have been kept secret — but about 6,000 is the estimate for war injuries, with another 179 confirmed deaths.
Australia sent 2,000 soldiers to Iraq, but the Howard Government kept the precise number of casualties and deaths secret.
The American Defence Department has issued some commentary on the quality the ISIL forces, describing them as
‘.. sophisticated and well-funded as any army we have seen.”
It refers to former Iraq military officers who can fly helicopters, locate artillery sites and manoeuvre efficiently in battle and describes them as
‘… part guerrilla army and partly terrorists.’
President Obama came into office with a policy to end the war and the massacres carried out by ISIL on religious minorities like Christians and the Yazidi sect, whom the Iraqis describe as “devil worshippers.”
According to the New Yorker magazine, Obama came under pressure to defend one of America’s allies in Iraq, the Kurdistan Government, which has links to U.S. oil companies.
Oil accessibility caused the trouble in the first Iraq war. Oil and money power are again at the heart of the matter in our greedy world.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Terrorism raids: beheading attack could have taken place within days, Tony Abbott says http://t.co/FfYmLOgSbO via @guardian
— IndependentAustralia (@independentaus) September 20, 2014
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