Hi. On each side of the war against war, hopes soar, hopes dive, hour by hour now. Resignations abound, timetables slip, and the world waits, mesmerised.
I’m off to Melbourne to record an arts chat show on a book about violent sex and a movie about punk rock – seems crazy stuff to think about now, but the demands of my diary are a comfort of sorts. Life goes on, for now. Back Thursday.
Today’s entry is by a stalwart, always-passionate contributor on the war, Jack Robertson, who’s more directly connected to the war than most as his brother is in the SAS. He’s written two letters to the future – one to John Wojdylo, the other to ‘Brian Dabeagle’, who wrote to Webdiary last week saying he was in the SAS and that Howard had committed the force to war a year ago. (A letter to the SAS?)
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Letters to the future
by Jack Robertson
Dear John Wojdylo,
Mate, I’m not sure why you’re suddenly so inspired to bray somewhat hysterically – like an Andrew Bolt or a Piers Akerman – that Saddam Hussein’s enduring regime is partly my fault, since I am Against Human Rights in Iraq. That I ‘give the green light for dictators.’ That I ‘have failed to consider the viewpoint of the Iraqi people’. That ‘neither [I] nor Amnesty are focussing on the individual’. That I ‘have you not bothered to find out what the Iraqi people think before involving [my]self in actions that would influence their fate’. That ‘Iraqis seeking liberty have become an abstraction to [me] – [I’m] preoccupied with [my] own concerns, in [my] self-centred world, despite the lip-service [I] pay to noble ideals’. That I am ‘clearly imprisoned by the rationalisations inside [my] head, by this self-obsession, and have lost the ability to see the world outside, the world of another person – particularly the world of the Iraqi desiring liberty’.
John, there’s a shameless audacity to this attack that makes me grin a bit nervously, and, even though I said I wasn’t going to jabber on about this foregone conclusion of an invasion any further, overheat the keyboard yet again in long response.
But how the hell do I answer your accusations? Do I whine back at you about much time I spend as Balmain AI co-convener writing letters, articles and appeals, helping run market stalls, collecting furniture, collecting money, collecting members, collecting signatures and advocating on behalf of Iraqi refugees and Iraqi HR-abuse victims – along with a lot of others – who ‘desire liberty’? Or would that be more ‘Western self-obsession’, Western moral preening, Western do-gooder-hood? It strikes me as so.
But I simply have to protest that it’s asking a bit much to expect me to cop it sweet when someone like you tries to blame us anti-invasionists for Saddam. All the warhawks are doing it these days, I notice.
Yeah, you’re not the first pro-war ‘Born-Again Human Rights Believer’ who’s berated me over my refusal to support the act of bombing Baghdad into HR submission, John. Nor, no doubt, will you be the last. ‘Against Human Rights in Iraq’. Jesus.
John – I can’t be sure, but I might just have written my first letter in protest against Saddam’s regime way back in 1983, the year I first joined AI. That was back in the days when Donald Rumsfeld was shaking the man’s hand and selling him weapons, and the Brits were financially-backing his mustard gas factories, knowing exactly what he was up to with the Iranians and the Kurds.
Now you may say ‘let’s forget about those mistakes, let’s get on and make amends now’. Maybe there’s an arguable argument for a Human Rights invasion somewhere, but why do you so desperately need to make it by painting harmless lefty plonkers like me as the HR enemy? Is your case in fact so flimsy and tenuous that you need a ‘bad guy’ against which to set it firmer? Must I – to prove my HR credentials to your satisfaction – climb heartily aboard your Iraq invasion bandwagon?
In any case, mate, a few minor points: As far as AI itself is concerned, they, as usual, have ‘no position’ on the power-politics of the invasion. I only disclosed my involvement with AI – while making it clear that my views were personal – because the piece I wrote at the time was a response to an earlier attack, on the same grounds as yours now, on HR groups in general (Take a risk for human rights: Back Bush).
I wasn’t then and am not now arguing on behalf of anyone but myself. Incidentally, I’m not a ‘senior’ person in AI. I’m the co-convener of a volunteer grass-roots group which has about eight active members. I can’t remember seeing too many pro-war hawks at our last public letter-writing day, either. Why is it that HR only becomes important to so many neo-cons when there’s a sexy war to fight in its name?
If you wish to know more about my general views on HR, then go back over the Webdiary archives and read some of my stuff from the Tampa time. If you want to know how I’d deal with Saddam’s hateful regime, read my alternative plan (Looking for John Curtin).
You’ll notice that my explicit aim in that (two-month-old) alternative is to get rid of Saddam. A plan which, contrary to your other claims, cheerfully and pragmatically employs the Great Satan’s (very handy, sometimes) military power, and in a far more moral, intelligent and focussed HR way than full-scale invasion and occupation will (oh, and I get the UN to pay the bill for the Yanks, too). That is, it’s anything but ‘Utopian’.
Sorry to mess up your knee-jerk lefty stereotyping, John, but I spent a good deal of my time in uniform finding practical solutions to real-world problems – floods, bushfires, aerial search-and-rescues, the odd delicate ‘crowd situation’, h/c medical evacuations, and so on.
It’s you, I think, who are the real Utopian – vague, assertive, short-sighted, unpractical, seeming to believe that an invasion will magically ‘cure everything’, even if it’s run by, and/or for the partial benefit of, oil ‘parasites’, to use your term.
You’re blindly hoping for the best, John, and not remotely preparing for the worst. Others – men like my brother and ‘Brian Dabeagle’ – will have to deal with that. You’ll notice that no-one has mentioned RULES OF ENGAGEMENT yet, by the way. Thoughts, John? Which ‘Iraqis desiring liberty’ shall we have these men kill in our names, mate, and which not? And how will we have them tell the difference in the heat of combat? Do you remotely care, John? Or is it their ‘real world problem’ to solve alone, out there on the solitary battlefields?
And my kind of plan is also far, far more likely to achieve a good HR and democracy outcome in Iraq in the long run than yours, mate, since mine involves a degree of active Iraqi participation, rather than simply a passive acceptance of your Western ‘largesse’, and the imposition of an external military/expatriate government.
You’ll agree that the West didn’t bring the Wall down by bombing Leipzig flat first; the inspiration and some assistance came from the West, sure, but the true, lasting urge for freedom welled up from within. That was certainly how all the people of Dresden still saw things when I lived there eight years later.
It was the same case with East Timor. And in every other post-war liberation that has stuck, too. You can’t democratise a country by imposed force, mate, any more than you can smack a child into adulthood. You’re supposed to inspire, demonstrate, show, lead by brilliant example.
After WW2, until now, that’s just how the gentle, democratic West, wherever in the unfree world it has achieved lasting results, has done it: by lifting struggling, rising Peoples up with a helping hand, mate, not smashing them further down with a swinging fist, in the vague hope that we’ll create an entirely new People in our own image from the pile of hard-smote corpses.
‘Shock and Awe’, and then proud, strong self-determination for Iraqis? More like dulled, numbed submission, I would have thought, John. Or angry, anarchic rejection. But we shall see.
But did you actually bother to read my alternative plan for the use of the West’s power, before you decided to declare me a self-obsessed, Utopian, pro-Saddam ignoramus who was too pathetic to try to exercise it at all? Does my willingness to use military force – intelligently – to help the Iraqi people save me from your stern lecture? Does it put me on the side of the righteous war angels? No? You’re either with-us-or-against-us, Jack?
Back to writing wussy HR letters for me, I suppose. I wonder if I will be excluded, by the triumphant warhawks, from any immediate post-Saddam celebrations that take place in Iraq? In the same way that John Howard and the neo-conservatives retrospectively appropriated the cause of the East Timorese, after a lifetime of opposing their independence.
Those like John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and Tom Uren and my Balmain AI predecessors and countless others, who spent thankless wilderness years trying to keep that issue in the global spotlight, might as well never have existed as far as the ‘pragmatists’ of the world were concerned. And now in East Timor, as in Afghanistan, the warhawks have wandered off again, uninterested in the longer-term security of that new nation, not particularly worried by what the militia might get up to in the future.
Because you’ll note, John, that the Australian government who so nobly ‘gave’ the East Timorese their independence have not wasted much time in stiffing them over the Timor Gap. Have a read of the Downer transcript over at www.crikey.com.au, mate; are these the kind of ‘free’ negotiations that await the newly ‘free’ people of Iraq when it comes to the untapped Western Desert oilfields, I wonder?
Is this what our SAS soldiers will soon be fighting for in Iraq? So that a pompous, silver-spoon prat like Downer can deliver the ‘free’ Iraqis a smug ‘lesson in democratic politics’, too? Is this the way to help ensure that those fiercely-independent, proud East Timorese do not rise against the Colonialists again?
Can’t you see the mistakes we risk making? It’s one thing for a fledgling democratic government to accept a skewed revenue split on disputed Greater Sunrise resources in the name of short-term ‘realpolitik’. It’s quite another to expect that the fledgling democratic people beneath it will do the same in the longer run. How long before the anger filters down, and up, again? How long before such rank neo-paternalism starts to bite?
You warhawks keep wanting to use force to bring stability to the unstable world. Sometimes, as in East Timor, force is needed; yet you then seem unable or unwilling to treat the newly-stable world with fairness and honesty and decency in the long-term, which is the only way it is ever going to become permanently stable. Australia and East Timor are now both equally part of the world community of the free; except that Australia is still more equal and free than East Timor, and Downer has just arrogantly and publicly rubbed the militia’s noses in it. How stupid are we? And do you think the Indonesian masses, the estranged, resentful ones who might be drawn to groups like JI especially, won’t draw ugly conclusions from such strutting, private-schoolboy behaviour?
John, there is an ugly dishonesty at work in your attack on me: I don’t agree with your plans for carpet-bombing Baghdad into freedom; ergo, I must be ‘against Human Rights in Iraq’. These tactics, so typical of your side in this debate, hit me like a battering ram. A righteous club. An intellectual cosh. It’s childish nonsense, but it’s impossible to counter, and that’s exactly why this invasion is going ahead. We just can’t hold back a zealous, charging steamroller with logic, reason, fact, foresight, or careful thinking about what exactly we’re unleashing in the longer term.
But enough about me, John. (A touch self-obsessive, no?) Mate, there are many Iraqis, here in Australia, around the world, and in Iraq, too, who don’t share your views that we in the West should ‘liberate’ Iraq by pure brute force. This debate is dividing Iraqis, just as much as it is dividing the rest of us.
Which is the more arrogant decision to make on behalf of them? To invade and occupy their country, or not to invade and occupy their country? Neither of us can say. I simply don’t know what ‘most’ Iraqis want. To live in a free and just country, certainly; but how, exactly? And does a ‘free’ and ‘just’ Iraq mean different things to a Shi’ite, a Ba’athist, a Kurd, a Persian, an Arab, a gay, a woman, an Israel-hating and a Western-expatriate Iraqi? I bet it does.
But you tell me, John. You’re the one about to summarily take over the joint, and tell everyone who lives there what ‘free’ and ‘just’ is going to mean to them all, from now on. I wish you luck. Personally, I just don’t know what all the many different, individual Iraqis want. Maybe they don’t yet, either.
Although we can make confident judgements about what they don’t want; to be tortured, beaten, imprisoned, raped, executed. Or blown to smithereens by a Tomahawk cruise missile, John. You’re quite wrong about AI, by the way – concentrating on individuals is exactly what our little group does.
We identify specific cases of HR abuse, and try to target those. Why? Because we can be sure of individual HR-abuse when we see it. What we can’t be so sure of is the ‘big picture’, the ‘sweeping solution’ that people like you – the real Utopians – love so much. That’s why AI has no over-reaching position on the ultimate pros and cons of this invasion and occupation. Though respect for international laws and covenants and organisations, however imperfect, does remain the fundamental basis for its work, and its best hope for the future.
We all want to ‘do something to help Iraq’, John, but we just don’t know what that might mean, perhaps beyond getting rid of Saddam. Or perhaps not, too. Or how we are going to go about ‘doing something to help Iraq’ once we have done that first bit, or even in fact whether our summary ‘getting rid of Saddam’ in this all-conquering, humiliating way isn’t going to make ‘doing something to help Iraq’ forever-after impossible for us. We just don’t know what all the twenty-three million individual Iraqis want, John. I don’t, anyway.
Still, pro-invasionists like you get bored by plodding, case-by-case grass-roots work. You crave the quick fix, the instant HR revolution, the ‘grand vision’, the control-freak external imposition of democratic order, freedom, justness. But because the Iraqi internal question is such a complex one, you’re all a bit confused about your good intentions; even Tony Blair – the great moral, Just War Crusader – is now once again suggesting that Saddam can in fact stay in power if he simply disarms fully.
I’m sorry, I’m now all confused again. This is your problem, John. For all your pompous bluster, none of you war-hawks have a clue what your invasion aim really is. Is it a WMD invasion? Is it a regime change invasion? Is it a democratisation invasion? A HR invasion? A terrorism-busting invasion? As Somalia should have shown us, having no clear, constant aim is a recipe for a humanitarian disaster.
I reject Margo’s claim that ‘it doesn’t matter what the reason for the war is if its effect is to liberate the Iraqi people’. That’s a dishonest, dangerous, backwards way of writing it, Margo. It’s true enough if the second clause does end up prevailing, but putting it that way leaves everything to chance, makes everything absolutely a hostage to ever-changing fortune. If we wish to make sure that the effect of the invasion is to liberate the Iraqi people, then we MUST start by saying: “The aim of this invasion is to liberate the Iraqi people’, first and foremost, and all else comes second.” Otherwise, conflicting aims interfere with each other. Then we must ask ourselves: what does liberating the Iraqi people mean? Installing a military government? Installing an expatriate crook like Chalabi as leader? Making a hell of a big mess, and then asking the UN to help clean it up?
John, what if our imposed liberation leads to a polite request from the newly-liberated people of Iraq to hand over fully-nationalised control of their newly-liberated oilfields? (Cf: Downer’s patronising ‘approval’ of the East Timorese government’s embrace of private firms to run their gasfields.) Or what if a majority-Shia democratic government decides they do not wish to award the Halliburton Oil Services company their oilfield reconstruction contracts? What if they prefer to have the Chinese, the Russians, the French do it? Or what if the Kurds decide they wish to assume control of Kirkuk? What if the new Iraqi government has no desire to smash OPEC? In short, John, what happens when ‘liberation’ means that serious conflict arises between the ‘invasion oil parasites’ and the ‘invasion democrats’? Who do you think will prevail? How do you think the Iraqis – all the different and conflicting groupings there will be – will respond? Will the Iraqis consider themselves truly ‘liberated’? These are real-world questions, John. This is what awaits us post-Saddam.
As you yourself point out, the politics of oil and the politics of Iraq – of the whole Gulf – have always been impossible to separate. Yet it has nearly always been the politics of oil that has prevailed in the region, and (now) disastrously so for the West. The long-term hegemony of oil over democracy in Saudi Arabia is, if we care to tell ourselves the truth, precisely what gave us al-Qaeda in the first place. What makes you so blithely sure that this invasion, run almost exclusively by oil men, is going to make Iraq turn out differently?
This is the whole point of my obsession with the black, sticky stuff in the Persian Gulf, John. The long-term ramifications of how the globalised world shares its spoils around. Not because I care less which oil-men get rich and which don’t – American, French, Russian, Chinese, British, is not the point. But because I don’t wish to be blown up by resentful Iraqi-born al-Qaeda terrorists in the future, any more than I wish to be blown up by resentful Saudi-born al-Qaeda terrorists now. Or Indonesian-born ones. Or Pakistani. Or East Timorese. We simply cannot keep treating non-Western Peoples as lesser Peoples, John. Not in the name of realpolitik – or human rights, or democratisation, or any other nice words, for that matter. Nice words are just nice words. Actions count. Our long-term actions in Iraq will count most of all.
The first Principle of War is ‘selection and maintenance of the aim’. If we don’t know and state clearly exactly what we are going into Iraq to achieve, then we go into Iraq inviting confused, anarchic disaster. We CANNOT put our soldiers into a pre-emptive combat zone on the basis of ‘suck it and see’, mate. Are they liberators? Peace-keepers? Peace-makers? Humanitarian aid workers? Nuke-busters? Counter-terrorists? (What are their Rules of engagement?)
Or are they just oil conquerers? I suggest to you, John, that in the absence of any rigid, limiting and public clarification of the aim from the Western warhawks – before you start this pre-emptive war – this last description is the only one that long history will ultimately recognise as fitting. I hope very much that I am proven wrong, and you are proven right.
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Margo: I published an email last week from ‘Brian Dabeagle’, who said he was an Australian SAS officer. I do not know if it is genuine. The email follows, then Jack’s reply.
I am a currently serving soldier in Australia’s Special Air Service Regiment (SAS) and believe me it has taken weeks, if not months of agonised soul searching as I have tried to decide whether to make my views public or not.
As you can understand, if my identity is revealed, my career (in a job that I love) is finished and as such I have taken some steps to protect my identity. However, some of the information that is in this email is not on the public record (but not vital to operational security) and can be checked to confirm my bona fides. I write this because I am sick of John Howard and the Federal Government’s lies about our position re Iraq and our role within the coalition.
By the time that you read this, it is quite possibly too late to influence the outcome of events regarding our involvement, but at the very least maybe one of you guys may have the courage to make the public a little more aware of what really is happening regarding our (the SAS) role in this conflict.
John Howard stated that we had only recently started preparing for this looming conflict. Bullshit! We, that is, 1 SAS Squadron (please refer to it as One SAS Squadron, not 1st SAS or anything else) were given orders to prepare for a war with Iraq around July 2002.
The Australian Special Air Service Regiment was specifically asked for by US planners after they had observed our performance in Afghanistan, where we demonstrated a capability that had been neglected by other Special Forces units who until recently had deemed it obsolete. Our skills in what is termed Strategic Reconaissance (SR) are unsurpassed by any other Special Forces unit in the world. This includes other so called Tier 1 (a system of rating free world Special Forces units devised by the yanks – Tier 1 being the highest rating) units, including the Brit SAS, US Delta and US Dev Group units.
What happened was we were initially deployed into areas deemed ‘clean’ by the coalition as we were viewed by the US command as really just a token gesture made by the Australian Government (as was our deployment to Kuwait in 98). We were also viewed as an ‘unknown’ quantity as our last real operational deployment working with the yanks was Vietnam. But, because we had maintained the skills of remaining ‘behind the lines’ for much longer periods without resupply or external support, we started to find things that had remained un-noticed by the coalition. Taliban & al Qaida forces started to reappear in the areas we operated in, thinking the area was secure. And, we started to find things that had been missed by the coalition as they passed through. Our discoveries led to some of the coalition’s biggest successes and suddenly the US planners started to realise that we were providing a service that they no longer had the capability to provide AS EFFECTIVELY.
Consequently and as a result of our operations in Afghanistan the relationship between the Australian SAS and our US counterparts is closer than at any time in our history. It is because of our ability to provide a service to the US effort that CANNOT be as effectively carried out by US forces that we were specifically asked for by the Pentagon right at the start of planning. Our role in this conflict is crucial to the outcome and there is no way that we can be taken out of the conflict without seriously affecting the US operational capability. Our planning was at such an advanced stage that whilst the parliamentary debate was raging, we were already into advanced planning of specific targets (not just general planning, but actual targets and operations) … quite contrary to what John Howard was stating. Without going into too much detail (for obvious reasons) what we will be doing is absolutely vital to the successful prosecution of the war. There is no way we are going to be withdrawn. This is nothing like Kuwait in 98, back then we were “untested” in the eyes of the yanks, now we are crucial to their plans.
So why am I sending you this? Because I am proud to be a professional soldier (not a nazi as I felt on the Tampa) and relish the job that I do, but I am concerned that as a human being that the war we are about to embark on is wrong. As important is the fact that I think that Howard is pandering to the will of that redneck Bush, without considering the long term consequences of this action, not just for Australia but for the whole world. He is lying to Parliament, he is lying to the people of Australia and no doubt he will lie to the dependents of any of us who don’t come back. This Government has a history of the latter as Kylie Russell, Jerry Bampton and the next of kin of the Blackhawk disaster can attest to.
As I mentioned at the start of the email, I think that maybe it is too late to do anything to affect our deployment, but at least if the truth as to our build up and deployment is made public, maybe it will give the parliament and the people of Australia food for thought.
***
Dear Brian Dabeagle,
I’m writing this letter working on the assumption that you are genuine. Your comments about operations in Afghanistan ring true, even if your claimed identity is in fact not; especially your allusions to the Seppo’s loss of capacity (or appetite) for bandit country recce ops longer than a couple of days at a time. (Guess those poor wannabe Tom Cruises start to pine for their PX Big Macs, huh?)
But then this sort of information – about the differences between US and Brit-Oz Spec Ops philosophy, in these tech-heavy times – is, as you yourself note, hardly a state secret. So if you’re not who you say you are – if you’re just some shit-stirrer with an interest in the SAS and an axe to grind (because you failed the Cadre course, say) – then you are beneath my contempt, mate. Especially for your references to the Regiment’s past casualties, including the Blackhawk disaster. If you are not in fact truly one of ‘your’ guys as you claim you are, you are making a public fool of me here, and a mockery of the history the Regiment and AAAvn have long shared.
But in fact those SAS NOK names you mention are partly why I choose to take you at face value. None of us like to throw the names of departed comrades around lightly. Nor, as you note, is it an easy thing for a proud professional soldier to break ranks and try to send a rocket up the lazy, ignorant, uncaring Citizens in whose name he is being sent off to fight by a thoroughly opportunistic and cowardly government.
The content of your letter tallies with my experiences of working with the SAS and the Yanks (albeit yonks ago now), and of my own readings of official and public information (especially re Operation Anaconda). So I will take you at your word. More fool me if you’re a sad cyber-con-artist, I guess. It won’t be the first time I’ve made a fool of myself due to a natural excess of Citizenly idealism.
Brian, I just wanted to say thanks for risking everything. I don’t mean your next promotion, either; I mean the whole ‘Andy McNab’ thing. (You will know what I mean.) The greatest asset the SAS Regiment has is its fraternal closeness, its tightness, its low, low profile (even though Howard’s men have made you jump through so many public hoops lately. What simpering Army PR clown agreed to put your medal-winners on the front page of the f**king national newspapers, mate?). But if you’re worried that you may now have run against that close-knit grain yourself, then don’t.
Mate, for what my opinion is worth, what you’ve tried to do is priceless leadership. Real leadership. Looking after the interests of the soldiers under your command. Christ knows that Peter Cosgrove – such a tamed, politicised pawn these days (an Australian General presenting Logies???) – just doesn’t seem interested in that side of soldiering, anymore. Apparently.
Mate, I agree with your implied view that this government has nothing but contempt for our professional soldiery. Howard, Reith, Max Moore-Wilton, Miles Jordana, Jane Halton – these grubby civilians have been cynically using you and our Navy and our Air Force as political tools for ages, now. If it all turns to shit in Iraq, there is every chance they will duck for cover all over again, just as they all did during the children overboard fiasco, and leave your boys flapping in the wind.
So what you did by writing to Margo and Bob Brown may not achieve much, but it was necessary, and it was right, and it was in the very best traditions of the Australian officer corps. (And WHAT, by the way, are your bloody CO and your RSM up to these days? Why don’t THEY get off their arses and start protecting their soldiers’ interests, too? Or are they sycophantic political placemen by now, too? Where’s a Jim Wallace when you need him?)
Again for what it’s worth, I’ve tried hard and often in the past to get answers out of Howard and his useless gaggle of tamed backbench arse-lickers. You might have read my latest letter to him, over Christmas last year, about the Tampa stuff, about the various HR accusations which have left your guys exposed, undefended, and no doubt feeling angry. Dave Marr’s book on all that comes out today. I hope he hasn’t stiffed you guys. I don’t think he will have.
My brother – if you’re for real, you’ll know him well – and I have never spoken much about what went on up north. He is well aware that I write for Webdiary, and knowing that I have become a bit of a wet, HR-Lefty in my post-AAAvn career, he is ruthlessly tight-lipped about the sensitive Op. stuff when we communicate now, which is pretty rarely, anyway. (If you’re for real, you’ll know why. Incidentally, if any of the Regimental boys bad-mouth him on account of me and my sad civvy grandstanding-by-association here, tell them to f**k off. I can assure you that he spills no unit fraternal stuff to a shiny-bum like me. He thinks I’m a bit of a wet-Lefty himself, actually. He is relentlessly schtum and proper.)
But one personal thing he did once casually say in passing is that he went up to the Tampa/Manoura fiasco ‘prepared to lose his job’ over it, if necessary. For mine, that grubby episode – the one during which this government made you feel like a Nazi – remains the most disgusting misuse of a world-class Special Operations asset by any Australian politician, ever. Howard – the self-proclaimed ‘ANZAC’s mate’ – pissed on the Regiment during that affair, Brian. Just as his government pissed on our Navy, via Operation Relex.
I’ve attached below for your wry bemusement the letter I received in reply to my Xmas greetings to the PM, mate. It came not from the PM himself, of course – like most pollies these days, he likes to construct an arse-covering ‘paper-chase buffer’ between himself and the real world – but from some minor functionary. Note the weaselly language. Note the complete ignoring of the core requests about HR abuse, and the buck-passing of responsibility to a Federal Court that this government usually treats with contempt. Note the sheer dulling meaninglessness of it. The utter disconnection from reality, the ‘one-way, on-message, spin delivery’, completely bereft of any engagement with the questions I asked.
If you received a wafty, waffly reply like that to an O-Group ‘question of fact’ from one of your dopey troopers, you’d kick him from arsehole to breakfast, and rightly so. Sloppy language leads to sloppy ops, mate. Nice words mean nothing. Actions count – as your pointers to those casually-ignored NOK names underscores. A dead soldier’s widow gets a dead soldier’s scrawny pension. Peter Reith runs away from the Tampa Senate Enquiry, with a raised middle finger for the Australian public on one hand, and a massive golden handshake from the tax-payer in the other. Straight into a lucrative consultant’s job shifting units for Tenix Defence Industries. All the while, protected by our ‘ANZAC’s hero’ PM. It sucks. And no-one in the press gallery gives a blind shit for more than ten seconds.
But the rubbish, bureacratic response below is in exactly the same vein in which this Prime Minister refuses to debate the issue of Iraq in Parliament, or answer media questioning about our involvement because it’s all still ‘hypothetical’. I wonder if the Welfare Officers back in Perth are having much luck calming the Regiment’s wives with that one, mate! No, he simply goes on controlled, friendly, talkback radio stations, and condescendingly chook-feeds us Australian Citizens, in whose collective name you will soon kill fellow human beings, his meaningless bullshit, without any return pressure at all.
A new age of magic interpretation of the world, Brian, in which all that matters is that the powerful retain control of the means by which they ensure that their interpretation of the world is the one that is most widely promulgated. “I acknowledge your concerns about these allegations and wish to assure you that the government has acted decisively but compassionately to protect Australia’s territorial integrity.” The second clause entirely disconnected from the first. Weak public language. Dead public language. ‘Nice’ words, backed up by ZERO action to investigate the damning claims made against you, our soldiers, much less to defend you with pro-active linguistic precision. The kind of moribund, dulled, vacuous public language that Heinrich Heine, and George Orwell, and every other writer worth reading, recognises is both necessary precursor to, and braying harbinger of, yet more of mankind’s ‘accidental’ inhumanity to man.
Death by default, mate; falling into war, simply because our public leaders refuse to speak precisely and bluntly in timely time. Waffle, waffle, buck-pass, lie, spin, waffle – then bang. (Oh – are we at war?)
Yes, apparently we’re at war already, mate: ‘The War On Terror’, Brian. What a crock of shit. Have you ever come up against one of them nasty ‘Terrors’ in combat, mate? Goodness! Whatever does a ‘Terror’ look like? However does one kill a ‘Terror’? H&K burst? Glock double-tap? Wombat gun? With helpless f**king laughter?
And does the meaningless, disconnected, surreal, bureaucratic pap below from this faceless Howard underling – in response to my urgent queries about internationally-promulgated HRW allegations that you and your men ‘beat refugees with batons and used unnecessary force against vulnerable refugees’ on the Tampa – fill you with confidence now, mate, as you head off to help start the most unpopular war in Australia’s history? A REAL one, this time, not a convenient ‘wag the dog’ one: a war on terror when it should still just be a fight against crime (one we are winning, too, closing in on Osama’s murdering thugs). Do you feel happier going into pre-emptive battle, knowing that this ‘Mr Richard Sadleir – Deputy Secretary, International Division, DPM&C’ is standing right behind you?
Oh yeah, and if this war does go badly, rest assured that the right-wing media – especially the rah-rah war-bloggers and the Murdoch Press – will run for cover just as quickly as the neo-con politicians and their pet paper-shufflers do, mate. You watch the buck-passing explode onto the broadsheets.
In fact, it’s already going on now – pre-emptively you could say. Even blokes like Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan are backing off a bit now, lobbing the hot ‘non-UN invasion’ hand grenade strictly in Howard’s direction, as they recognise that just maybe the Bushies are nuts, after all. The Australian is re-trumpeting its ‘kids overboard’ scoop in a vaguely anti-Howard riff; even Greg Sheridan’s mostly gone back to whining about disengagement with Asia – another oblique hack at Howard.
They’re all setting themselves up with escape routes, Brian; all getting in a position to re-adjust their stances, their focus, their personal Op Ed ‘spin’ so that if this all goes strategically wrong, they can stay on top of ‘public debate’ by shifting seamlessly, without a backwards glance, to other issues.
The Australian political media is starting to look ahead, mate. To Costello, to Abbot, to the post-Howard era, to ‘ongoing economic reform’. It’s a bit pathetic, I know, but that’s the way the Baby Boomer Op Ed leaders have learned over the years to work the McLuhanite Mass Meeja game, mate. Play along with stirring up a newsworthy ‘event’ – a leadership tiff, a little war, a ‘law and order’ panic – and then stand back tut-tutting and sighing as the rest of us (especially our pollies) try to cope with whatever it all unleashes. Always tearing off their acres of copy, yet never actually getting involved in making our society better themselves. Modern political journalism is the ultimate freeloader’s career, Brian. The ultimate way to get close to the dirty action without having to get your own hands the slightest bit dirty. The ultimate ‘public eye’ contact sport, all with no risks attached.
Howard will go down one day, just as Keating, Hawke, Fraser, Whitlam, McMahon and Gorton went down. Yet Laurie Oakes is still in there, tearing down a Cheryl Kernot just for kicks, just for a Walkley. Alan Ramsey – who once upon a time was gutsy enough to stand up in Parliament and shout ‘You LIAR!’ when a politician told a lie on the public record – is still there, still trying to help take down our elected political leaders (back then it was Gorton, now it’s Crean).
These guys learned this trade from Alan Reid – maybe the first and most devious, shit-stirring, game-playing modern political journalist in Australia’s long line of devious, shit-stirring, game-playing, modern political journalists. There’s been plenty of good journos, too – men like Neale Davis and Greg Shackleton, who knew what war was, and ALWAYS screamed the truth about it in public, as loud as they possibly could.
There’s still plenty of good ones now, too, but they’re all too cowed, or cowardly, or self-interested, or just plain ignorant to give a shit about a letter like yours. You’ll notice, mate, that no-one has really touched it, not even Margo. Even though – if it turns out that you are for real – what you say about SAS planning would expose this government’s posturing, and thus Bush’s and Blair’s too, as the purely convenient bullshit that it really is.
But then maybe the whole lying edifice of justification for invasion – the WMD, the UN resolutions, the HR, the ‘democracy for the Middle East’, the ‘last chances’, the ‘real and present danger’ – might tumble down, too. Some stories, mate, are maybe a little too hot, especially those where the press is implicated, too.
Who are these journalist colleagues of yours, Margo, and where exactly do they get off freeloading like this on the rest of us? Why do you get to be the gate-keepers of public truth? Why are some things off-the-record, and some things on-the-record? Why is it that you, and you alone, get to decide which becomes a public spectacle, and which remains an insider’s secret – Sheridan’s cosy off-the-record chats with Kissinger, Keating’s Kirribilli Pact, Hawkie’s shenanigans in office, Richo’s backroom doings, all the little open secret Canberra goings-on that, by withholding them from us, make your lot feel bigger and more important than the rest of us? Why do YOU get to decide that Cheryl Kernot’s private emails are worthy of placing on the public record, Laurie Oakes, but that Brian Dabeagle’s public letter is not? Have you tried to check it out? If not, why not?
And then there is modern war, the ultimate media-insider’s spectacle now. Do you ever wonder how the average Australian or American would react to seeing some of the insider combat footage from the first Gulf War, Brian, the un-CNN-sanitised stuff? The savage, disproportionate, technically-triumphant butchery that goes on nowadays, all in the name of gentle democracy? ‘Smart bombs’. ‘Shock and Awe’. ‘Full spectrum dominance’. Do we the people understand what this actually looks like? Jesus Christ – you simply have to laugh bitterly at our trusting ignorance, don’t you. Or else you’d probably cry.
And it’s bitterly ironic, Brian, in a sick post-modern kind of way: as the ‘new journalism’ becomes more and more invasive and pervasive and ubiquitous and instantaneous in peacetime, we get to see less and less of what happens in wartime than we used to. So much ‘Reality TV’, so little plain, old-fashioned reality on TV.
Carmen Lawrence has written about this on this site. We’ll see almost nothing of this war’s violence, even though, in Iraq, there’ll be thousands of war correspondents swarming the joint. And every single one of them, even the good ones, will be desperate to make their names from all the death and destruction that unfolds. They’ll want to be the next Peter Arnett, or Richard Carlton, or Martin Bell, or Walter bloody Cronkite, or whoever. Try not to think too much about the big bucks, the future book deals, the Larry King interviews and the celebrity the more opportunistic, the more successful among them will doubtless extract from this next bloody, newsworthy event, mate, as you help put the bloody show on for their and our dirty, vicarious pleasure. (Maybe you should write a book yourself, like McNab, and make a killing from the killing too, mate. Why not? Everyone else, from CNN down, will be. Better retirement plan than a pissant widow’s pension, I would have thought.)
Since East Timor, and especially right now, the media can’t get enough of you guys. (Makes a change from when I was in, I s’pose.) But never forget one thing, Brian: exposing a military f**k-up is a major, name-making news coup, and this time around the Gulf paddock, you will probably not get any leeway from the Press, if there’s a Pulitzer or a Walkley in the offing.
Underlying public opinion is largely ambivalent about this war, for one thing, which means that explicit public opinion is highly-unstable, and will turn viciously if it doesn’t go near-perfectly well. And if there’s one thing that the commercial Press especially hates above all else, mate, it’s to be on the wrong side of public opinion for too long.
If it turns to shite, the Murdochians will swing against the whole misadventure in a flash. Just remember that when our boys really needed his support, the pompous Piers Akerman was throwing pig’s blood at our Vietnam soldiers and calling them ‘mercenaries’. Back then, of course, the smart, ambitious journo made his name by being anti-war, not pro-war. Times change, mate! Either way, I’ll guarantee you now that most Boomer journalists of his latter-day pro-war ilk simply won’t be much help in making damned sure that the politicians and the press, and not the soldiers, shoulder responsibility when some angry Iraqi calls one of your diggers a baby-killer, and might even have the accidental grounds to do so.
Nope; you won’t get top cover from these tame media clowns any more than you’ll get top cover from the PM’s office. If Regimental NOK really have been screwed around by this government, then dear Piers has hardly gone out of his way to help publicise their plight, has he. Nor has Miranda Devine, who at the time of one Regimental combat death you mentioned made a huge meal of it with a resoundingly patriotic column, you might recall.
These pro-war journalists are not the soldier’s friend, Brian. Their own upward career trajectories are simply far too precious for them to ever admit they got something wrong. So if it does go wrong in Iraq, they will simply quietly move on to other matters as the current politicians retire quietly, and they will end up taking no responsibility at all. The war they have pushed for, pushed hard and long to help make happen, will retrospectively become simply an inevitable, ill-judged, well-meaning (but disastrous, tut-tut) piece of old news. They’ll ignore its aftermath, just as they are now ignoring Afghanistan’s aftermath.
In the world of ‘new journalism’, mate, there is no such thing as truth or history, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. There is only what gets written today. Aging Boomer journos and intellectuals and ‘celebrity thinkers’ never die or fade away, Brian. They just keep putting a fresh sheet of A4 in their typewriters and printers, keep tap-tapping merrily on, forever retrospectively changing their opinions and their opinion-histories as they go, changing with the times and the newsworthy trends to stay in the risk-free public game.
Still, for what it’s worth, Brian, I take you at face value, and I take your going public like this so seriously it hurts, even if no-one else does. If you’re a fake who’s just made a dickhead of me, then good for you. I hope you feel pleased with yourself, now. But those who haven’t served in uniform – and especially in the SAS – will find it very hard to grasp the magnitude of what it is you’ve done, and as a former officer I cannot accept the possibility, if you are for real, that no-one will acknowledge your gutsy attempt to tell the truth publicly, and what it has cost you to do so. So I take you at your word, and say again: thanks for trying, mate. Excuse me if I’m being a bit presumptuous or over-the-top, but I promise you I’ll continue to make a fool of myself, doing whatever I can, in whatever bloody public forum I can find some space in, to make sure you and your soldiers are not let down by this government, its compliant media, and we the Australian people, whatever happens in Iraq. ‘Whatever I can’ probably won’t be much at all, mate. My stupid letters to our politicians and our press will probably continue to be ignored, as usual, as the self-obsessed rantings of a borderline green-pen loon. Sigh.
But the really important thing to take on board is this, I think: right now there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of us nobody Australian ‘loons’ who, while we may oppose this invasion vehemently, are rock-solid in our support of you and your colleagues personally. We are with you personally with a white-hot, Australian passion. And there is NO WAY we are going to allow you guys to carry the can for what we vehemently oppose being done in our names in the first place, and especially for whatever might go badly wrong with it.
So go onto the two-way in Iraq with one thought only. You have a job to do for now. Just do it, and do it as well and as humanely as you can. You will simply be fulfilling your part of the paradoxical bargain the professional soldier of a civilised country makes with his Citizens – to commit uncivilised acts in our name, when we, the non-violent guardians of our shared civilisation, ask you to. It is up to us, not you, to take full responsibility as a society for those uncivilised acts, even those of us who don’t support you being there, or being there in the pre-emptive way that you will be there. If it turns out that they were unnecessary and ill-judged uncivilised acts, or in grave error, then the responsibility will then especially lie with us.
You may have no useful top cover from our politicians and our press, Brian, but I am utterly sure – having marched in the peace rallies a few weekends ago and having heard nothing but deep concern and support, among those gentle civilised crowds, for you and your men – that you have buckets and buckets of top cover from the Australian people.
We will do our best to make sure that the responsibility for, and any subsequent moral pain resulting from, this war is – unlike all other wars before – appropriately shouldered by the people who have made this war happen. I hope whatever it is that you and your men are ordered to do in Iraq turns out brilliantly, for both Iraq and the West, mate, and that the likes of John Wojdylo get to consign the likes of me to the dustbin of history with a vindicated sneer.
I truly hope my opposition to this invasion and occupation, and especially my oil obsessions, end up making exactly the self-obsessed, Western loser of me that John claims I am. Better that I turn out to be hysterically wrong, and then simply go away and shut up, than that I turn out to be right.
Good luck, Brian. Stay sharp. Safe return. Say hi to my ratbag brother if you see him around the place.
Warmest regards,
(Stephen John) Jack Robertson
Captain AAAvn, 1987-1994
***
PS: A pathetic post-script. Here is the final, operative paragraph of my Christmas letter to our leader:
To that end, I respectfully request you to a) publicly respond on behalf of my brother and his ADF colleagues to the HR abuse accusations in the HRW Report, and do your best to ensure that the mainstream press gives that response the fullest coverage; b) publicly state for the record – ‘before the fact’, so to speak – that responsibility for any such accusations against any member of our ADF that are subsequently proven lies ultimately not with them, but with you, your Ministers and your government for placing them in such difficult, non-military situations in the first place; and c) re-affirm that all past, present and future activities relating to ‘border protection’, on the part of our soldiers, sailors and airman, along with our AFP and ASIO, have been, are, and will continue to be, carried out with your government’s full authorisation, support, supervision and acknowledgment. Thank you.
And here is John Winston Howard’s reply. This is what we have backing up our soldiers in Iraq, if and/or when HR abuse allegations are made against them there, too:
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet
18 February 2003
Dear Mr Robertson,
Thank you for your letter of 14 December 2002 to the Prime Minister regarding human rights abuse allegations against Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel. The Prime Minister has asked me to reply on his behalf.
I acknowledge your concerns about these allegations and wish to assure you that the government has acted decisively but compassionately to protect Australia’s territorial integrity. Australia has a proud humanitarian record and the government remains committed to meeting Australia’s humanitarian obligations. On 17 September 2001, the Full Bench of the Federal Court of Australia confirmed that the Australian government acted within its powers in taking the action it did in relation to the people rescued by the MV Tampa. The government, through the ADF, ensured that those on board were properly cared for through the provision of appropriate food, shelter, medical assistance and other supplies.
The Prime Minister has on numerous occasions expressed his strong support for the ADF in the performance of its many difficult roles. Specifically, on the day that the Special Air Service personnel took control of the MV Tampa, the Prime Minister made a statement expressing gratitude to the ADF personnel involved in the operation. Separately, he has reaffirmed the country’s pride in the courage, integrity and professionalism of all the ADF personnel.
Thank you for bringing this matter to the attention of the Prime Minister.
Yours sincerely,
Richard Sadleir
Assistant Secretary, International Division, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet
Arse-covering, bureaucratic, meaningless nonsense. Our soldiers are, in my opinion, gravely exposed. It’s time to get angry about it, and fulfil our responsibilities as Citizens to them, by DEMANDING real honesty and accountability from this government, at last. Over to you, Australian Press. Start doing your jobs.
