RIGHTLY, we have been memorializing the Boxing Day 2004 seismic sea wave with its hundreds of thousands of deaths in a short space of time.
Conveniently sidelined are the deaths in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands from the Saddam dictatorship, a man put into power by the CIA for US interests, from the war with Iran and from the casualties of the first Gulf war when the dictator went from favoured son balancing the Ayatollahs to enemy number one, seeker of all sorts of WMD’s.
The global effort to rein him in after 1991 saw him reduce his WMD program to almost nothing, a few samples in research labs.
Still, we were told WMDs were the reason for launching the latest wave civilian of casualties in Iraq. Ritter and Fisk were proved correct, no WMDs could be found and so the brutality of the regime was made the reason.
Global events turned the US on their own puppet as they took their eye off the then evil one, Osama, to focus on Saddam, and found they created a maelstrom for the bin Laden Organizations benefit. This was combined with a set of stupid ideological moves in Iraq that has brought home several thousand dead soldiers and expended huge amounts of wealth.
In the meantime that other Middle Eastern pariah of the US, Iran, [remember the capture of the US Embassy, the failed rescue, the Oliver North contra scandal — a lot to pay them back for, has been step by step developing a nuclear capacity. Iran claims it is for peaceful purposes. Israel, the US and Europe are not so sure.
Iran is playing hardball, seeking to be allowed to act as an independent nation and develop at least nuclear power and currently diplomacy is seeking to tie them to that.
Israel is making noises that it cannot abide a second nuclear armed state in the Middle East. A one bomb state, Israel is too small to absorb the shock of a single nuclear weapon and continue with warfighting.
Iran is particularly hardline against the state of Israel, its current President making statements about the abolition of a whole state.
Destroy its nuclear capacity
Where will Australia be if Israel conducts an attack on Iran to destroy its nuclear capacity as it did to Iraq when Iraq was developing a similar capacity.
Will that leave us keeping the peace across the border from the target, guarding the troops of the only nation to, so far, suffer a nuclear attack whilst they attempt to rebuild a nation that has suffered the death and destruction of 2 wars in as many decades.
The US has, in the Muslim mind, tied itself to the mast of Israel and we have tied ourselves to that of the US.
Our defence forces’ recent purchase of a main battle tank suited to nuclear conflict and unsuited to our region and the subsequent agreement to purchase heavy lift aircraft so we may move them overseas rapidly strongly hints at a new role for Australia’s defence forces.
I hope that the impasse with Iran can be settled diplomatically. Unlike Osama, I don’t want to see 2006 with an expanded war in the Middle East. The fundamentalist fanatic must be laughing heartily, his perverted dreams moving inexorably toward a confrontation between Muslim and Christian on a scale he could only dream of.
Will the skills of US diplomacy, a state with almost universal sympathy on 9/11 and now back to being of low esteem with many people throughout the world, manage to manoeuvre out of an impasse that faces it toward a perpetual war over religion.
One hopes that those who claim to be defending democracy against tyrants have Mugabe and Zimbabwe clearly on their program for change, his recent antics including starving and making homeless his own population should put his regime under intense scrutiny and pressure to change.
phill Parsons would prefer a cheerier New Year message, resolution of the climate crisis remaining unclear and many areas of environmental significance also directly threatened by human activity.
