Pandering to the strategic goals of the United States, which puts a target on our nation’s forehead, our Government keeps lying to us. Michael Pascoe with some uncomfortable truths.
First, a little context, a little perspective, before getting to our government blatantly and consistently lying to us:
On January 29, 2002, five months after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush declared Iran, Iraq and North Korea to be the “axis of evil”. None of those countries was responsible for 9/11, but the US set about planning to invade Iraq anyway and did so the next year.
With that invasion imminent, North Korea pulled out of the nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty (NPT) in January 2003, not that its heart was ever entirely in it. In 2006, North Korea conducted its first atomic bomb test. What else is a dictator to do when the US draws a target on his forehead?
And then there are the other countries, understandably feeling threatened, and with the extra complication of their governments suffering a significant level of religious fanaticism, i.e. Iran and Israel.
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Israel never bothered to sign the NPT and has built a nuclear arsenal that it neither confirms nor denies.
The trouble with Iran
Iran meanwhile, upon overthrowing the US coup-delivered Shah, found itself invaded by US backed-Iraq and eight years of war that killed some hundreds of thousands of its people, plus the rival US-guaranteed power of Saudi Arabia across the gulf, never mind byzantine Middle Eastern politics and the complications of being Shiah Persians amidst mainly Sunni Arabs and a theocracy amidst feudal dynasties.
If that wasn’t tricky enough, post-Shah Iran doesn’t recognise US-guaranteed Israel. It calls for its destruction, backing various criminal, terrorist and revolutionary groups around the place, much as the US has always done.
(It’s apparently irrelevant that the founding platform of Netanyahu’s Likud party holds that Israeli sovereignty shall always extend from Jordan to the sea and that various current ministers from harder-right parties shout the quiet bit out loud, actively implementing that policy and pursuing “ethnic cleansing” while Israel campaigns against anyone thinking of recognising Palestine.)
The result is a few decades of proxy and not-so-proxy attacks. Given all that, Iran, to greater and lesser extents, has sought to have its own nuclear weapons, prompting greater and lesser diplomatic and punitive actions by the US and Europe.
Now, for various reasons, including the advent of King Trump, Israel has declared war on Iran by way of bombs and missiles. (Heck, if you’re getting away with genocide, why not fly a few sorties against the Ayatollah?)
The nuclear threat
Amidst all the usual speculation such things generate, there’s a worrying insight from Farah N. Jan published in The Conversation.
Dr Jan claims this war is much more than yet another Middle Eastern crisis, “it marks the emergence of a dangerous new chapter in nuclear rivalries that has the potential to reshape global proliferation risks for decades to come”.
Big call. Dr Jan argues the initial Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have spiralled into the world’s first full-scale example of what she calls a “threshold war”, a new form of conflict, where
a nuclear weapons power seeks to use force to prevent an enemy on the verge of nuclearisation from making that jump.
“The international community is witnessing the collapse of traditional deterrence frameworks in real time,” Jan writes.
Unlike traditional nuclear rivalries where both sides possess declared arsenals, like India and Pakistan, who despite their tensions operate under mutual deterrence, this new threshold dynamic creates an inherently unstable escalation spiral.
“Iran increasingly believes it cannot deter Israeli aggression without nuclear weapons, yet every step toward acquiring them invites more aggressive Israeli strikes. Israel, for its part, cannot permanently eliminate Iran’s nuclear knowledge through military means. It can only delay it through means that would seemingly guarantee future Iranian determination to acquire the ultimate deterrent.
“Under this dynamic, neither side can step back without accepting an intolerable outcome: for Israel, an Iran more determined than ever in becoming a nuclear weapons nation capable of deterring Israeli action and ending its regional military dominance; for Iran, the risk of regime change through devastating Israeli strikes.
The consequences of this deadly logic extend far beyond the Middle East.”
Jan goes on to explore the legality of what Israel calls a “pre-emptive strike” but which is actually a “preventive strike” which targets distant future threats when conditions seem favourable, citing Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour as an example.
Preemptive wars
Allegedly, “pre-emptive” wars are bad enough at eroding international legal frameworks, e.g. the invasion of Iraq by the US, UK, Australia and Poland. Accepting “preventive” wars with just the odd expression of concern simply scraps all pretence of the “rules-based international order”.
But that is what is happening, that is what Australia is part of, both actively and passively.
The passive bit is our government and opposition, along with the rest of the West, not criticising Israel but treating both sides equally in calling for “de-escalation”.
In the Guardian, Ben Saul, Challis chair of international law at Sydney University, makes a similar point,
“The risk of abuse of ‘anticipatory’ self-defence is simply too great, and too dangerous, for the world to tolerate. Many countries have hostile relations with other countries. Allowing each country to unilaterally decide when they wish to degrade another country’s military, even when they have not been attacked, is a recipe for global chaos – and for the unjustified deaths of many innocent people. Would Australia accept, for example, another country’s right to preventively bomb our AUKUS program, if they perceived it as a security threat?”
We’re also actively trashing those supposed international standards by supporting the United States’ support of Israel.
If you believe the US isn’t supplying Israel with intelligence to help guide its war on Iran, you probably think the bombs, planes and missiles aren’t American, German and British because there’s an Israeli flag painted on them.
Critical to America’s intelligence gathering as the world’s biggest eavesdropper is the US base at Pine Gap, outside Alice Springs.
We’re hosting the war effort.
But we’re not supposed to call it an American base, just as we’re not to call the US submarine base being built in WA an American base or call the US Air Force B-52 base and the US Marines base in the Northern Territory “US bases”.
To admit they are American bases would be to admit our government has compromised our sovereignty, so instead the Labor and Liberal Parties pretend they are “rotations”, not bases.
George Orwell might smile at that. A savvy brewer of zero-alcohol beer should brand it “Rotation”.
Government lies
Our government lies to us about our sovereignty, declares black to be white and, with only rare and minor exceptions,
remains in lock step with US strategic ambitions.
It was on vivid display in Four Corners’ “Submerged” examination of the AUKUS submarine folly on Monday night. The program let key players and observers from here and abroad tell the story, for and against, leaving it to the audience to reach the obvious conclusion, the one that our government and opposition refuse to consider: it’s a monumental cock-up.
Like jury members, viewers were allowed to judge who might be credible witnesses and who was not. The program steered clear of the domestic politics involved and did not delve into the dubious strategic purpose of acquiring SSNs in the first place. It had more than enough to deal with just in the practicalities.
But always on display was our government lying to us, lying that AUKUS will be just fine, lying that we don’t need a Plan B, lying that what we’re building at HMAS Stirling is not a base for American SSNs.
If you’re a dictator and the US paints a target on your forehead, you probably try to acquire nuclear weapons to deter being killed.
If you’re an Australian and the government and the alternative government keep lying to you, I don’t know what you do beyond joining the growing third or so who don’t vote 1 for either of them.
Rudd talking the AUKUS talk in Washington, but is the US walking?
Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.