Politics

Abbott's wars

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Strange how Abbott thinks wars win votes.

Churchill won one and was voted out by a landslide. Bush I won one, and was voted out by a landslide. Menzies declared one, and was overthrown by his party. Lloyd George won one and, after his subsequent crushing defeat, his party never held office again. Gerald Ford lost one, and was defeated by Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter stuffed up a wartime rescue, and was defeated by Ronald Reagan. John McCain campaigned for a wider war, and was defeated by a black man. Bob Hawke ‘won’ the Gulf War, and was immediately overthrown by Keating.

Abbott is ignorant of all this, and thinks all Australians (of Italian background, Greek, Macedonian, South American, German, Dutch, Yugoslavian, Indian, Irish, Pakistani, Tongan, Ukrainian) will rally behind a war with Russia, winner of World War 2. What will happen, of course, is that mothers will fear their sons will be killed, and curse, at the family table, him and his wild ideas.

Very few wars win votes. Vietnam did in 1966 but left, after the Birthday Ballot, the Liberal Party accurst. Menzies joined the Korean War and, at the next election, got fewer votes than Labor, after landsliding to power two years before.

And Abbott is now proposing we wage war on those Iraqis we ‘trained’ to defend democracy and are now attacking it ‒ with beheadings and crucifixions and forced conversions ‒ and an imperial vision so barbarous al-Qaeda wants no part of it.

Clearly, our ‘training’ did not work. Nor will our ‘retraining’, if we slaughter this lot, of their surviving Sunni cousins and Shi-ite serial murderers.

Many Australians ‘get’ this and think we should never have gone there in the first place, and are appalled we are going back.

And into a war with Russia to boot — wow.

‘Never march on Moscow’ has been a commonplace of war theory since Napoleon’s time. Hitler did, and it destroyed him. Abbott is now proposing we do this as winter approaches and run up the Australian flag on the onion domes by Christmas Day.

And he thinks the women whose schoolkids’ money he wanted to take away will come back to him because of it.

He doesn’t understand that bringing bodies home is one thing ‒ a good thing, probably ‒ and rescuing, and taking in as refugees, people trapped on a scorching desert mountainside is a good thing too. But going to war with crucifying maniacs, and going to war with the Russians, is another.

And it will destroy him, soon or late, as it did so many before him.

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