Tag: War

Sunni, Syria/iraq, Tony Abbott

We can’t beat a Sunni uprising we can however stir the hornets nest. Ideas need to be countered with ideas something Abbott lacks.

https://i0.wp.com/theaimn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ISIS.jpg

The current war against ISIS cannot be won with air strikes. I would go further and say it cannot even be won with a large ground force either. The reason is simple. You cannot fight an idea with guns or bombs. Guns and bombs may blow people away but the idea remains. And no matter how many people you blow away, others will come to take their place. That is the power of an idea. You can only fight an idea with a better idea. And thus far, no one in the west has been able to do that, if indeed it can be done.

One would have thought that the billions of dollars spent in just the last 25 years trying to restore some degree of peace and stability in the Middle East would have been enough to demonstrate the futility of waging wars. But no, it hasn’t. If it were not for the strategic interests of the region (i.e. Oil), the rest of the world would not have the will or desire to intervene.

And to think that Australia’s efforts in sending a couple of planes to drop a few bombs on an uncertain target will make a difference is just ridiculous. We, along with a multinational coalition, spent eight years routing out ‘evil’ and replacing it with supposedly highly trained ‘good’ for what result? The ‘good’ we left in place has disintegrated. Hugh White makes it clear that if we do it all again, this time for longer and with larger numbers, such a strategy will achieve no more than the last great effort. It might bring some form of political stability to the region for a short time, but it won’t bring a lasting peace.

It certainly doesn’t address the idea that motivates the ‘enemy’. The raw truth is, we do not know how to identify the ‘enemy’. Is it ISIS, is it Islam? Is it Israel? Is it far away Christians believing that this potent mixture of cultures and religions can ever be at peace? Even in a world without gods, there would still be conflicts but nothing as complex as this.

peacefulWe should commend President Obama for at least holding back and not being sucked into sending another ground force to try and resolve this mess. But for how long can he hold back? The Hawks in the Pentagon are busting for another fight. The American people, by and large, are not. They’ve had enough. So have we, in Australia. Western interference in the Middle East has brought the conflict to our own backyards in ways no one ever dreamed of 50 or 100 years ago. We are reaping what we have sown.

I don’t think Tony Abbott has the mental maturity to realise this, and I fear that before long, he will commit us to increase our pathetic contribution to something that will make things worse.

 

Filed under:
Media, Propaganda

Pilger never fails to impress

Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott

If Hockey’s still in the game he’s the puck.

Bill Shorten and Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott praises Labor on Iraq, distancing himself from Joe Hockey

The prime minister,Tony Abbott, has praised Labor’s support for military intervention in Iraq, distancing himself from his treasurer, Joe Hockey, who questioned the value of bipartisanship on the issue when the opposition would not pass the budget.

As Australia carried out its first air strike on an Islamic State target in Iraq, Hockey demanded that the federal opposition pass the budget in order to allow the government to meet the costs of the conflict, expected to run to hundreds of millions.

But during a morning radio interview, and at a press conference later on Thursday, Abbott declined to endorse Hockey’s remarks, pointing instead to co-operation between the major parties on the Middle East conflict to date.

Labor however moved to capitalise on Hockey’s untidy intervention. The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, said the prime minister should “correct his treasurer”.

“Joe Hockey probably thought he was being clever, creating this political issue. Well it’s not,” Shorten said in Melbourne. “Every time Joe Hockey opens his mouth now he says something silly.”

“Australians will see through this political game. Under no circumstances should our intervention in Iraq be used as a source to justify hurting Australian people through this unfair budget – and the cuts and raised taxes which flow from it.”

Shorten went to a matter of policy contention within the Coalition: declaring that if the government needed additional resources to fund Australia’s military operations, it should dump the prime minister’s signature paid parental leave scheme.

Coalition MPs have continued to speak out against the generous scheme – arguing the money would better be directed elsewhere.

“Why don’t they actually go after the multinationals they’ve gone soft on?” Shorten said “There are plenty of measures that this government could do if it really is the crisis that Joe Hockey says it is.”

Hockey had told reporters in Washington that the costs associated with Australia’s military intervention were another reason Labor should “immediately pass the remaining measures in the budget”.

“Everything comes at a cost and if Bill Shorten truly is honest about his commitment to deliver bipartisan support in relation to our defence efforts in the Middle East he’ll provide bipartisan support to pay for it,” he said.

Earlier in the week, the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, declined to rule out raising taxes to pay for the conflict, but the prime minister stepped in on Tuesday to do so.

Abbott, speaking on Fairfax Radio on Thursday, would not link passing the budget and paying for the Iraq contribution, despite being given several opportunities to do so by his host, Neil Mitchell.

Abbott said Shorten had been a “patriot” on Iraq, and had been concerned to address the threats posed by Islamic State.

On the subject of the budget, the prime minister said it remained incumbent on Labor to suggest alternative savings or revenue measures to ensure long-term fiscal sustainability if the opposition did not like the government’s approach. Abbott also accused Labor of playing politics on unpopular measures such as the GP co-payment.

At a media event later in the day, Abbott said: “What is important is that the opposition continues to support our mission in Iraq and the Middle East.”

“Obviously there’s a lot of things that the government and the opposition disagree [about] but when it comes to national security it’s good that we stand shoulder to shoulder together.”

Abbott

Abbott Booed at the NRL Final…. He loves the smell of napalm in the morning….. WAR

The forgotten war but they are still there

They are booing the man

Filed under:
Abbott, Syria/iraq

Abbott and Obama’s Iraq: The war that is and is not

When is a war not a war? When is a war really a war?

The answer to those questions is strictly in the hands of whoever is in charge of a country at a particular time.

Tony Abbott badly needed a war, or something like it, when his Government was being shredded a few weeks ago — firstly because he lied to the population about everything his government intended to do. He lied before the election and he lied again after the election when he said he didn’t lie.

The angry backlash had begun to look serious for his Government.

The murderers who appeared out of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham gave Abbott his real opportunity.

War! War! War!

Now U.S. President Barack Obama has decided that

“… we will not get dragged into another ground war.”

Instead it is a “counter terrorism campaign” in the president’s words, but our Tony Abbott decided that it was a war and he is throwing the Australian army and air force right into it.

More recently, Obama has decided that American troops still in Iraq, should be part of a routine policy which America has been following in Somalia and Yemen aimed at securing “national security” and to “protect of our people” — meaning the workers of U.S. oil magnates.

For Tony Abbott, it’s a war. For the U.S. it is not a war.

In Australia, we have a news media today that reeks of sheer bullshit, making headlines of nothing, scaring the pants off many in the population, arguing endlessly about what women should be allowed to wear or not to wear. Inside our population, we undoubtedly have a number of people who have come to Australia and received citizenship but there will always be some who will abuse the freedoms that Australia offers them.

Tony Abbott and his favourite dinner companion Rupert Murdoch are playing a game with the Australian people, while at the same time our police and security forces are doing all that is reasonably necessary to keep us safe. At the same time, we need to be concerned that the opposition side of our parliament must be convinced that Abbott is doing the nation no good.

There are plenty of people in Australia now who are well aware that the country is being taken for a ride for outrageous political chicanery and it needs to be stopped.

I would love to know the subject of the dinner conversations of Abbott and Murdoch. Particularly Murdoch, whose obsolete views on practically everything I learned years ago.

Filed under:
Morals, Syria/iraq, Tony Abbott, Uncategorized

We as part of a coalition will be bombing under the same guidelines. “near certainty” does not fit here so screw civilians

Australia has been propagandized.

At the same time, however, Hayden said that a much-publicized White House policy that President Obama announced last year barring U.S. drone strikes unless there is a “near certainty” there will be no civilian casualties — “the highest standard we can meet,” he said at the time — does not cover the current U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

The “near certainty” standard was intended to apply “only when we take direct action ‘outside areas of active hostilities,’ as we noted at the time,” Hayden said in an email. “That description — outside areas of active hostilities — simply does not fit what we are seeing on the ground in Iraq and Syria right now.”

There’s a strong whiff of hypocrisy about this new standard for collateral damage.

The Obama administration has been roundly criticized for pursuing an air campaign that cannot possibly destroy the Islamic State. If that is a strategy with limited efficacy, what is the moral argument for continuing to employ it when civilian casualties result? It is one thing when a strategy is well-designed to achieve a specific military objective but quite another when it is not. Obama now is being severely criticized by Isreael. However does anybody even consider that they are all wrong? ISIS hasn’t launched any attacks on American targets (yet), but just the mere potential apparently allows Obama to jettison the same standard he applied to Israel while our ally was under direct and continuous attacks that qualify as war crimes in any sense of the word — from an Islamist terror network not dissimilar at all to ISIS.

The decision not to put a force of ground troops to push ISIS off its ground guarantees that we will create collateral damage like this for months and years to come. If the mission is to “degrade and destroy ISIS” while they remain embedded in these cities and towns, there is no other possible outcome than massive civilian casualties. ISIS will not withdraw under air attack to the desert where they can get bombed and strafed into oblivion, after all, and without ground forces, we won’t have the means to hold any ground we might liberate anyway. Nor will we have the specific intelligence needed to avoid mistakes that happen in any war.

Remember this name Tony Abbott you voted for him I didn’t. He will kill not some “devil cult” but he will kill a lot of families like yours and mine.

Filed under:
Islamophobia, Syria/iraq, Tony Abbott

The Viet Cong fought against poverty and repression we weren’t told that. Like mushrooms we were kept in the dark and fed bullshit. As we are now

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“ISIL will claim that our involvement in this international effort is the reason they are targeting us, but these people do not attack us for what we do, but for who we are and how we live.”

Despite this narrative’s denial of the truth, the harsh reality is Australia has caused the threat to itself by striding clumsily with guns blazing and meddling in Middle Eastern affairs — something that began with military action in Afghanistan in 2001.

Last Monday, in a call for action against it enemies, ISIS urged its members to kill civilians and soldiers of the nations aligned against it, naming Australia.

They did this not because Australia is a liberal democratic country, but rather because Australia has allowed itself to become embroiled in Middle East politics and line up as an ally and soldier on the battlefield with the United States.

Why then would the PM come out and claim differently?

The prime minister is playing a political game, attempting to frame the threat to Australia in a way that absolves Australia as the cause of the threats itself.

Government needed to own the intervention and breakage it made, respectively, in 2001 and 2003  to show good faith with voters and to reduce the vicious Islamophobia we are now, unfortunately, seeing spread like wildfire through the community.

ISIS, Shiia, Sunni, Syria/iraq

600 SAS are off to Iraq to train the Iraqi army. The same army of deserters that abandoned their US hardware to ISIS. They have no guaranteed loyalty to the state of Iraq other than$$. Is Abbott doing us any favours??

Tony Abbott is desperate to go to war, but what are the costs Veteran Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh says

The so called Islamic State is a marauding force of Sunni adherents with an ambitious and opportunistic agenda. It seeks to fill the political and military vacuum brought about by the first American invasion of Iraq.  Acquiring power behind the shield of religion is its modus operandi.

Commonsense and compassion dictates that the rampaging rebels must be halted and contained. They must be stopped from beheading western hostages, abducting and raping women and executing prisoners of war. But who is it that should stop them?

This is not Australia’s fight.Australia is not threatened in the way Iraq and neighbouring states might feel threatened.This is a fight for a broad coalition of Arab states. In the absence of this why should Australia step up?

Abbott is approaching military involvement as a religious crusade. He has said that anyone fighting for the rebels is against God and religion. The Attorney General, George Brandis, appears to be on the same hymn sheet, describing the “mission” as humanitarian with military elements. They describe the rebels as evil.The original Crusaders saw their missions as an act of love, righting the wrongs of Islamic occupation of the Holy Lands.

As with American entry to the war in Vietnam, this current undertaking is bereft of strategic thinking and planning. There is a forward rush based on emotional footage and commentary.Abbott and his followers are banging an urgent military tattoo, in order to drown out dissent and numb clear thought.

In building the case for war in Vietnam, media outlets in 1963 were swamped with images of village headmen decapitated, hung and disembowelled by the Viet Cong. Emotion and fear was exploited.

The slogan of the time was that it was better to fight Communism in Vietnam than at home. Abbott’s better to fight the Jihadists in Iraq than Australia eerily echoes the propaganda from that earlier ill-judged and failed war. 60,000 Australians served in Vietnam, 521 died and 3,000 were injured.

Nothing was achieved.

America fatally misread the political and social dynamics of Vietnam.Yet here is Abbott, a latter day lap dog, swallowing every grim U.S. ‘intelligent report’ on IS and Iraq, not factoring in the earlier failure of U.S. policy, which has led to the present imbroglio.

How exactly does Abbott believe the U.S. confrontation of IS will proceed to a more successful outcome than Vietnam, the first and second Iraq wars and Afghanistan?

We have gone to war with the IS in conjunction with the Iraqi military in order to support the government of Iraq, but what if the government in Iraq collapses and/or the  untrained and uncommitted Iraqi military fades into the desert? Will the ‘Coalition’ continue the war? Will they take over the instruments of the failed Iraqi state?If Vietnam is any guide, the answer is yes — and with predictable and catastrophic results.What if IS should have further success, gaining more ground and assets and, in the process, look and behave more like a functioning state to the point that a number ‒ perhaps a majority of Arab countries ‒ give recognition and trade with the new entity or state.What if they turn against the ‘Coalition’ on the basis that it comprises interfering infidels?

What if the Taliban in Afghanistan use the ruggedness and remoteness of the country to train IS and other fighters?

As the war drags on, or perhaps before even that situation is reached, will the Abbott government introduce a war levy (tax) and re-introduce selective conscription, for what is likely to become an unpopular war? To top off Abbott’s silly and alarming sabre rattling, we have heard little from the immature government he leads regarding the far greater threat to the world posed by the Ebola plague.

Bruce Haigh is a political commentator, conscript and retired diplomat, who served in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

ISIS, Media, Security, Syria/iraq

Our Prime Minister thinks the war back home is the easiest but we don’t have enough POW camps

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Shiia, Sunni, Syria/iraq

Abbott said it was simple baddies vs baddies He can’t ID them. They know who we are and Abbott has put a target on our backs

Mosul dam Isis airstrikes

Isis: the international community has responded just as the jihadists wanted

It is irrelevant what terminology the Australian government chooses to use to defend its involvement in a new war because the declared enemy, Isis, has already set the terms

While it might suit us to imagine this fight in binary terms, a struggle of good versus evil, there is an important point that must not be ignored. This war is pulling together an uncomfortable conglomeration of natural allies and natural enemies on one side and pitting them against an equally messy conglomeration of allies on the other. Within this international coalition there is not even a clear set of values underpinning the agenda and perhaps, more worryingly, there is no clear objective.

Some members of this coalition will be satisfied with diminishing the operational capabilities of Isis. Others will want to see Isis destroyed completely, whatever that means. No convincing argument has yet been made about how bombing specific targets in northern Iraq and Syria will help to destroy an ideology which has spread, cancer-like, radicalising limited but troubling numbers of disaffected young Muslim men and women around the world, including in western Sydney.

Complicating this scenario even further will be the outlying objectives of some members of the international coalition. The Sunni governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE have long wanted to see off the Alawite dominated regime of Bashar al-Assad, with its allegiances to Shia Iran and Shia Hezbollah, in Lebanon. Speaking on Sunday, Syria’s deputy foreign minister Faisal Mekdad put it mildly when he described that approach as “a very dangerous game”

As this drags on, there’s every chance the line will become blurred between radical Sunni Muslim targets and other targets in Iraq and Syria. If, for example Sunni tribes in the north-west of Iraq are not brought back into the fold by a more inclusive national government in Baghdad, how then does the coalition distinguish between them and the radicals? The risk is that what we, in Australia, might see as a clear battle-line between Isis and the rest of the civilized world will be understood in a vastly more nuanced fashion in the Middle East. In truth, this war has a multitude of battle-lines and whilst Australia might be clear about where it stands, it will not always be immediately clear where our partners stand.

The Australian government may have deemed that there is simply no other choice than to commit to this. And they would not be alone in concluding that. But if we are going into battle, we should firstly know if this is in fact “a war”, which side we are on and what precisely it is that we are fighting for.

Filed under:
Australia, Injustice, Israel, Prime Minister

Given 43 Experienced Israeli Intelligence reservists wrote their resignation out of conscience and will now be criminally prosecuted I’m posting a report by John Pilger. It’s long but informative unlike Andrew Bolt.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/breaking-the-last-taboo-gaza-and-the-threat-of-world-war,6901

With Prime Minister Tony Abbott plunging Australia back into another war in the Middle East, John Pilger argues that the attack on Gaza poses a wider threat to us all, fuelled by a complicit media.

SAID THE VISIONARY Edward Said:

“THERE IS a taboo on telling the truth about Palestine and the great destructive force behind Israel. Only when this truth is out can any of us be free.”

Australian Shame, Humour, ISIS, Tony Abbott

We are further away but even there before the UK. We are the first to Jump and ask “How High”

Fools rush in: Tony Abbott joins a war without definition

Date
September 15, 2014

Committing of forces gathers pace

US Secretary of State John Kerry says countries inside and outside the Middle East have pledged military support against IS militants with some nations offering ground troops

The smart thing for Western leaders in the wake of John Kerry’s session with Arab leaders in Jeddah on Thursday last, would have been to bide their time. But Tony Abbott leapt straight in – committing 600 Australian military personnel and more aircraft to the conflict, thereby giving the Arab leaders good reason to believe that if they sit on their hands for long enough, the West will fight their war for them.
Either collectively in Jeddah or in one-on-one meetings with Kerry as in Cairo, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Lebanon all have baulked at making explicit military commitments to confront a force that they all see as a direct threat to their thrones, bunkers and, in one or two cases, tissue-thin democracies. With the exception of Iraq, which has no option because it is under attack at home, none has publicly committed military support.

Conversely, Abbott was coy in claiming that this new deployment did not mean that Australia was at war??? Australia has been at war since its first airlift of weapons and ammunition to the Kurdish Peshmerga in the north of Iraq last week.
Because they are on the ground in the UAE doing logistics and maintenance or in Baghdad and Irbil as military advisers certainly would not absolve any of them from being a target if IS fighters contrived to get access to them. It’s also a dramatic instance of mission-creep in a conflict bedevilled by uncertainty and missing any clear sense of a timeline or even the vague contours of what “victory” might look like.

US President Barack Obama demanded that Iraq form an inclusive, representative government before he would commit. But just three days after the new prime minister said he would behave himself, Obama had aircraft over Iraq, and we still know nothing about how different this Iraqi leadership will be from the last. There is no certainty that it will win the confidence of the Iraqi Sunni tribes.
An air war cannot succeed without a substantial boots-on-the-ground accompaniment – and that part of what Obama calls a strategy is very much on a wing and a prayer.

The Kurdish Peshmerga can fight, but they can’t defend all of Iraq. The Iraqi army, trained and equipped by Washington at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, is erratic and more likely to cut and run than to stand and fight. Next door in Syria, Obama is banking of the ranks of the Free Syrian Army – which for years he has complained could not be counted on, and which Washington now tries to convince us can be taken to Saudi Arabia, retrained and sent home to win the war.

Abbott must have had his hands over his ears last week as Obama spoke to the US nation and analysts around the globe distilled his words to mean a conflict that will last for years.Oddly, the Prime Minister warned Australians to prepare for a fight that might last “months rather than weeks, perhaps many, many months indeed…” Seems he’s in as much of a hurry to get into this war, as he seemingly thinks he will get out of it. He’s simply hides from the truth.

It’s not clear why. This “we must do something right now” response is likely to create a bigger mess than already exists in the region. Consider: the death of 200,000 locals in Syria failed to rouse much of a reaction in the West; but the deaths of two Americans – and now a Briton – has raised a crescendo for international war when it might have made more sense to tackle regional politicking and feuding first.