Posted on 07/21/2005 5:13:08 PM PDT by naturalman1975
THE Bush administration showered John Howard with the most effusive public praise in Washington this week. He would have been less pleased by the nickname used privately in Republican circles inside the Beltway where he is known as "Bonsai", the mini Bush. This is particularly hurtful since George W. Bush is known as "Shrub"; that is, a smaller version of his father, George Bush, US president from 1989 to 1993.
Still, Howard could not fail to be pleased by the public accolades and the press coverage in Australia. Howard's early moments in Britain were less comfortable. One of the Australian victims of the London bombing asked Howard whether he thought there was a link between the London bombings and the Iraq war. Howard said no.
Blind Freddy can see that our involvement in Iraq with the US and Britain makes us a higher priority target than we might otherwise have been. Howard should acknowledge that commonsense position. He would then be able to more credibly argue a series of much more important points.
First, right through the 1980s and '90s there were terrorist attacks on the US. In 1983, there was the bombing of marine barracks in Lebanon that killed more than 200 people and successfully sent the Americans scuttling home. Terrorists bombed US embassies, bombed a US warship and in 1993 (yes, 1993) tried to blow up the World Trade Centre in New York. Then, of course, came September 11, 2001. All this happened before the attack on Afghanistan, let alone the attack on Iraq.
Second, as regards Australia, we were direct targets in the Bali attack in October 2002. The Iraq invasion took place in March 2003. The reasons given by those who attacked us related to our involvement in the UN force in East Timor in September 1999 and our involvement in Afghanistan which began in October 2001. No Iraq connection there.
Third, this characterisation of Iraq as the cause of the terrorist threat to us simply fails to take account of the core of what the fundamentalists repeatedly say they are about. They say that attacking and killing Christians, Jews, Crusaders and infidels generally is entirely legitimate. In their eyes we are friends of Israel, a broadly Christian society and part of the Crusaders' war against Islam. And that was all the case before East Timor, and before Afghanistan, let alone Iraq.
So it is utter foolishness to suggest that if it were not for Iraq we would be safe from terrorist attack. We would only be safe if we had not been involved in East Timor or Afghanistan, dumped the US alliance and our friendship with Britain, gave up our support for Israel's existence, and preferably adopted Islam -- and even then I wouldn't be too sure, given that Indonesia was a target.
What is correct, however, is that while Iraq has not made us a terrorist target, our involvement there has added marginally to our prominence as a target in the eyes of the terrorists.
So is that a reason for not being involved in Iraq? It's a factor that should be acknowledged and it's foolish of Howard to deny it. But it should not be decisive.
All actions involve risks, but it does not follow that we should remain permanently passive. For example, we were an ally of the US throughout the Cold War with the Soviet Union. As the Hawke government was the first to publicly acknowledge, this made us a nuclear target. The presence of US facilities in Australia added to that risk. Does this mean we should have broken that alliance and thrown the facilities out? Australians certainly did not judge so at the time.
Our involvement in East Timor and Afghanistan raised our prominence in terrorist eyes more decisively than did Iraq. But few people argue that means we should have stayed out of those two situations. Some now argue that by fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq we have stirred up a nest of hornets that otherwise would have left us alone. Indeed, London Mayor Ken Livingstone and the former Labour and now independent British MP George Galloway (who was friendly toward Saddam Hussein) have now questioned US support for the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s, saying that we are reaping now what they sowed there 20 years ago.
I won't go into the detail here of why a united national struggle directed against Soviet military targets in Afghanistan is totally different to attacks on civilians in Iraq and elsewhere. But the logic of Livingstone and Galloway's argument is that we should have just left the Soviet Union to take Afghanistan over. I don't think so.
As regards fostering a new generation of terrorists in Iraq, the logical implication of that argument is that if we just left them alone, they would leave us alone. We tried that for 20 years and for 20 years they gradually gained strength and confidence in our weakness, culminating in 9/11. To think that by now leaving them alone they will leave us in peace would be to deny recent history and, even more to the point, to deny that they mean what they say is their intention. We know from bitter experience that their lurid and extreme threats are meant deadly seriously, and they would not be diverted by us leaving the field of battle.
Fantasies of a McDonald's solution to the Islamic extremists' threat - a solution that was hot, fast and tasty - also deny history. It is to the Bush administration's discredit that this was the impression it gave about the Iraq conflict, and it is now rightly reaping condemnation for its profound misrepresentations of, and lack of preparedness for, what was always going to be a long and gruelling struggle.
But let's not add to Bush's fantasy by creating one of our own: that the source of all our troubles is the war in Iraq. The terror threat to us is rooted in the ideology/theology of the Islamic fundamentalists and we can only combat it by a long-term and complex strategy that focuses on politics, social and economic responses, the encouragement of the vast bulk of moderate Muslims to reclaim their culture and religion from the extremists and yes, police intelligence and military actions. To pretend otherwise is just wishful thinking.
We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons. (Applause.)
Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch -- yet it must be and it will be waged on our watch.
-George W. Bush, State of The Union, January 29, 2002
Congratulations, Mr. Costello, you're a bona fide Idiotarian.
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