Abbott's War and the world of oil and money
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 ‒ was a humanitarian disaster, with half a million dead babies not enough to fill the West’s insatiable maw.
It was based on outrageous lies about “weapons of mass destruction” that were clearly shown not to exist — before or after the war.
After Saddam Hussein
was hanged, it was the Americans who had to clean up the mess and
establish a new government for Iraq — a government that failed 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 ‒ called ISAL or ISIS, you take your pick.
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 certain suspects.
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 6000 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
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