John Kerry and Israeli apartheid

Submitted by Ali Abunimah 

Anti-Palestinian advocates are up in arms over US Secretary of StateJohn Kerry’s warning that Israel could become an “apartheid state” in the absence of a “two-state solution.”

The Anti-Defamation League declared itself “startled and disappointed” that Kerry would use the “offensive term ‘apartheid’ to warn what might become of Israel should an agreement not be reached with the Palestinians.” The neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel has meanwhile demanded that Kerry be sacked.

Caught on tape

Kerry made his “apartheid state” comment in a closed meeting of “influential world leaders” on Friday and lashed out at Israeli and Palestinian leaders, blaming both for the failure of negotiations. Kerry’s comments, caught on tape and reported by The Daily Beast, included:

A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens – or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state … . Once you put that frame in your mind, that reality, which is the bottom line, you understand how imperative it is to get to the two-state solution, which both [Israeli and Palestinian] leaders, even yesterday, said they remain deeply committed to.

Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss has already made the obvious point that the “apartheid” description has long applied, although Kerry posits it as a hypothetical future scenario.

Weiss wonders: “How long are you allowed to issue dire predictions of future apartheid when there have been two sets of laws for different ethnicities under Israeli sovereignty for 47 years of the occupation (and different sets of laws inside Israel from the jump)?”

Can’t be Jewish and democratic

And Kerry has previously warned about the grave danger and indeed the supposed impossibility of a one-state solution – which he refers to in his latest comment as a “unitary state.”

But Kerry’s concerns are revealing in what they leave out: he makes no mention whatsoever of Palestinian rights. His only concern is preserving Israel as a “Jewish state.” That is the only solid commitment he and the administration he represents have.

And this is why Kerry’s reported positions in the US-brokered negotiations have hewed so closely to those of Israel on the most substantive issues.

Kerry is implicitly stating that a state based on equal rights and democracy would be “a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.”

Is he admitting then that Israel’s “right to be a Jewish state” is indeed incompatible with democratic principles, a case I make in The Battle for Justice in Palestine (read an excerpt from the chapter “Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state”).

Ignoring Palestinian rights

By contrast, the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) puts the rights of all Palestinians front and center. These include ending the occupation and colonization of all land Israel conquered in 1967; ending all the forms of discrimination Israel practices against Palestinian citizens of Israel; and respecting, promoting and implementing Palestinian refugee rights, including the right of return.

As I’ve explained previously, a two-state solution is theoretically compatible with the full implementation of all the Palestinian rights set out in the BDS call. And the BDS call does not take a position on one or two states.

But the kind of two-state solution envisaged by Kerry and his boss President Obama, and by “liberal” Zionists everywhere, is not designed to respect and restore Palestinian rights, but to negate them in order to pursue the overriding goal of protecting a Jewish majority and therefore Jewish political supremacy throughout most of historic Palestine.

Kerry’s goal is to get Palestinians to legitimize this kind of discrimination as quickly as possible in the form of a “state” that would leave the vast majority of Palestinians – refugees and Palestinian citizens of Israel – permanently shorn of their basic rights solely because they are not Jewish.

Opposing Palestinian rights while supporting a state

Indeed Kerry’s comments closely echo the immortal words of The Crisis of Zionism author Peter Beinart, explaining to ex-Israeli prison guard andThe Atlantic blogger Jeffrey Goldberg in 2010, how he simultaneously forcefully opposes rights for most Palestinians while strongly supporting a Palestinian “state.” Beinart said:

I’m not asking Israel to be Utopian. I’m not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I’m not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I’m actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel’s security and for its status as a Jewish state. What I am asking is that Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become–and I’m quoting Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here–an “apartheid state.”

Kerry, like Beinart, supports the discrimination and racism necessary to maintain Israel’s status as a “Jewish state.” He just wants it to be hidden behind a “two-state solution” with Palestinians blessing their own subjugation.

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/john-kerry-and-israeli-apartheid

Kerry Grovels over Israeli ‘Apartheid’

Exclusive: Secretary of State Kerry gets to say whatever half-truth or fiction comes into his head about Syria, Russia or other “designated villains,” but when he cites the inconvenient truth of Israeli “apartheid,” he must scramble as fast as he can to retract and apologize, Robert Parry reports.

By Robert Parry

It is a mark of how upside-down Official Washington has become over facts and evidence that Secretary of State John Kerry, who has developed a reputation for making false and misleading statements about Syria and Russia, rushes to apologize when he speaks the truth about the danger from Israeli “apartheid.”

After public disclosure that he had said in a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state,” Kerry hastily apologized for his transgression, expressing his undying support for Israel and engaging in self-flagellation over his word choice.

Secretary of State John Kerry speaking to the AIPAC conference on March 3, 2014.

“For more than 30 years in the United States Senate, I didn’t just speak words in support of Israel,” Mr. Kerry said in hisstatement. “I walked the walk when it came time to vote and when it came time to fight.”

He then sought to clarify his position on the A-word: “First, Israel is a vibrant democracy and I do not believe, nor have I ever stated, publicly or privately, that Israel is an apartheid state or that it intends to become one. 

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that without a shred of doubt.”

Kerry added: “If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution.”

Kerry scurried to make this apology after his remark was reported by The Daily Beastand condemned by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which said: “Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate.”

The only problem with AIPAC’s umbrage – and with Kerry’s groveling – is that Israel has moved decisively in the direction of becoming an apartheid state in which Palestinians are isolated into circumscribed areas, often behind walls, and are tightly restricted in their movements, even as Israel continues to expand settlements into Palestinian territories.

Key members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud government have evenadvocated annexing the West Bank and confining Palestinians there to small enclaves, similar to what’s already been done to the 1.6 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip where Israel tightly controls entrance of people and access to commodities, including building supplies.

In May 2011, Likud’s deputy speaker Danny Danon outlined the annexation plan in a New York Times op-ed. He warned that if the Palestinians sought United Nations recognition for their own state on the West Bank, Israel should annex the territory. “We could then extend full Israeli jurisdiction to the Jewish communities [i.e. the settlements] and uninhabited lands of the West Bank,” Danon wrote.

As for Palestinian towns, they would become mini-Gazas, cut off from the world and isolated as enclaves with no legal status. “Moreover, we would be well within our rights to assert, as we did in Gaza after our disengagement in 2005, that we are no longer responsible for the Palestinian residents of the West Bank, who would continue to live in their own — unannexed — towns,” Danon wrote.

By excluding these Palestinian ghettos, Jews would still maintain a majority in this Greater Israel. “These Palestinians would not have the option to become Israeli citizens, therefore averting the threat to the Jewish and democratic status of Israel by a growing Palestinian population,” Danon wrote.

In other words, the Israeli Right appears headed toward a full-scale apartheid, if not a form of ethnic cleansing by willfully making life so crushing for the Palestinians that they have no choice but to leave.

Just days after Danon’s op-ed, Netanyahu demonstrated his personal political dominance over the U.S. Congress by addressing a joint session at which Democrats and Republicans competed to see who could jump up fastest and applaud the loudest for everything coming out of the Israeli prime minister’s mouth.

Netanyahu got cheers when he alluded to the religious nationalism that cites Biblical authority for Israel’s right to possess the West Bank where millions of Palestinians now live. Calling the area by its Biblical names, Netanyahu declared, “in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers.”

Though Netanyahu insisted that he was prepared to make painful concessions for peace, including surrendering some of this “ancestral Jewish homeland,” his belligerent tone suggested that he was moving more down the route of annexation that Danon had charted. Now, with the predictable collapse of Kerry’s peace talks, that road to an expanded apartheid system appears even more likely.

But apartheid already is a feature of Israeli society. As former CIA analyst Paul R. Pillarwrote in 2012, “the Israeli version of apartheid is very similar in important respects to the South African version, and that moral equivalence ought to follow from empirical equivalence. Both versions have included grand apartheid, meaning the denial of basic political rights, and petty apartheid, which is the maintaining of separate and very unequal facilities and opportunities in countless aspects of daily life.

“Some respects in which Israelis may contend their situation is different, such as facing a terrorist threat, do not really involve a difference. The African National Congress, which has been the ruling party in South Africa since the end of apartheid there, had significant involvement in terrorism when it was confronting the white National Party government. That government also saw the ANC as posing a communist threat.

“A fitting accompaniment to the similarities between the two apartheid systems is the historical fact that when the South African system still existed, Israel was one of South Africa’s very few international friends or partners. Israel was the only state besides South Africa itself that ever dealt with the South African bantustans as accepted entities. Israel cooperated with South Africa on military matters, possibly even to the extent of jointly conducting a secret test of a nuclear weapon in a remote part of the Indian Ocean in 1979.”

Yet, Official Washington can’t handle this truth, as the capital of the world’s leading superpower has become a grim version of Alice’s Wonderland in which speaking truth about the well-connected requires immediate apologies while telling half-truths and lies against “designated villains” makes you a proud member of the insider’s club.

When Kerry makes belligerent claims about Syria and Russia – even when his statements are later shown to be baseless or false – there is not an ounce of pressure on him to issue a correction or apology. [See “John Kerry’s Sad Circle to Deceit.”] Yet, when he says something that is palpably true about Israel – indeed a pale version of the ugly truth – he cannot run fast enough to issue a clarification and beg forgiveness.

While Kerry and other longtime inhabitants of Official Washington have become accustomed to this madness – this politicized disdain for reality – their overly militarized fantasyland has become a nightmare for the rest of the planet.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazonand barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/29/kerry-grovels-over-israeli-apartheid/

Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to NDAA Detention Power

Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to NDAA Detention Power

Refuses to Hear Hedges v. Obama Case

by Jason Ditz, 

The US Supreme Court has further enhanced the administration’s ability to detain anyone, at any time, on any pretext today, when it refused to hear the Hedges v. Obama case, meaning an Appeals Court ruling on the matter will stand.

The case stems from a 2012 lawsuit brought by Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky and others, and sought to block the enforcement of a 2012 National Defense Authorization Act statute that allows the president to unilaterally impose indefinite detention on anyone, without access to courts, if he personally believes something they did “aided” the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

Courts initially banned such detentions, over intense objection from President Obama, who argued that prohibiting the detentions would be an unconstitutional restriction of presidential power.

The Appeals Court eventually restored the detention power, however, insisting that Hedges et al didn’t have standing to contest their future detention because they couldn’t prove that the president might decide to detain them at some point in the future.

The standing argument effectively makes it impossible to challenge the NDAA statute, as it precludes challenges before the detention takes place, and once a person has been disappeared into military custody under the NDAA, the law explicitly denies them any access to the courts.

http://news.antiwar.com/2014/04/28/supreme-court-rejects-challenge-to-ndaa-detention-power/

US supreme court needs to keep up with our cellphones – and the NSA

The US supreme court needs to keep up with our cellphones – and the NSA

Tuesday's oral arguments on search and seizure make it clear: the era of incremental justice ends now, because the age of metadata is already getting out of hand

Yochai Benkler

Tuesday's US supreme court arguments involved a seemingly basic legal question about the future of the Fourth Amendment: do police officers need a warrant to search the cellphone of a person they arrest? But the two privacy cases pit against each other two very different conceptions of what it means to be a supreme court in the first place – and what it means to do constitutional law in the 21st century.

"With computers, it's a new world," several justices reportedly said in the chamber. Are they ready to be the kinds of justices who make sense of it?

Cellphones expose so much of our most personal data that the decision should be a 9-0 no-brainer. The basic problem that makes it a harder call is that lawyers and judges are by training and habit incrementalists, while information and communications technology moves too fast for incrementalism to keep up.

Judges wear legal professionalism and precedent as a mantel that secures legitimacy for their decisions. It's how they distinguish themselves from politicians or administrative agencies, while wielding power that is sometimes much greater than those democratically accountable actors. But this kind of narrow legalism simply cannot do when the world is changing as rapidly as it is today: all narrow analogies will systematically fail to preserve the values they did five or ten years ago, especially when we're walking around with all the metadata coming out of the bank/medical monitor/full-on GPS trackers in our pockets.

One of Tuesday's cases, United States v Wurie, stems from an arrest in 2007, the same year the first iPhone was launched and changed handheld computing forever. In the second case, Riley v California, the arrest and search happened only two years later. So the future of the Fourth Amendment will therefore depend not on the particular doctrines of the case, but on whether the formalistic justices – the ones with a line of reasoning that lacks agility to deal with a radically changing world – prevail over those who take a broader constitutional vision. If they do, we are in for a dramatic erosion of constitutional privacy protections in the coming years – all thanks to the same kind of old-school legal approach that allowed National Security Agency lawyers to justify mass telephony meta-data surveillance.

Should spy-level sway continue to hold when it comes to getting pulled over on the side of the highway?

Police in Tuesday's cases have argued that they don't need a warrant to search the cellphone of people whom they arrest, at least when the cellphone is on the person arrested. This is a country in which between 30-40% of young people will have been arrested by the time they reach age 23. That's an age group with practically universal cellphone use. Connectivity is the foundation of sociality, and the practical implications of the court's decisions to the privacy of Americans simply cannot be reduced to saying "the case raises grave constitutional questions". A wrong turn by the justices will give every federal, state and local police officer discretion to search the most ubiquitous and invasive surveillance device we have ever seen without a warrant or probable cause.

The briefs in the case are, as you might imagine, full of carefully crafted legal arguments on both sides. But the decision ultimately will be decided by a much more basic choice that was presented in the most important recent supreme court case pitting constitutional method against technological change.

In 2011, in United States v Jones, the justices exhibited two opposing visions of what a constitutional court should be – a technical legalistic court, and a broad constitutional-vision court. In Jones, the government had attached a GPS tracker to a suspect's car for a month, and all nine justices held that such tracking went too far. Justice Scalia, writing for four conservatives and joined by Justice Sotomayor, held on narrow technical grounds – the tracker had been a physical invasion of the suspect's property, he wrote, and so it fell within a narrow technical category of "trespass" that the government could not violate without a warrant.

Justice Alito wrote a combative Jones dissent for himself and three liberal justices, which would have provided a broader vision, recognized the rapid change of technological change and set as the court's goal the achievement of a stable level of substantive privacy in the face of innovation. Justice Sotomayor voted with the majority on the narrow technical grounds, but wrote an opinion that was even more assertive than Alito's opinion: what the court needs, she wrote, is a constitutional vision sensitive to radical change.

If Tuesday's cases are resolved under Justice Scalia's specific rule,there simply is no trespass, because we own the phone – we carry it of our own accord. More importantly, if Scalia's technical approach carries the day, our level of privacy in the coming decades will rise and fall more or less randomly, based on whether a particular new technology can or cannot be shoehorned into this antiquated doctrine.

But the world is changing, and that narrow view of constitutional adjudication will not offer us meaningful protection. We have already seen how technical legalism allowed well-intentioned NSA lawyers and conscientious judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve pervasive telephony surveillance because it involved "metadata". They were professionally blinded from seeing that metadata – in our current big-data universe, is simply not the same thing as call records were during a court decision in 1979. In the Patriot Act telephony metadata fiasco, legal formalism completely disabled both lawyers and judges: they were blessing a program that had become unrecognizable as consistent with constitutional protection of privacy – anyone who read Edward Snowden's documents soon knew that, and the legal world should have known it sooner.

But we have a way out. In that 2011 decision in US v Jones, five of the justices showed that they understood we needed something more than just technicalities. What we need in these news cellphone cases is for those five justices to join together and show that constitutional vision is more than just the workmanlike competence of lawyers. Otherwise, the coming decades will become a series of lurches from one formally defensible but substantively implausible invasion to another, with no end in sight – as long as there's another iPhone in the works.

Questions from Justice Kennedy – and perhaps Kagan and Sotomayor, though maybe not Alito – appear to suggest that the court may finally be ready to embrace that broader, more substantive view of its own role. It's about time

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/29/supreme-court-cellphones-privacy-search-seizure

Move over selfies … here come the dronies

These self-shot aerial videos are filmed by drones. So how do you make one? With a breathtaking big reveal, ideally

The new craze of dronies.

Take an airborne robot minion and a hi-tech camera and what do you have? A "dronie": a new form of self-shot aerial mini-video for online exhibitionists looking to create more drama than the average selfie can supply.

The term was coined by Alexandra Dao while commenting on a video created by internet entrepreneur Amit Gupta. The clip, which went viral, showed Gupta and companions on top of Bernal Heights Hill in San Francisco before a camera pulled back for a breathtaking zoom-out.

Bernal Hill selfie from Amit Gupta on Vimeo.

Videos on YouTube, plus a dedicated "dronies" channel on Vimeo, show the diversity of the shots. As well as giving a sense of breathtaking weightlessness the videos can contain an eerie sense of foreboding (such as Taylor Scott Mason's cliff-side dronie, complete with dissonant soundtrack), or give you sensory stomach flips (such as the one from Social Print Studio, which splices in imagery from GoogleEarth).

The alchemy behind the perfect dronie seems to hinge upon the "big reveal". A wind-free, wide-open space is vital: the top of Hampstead Heath is better than your bathroom. More prosaically, to create a dronie you need more than just a smartphone and the ability to do duckface. Happily, acquiring a drone is easier than you think: they can be purchased online (both Tesco and Selfridges sell them) for between £55 and £500. It's recommended that you try to get one with a built-in camera; otherwise you'll also need something called a "Gimbal", which holds your iPhone in place when it's whizzing about.

#spaceselfie from Social Print Studio on Vimeo.

Thus equipped, you'll need to master a few signature moves. In a piece for the New York Times, Gupta suggests two things: practising "in figure-eights" to get a sense of how to control your drone, and having the drone circle you while the camera stays focused on you and your fellow subjects. Easy, when you know how.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/apr/28/selfies-dronies-self-shot-aerial-videos-drones

Australians were killed by a US drone strike, and we deserve to know why

The killing of two Australian citizens is not end of the conversation, but the beginning. If these men were threats to national security, then the public deserves to know why

Antony Loewenstein

The news that the US had killed two Australian “militants” in a drone strike was announced in mid-April. Christopher Havard and “Muslim bin John”, who also held New Zealand citizenship, were allegedly killed by a CIA-led airstrike in eastern Yemen in November last year.

Readers were given little concrete information, apart from a “counter-terrorism source” who claimed that both men were foot soldiers for Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, though they may also have been collateral damage (the real target being other terror heads).

The Australian government claimed ignorance of the entire operation. “There was no Australian involvement in, or prior awareness of, the operation”, a spokesman said. New Zealand prime minister John Keyreleased some more details, saying that the country’s GCSB spies had been authorised to spy on him. “I knew that he had gone there [to Yemen] and gone to a terrorist training camp”, he stated.

Since publication of these bare facts, little new information has emerged from the government or other sources – except for somereporting in The Australian about Havard’s apparent transformation after he converted to Islam in his early 20s and went to Yemen to teach English. The paper editorialised in support of the strike: “to be killed in this way is regrettable”, it wrote, but obliterating civilians without a trial was acceptable because “such attacks have done much to stop the terrorists committing even more atrocities.” There was no condemnation of the scores of civilians killed by drones since 9/11.

It’s of course morally convenient to believe that the death of these men will make the world a safer place by removing "threats" without the need to place western soldiers in harm’s way – this is, after all, the apparently compelling logic of drone warfare. But it’s a myth challenged by the former drone pilots featured in the recently released documentary Drone, in which ex-Air Force pilot Michael Haas explainsthat:

"You never know who you’re killing, because you never actually see a face. You just have a silhouette. They don’t have to take a shot. They don’t have to bear that burden. I’m the one that has to bear that burden."

Yet, uncertainty be damned, the Australian government seems to keep on supporting the CIA killings with most of the media following without question.

Fairfax Media headlined one story “Abbott government defends drone strike that killed two Australian Al-Qaeda militants" without challenging that the two men were, indeed, militants or affiliated with Al-Qaida – they may or may not have been, but innocent civilians have been killedby drones before. The sentence “alleged militants, according to the government” never appeared in the article (this is a relatively common habit in journalism – see for example this essential take-down of a New York Times report on drone killings in Yemen).

I’ve reported independently from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and accurate journalism requires finding reliable sources on the ground (or corresponding with individuals through email, phone, encryption or Twitter) who can confirm or challenge the official version. It’s not rocket science, though definitive information can be scarce in a war zone.

In the last days I’ve reached out to various sources in Yemen (some of the best are here, here and here) and asked Sanaa-based Baraa Shiban to comment. His answer is revealing. “The lack of transparency has became a fixed strategy for the US in its drone war. The US announced recently the death of almost 30 militants in a training camp in Abyan, south of Yemen, but can't release a single name; this tells it all.”

Taking the word of security sources and the state, when this information is so often wrong or deliberately skewed by anonymous officials who strategically leak to justify their counter-terrorism policies, is sadly all too common. “We don’t know the facts” is not a shameful statement. To be skeptical shouldn't be a flaw, but an asset.

The desultory lack of debate over this latest drone attack is a sadly familiar tale (former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser lent a rare voice of criticism, saying Australians assisting the US drone program could face crimes against humanity charges). The Lowy Institute’s Rodger Shanahan, former army officer and Australian diplomat, offered a commonly-held view of the deaths: “If it is confirmed that these Australian citizens were members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and were not deliberately targeted”, he wrote, “then I don't think either the Australian government or public will lose much sleep over their passing.”

This misses the point entirely. The two men are dead, so arguments about the legality of their assassination should surely have happened before the US fired its missiles. Shanahan expressed confidence without evidence that Australia “would not allow the deliberate targeting of one of its citizens by another power.” This is a familiar refrain echoed by governments, too: that if you’re standing, sitting or socialising with militants, with or without your knowledge, your life could be in jeopardy.

The effect of this random violence, along with the devastating signature strike policy – drone attacks based on “suspicious” behaviour without knowing names or identities of people – is well documented. In Yemen, hatred of the US, along with major social and political tensions, isgrowing amongst a poor and scared population.

Although the Yemeni regime works openly alongside Washington in its war against perceived enemies (unlike Pakistan, which many say behaves in a similar way but feigns opposition to appease the angry masses) the death of dozens of alleged Al-Qaida militants and civilians at a major base in the remote southern mountains last week will onlyinflame tensions in the nation.

Let us not forget that the US drone program, massively accelerated under the Obama administration, is mired in secrecy. Earlier this month, a US federal appeals court ordered the government to release legal advice relating to the killings of three US citizens in Yemen in 2011. The American Civil Liberties Union correctly argued that it was unacceptable for the US to both claim the program was classified and yet leak selective information to favoured journalists to “paint the program in the most favourable light.”

The latest killing of two Australian citizens is not the end of the conversation, but the beginning. If these men were threats to national security, then the public deserves to know why and the legal backing behind it. The countless lies during the “war on terror” warrants skepticism of official claims

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/29/australians-were-killed-by-a-us-drone-strike-and-we-deserve-to-know-why

Australia's dependence on a major power lies deep in our national psyche

In distant days, if Britain went to war, we also were at war. We have tragically put ourselves in the same position with the United States

Malcolm Fraser

My latest book Dangerous Allies focuses on Australia’s strategic dependence – first on the United Kingdom, and then on the United States. It tells the story of sometimes enormous sacrifice and loss of life, and of fighting wars that were not always in Australia’s direct interest.

The need for dependence on a major power lies deep in Australia's psyche. It is in our DNA. 

There was a grand bargain: we would help Britain fight Empire wars and in return, Britain would defend us should we ever need it. Later Robert Menzies and John Latham, attorney-general and minister for external affairs, would not ratify the Statute of Westminster passed in 1931 through the British parliament because they thought it would weaken Britain’s obligation to defend Australia. They did not realise, even then, that Britain had been so weakened by the first world war that it no longer had the capacity to protect us.

Of course, a new world war would soon erupt – and as a result, Britain’s Navy no longer had the capacity to fight in two oceans, and was not able to fulfil its part of the grand bargain. With small numbers and inadequate resources, Australia clearly could not defend itself against the advancing Japanese. Our prime minister, John Curtin, appealed to the US for help. American interest then, following Pearl Harbour, was the ultimate defeat of Japan – which also assured Australia’s freedom.

After the second world war, the cold war evolved. Communism was regarded as a worldwide movement. It was outward looking and dangerous. In 1948, Berlin was blockaded. In the same year, Soviet tanks drove into Czechoslovakia. In 1956, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary. There was a communist insurrection in Malaya, which delayed independence for 10 years. Later still, there was an attempted PKI coup in Indonesia, and there had been major wars in Korea and Vietnam. All of which, in the conventional wisdom of the day, represented a dangerous and aggressive Soviet or Chinese-inspired communism.

Strategic dependence on the US and the ANZUS treaty therefore made sense in those years, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan reaffirmed the need for close links with the US. But a decade later, the Soviet Union disappeared, and communism was no longer a global threat. After 1990, an opportunity for greater independence appeared, and the capacity to build a strategic capacity to be fully master of our own decisions was within reach. Unfortunately, this did not happen.

Since 1991, we have become more closely entwined and committed to US policy than ever before.An Australian, Major General Burr, is second in charge of 60,000 US troops in the western Pacific. We have a frigate periodically acting as one of the escorts to USS Washington stationed in Japan. We have US marines in Darwin. That military force is turning step by step into a hard hitting, aggressive one, capable of exercising power anywhere throughout the region. With the development of new weapons technologies, the purpose for which joint Australia-US defense facility Pine Gap is used has been subtly and dangerously altered. It is now integral to the targeting of a variety of weapons systems, including drone killings, even of Australians in Yemen. 

While our forces have become more closely enmeshed with US plans in the western Pacific, America has also changed. It is now one of the most powerful military country, no longer restrained by an equivalent Soviet Union. The American exceptionalism doctrine, coupled with neo-conservative policies, have created a different America.

In 1997, the neo-con Project for the New American Century think tank published a statement of principles outlining that the US would only be secure if the whole world were a democracy. America’s duty was therefore to achieve that – if possible by peaceful means, if not, by force of arms. And indeed, the most credible reason for the Iraq war was the naive and foolish belief that to destroy Saddam Hussein would lead to a benign democracy – a model which would spread through the Middle East. No account was taken of the blatant hostility between Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites.

We should note that Canada, also a US ally, did not follow America into the Vietnam war or into Iraq. They exercised a degree of independence of which we appear to be incapable.

The next chapter is starting to unfold. The US has embraced a policy of containment of China. Military relationships from Japan all the way south through the Philippines, Singapore and Australia are being strengthened.

Hugh White has said, and I agree with him, that a clash between China and Japan, who are not really talking to each other, is highly possible. While technically the US remains neutral over disputed islands in the East China Sea, they have de facto sided with Japan.

If the US is involved with a war with China as the result of Japanese provocation, Australia, on current policy settings, would inevitably be involved. Our national interest would require us to stay out of such a war, but the marines in Darwin and the current use of Pine Gap would make it impossible for us to stay neutral. We would not be believed, because we are hosting an aggressive military force which is integral to the firing of a variety of weapons systems.

In distant days, if Britain went to war, we also were at war. We have now tragically put ourselves in the same position with the US, in circumstances far more serious for our future.

That is the decision Australia faces today. Some commentators have argued that Australia has to choose between the US and China, which is nonsense. I want Australia to be strategically independent, to have the capacity to make our own decisions, to not to be bound by US decisions and not be allied with the US or with China. 

I want Australia to be able to work closely with our neighbours, and with organisations like ASEAN. Such an Australia would be able to contribute much more to peace in our own region than an Australia caught in the mesh of US policies. This is especially so since America has still not learnt that political outcomes can rarely be achieved by military means.

• Malcolm Fraser was Australia’s 22nd prime minister. His latest book,Dangerous Allies (MUP), is published tomorrow

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/29/australias-dependence-on-a-major-power-lies-deep-in-our-national-psyche