On War: letter to the Foreign Minister September 2003

In writing to the Foreign Minister half a year after the invasion of Iraq I had the temerity to address him by first name, having known him for decades. I wrote because he said he didn't know what people thought about the war six months in, perhaps thinking we should admire what he and his colleagues. I have received no acknowledgement or reply. 

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 [my address]

7 September 2003

 

The Hon Alexander Downer MP

Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade

Parliament House

CANBERRA ACT 2600

 

Dear Alexander

 

Some time ago I heard you remark in the course of a radio interview that you did not know what those people who had opposed war with Iraq now thought about it.

 

I have been remiss in not writing sooner to let you know.

 

I wrote to the Prime Minister in February to say, among other things, that the war ‘would not work.’ I see no reason to vary that view now. Though the close-up war aims have been pretty ambulatory and in those terms an answer to ‘did it work’ is a bit elusive and a terrible distraction, in terms of core principles of enhancing international and national security, the impact of the war has been for the worse. As regards Iraq, you took a badly governed country and turned it into an ungovernable country.

 

I said in a speech in Nowra on Palm Sunday that “… Australian commitment to this war represents the single greatest error of strategic judgment in the history of Australian government.”

 

I have found no reason to alter that judgment.

 

Around 20 years ago, when the present Israeli Prime Minister was Defence Minister, he was opposed, as is his nature, to negotiation, and especially was then opposed to negotiating with Arafat, who was then in a weak position and wanted to negotiate. So Israel invaded Lebanon. Getting into Lebanon was a piece of cake, as was getting into Iraq more recently, more or less. Back then, ONA’s representative came to the Foreign Affairs division heads meeting and told us that Israel’s neat aims were these and those and Israel would be out of Lebanon in such and such brief time. “No,” I said, “they will be stuck in Lebanon for a very long time, and they will import into Israel all the problems of Lebanon.” I have seen no reason since to alter that judgment either.

 

I have become increasingly of the view since that it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading.

 

You will of course be able to say: “See, I told you terrorism was rising and we had to act.” But at some point you will have to acknowledge some responsibility for that: validating the use of violence to pursue personally defined righteous objectives, then steering the focus of foreign policy to a singularity of security mind-set such as we had in the 1950s.

 

In asserting a right to invade Iraq, you asserted a doctrine of old-fashioned exclusive state powers. But we live in a world much changed, the role of the state and individual altered by processes of globalisation. Your assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension. The security mantra you impose will have a pervasive and persistent effect comparable to that of McCarthyism through the 1950s and beyond.

 

I am also still of the view that since September 2001 we have been watching events and strategic responses unfolding as at the outbreak of war in 1914:

• Delusions of moral rectitude.

• Defence of imperial status quo.

• Nothing but narrow military options.

• Resort to alliances, hostility to thought.

• Vilification of the enemy, climate of fear and promotion of paranoia.

• Simplistic notions of victory, expectations of speedy end.

• Failure to address real wider issues.

• Enveloping sea of violence.

 

John Kennedy asked his National Security Council members to read Barbara Tuchman’s history of the onset of the First World War - to consider the problems arising when policy options are largely military. Such wisdom contributed to war avoidance when the Cuban Missile Crisis arose.

 

Tuchman, later, in the Viet Nam period, wrote a book called The March of Folly regarding the tendency of states to pursue deliberately courses of action contrary to national interest. This is manifestly a time when your government, and the United States Government, is acting in such a manner.

 

For the most part, all our lives, and all our foreign policy and national identity, are the sum of small decisions. There are rare moments when leaders have the opportunity to shift and shape the way nations think about life and the world. This is one of those moments. Your contribution will be measured by history. It lacks vision.

 

Yours sincerely

 

 

Dennis Argall

Speech against Iraq War, Wollongong July 2004: towards a constructive international policy

 

SPEECH TO ILLAWARRA NOWAR RALLY 11AM WOLLONGONG MALL SATURDAY 3 JULY 2004 Towards a constructive international policy DENNIS ARGALL Formerly Ambassador to China. We are here today because we believe that what has been done in our names is morally, politically and strategically wrong. We are also here today to say that those leaders, who took a badly governed country, invaded it and made it ungovernable, have no right, no track record to argue that we should ‘stay the course’. They do not make things better by staying. They should get out. Now. They express no awareness of error. We grant no blessing of support now. We reject the idea of ‘pre-emptive’ war - the notion that one country or group of countries can solve international tensions by attacking another country on their own judgement. We reject the idea that the problems of the world can be solved by rushing to the use of force. We reject the idea that you can have a ‘War on Terrorism’. Terrorism is a real risk here in Australia — and much, much more so in other countries. But terrorism is not a cyst or growth that can be cut out. It arises from despair and alienation, from loathing of the privileged by the disadvantaged, from clash of cultures. From resistance to domination by a global system that not only imposes economic values but pervasive invasion by culture and information which overturns all local social principle in its path. It arises, above all, from examples of violence. We cannot make good, make security, out of our own violence. We cannot surgically remove such a problem by military action. The injury to the United States on September 11, 2001 was profound. Far beyond the cost of lives on the day. Poisoning the American soul. Here is a nation, like Australia – and Britain – isolated by sea from sharpest realities of international dealing. With a foreign policy, like ours, driven by posture and rhetoric more than the reality and shoulder bruising of life along borders with different people. At home with self-importance, at home with big posture, profoundly secure in self-esteem, but now suddenly profoundly insecure. A single superpower for a decade now, seeing virtue only in the light from TV images of itself, uninclined to accept jurisdiction and moderation by international opinion. As European kings were once surrounded by a so-called ‘Divine Right of Kings’, so the United States had clothed itself in a ‘divine right’ to be unopposed. Which was devastated. The historical parallel is with August 1914, the beginning of the First World War, with the assassination of an Austrian Archduke by Serbian rebels. An act as wicked in the terms of 1914 as the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. An assault on divine right. On each occasion, there followed a resort to moral outrage on the one hand, and the unleashing of cynical, narrow perspective machinery of military response on the other. In 1914, no one said “this is World War One”. No one imagined it would last four years, chew up millions of lives, produce revolutions, create the Soviet Union, grind down the conquered state of Germany and lay the ground for another world war 20 years later. Our present situation is not just like following or obeying or egging on the United States in Vietnam. This is much more terrible than that. This is indeed a new world war, one which is no better comprehended than was what happened in 1914 then. In 1914 and again in 2001, there was a rush to alliances, a taking of sides that polarised and made more enemies and closed avenues for peace making and conflict resolution. In 1914 and again in 2001, there was expectation of swift victory — the French in 1914 shut down arms factories to hurry men to the front. Today United States military forces are being unsustainably chewed up at reserve as well as regular level by longer-than-planned war. In 1914 and again in 2001, there were flushes of nationalistic fervour and there was castigation of opinion opposed to war policy. Let us remember that Keith Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s dad, his inspiration, achieved greatness by his journalistic campaign that reversed policy and produced withdrawal from Gallipoli. We did not stay the course there. We call on the media to take a stand against closing down the vocabulary of public debate. We reject the idea that you can have a free press if it just follows the drumbeat of the War on Terrorism. In 1914 and again in 2001, there was only a war policy, only a bunch of advisors with maps and war plans and notions of taking the war to the enemy. If you only plan for war, war is all you can get. We reject the idea that war is the only option. In 1914 and again in 2001, there was no real thought that there were issues to be resolved between the rich and the poor, to resolve disadvantage, to redress the balance between those who consumed most of the world’s resources and dictate terms in world affairs and those who had no such share of resources and who resent being dictated to. We reject the idea that the United States or Australia has a divine right to shape the world. We affirm our readiness to listen to people with different voices from different cultures and to learn from their wisdom. In 1914 and over the years that followed, as in 2001 and years that follow it, we see political leaders create a situation where they must remain consistent with already failed strategy. They must chew up more lives, because to do otherwise risks not just their own positions but the whole posture and shape of state power they have built up to reinforce their strategies. So much so, that rivals, like Bob Carr - and even the rock singer - have to speak the same language, have to say yes they will fight the War on Terror, otherwise they themselves fear being political losers because the whole political vocabulary has been distorted by fear and misinformation. We say to ALL political leaders this: we reject the macho thick-skull notion that you can’t change your mind. We will support you in any pursuit of sane new policy directions to other than war. Let us always remember the gift of the lives of young Australians in earlier wars, for their country. But let that not obscure the fact that such lives were lost not on the basis of those young men’s strategic decisions, but those of their national leaders. Let us, as so many old diggers quietly ask, use the memory of war to AVOID more war. Why do we not use these remembrances to ask what politicians have learned? If we send people out to die needlessly, we are not respecting those dead, we are spitting in their faces. We reject the idea that wasting more lives gives any respect to the sacrifices of those who died before. I am just a little younger than the Prime Minister. We are both children of the Menzies Era. We both were too old to be caught by the Vietnam conscription. John Howard is not a fool, and was mature and involved with politics at that time. Did you learn nothing during Vietnam, Prime Minister,from what happened then? Were we not given a lesson on how wrong strategic wisdom could be? Were we not shown how limited in value was the exercise of preponderant military force? Did it not become painfully obvious that persisting in a war where you are unwanted produces more enemies and more mess with every extra killing. The philosopher of war Clausewitz said, 200 years ago, that war is an instrument of policy. That gets remembered by statesmen. What they seem to forget, over and over again, is that Clausewitz went on to warn that war, once embarked upon, drives out policy and pursues its own ends. War drives towards the extreme, to barbarism, to destruction. We reject the War on Terrorism, we call for sensible constructive international policy. ======== Rage is easy, painting historical parallels is easy. What is hard is to know where to go from here. We will have to work out what to do next. This is a collective task in a democracy. Let me venture some broad ideas as a start point: FIRST: we should be very wary of people of whatever hue who say they have the absolute truth. Not because there is no truth available, but because truth is individual. I hold passionately to my beliefs, you hold passionately to your beliefs. But this is a crowded world now, even here on the south coast, and if we do not put first an ethic of dealing as community with each other at grass roots level, we will never be able to deal sensibly with international issues. Fundamentalisms, fanaticisms, uncompromising pursuit of whatever absolute belief is what will kill us all. SECOND: We should avoid shallow moral relativism. We do not ask that asylum seekers be treated well because we think they are all bonza blokes. We demand that they be treated decently because we expect this country to maintain decent moral standards generally. We do not want to know that the way our lot torture prisoners isn’t as bad as the other lot’s torturing. We don’t want to know that an unjustifiable war was ok because Saddam was a bad guy and the Iraqis didn’t need him. We want just international behaviour because there is no boundary between international and domestic behaviour. If we behave unjustly and poisonously abroad, our own society is poisoned and becomes more unjust. Violence abroad feeds into violence at home and in the home. THIRD: We deny that an alliance demands acquiescence. We decline to accept that two or three democracies can, as allies, embark on international adventures which defy any democratic principle, which impose will, which are narrowly military in their design and perspective, without poisoning our democracies at home. But we can’t just blame the Americans if they think the natural perpetual Australian stance is that of toadying. There are other ways to conduct an alliance relationship, as a wise and sensible and steadying friend. If such an approach were rejected by our major ally, then what value is the alliance? FOURTH: We ask that the cost of war fighting be compared with the costs of doing things to alleviate conditions in the Third World and doing things in the developed world to reduce our gross consumption of resources — that people try to find their way back to sanity. How can it be smarter to fight and fight and re-equip fighting forces, while holding it to be too hard, too risky, too wasteful to resolve the problems of Third World debt and industrial world resource consumption. Why do we point to the risk of waste in generous policies, while being extravagantly wasteful in military matters? FIFTH: We do no deny that there are evil men in terrorist movements, but we ask for understanding that the so-called War on Terrorism will increase the number of terrorists and increase their vividly imaginative ways of stirring us up. SIXTH: In the present climate, the Moslem community has been under attack. If you do not have Moslem neighbours at whom to smile, I commend to you that you seek opportunity to do something practical. When I go to Sydney, I like to visit Lakemba, just to be a smiling face and to do ordinary things like shop and bring custom and fair dealing to this community. The coffee, the food, the ice creams are well worth the visit. Take an interest. Browse the bookshops... We are here because we reject racism and despise racial hatred. Often though, we are shy of taking steps to advance this abstract notion to practical affirmation. Let’s not be shy about extending a friendly hand. FINALLY: We all know that we live in troubled times. It is not easy to see the way forward. It is easy to create fear of threats to security at all levels, to sell people insurance, to sell legal services, to sell home security, to sell a national security policy based on fear and suspicion. We are told a lie when we are told that if we do not accept this fear-based national security policy we are being isolationist. Nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that a national security policy can be based on a constructive international policy — policy not focussed on fighting but on building a more constructive world. The irony of the demand for us to conform to the narrow fear-based international policy is that it reflects fear on the part of political leaders of thinking more openly about the world. They are indeed like the politicians and generals of WW1 who fed a generation into the mincer of war because they feared looking and listening, they feared thinking, they feared learning. We are at a hinge point in world history now, a rare privilege. Now is a time and a chance for innovative policy, delivering at home as well as abroad a strengthening of democracy and community spirit, and perhaps even a return to trust in government. Without that, we will continue to fight each other. We are a rich and lucky country, we have no right to be mean spirited. We came here today because we reject such narrow and negative thinking. Let’s leave here determined to widen the language of public debate and saying —War is NOT inevitable. —We CAN and WILL pursue policies of peace and international understanding. —————ooOoo————— Dennis Argall 2004 02 4421 3840

CANBERRA: Retrieved from an old hard disk

 Some Canberra portraits of the natural, taken with interesting camera, Sigma DP1.  It was a much anticipated camera in 2008, with a large Foveon sensor. The limits of the camera, excruciatingly slow, with the astonishing merits of the sensor, made it excellent for seeing things in the landscape, if you stood really still and tried not to breathe. Which is sort of how to appreciate Canberra on a cold day: a cold hard look, empty, shouting, unforgiving, relentless. 

These are things and circumstances in the centre of Canberra, according to my eye, winter 2011.

Nothing altered, just as taken from camera.

Click on images to see images only, black background. 

Any lack of quality reflects issues in your computer, of course. 

Retrieved from archive. Letter to Prime Minister May 2004. Iraq.

 Copy of letter lodged at Prime Minister's web site 20 May 2004

Dear Prime Minister

In you speech [on 19 May] you opened with a joke which has no life beyond Melbourne football and is gratuitously offensive to people struggling to survive in Iraq. You said:

"...Carlton has now entered a rebuilding phase. If that be the case, then CD, RG and BA would have all been mildly encouraged.

"Iraq is caught in a complex and crucial contest of values and ideals."

That is simply not funny, when discussing a vigorous strategic offensive to which you committed this country and which has changed Iraq from a badly governed country into an ungovernable country.

You then said:

"It is a contest between the majority of Iraqis who want to establish a viable democracy and a violent and determined minority who want to install a new dictator or a Taliban–style regime in Iraq."

This is a flawed and narrow perspective. You are, as has been the case throughout, isolating the local, key issues from the broader perspective of which this is a part. As the President of Egypt recenlty observed, terrorism arises from disadvantage. You give no sign of recognising that the problem of terrorism is one which will remain for so long as there is an insensitivity of the wealthy and massive consumers on the planet for the plight of the poor. This again may sound wet and simplistic to you, but it is a superior moral framework for addressing the whole array of intercultural, political and economic issues than is your 'war on terrorism' which has the intellectual sopphistication of a campaign against the scourge of thumbsucking by a Herodian hunt to lop off first born thumbs.

You continue:

"It is a contest of will – as the terrorists and insurgents try to use fear and intimidation to drive the forces that support the democratisation of Iraq – the coalition forces - out of Iraq."

Well, it's certainly headed that way, but whose fault is this? It has all the prospect of horror for people in Iraq as was the case for the people in the middle ground in El Salvador in the 1980s, as the right and the left tore away the middle ground and all social decency. For much of this you have to accept responsibility. Don't consider problems dealing with prisoners in Iraq as anomalous. First, you should have known that war is an inexact instrument, that the choice by statesmen of war as an instrument inevitably leads to war, as Clausewitz observed a very long time ago, driving out policy and pursuing its own ends. And also, let's not forget that a lot of the US military is drawn from those sectors of society that also feed the world's largest prison system, where two million are in gaol and rape and horror are routine and unremarked.

"Ultimately, it is a contest of conviction – whether the free world is prepared to protect and encourage democratic values. Those values Australians cherish – tolerance, opportunity, security and respect for one’s neighbours."

This is a fraudulent logical short circuit. You make a poor ally to the Unites States. Having spent some time in government with responsibility for nurturing the alliance relationship, I know that there are other ways to be an ally. The analogy for your conduct of blind support for US policy in the present instance is the child who follows the raging offended patriarch into violent retribution for offense, rage directed at targets of opportunity, rage and passion based on notions of unchallengability. You are entering the Nazi soldier's defence, of doing your duty.

You have no right to claim ownership of 'those values' above, when you have done so much to jeopardise them and in fact you in so many ways oppose tolerance and learn little about the sensitivities and moral integrity of other countries. As I indicated in writing to you in early 2003 to say that this war would not work, the situation resembles World War I more than Vietnam, with the absence of non-military strategic thought, the expectation of early victory, the progressive consumption of more and more resources, the resort to entrapping alliance, the castigation of opposing thought, the militarisation of the nation, the terrible horror that the adopted strategy is fatally flawed, leads only to exhaustion, will pull down the world economy.

This is your legacy, Prime Minister. You will, sometime, have to say sorry.

Yours sincerely

Dennis Argall