There’s been lots of discussion of what the de-facto basing of up to 2,500 US Marines at a training area in the Northern Territory means. There’s been blather about Guam, Okinawa and Chinese missile strike capability, for instance.
Perhaps the armchair generals know better, but shifting a tiny fraction of the US forces currently deployed in Guam and Okinawa to northern Australia doesn’t seem to alter that vulnerability one iota – unless you’re planning to shift a whole lot more in the future. In which case, what purpose does the initial presence serve?
Then we have the tripwire theory advanced by Peter Hartcher, that says that Australia’s security planners are getting so paranoid about Australia’s military vulnerability that having 2,500 American marines as (effectively) human shields serves to placate their nerves.
Aside from the frankly alarmist (and needlessly provocative) reading of Australia’s security situation, if Australia needs an American tripwire, we already have one. It’s called Pine Gap, and it’s been sitting in the Australian outback for 40 years.
The broader political context here is of course American policy towards China’s growing economic and military strength. But on the specifics of the base, well, I’m just not buying the discussion so far.
There is also the ‘thin end of the wedge theory’.
That says that in the event of US troops in Okinawa getting a bit politically hot for the Japanese government, Darwin might be somewhere to park at least some of those troops.
Of course, to park that number of troops would be a big deal here domestically if it were done all at once.
However, if we were to have had 2500 troops in Darwin for a few years by that time, pumping money into the local economy, being good lads and lasses in uniform, it is quite reasonable to say that the local community in Darwin would welcome more of them, and the rest of Australia over 2000km away would not worry too much if a few thousand more were to turn up.
While I would not assert that this is the rationale, it certainly gives the US military planners scope to move in that direction should these pretty reasonably forseeable events dictate it.
I’m puzzled by why the US forces would ever need to move from Guam. It’s US territory, and they even have a delegate in Congress.
The only way the US would lose it in the foreseeable future is the result of a hot war with China. Is that a real concern of the US military?
This is just a theory but I think that the Darwin troops announcement should not be taken in isolation. Remember there was the Indian uranium announcement at the same time.
China is currently paying for 80% of the development of the deep-water Gwadar port in Pakistan (supposedly for purely commercial purposes). Likewise, China is investing in ports Burma, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka (see Chinese String of Pearls). At the very least they could be used for refueling and resupply of warships.
Most of the commentary focuses on these 2500 troops as a counter to China directly in South East Asia. Which I don’t see much sense in given Guam as Down and Out points out above. Maybe the focus should instead be on the Indian Ocean.
India gets jittery over Gwadar, Pakistan. The US sees an opportunity. Throws the 2500 troops on the table to us. We throw in the uranium for good measure. Everybody’s happy. Well, everybody except China.
What we are seeing here may well be more evidence of a realignment of US strategy from Pakistan to India. Australia is just one square on the New Great Game chessboard.
I believe that the US is flailing about for a means to confront the challenge of China.
Certainly, as a superpower, China is developing a worldwide military capability. But unlike fascist Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, China is besting the US at what the US once did best — dominating the commercial and financial world.
Under present circumstances China has no interest in changing its strategy. But perhaps the Darwin provocation is an effort to distract China from playing its winning hand.
If this is the case, then we are seeing evidence of US desperation. Obama said that time was on the side of the free. He talks the talk but he is walking the walk of a power whose time is running out.
I think this interview is worth a read http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2011/s3369062.htm
The interviewee reckons it is possible to have an alternative to relying on the US as an insurance policy. But that it would cost about 3-4% of GDP which is almost double the amount of our current defence spending. I think that sort of spending would encounter a lot more opposition than letting some US troops rotate in and out of Darwin.
Newt Grinich, a US isolationist, is suddenly doing well in the Rebublican nomination polls. Perhaps Julia is trying to lock in a bit of the US alliance to reduce the impact on our security if Newt ends up as president.
Also keep in mind that China is rapidly building up its military capacity and would have no hesitation in telling us where to go if we were to criticize this.
The rune reading going on around this base is silly: what does it mean, this new base of marines in the NT? Does it signal this or that in relation to China. And so on. What it means for the populations coming into contact with US military bases, as with Subic Bay and Okinawa, is an increase in prostitution, violent crime, sexual offences and drug offences. This ought to concern the left not double guessing the foreign policy implications of decisions made by unaccountable leaders. The domestic issues are very real. However, if we are not concerned then we can always console ourselves that for a lot of Aboriginal people in the NT their future of sex crimes and violence will be much like their childhoods except with more uniforms.
John D. Newt Gingrich is not an isolationist. He is an anti-whatever-the-hell-Barack-Obama-is-doing-ist. If president he would have no problem with bombing who-ever the flavour-of-the-week was for the GOP’s base and would only be restrained by the more reasonable Democrats, (maybe) John McCain and the Joint Chiefs.
Ron Paul has the GOP isolationist wing locked-up. And he is considered the patron saint of cloud-cuckoo land on both sides of the isle (see Gold Standard loonies).
Defense remains a sacred cow in the US and cannot be questioned by any candidate if he ever wants to win the nomination of his party – let alone be president.
Paranoid blast from the past: anyone remember the ‘Project for a New American Century’ Report? In the early 2000s it got a notorious reputation as the neocon blueprint to invade Iraq among other places.
It was actually mainly concerned with China, and featured more than a few references to Australia and the need for the US to have a stronger military presence here.
It’s not that Obama is a neocon, however strategic ideas have long gestation periods in the US military establishment. Australia is an asset to the US primarily as a ‘base’ so it makes sense that they would gradually start taking us up on it.
http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf
akn, you seem to have a really salacious and excessive interest in US marines’ use of sex workers and interest in local women. Are you feeling threatened?
In case you aren’t aware, sex work is licensed and legal in the NT, and any increase in the industry as a consequence of 2500 soldiers is entirely the voluntary decision of the women who choose to work in that industry. I also find it highly unlikely that there will be an increase in drug offences in Australia compared to Okinawa, and I don’t know if you’ve ever met any US marines or been to a US marine base but I really don’t think they’re the monsters you make them out to be.
In fact, marines are under a fairly strict set of rules about their private interactions with locals, and their presence brings a lot of benefits to the areas they’re based in. So I really don’t think that their personal behavior should concern the left.
I think it’s a stroke of genius. Want to get China mad? Make sure they get mad at some other western country….oh….shit.
As someone else said further up thread China need not use force to isolate the US. They need only let the US run itself into the ground trying to compete. Much like how the US defeated the USSR.
I think it is just another way for Australia to say “all the way with LBJ(replace with whom ever is current c-i-c), i cant read the future,but I sure as hell prefer the way the Chinese are currently using their ‘power’ than the US,droning and killing their way to resources.
What Katz said.
I’ve said it before, but I think the smart strategy for the US is not to directly push back against China, but to help other countries in the region resist any bullying.
Take the Spratly Islands, over which six countries have various claims. China prefers to sign bilateral treaties with the other countries, which is understandable, as it’s a nice example of divide and conquer, and China would be the stronger party in each relationship. Other countries like the Philippines prefer a nice multilateral treaty. The US doesn’t have any claims in the area, but would prefer not to have a war over the place.
I’m not a diplomat, but it sounds like a no-brainer. Quietly encouraging the other five to the negotiating table, and then invite China to follow suit. Obama’s got the peace prize – now he can earn it. No Subic Bays or Darwins necessary.
Even if it’s a bad idea (and maybe it is), it’s at least an idea where the US can be an effective force for peace, rather than pushing around its guns like an aging lothario pushes around his V**gr* [*]. It’s better than the nonsense peddled in the papers, where people confuse their foreign policy with their theology. Certain commentators (and I’m speaking to you, Greg Sheridan!) speak of the US-Australia alliance in the hallowed terms that the Pope would speak about communion wafers. We don’t need such rot.
[* Asterisked in order not to trip the moderation filter.]
Just curious, does this make Julia Gillard a Deputy Sheriff?
sg my knowledge of the social conditions of the civilian population surrounding Subic Bay base in the Philippines derives from a visit to Australia of a ‘peace mission’ of Philippine citizens who emphasised that the drugs and sex trade was unknown in the area prior to the US base but has bloomed since. I’m guessing, but I’d doubt that conditions have changed. As to Okinawa the figures say one thing but local sentiment says another … see Okinawa rape case (http://www.japaninc.com/node/2920).
Finally, and most amusingly, you are convinced it seems that US Marines are models of probity and sober behaviour. I guess you’re too young to have been up The Cross during the R&R days. What’ve you been watching – Top Gun? An Officer and a Gentleman? You need to stretch your horizons beyond masculinised Mills and Boon depictions of US servicemen who ain’t no gentlemen and invariably bring with them a supremacist attitude to local relations.
As to prostitution in the NT… this is the one bright note, really, and at least offers a real dignified economic future for Aboriginal kids on the game. An excellent win/win all around.
Yeah well, I guess the ramp up from 250 to 2500 will sort out whether akn is prescient or not. Mind you, an unquestioning belief in a group of people who reckoned that there was no prostitution or drug use in the Philippines before the arrival of US forces seems to imply a certain amount of credulity.
If no problems, I guess we could see it go higher. If, however, there are problems it would not have a long future. Guess we will see. Nothing like some data eh?
As for worrying about aboriginal people working in the sex industry in the NT. Whether they do, will, want to, or not is entirely their business. No-one else’s and I guess they will make their decisions based on what they want to do. I have worked for some time in the NT, and my experience is that aboriginal people actually can make decisions for themselves akn. Maybe not on terms that some outsiders might like, but that is their prerogative. Although why you introduced it to the thread I am not sure.
AKN. The Subic Bay Naval Base was closed in 1991. And yes, the conditions there have changed substantially. It is now a commercial trade zone, industrial park and recreation park. It is quite pleasant actually in the 3 or 4 times I have been there in the last 10 years.
US Marines, sailors and soldiers are by no means universally considered angels. I would be the first to grant you that. But lose the snark. They are not all devils either.
Anthony the US naval base at Subic Bay has been closed for twenty years. Surely you can’t blame it for whatever drug and sex trade issues the area has now.
Next you’ll be telling us, based on your knowledge of the social conditions of the civilian population surrounding Kings Cross in Sydney, derived from a visit of a ‘peace mission’ of New South Welsh citizens, that the drugs and sex trade was unknown in the area prior to the the R&R days but has bloomed since.
i still don’t know who pays for it all. are we footing the bill for this ‘security’?
yeah i know the marines will infuse the local area with fresh money, but if we’re forking out millions to house/feed/equip/requip/have them there. one of my pet theories is that the US has this massive armed force, they have to pay for it, so why not push them onto other countries as basically mercenaries against imaginary foes.
china was no threat to us, if the shenanigans in the china sea were so bad, why weren’t they in the media… oh, nvm. our media is useless.
but mark my words!
just like AFTER the invasion of afghanistan, we are now a terrorist target (dozens in jail since)… i suspect now we’ll see economic contracts not renewed, cyber warfare… hopefully that’s all. but that’s enough to show that it all just wasn’t worth it.
imo.
This debate about what it all means for the US-China-Australia relationships is really a policy wonk relevance deprivation avoidance measure.
1. While it may wax and wain and critics will point to a lack of attention/priority from the US and it’s POTUS from time to time, the Australian/US relationship is on a bedrock of cultural and geopolitical synergies. The US can afford to take us for granted from time to time (if not always) because we need them militarily a lot more than they need us. However, strategically the US knows that we are the firm base for power projection for the US into SE Asia and the Indian Ocean. The trip-wire theory of basing US troops her really doesn’t hold much water with me.
2. While Australia is doing very nicely from the Chinese demand for our minerals and energy – the fact is that if push comes to shove Australia will always be on the side of the US. Australian politicians know that (unlike some of the rabid anti-American posters on LP) the vast majority of Australians will back a government that throws it’s hat in the ring with the US, especialy against undemocratic countries that we have little culturally in comon with.
@19 OBR.
1. The base of power projection in SEA is Guam not Australia. The base of power projection in the Indian Ocean is Diego Garcia. Unless the US ever stations more than one Marine Expeditionary Unit (the smallest Marine task force unit) here which is unlikely.
Minus 10 pts for use of the word “synergies”.
2. This is true. Though push will never come to shove. China is not Imperial Japan and this is not 1941 (or any time before that). Australian politicians know this too.
OBR. You are right. If push ever came to shove Australia would back the US to the hilt – the happy little lackeys that we are. And probably just as well, because if it ever came to that, things would have to be pretty dire indeed.
But would we be so confident that the US would do the same for us? See Islands, Falklands. ANZUS isn’t worth the paper its written on.
1. Making boatloads of money from mutually beneficial trade is a very efficient means to discover deep and abiding interests.
2. As I suggested above, it appears that the US is the provocative party in this developing contest. China has virtually no military presence beyond its borders. China appears to be content to compete in matters of commerce and finance. In short, China is a peaceable world citizen that may be facing threats and insults from a black-hatted bully. If Americans persist in provocative and bullying behaviour perhaps even Australians may revise their “cultural” prejudices.
Just on that thought, I guess that is the point of trip wires. If the US had 100 Marines stationed at Port Stanley, The Falklands War would never have happened.
So maybe that’s why Gillard and co love this idea. They have 2500 new hostages to provide cover for our little pile of dirt. Its not like the US would ever come to your aid out of the goodness of their hearts now would they? Maybe our betters are so enthusiastic about US troops not because they think the ANZUS Alliance is so strong but because it is so weak.
Exactly. The Tibet and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regions are pretty much the benchmark for the benevolent management of dependent territories. And Chinese mining corporations’ treatment of their African employees in the Congo and elsewhere put Western European standards to shame. As China’s economic geopolitical rise continues, we can only look forward with enthusiasm to the wonderful improvements these examples foreshadow.
“it is quite reasonable to say that the local community in Darwin would welcome more of them”
Sorry, I was part of that community, and it isn’t. It is reasonable to assume that the Chamber of Commerce and similar will all cheer. And that the voices of ordinary people on the street with ordinary every day concerns will be dismissed.
Case in point:
“Are you feeling threatened?”
So what if someone was? Do we always need this locker room bravado type response shutting down any effort to stick up for the more awkward ends of male sexuality? Darwin has long had more men than women, the influx of our own military has made that worse, and it has a lot of resultant effects such as the less than delightful atmosphere in Darwin nightclubs at 3am when people are drunk, frustrated, depressed.
The whole prostitution-consent thing is a wee bit simplistic as well.
It isn’t just to point at the military. It’s a rough town generally, despite the Lonely Planet whitewash. I saw a lot of people’s heads pounded into the pavement in my many years there. It was normalised for me. Over time I learned of a lot of sexual assaults that had been inflicted on female friends. It’s still a hard town, especially well after dark. I don’t say US Marines are evil and will be solely responsible for something bad. I do say that give the size and present constitution of Darwin, this is hardly a good thing. And yes there will be plenty of locals who agree. And yes some will be male (and many will be women). I can’t see why the subtle social, the nuance of community and everyday life, is not relevant to decisions like this.
@20 – While the US may have played a bit of Ducks and Drakes over the Falklands that needs to be looked at in the context of the US’s interests and relations in South America, and the fact that the Falklands dispust has been simmering at various temps for many decades and in reality the Falklands were a pretty insignificant group of islands in the deep South Atlantic with little strategic value to the US or the UK. As it was the UK didn’t need much help from them anyway, although it was anear run thing (one or two more well placed Exocet missiles would have been a game changer).
Katz @ 21 – I agree with your first point – long may it continue. In fact the more we can contribute to the economic development of China the less likely it is that they will be to do something stupid like invade Taiwan.
I disagree with your second point. China is developing a blue water navy. They want to get into the power projection game.
@22 – the US trip wire already exists here – apart from Pine Gap, which is a key part of their early warning system for missile launches, they also depend on the communcations base Harold E Holt in Exmouth on the NW Cape that communicates with their subs over about one third of the globe.
@26 – I can tell you from my experience that ADF personell and their families are a lot more welcomed in Darwin by the locals than in any other location that I served in. Loved living in Darwin.
When my lotto numbers come up I’ll be spending probably 4 months a year up there.
This does not invalidate my argument. China is as entitled as any nation to develop a blue water navy.
I see they are only here for 6 months of the year. Cyclone season?
@27. “the US trip wire already exists here”.
Indeed it does. But my point is ultimately Australia needs the US a hell of a lot more than the US needs Australia. Or at least it thinks it does. And when I mean “it” I mean the ruling elite + our lockstep media. We need that trip-wire because all we have is a piece of paper without it.
Not to get all Melian on y’all but nations such as the US do whatever is in their own interests. IMHO “cultural ties” are irrelevant. Today, the maintenance of Pine Gap, Robertson base and I suppose Exmouth are in the interests of the US – rightly or wrongly. Tomorrow maybe not.
And China is no different. If it fit into their strategic plan the party elites would throw their own mothers under the bus. Tim Macknay is correct to caution against any false dichotomies. There is nothing moral about strategic brinkmanship.
But Katz is also correct that any nation is entitled to a Blue Water Navy. There is no Washington Naval Treaty today. China is not the nation with troops in over 100 nations on this planet. Their reservations are warranted.
And this little circle of brinkmanship will continue until there are troops, and ships and planes on every corner of this hemisphere. And in all likelihood none of which will ever fire a shot. The people who will be happiest – shareholders in Lockheed Martin.
Despite all the platitudes from Obama/Bush/whoever we are just pawns when it comes to this stuff. Empires do not have allies, only clients.
If history is any guide (given its track record to date) the US has no other option but to go to war with China to preserve its imperial hegemony or retreat into impotent isolationism.
Huggy
If LP’ers don’t trust the Americans (and clearly many dont), they shouldn’t trust the Chinese either – both are engaged in a game of world domination. Why does China need or want 90 submarines and a bunch of shiny new aircraft carriers – not to mention advanced stealth aircraft? Don’t be naive – these weapons systems aren’t defensive.
I’m afraid that at some point global political and economic forces will drive us into a position where we will need to choose sides – that’s just the way history works. So whose side do you want to be on – what’s more to the point who do you want to win – an untidy democracy or a neat dictatorship?
Yeah well, the Subic Bay base may be closed but that doesn’t change at all the reality of social conditions around US foreign bases. For your information the Philippines delegation was here in the 1970′s which was a time when the left and the peace movement didn’t offer to hold Ozzie buttocks open for the rogering the Yanks are about to deliver. But hey, pomo leftism holds that hawkin’ the fork is a legal and dignified way to earn a livin’ so who am I to speak. Quite when US forces became champions of freedom has also escaped me. You guys are so pissweak you make the cultural left look like hard core Stalinists.
“hawking the fork,” akn? Charming. Perhaps you should update your understanding of sex work as well as the location of modern American bases…
for the record, my partner lived in Hiroshima for a year, and a close friend during that year was going out with a marine (they’re now married). So I met quite a few marines while I was there, had xmas dinner with one, went to their base (my partner went to a few parties there too). Some of them can be a handful, but they aren’t the people you make them out to be.
I’m not and have never been a soldier and I am generally anti-war, but I’ve spent enough time around American, British and Australian soldiers in enough social settings to understand the difference between akn’s ’70s stereotype and the reality, and I don’t think the stereotype is very helpful.
“an untidy democracy or a neat dictatorship?”
A very good question, particularly as the untidy democracy could soon become very messy indeed.
PDL, I’d prefer to support an intelligently governed democracy. To sign a blank cheque for a dumb democracy is dangerous.
In the Great War and WWII the US cleverly manoeuvred it’s eventual enemies into taking the first military action. Against the Soviet Union the US maintained a balance of terror and played a clever waiting game until internal contradictions caused the collapse of Sovietism.
The Vietnam War, GWII and Afghanistan were examples of unilateral US aggression. These episodes represent dangerous US provocation and strategic blundering.
One can only hope that in relation to China the US reverts to its earlier record of intelligence rather than its later record of recklessness.
OK sg. I know history for you started with Steve Jobs and ended somewhere around when Francis Fukyama said it did but some of us have longer and more functional memories. Try Lt Calley and the My Lai massacre after which, if you’ve the stomach for it, the Haditha massacre and the Shinwa massacre. Real cool shit. Just like an x-box game dude. But hey, Lt Calley apologised! Now that’s Marine training for you. Man enough to apologise.
As to your dinner party companions, Marines to a man apparently, who could gainsay that sort of personal insight. Sheeiiit dude they even knew how to handle their cutlrey.
In the meantime some of us are wondering what national sovereignty means.
akn …
I normally follow your comments with interest, but beyond the sense that you are deeply troubled by the announcement on the US bases, your posts here have resembled a stream of angst-ridden consciousness.
What is it you are trying to add to the point that you’re hostile to the idea of an expansion of military ties with the US, (with which point most here would already concur)?
Good memory you’ve got there, akn. My Lai wasn’t the US Marines.
At comment 7 you seemed to think geopolitical discussion was “silly” rune reading. You were all about the prostitution and the scary Americans taking Australian “fork.” Now that it’s been pointed out to you that your stereotypes are silly and your knowledge of the Philipines is 20 years out of date, you’ve switched to this:
So just to be clear: back at comment 7, national sovereignty was a sideshow and it was the fork-hawking that was the main deal. Now you’ve been called on this, the social behavior of marines is a sideshow and it’s all about national sovereignty?
One could be forgiven for thinking you’re being reflexively anti-american …
dear akn (from further up)
i hear you. i get you. i’d up-thumb ya, but we don’t have that system here.
us soldier sentenced november 1 this year to 10 years for “sadistically & pervertedly” raping a 17 year old girl in south korea:-
http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/korea/u-s-soldier-gets-10-years-in-rape-of-korean-teenage-girl-1.159407
unit commander: “The 2nd Infantry Division has been proactive in its efforts to reduce crime,” he said. “We have conducted and will continue to emphasize comprehensive sexual harassment prevention training, responsible alcohol use and cultural training with all of our soldiers.”
this site has a search engine:-
http://www.militarysexoffendersregistry.com/foreign_crimes.html
for what its worth, i hated “top gun” – what a wank. as for “an officer & a gentleman” – another ginormous pull; richard gere, sheesh. i did have one a hack of good time, though, with “buffalo soldiers”, a bag of corn chips & a six pack of coopers – what a hoot!
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Anthony, William Calley wasn’t a Marine but a member of the United States Army. He would have received no Marine training.
As a history buff I am sure that you’d be aware of events before 1968 with direct involvement of the US military in Australia, though I expect that your jaundiced memory would only extend to the Battle of Brisbane and not to the Battle of the Coral Sea of the Battle of Guadalcanal.
Fran (and sg) the issue is national sovereignty and so far as I can see I’m the only person to raise it so far on this thread. The other issues are derived from the social consequence of sticking a US base in a place like the NT. Beyond that I’ve a very dim view of the US armed forces. Reflexively anti-US? You betcha, never a backward step, especially when it comes to ruling US classes pursuing their own interests by deepening the client state status of Australia. Not anti-American people, note, but anti-US interests which are a long way from the interests of US citizens as the recent 99% movement has shown.
I’ll happily predict that Darwin will become even more of a seething hotbed of crime, violence and sex assault than it already is once the base is sited.
I think that Australia should see the writing on the wall with respect to how the country should be preparing itself to be successful in the future. Basing an economy on services and mining isn’t a good foundation going forward. (Floating currencies are no protection against high debt levels. Cheney etc. were about 85% wrong.)
Our economy needs to be technologically competitive and that means we need a good education system, which is able to compete internationally and supply people to work in high tech industries. If a company is able to compete in the international market it’s able to compete in the international wage market. The tyranny of distance is also no longer an excuse.
For this simple traditional model to work you need a society based on ability, accountability and a fair distribution of wealth. You also need an economy which is balanced and diversified.
Why can’t Australia think independently and maintain a good relationship, based on real communication with its allies the US, or nations with which it has a traditional relationship, UK, Canada, etc. It seems that our diplomacy is often effected by a sort of school-yard you’re my 3rd-best-friend-attitude.
A modern nation needs to be respected for what it can do and then it needs to be as open and integrated as much as possible into the international community. Australia should be trying to have the best relationship it can with both China and the US. Not on the perceived interests of either or but on the basis of actual information shared between itself and its partners. Good national relationships are based on real common interests.
Quite agree Joe which is why I object to the whorehouse future signed off by Gillard and Obama. We’re being treated like the Philippines or the Japanese defeated at the end of WWII. A subaltern future for a subordinated nation where the economic interests of air-conditioned fifo miners dominate. There is no discernible benefit from this proposal notwithstanding how clean and polite the marines are trained to be at the dinner table. It’s a good idea to remember what professional killers do before dinner which is, often enough, slaughtering rebellious peoples elsewhere.
I have to say though, these kinds of photos are sickening.
I mean, what kind of an image are we trying to present, here?
Australia the model of a dynamic, flexible, sophisticated, nation, or land of the bumpkins. I mean, sorry foreign affairs people, but this looks like the grand meeting of some Southern States militia group. “Jus’ family and friends in cash’al mil-i-taire-e dress. Ye-sir…”
Pathetic.
Get ready to kiss a little ass Joe along with the Stars and Stripes. Great photo. Says it all.
Wow Joe, your link has really nailed it. We shoulda thought this through better. The three photoes you have linked to from Der Spiegel are truly sickening.
I am sure that when they get wide coverage not only all LPers, but all Australians will vomit, and many of them will projectile vomit. And that will be the end of ANZUS.
The first is of a joint American/Japanese naval exercise somewhere in the Pacific, involving an aircraft carrier. Sickening, Truly sickening.
Since when did either the Japanese or the Americans have any vital interest in the Pacific and why are their naval vessels there at all?
The second photograph is of the American president greeting Australian troops. How dare he? How dare they? Heinousness. They should be taken out and shot for that act of courtesy. (I’m only guessing here but I gather that that is your line of reasoning).
The third photograph is of the American president addressing Australian troops. On seeing that my gorge rose, as I am sure yours did. I must admit I had a mild projectile vomit, as I know you must have (although it may be that yours was a full on projectile vomit, or at least I surmise that from the passion of your comment).
The sheer cheek of him, partner in a significant and sixty year old military alliance, talking to the troops of a nation with which his nation is in alliance. Unthinkable. Unforgivable.
But bumpkins Joe? That’s a bit unkind. Though in charity I’m going to guess you were only referring to yourself and Anthony.
dear joe
what does it say? i’d say it says “demonstrated force inter-operability”. sir!
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Joe @ 47.
It just goes to show that different images hit people in different ways. Those images were on air live at the time, and yours is the first comment I have read like that. Interesting. Plenty of talk in the office, but I have to day most of it is positive. A bit like rohrschach blots it would seem.
Can’t please everyone I guess.
I think you have a problem with sex workers, akn. I think you should update your political references. A little less sexualization of disempowerment would probably be a good move, and a little less sneering at working women …
dear akn
i had the vietnam war on tv every night: every night moving sound pictures of yet another wounded soldier with contorted face carried by his “buddies” to a medivac chopper, every night another crying old woman in front of her burned out hut, cut-aways to clever men in stylish suits, who thought they were in control, while pontificating away with their obscene jargon of “strategic hamlets” & “body counts”. and i remember my lai vividly. it took ‘em a very long time to award a medal to the chopper gunner who trained his weapon on his own people to save the lives of civilians there. remember him not that man calley. and i don’t give a rat’s cuss whether or not it was “the marines”, “us forces” is enough.
the usa does nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of treaties with other countries that’s not to the distinct advantage of the usa itself; these are never “partnerships” in any fair sense of the word. the business of the usa gov’t is business. had a thought about the usa-australia “free trade agreement” recently? heard a lot of american voices on tv ads here, lately? what kind of “cultural penetration” of the usa market do you reckon australian voice actors get in exchange? what about the panama canal treaty? heard of that one? went well for panama, didn’t it? how about naafta? going well for canada? how’d that softwood lumber dispute go? oh, that’s right, settled in favor of usa after 10+ years of litigation & the ruination of canadian competition. canadian beef back in the usa? not soon enough for my brother-in-law & others like him who couldn’t afford another winter with no improvement in trade expected in spring & sold his herd for a song. how’s it going for mexico, for mexican workers? free trade agreements my ass/arse.
it wasn’t long ago the catchphrase “neither confirm nor deny” spoken in reference to usa ships & their possible nukes provoked apoplexy in people on the left. well, gird up for a revival, at least of the catchphrase, if not of the associated outrage. get ready to get used to it. they want to eventually upgrade this “relationship” to include visits by subs, too. unless the journalist i read last week was hyperventilating.
this is all about advantaging the usa; anything australia gets out of this is epiphenomenon, collateral advantage. and then there’re the downsides. and, yes, i’ve got issues, seriously, with usa foreign policy & if that’s “anti-americanism” then so be it; i’m happy, content & at peace with myself over it. i’m pleased also to know at least one septic-australian who’d outdo me in a trice. be wary of yankee government’s bearing gifts.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
“the usa does nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of treaties with other countries that’s not to the distinct advantage of the usa itself”
Alfred, without taking any position whatsoever with respect to the subject matter, I would ask you for an example of any nation state doing otherwise.
If you’re following me, and like me can find no such example, then it follows that no international arrangement should be seen in any other light.
dear FDB
sure that might have been worded better, but nations can negotiate co-operative treaties for mutual benefit: the peace of westphalia, the congress of vienna, the league of nations, the franco-german coal treaty of the ’50s, i’ll stick my neck out and say it, the united nations treaty, the european union. the usa’s stance towards its treaty partners, however, is is always adversarial, not collegiate or co-operative. the usa attitude to the un & its bodies like unesco is notoriously un-operative to the point of belligerence and one-sided; that is, they never bend, others bend, others make the concessions. they have a “free-trade agreement” with mexico & canada that they use to destroy economic competition. many canadians now rue signing up to nafta. canadian oil, for example is locked into to usa market under a “proportionality clause” with big penalty dollars to back out. http://www.iatp.org/documents/over-a-barrel-exiting-naftas-proportionality-clause. so, however much they rant & rave in alberta tonight, about the recent state department (i.e. the “foreign affairs” department) decision to refer the keystone xl pipeline to committee, it looks like they won’t be able to vent their spleen, “get even” & sell their icky tar sands product to china, even if they could manage a pipeline to the coast. they were suckered by the yanks back in ’92. thank god they didn’t negotiate water exports back then, like the yanks wanted to, at least they still control their water.
all i’m saying is be careful with yankee gov’ts & their siren song of shared values & their fist full of dollars. and take a long fork with you to the diplomatic dinner, these guys play only hard ball.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
alfred, i don’t think anyone here is falling for the “siren song” of yankee govts and their “shared values.”
Alfred Venison @ 53: a perfect voice on this subject. My anger at this development prevented such consideration.
Now it occurs to me that our generation had a totally different exposure to the realities of war during those terrible Vietnam years. The current media collaboration in the ‘spinning’ of war gives coverage of Afghanistan and Iraq all of the glamour and reality of a video game. My response to war mongers is rational but derives from a deep, visceral repugnance at the entire machinery from the state through to the professional killers who constitute a professional standing army.
I’m delighted Alfred that you also recall the real hero of My Lai – the chopper pilot. It is arcane knowledge these days but the sort of story that humanises war and shows that even in the depths of great evil some people have the courage of their humanity.
One of the main issues around the Australian military is the way that, in the post war period, it has actively engaged in killing the left in SE Asia especially the thirteen year engagement in Malaya (1950-1960) and Vietnam (1962-1975). These incursions were brutal and have shaped the geopolitics of the region in very significant ways mainly by slaughtering the left and attempting to crush what were essentially nationalist movements in the guise of socialism. Moreover, the failure of Australian foreign policy and the military to engage with Indonesia over the invasion and apparent attempted genocide in East Timor (1975-1990) derives from the way that left nationalist movements are despised and loathed by the Australian establishment. This establishment includes the military intelligentsia who were very well informed about what the Indonesians were doing in the period between 1975-1999 when about one third of the East Timorese were killed or died of disease and famine. Quite why the Australian military establishment still engages with and ‘trains’ Indonesian officers is beyond me. It constructs all Australians as collaborators with Indonesian expansionism and brutality. We will become a regional cop. Deputy to the Yanks.
No good will come of this new base in the NT. We are officially now in the same relationship to the USA that we ever were as handmaidens to English imperialism. Those who try to imagine ways that closer military ties and ‘co-operation’ with US military requirements might be played to Australian advantage are genuine first class, card carrying Pollyannas. Either that or they just don’t know the history of their own region.
It may also be apt to put these matters into some perspective. Traditionally in Australia, the debate around defence policy matters has focused on the question of whether Australia needs a powerful protector as a shield against regional enemies {let’s call this the “PP” approach} (and if so, which PP that should be) or whether Australia can simply go it alone and protect itself, relying on its own geography (Continental Defence {CD}). A redux of this debate occurred on PM on Thursday with Raoul Heinrichs of the “Sir Arthur Tange Scholar at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University”.
The trouble here is that CD would inevitably be a lot more expensive — Heinrichs suggested a ramp up to about 3.5% of GDP from the current 2%. In practice though, since the question is existential, the political dynamics of such a view would make defence expenditure virtually sacrosanct and open-ended, and just as nobody wants to bargain with someone who has absolute leverage, giving that sort of cultural power to any government agency makes the kind of debate taking place on CEFC and “picking winners” seem rather quaint. Defence would essentially have a blank canvas and a blank cheque to fill it. So while CD has tended to be more associated in the period since the 1970s with the left, the problem is that the implications of that for the left in greater latitude to spend on defence and to give defence open slather have been much less appealing. For left|sts, who would like to radically shrink if not actually dismantle the capitalist armed forces, signing up to increased defence spending is simply not something that is going to fly.
On the other hand, backing the US alliance runs exactly counter not only to decades of left-of-centre policy here, but to liberal populism, which favours Australia taking an “independent” line from the US, either on liberal grounds or out of self-interest. As Heinrichs noted:
From a left-of-centre perspective, this is then really Scylla and Charybdis. The alternative to both entails a return to a perspective in which one sets aside existential concerns about the fate of any specific jurisdiction against any other and declares that the only way to escape this global protection racket is to refuse to play and instead insist that humanity’s only efficient and effective shield against being brutalised by some invader is to achieve inclusive governance on a world scale. That can’t be done (and is inconsistent with) large military spending and we should politically oppose any attempts by any regime to do so.
Let us be very clear that in relation to Australia, that if a significant regional power — China or even Indonesia — were minded to mount an assault on the Australian land mass, there is no force, local or international that could prevent this taking place and inflicting very serious and probably catastrophic losses on the residents of Australia at the time. Even if a power such as the US decided to inflict very serious losses on the aggressor, that isn’t going to help the local residents of Australia in the short to medium term, and as we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, those losses simply become part of the cost of the disruption. It’s also unlikely that the US would directly attack a power like China in any event. The US (and Europe) needs China to keep its own economy afloat, and having a major war in Asia would be devastatingly bad for the US. There’d be a lot of bluster about it all, but nothing much else. So PP can’t really do what most Australians who support the US alliance hope it will do — stop an aggressor from contemplating occupation of the most valuable bits of the country.
On the other hand, the idea that Australia could in practice muster enough hardware and strike power to parry China or even Indonesia is utterly ludicrous. If either of these jurisdictions gets the idea that bringing its forces here to plunder the place would be on balance a good idea, there’s really nothing we can do about it. So spending up big on CD doesn’t make sense either.
Luckily, at this stage anyway, it seems that those in charge of Indonesia and China understand that trying such a thing wouldn’t be on balance a good idea, largely because buying resources and using them in a stable global rules-based trading regime is far more profitable and less risky than trying to pillage them. Being in front in a game where everybody loses a lot is not that appealing.
So while we’d like to feel utterly immune to attack from our neighbours, it would be better if we stopped craving things we can’t have. Life entails risk and uncertainty. All of us accept this in our personal lives and at the level of community we ought to keep a level head about this too. Instead, to borrow the terminology of the political classes, what we need is to ensure that the political architecture of the world favours states making sure first of all that their own communities are getting what they need, when they need it, appealing for external assistance when that is required, and that all states really do reflect the informed consent of their communities. We are a very long way from getting to that point but if we really want to improve our chances of avoiding nasty military conflict and ensure that humanity as a whole lives better than it does now, there is nothing better.
Funny thing. The Eurozone is in meltdown in part because the free trade rules stop Greece, Italy etc. slowing down the importation of goods and services these countries cannot afford instead of killing their economy.
Worse still, free market globalization is part of the reason that poor Governance in a minor economy like Greece is causing wobbles to the world economy.
Then there is the GFC. Part of the problem there was that the US was blocked by WTO rules from doing anything about its massive balance of trade problem with China.
I am a lot more worried about Australian governments who expect praise every time they set up a free trade agreement even if it is biased against Aus. Julia should stop and think about the wisdom of moving towards a Pacific Rim EU and more free trade agreements.
The marines are of far less concern.
Kevin Rudd and Hilary Clinton have been interested in regional strategic developments for some time. Our substandard MSM have left Rudd’s outstanding regional strategic work mostly unremarked, getting all excited instead about manufactured leadership tensions in Canberra. Ooh look, Julia didn’t ask Kevin about India.
Obama and Gillard are surfing this wave of parochial confusion and stupidity. Dropping the Darwin bomb on the MSM has left them all chasing their tails, what a bunch of hopeless nongs. The conversation here on this thread is richer by a country mile that the trash we are offered in the news media.
Someone upthread mentioned the Chinese String of Pearls strategy (in part to avoid the choke point in the Malacca Strait which channels some 50% of the world’s oil) and the Spratly Island dispute in the South China Seas. Let’s hear more of this, its important.
Of related interest perhaps is the long-mooted Kra Canal across the Thai peninsula, on the drawing board since 1677. Singapore only exists because of its port facilities and would decline quickly if the canal were to be built, and Malaysia is not at all supportive for obvious reasons.
In 1985 the Japanese proposed using over 20 nuclear devices to blow a channel through the mountains across the Thai peninsula. More recently the Chinese have expressed interest in underwriting the multi-billion dollar construction of the Kra canal, as part of its forward bases strategy: the string of pearls.
We are small fish swimming in a crowded ocean. We should open our eyes and look beyond the horizon to see what is really going on, and perhaps ask Rudd a few intelligent questions at the next press conference. He might have something interesting to tell us beyond how he feels about Julia, and vice versa.
For example, Burma. What is happening there is not just all about Aunn San Suu Kyi, photogenic as she might be with flowers in her hair. The burmese just kicked the chinese off one of the dams they were building on the Mekong. That really hurt, much more than Darwin probably.
But don’t ask the Canberra Press Gallery to explain, they have their heads up their bottoms. Julia apparently blushed when she met Obama, that is all the news we need to know.
We should understand this:
The 1% who rule the US will do whatever it takes to maintain the status quo, that is US imperial rule (as that photo illustrates- straight out of Imperial India, it could be).
They would have no problem with setting the world on fire – so long as they rule it.
If this means nuclear armageddon then so be it, the global rape pillage and plunder that began at the turn of the last century will continue because they know nothing else.
Huggy
dear akn
thanks for the encomium. we are certainly living in conservative times, eh, and the reporting of war is more circumscribed, conventionalised & effectively neutered, than it was in “the wild west of tv” when i was growing up. i was born as the yanks took over intervention in the vietnam nationalist civil war from the frenchies. i started school when kennedy was pres & “escalation” entered the vernacular. i graduated from school when the end & henry kissinger’s nobel peace prize were in sight. efforts by the state to control news were nothing new then either but it feels these days like there’s a more unquestioning, widespread, and normalised acceptance of & compliance with these efforts of the state. security from terrorism is another nail for tyrants with hammers to pound.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
That’s a good framework Fran. There are tendencies within Australian strategic thinking towards air and naval defence of shipping lanes and strategic land points. More forward air and navy bases are good economic stimuls and serve well over time especially built to service ships and planes that are designed and repaired in Australia. This avoids dependency. As defence of Australian soil and army would be very hard pressed so better defend the island continent which is our real tactical advantage.
However, your point about global international co-operation is the salient one here. War is no longer diplomacy by other means. It is mass slaughter of populations by national identity and/or ethnicity. Counting in war crimes against women, war is also femicidal. It is simply unacceptable. Those who favour war may have their way but it will not happen without their having hear the voice of reasoned criticism. War is the form of barbarism that most chains humanity to a pre-modern past and it is the key mechanism by which our rulers bind us to their authority.
On the other hand we could always rename the joint Quislandia and find ways to make a quid out of being imperialist collaborators. No, wait…
What? Indonesia? Are you insane?
They don’t have a navy to speak of. They don’t have an air force. Their army is on garrison duty to keep their country together.
Their economy is a not much more than a half the size of ours.
Their cities are within striking range of our air force and navy. Our cities are not within striking distance for them, even if they had an air force to speak of.
You may as well speak of an assault on us by that other significant regional power – New Zealand. It is closer to our heartland and great cities than Indonesia is and its armed forces pack all the same punch as the Indonesian military.
Indonesian military have to raise a significant proportion of their own funding just to keep their units operating – an invasion would take too much attention from their business enterprises
All true GregM … in the short-to-medium term, there is no prospect of doing such a thing, but in 25 or 30 years’ time, Indonesia has a population base and the scope to significantly increase its military capacity to contrive an assault on the north of the country.
As I implied above, I think this utterly improbable but really this is an argument against the need for Australia to have a defence capacity in excess of what would be required to police territorial waters against non-state actors doing the wrong thing and civil defence in emergencies like the Queensland floods.
We don’t need to guess what the 25-30-year picture is going to look like because we can’t guess with sufficient accuracy to warrant the resources we’d have to start building now and if there is a real threat from China or Indonesia then it’s not something we will be able to do much about.
We are far better off fostering good governance globally and in our region rather than sabre-rattling US military power.
GregM, I think that Fran has a point regardless of whether you ignore Indonesia as a “significant regional power” now or in the future. I think the reason Fran is right is that any regional power would have to be insane to think invading us is a good idea, and thus presumably wouldn’t be put off by thoughts of US retaliation. By the time the US sorted something out we would obviously have suffered a lot of damage.
But there is only one example of a country in Asia embarking on such an insane foreign policy in the past 100 years, and it took a year to get to PNG because its imperial plans were so insane. Given that, I really don’t think that Australian defense policy needs to worry too much about the possibility of a foreign power in this region attempting to invade us.
Thus I think we can have a continental defence strategy without raising our defence spending to insane levels, because all we really need to do is make it hard for a nation to invade us without first establishing an overwhelming force at a staging point in Asia. By which time a range of regional actors will have come into play.
And anyway the only country capable of acting on such an insane foreign policy would be China. Provided that the regional powers don’t treat China the way that the UK and US treated Japan in the 20s and 30s, everything will be fine. They are clearly not planning on dominating the world through military force, and don’t even seem to have imperialist ambitions in the old-fashioned sense.
This all makes continental defence for Australia cheap and easy, and I think it also makes NZ defence policy very rational.
I like Indonesia where it is: a large country conveniently located between Australia and China. The Japanese overrun it once when it was a colony of the Dutch; it’s hard to see anyone over-running it again as an independent country.
All true sg @67. But there is that malevolent presence to our south east we have to protect ourselves from.
Imagine what would have happened if events went other than the way they did in the RWC last month. Imagine if it was us against them in the Final and we beat them. They’d have been tearing the bathtubs out of their bathrooms to paddle over and have a go at us.
We can’t be too careful.
True GregM, but in those circumstances what chance would we have? Is our army a match for the combined might of their amateur rugby clubs? Such a battle isn’t a mere trifle, like Vietnam or WW2 PNG. We’re talking about a serious conflict. I think diplomacy, especially where it consists of a carefully crafted loss in the semis, is a better approach.
It’s not that Obama is a neocon, however…
He is locked in to their policy.
The same kind of authoritarian/democratic faultline runs thru Asia as did Europe a hundred years ago. History rhymes. The StrategyBots at the three thousand odd US agencies and thinktanks that deal with this stuff know that. Some might argue it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. But we can expect to see a ramp up of Australian military spending, possibly a homegrown MIC and more duties attached to our ANZUS obligations.
Whether or no it’s in our interests to join the US in a fight with China is a matter of debate amongst our own StrategyBots. For economic reasons they think we should remain neutral. I’m not sure that will be up to us.
Iraq was also about China. (imho)
I’m with GregM. Anyone who thinks the internal security goon squad called Tentara Nasional Indonesia constitutes a threat to Australia needs to go have a good lie down.
Moreover, from Indonesia’s perspective, the main point of ASEAN is to keep China’s influence at bay in the region. This is why they are the biggest sponsors of Timor’s accession application.
Traditionally in Australia, the debate around defence policy matters has focused on the question of whether Australia needs a powerful protector as a shield against regional enemies {let’s call this the “PP” approach} (and if so, which PP that should be) or whether Australia can simply go it alone and protect itself, relying on its own geography
The powerful protector was for three-quarters of white Australian history the British Empire. Those who were loyal soldiers of the Queen spruiked the myth that our geography made us vulnerable. There was an assessment in Foreign Policy in ’41 of Australia’s capability. It’s conclusion was that we had never been responsible for our defense. This continued to be true until the present point.
“I’ll happily predict that Darwin will become even more of a seething hotbed of crime, violence and sex assault than it already is once the base is sited.”
“Hotbed” is a good word to use in relation to Darwin, particularly at this time of year; some people use “air-con” to deal with it but, honestly, I’ve now seen an “air-head” make objectionable assertions about Darwin that should not go unchallenged.
The base where the US Marines will be stationed, called Robertson Barracks, has been sited already for the best part of 20 years.
… we can always console ourselves that for a lot of Aboriginal people in the NT their future of sex crimes and violence will be much like their childhoods except with more uniforms.
What – are the Marines a “surge” for the Intervention? You don’t have any idea what you are talking about.
As to prostitution in the NT… this is the one bright note, really, and at least offers a real dignified economic future for Aboriginal kids on the game. An excellent win/win all around.
The white kids, presumably, got a nice little monopoly on future economic dignity when they got out of prostitution and sold it to the South East Asians now operating it.
There it is in a nutshell: No better way to win an argument than to co-opt concern for the well-being of blackfellahs.
Katz;
Why don’t you ask Vietnam, Philippines about recent Chinese maritime behaviour in the South China Sea. China lays claim to the whole thing – quite contra to international standards. To those guys the developing Chinese blue water navy (the “South China fleet” whose “peace loving” remit of interest now extends to the African coastline) is a big territorial concern. Plus, Chinese expansion of its power-projection capabilities is a strategic threat to the Japanese and the Indians.
Everyone *but* China wants American re-engagement with S.E. Asia because everyone (including China) understands that the U.S.N. 7th Fleet is only real counterbalance to China’s growing aggressive postures in the area (as well as for example, financially sponsoring anti-democratic regimes in places like Burma and Fiji). Of course, not everyone will want to sign up lock stock and barrel to the growing US-Japan-Australia-India axis, many will want to play both ends against the middle.
So, why Darwin? For the Americans they are looking to save money by having more troops forward-deployed. My bet is that Marine units will go to Darwin for training, then there’ll be a visit to Darwin by by one of the LHD MEUs (Marine Expeditionary Units) and the freshly-trained Marines and a flown-in Navy crew will embark and the old units disembark. This is a lot cheaper (and gives quicker readiness postures) than having to sail all that heavy steel back to Pearl Harbour or San Diego.
From the Australian point of view, we are acquiring new LHD platforms and we need to re-learn how to use them properly. Having the Marines up close gives us a very good annual chance at a good squizz at their operational doctrine and a way to get our own Navy and Army personell some hands-on training in these matters.
Fran@58 and Adrien@73: as a Canuck-Aussie, I note that Australians seem more obsessed with Canadians about the threat of invasion. I find that slightly ironic, as Canada has been invaded four times: when the French took over in the first place [if we count that as an invasion], when the British took the land from them during the Seven Year’s War, when Washington and Arnold tried to grab the territory during the American War of Independence (a failure), and another attempt from the Yanks during the war of 1812. What about Australia? 1788 [again if you count it as an invasion], and an invasion in utero courtesy of the Japanese in WWII. Bombing Darwin doesn’t count.
Being able to defend ourselves is one thing, but I think it’s about time to put the spirit of the “Yellow Peril” to rest. What are the hordes from the North going to grab from us – arable land? There’s more productivity in relatively tiny Java than in the whole Australian landmass, Tasmania included.
We are not going to have a mature relationship with China if we let China tell us how to deal with the Dali Lama or whether Marines are based in Aus.
Mature relationships allow for disagreement and different needs and priorities.
The same is true for our relationship with the US.
Way to go there Tyro.
Everyone including the Phillippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Indonesia wants American re-engagement with S.E. Asia.
As you point out they appreciate the consequences of China’s agression in the South China Sea and the value of the US Seventh Fleet to them in repulsing it.
Unlike Fran Barlow and Anthony K Nolan who would treat those hundreds of millions of people as a piece of trash to advance their ideological views.
I think the fixation of “defence” as if it’s just defending the territorial integrity of the nation misses half the picture. Defence is as much about defending national interest, which in our case is our export economy, which in the main, travels by sea. We are a maritime nation and we always have been. What do we do if some power* starts, for example, to attack and destroy LNG tankers as they make their way up through Asia to our export markets? Do we just shrug our shoulders and let that happen? Or do we defend our interests?
* This wouldn’t have to even be China. Any of the nations in the region would be capable of this at least once, even a committed and resourceful non-state actor.
TR:
Yes and no. The PRC inherited these claims from the KMT regime. Taiwan makes the same claim. Clearly this is a difficult issue.
What can the US contribute to this controversy? Is the US interested in a negotiated settlement or is it interested in stoking a confrontation? My bet is on the latter. If this is the case is it in Australia’s interests to be associated with US provocations?
Don’t forget that the PRC has played the long game for more than 50 years over the difficult issue of Taiwan.
Only an [redacted] would ask that question. And in such provocative terms.
This is our primary trade route. Our interests are associated with our absolute maritime right of free passage through it. China, with its claim of sovereignty over it, does not guarantee that. The United States Navy Seventh Fleet does.
Only a [redacted] would think otherwise. And a [redacted] does.
[Moderator Note: unacceptable content has been redacted]
GregM, in a rather biazarre outburst, apropos of nothing at all said above by either Anthony or me volunteered as follows:
Fran, you have run the ideological line that we shouldn’t have a defence force at all because if, one day, Indonesia decided to it could, in 25 to 30 years, invade us and that in that event there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it.
See your post @58.
You could not have been clearer.
Anthony K Nolan ran a series of salacious and racist posts about the deployment of American marines to Darwin, about which Matthew of Darwin, among others, pulled him up on.
You have free run on this site to run that garbage. I get censored when I try to point it out.
A bizarre outburst indeedit is Fran from GregM @ 78. I can’t repond because what he’s written is incomprehensible. I can say that I’m post everything and don’t run on ideology.
However, a plea to GregM: please exploin! For my edification please unpack what you think my ideological purposes might be here in relation to the US base, China and err..whatever else you might be feverishly imagining.
And Fran’s too. That’d be fun!
Matthew at Darwin @74. My guess is that the interests of blackfellas in the NT would be your last consideration. It’s my first consideration of any development there – how does this affect the most vulnerable section of the community which in the NT is the blackfella. Moreover, hows it going to affect the 30% of the NT population who are first people?
Military bases bring trouble – anywhere they are including NSW and Victoria where I do have experience with the sorts of social issues that attend the military life especially around child protection issues.
So, I reckon it is an unhealthy devlopment. And if you reckon Darwin is the very model of civic behaviour then you need to get off the base more often after dark.
Anthony @84 I’d love to respond to you.
But I can’t. Not of my own doing however.
I’ve already tried but my comment is held up in moderation.
So you can go on making racist and sexist comments to your heart’s content. No-one is going to stop you, or even, it is apparent, be allowed to point that out.
So keep taking your cheap shots.
@GregM,
Yes, your comments have been filtered so that we may pre-screen them before publication. We don’t have full-time moderators, therefore sometimes there is a delay until one of us logs on and can approve those comments which don’t breach our comments policy.
That very same comments policy, by the way, very clearly states that moderation decisions will not be discussed on the blog. Please discuss this with us via email if you have questions about your moderation status.
dear all
i’ve said this before on another thread but has anyone read “climate wars” by gwynne dyer?
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Wars-Gwynne-Dyer/dp/1921372222
developments like darwn, in conjucntion with contracting to sell uranium to non-npt india, fill me with dreadful anticipation.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
This is really rather out of hand isn’t it? akn, you aren’t the only person in the world who cares about “blackfellas,” you know. And you do seem to be treading a dangerous line towards making assertions about (at least) US soldiers’ increased likelihood of being child s:x offenders that is more than a little dubious.
Plus your views on s:x work seem to be a little out of step with those of the NT community, who chose to legalize it in the health and welfare interests of the women who work in the industry. If you’re concerned about the fact that that industry attracts poor and uneducated people then your beef isn’t with American soldiers, but with a broader debate about s:x work that has been done and dusted in this country and (thankfully) isn’t going backwards any time soon.
From Closethebase.org:
I realise you will say that a writer on a site called closethebase.org may be accentuating the negative, but if you halved all of the above it would still be unacceptable.
Further, I wonder whether US base = US private contractors? Their reputation is far from benign.
Yep, Helen. The facts around Okinawa base speak loud and clear. You know about it, it’s an old school thing. Unfortunately people who know nothing about it don’t bother to inform themselves even when pointed directly at it as I did regarding Okinawa @ 7.
I also mentioned Subic Bay which was the source of military aid and pipeline for U$ during President Marcos’ long and corrupt reign. (A quick and dirty reference on this, sg and GregM, is Andrew Yeo’s Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests with substantial material on the Philippines anti-bases movement.
Now that’s out of the way sg, it is still unclear what your criticism of me in relation to sex work, sex workers and the sex indistry may be. You are trying to elicit information or attitudes from me towards those subjects. OK. Whenever you want, ask specific questions and I’ll attempt to address them on those matters. I won’t address what you’ve a;ready imp[uted because your imputations aren’t clearly stated. Go ahead and inquire. I can stand my ground.
I’m interested to note the existence of impermissible questions.
I repeat that Taiwan’s and the PRC’s claim to the South China Sea are essentially identical.
Do I want either entity to make good this provocative claim to the South China Sea? No.
Do I expect that the approach being evolved by the US to nullify these extreme claims has the best chance of success? No.
Because my motives have been misrepresented, I wish to state what I perhaps inadequately implied above: I am no apologist of the PRC. I am a critical proponent of US ambitions for the region but no fan of its methodology.
I thank the moderators in advance for this indulgence.
Helen, do any of the facts given in that report pertain specifically to the nationality of the soldiers? i.e. would the effect of having the extra 2500 marines in Darwin be any different to having 2500 diggers, or 2500 mine workers (for that matter)?
Having large numbers of young, single men in one place is obviously a sexual assault risk but this is presumably at least reasonably likely ot be independent of nationality, right? And note: there are 35000 US soldiers in Okinawa. They caused 5600 criminal cases over 35 years. i.e. 150 a year, out of 35000 soldiers. That is about 4.5 per 1000 people. According to the AIC, there are 22 thefts per 1000 people in Australia every year.
The 560 cases of murder, burglary and rape equal about 15 per year, or 43 per 100,000. There were 783 assaults, 86 sexual assaults, and 72 robberies per 100,000 in Australia in 2009. And apparently, Darwin has above average rates of crime. So maybe Darwin needs more marines to bring its crime rate down?
I thought soldiers were supposed to be there for the protection of the population, SG, not to engage in the activities normal to the criminal layer of said population.
And no, having thousands of soldiers with a heavy sense of entitlement concentrated in one location does not make for a normal or desirable cultural milieu, in peacetime at least.
dear Helen
nicely put. to me the brutal facts speak for themselves. the contractors may well turn out to be halliburton.
and people unwilling to credit a site called “closethebase dot org” can try “militarysexoffenersregistery dot com”.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
GregM said:
As you have it here, you are calling the consideration of the utility of have a defence force “an ideological line”. Arguably, that is so, because utility is a paradigm, but I suspect that’s not what you are wanting out of your allegation.
The question is this — if one grants, for the sake of argument, that a defence force could not repel an assault by Indonesian forces without catastrophic consequences for all the parties or only by engaging in action from which most civilised human beings would shrink, then should the rationale for having a defence force rely in any part on the assumption that such a force could serve in such a capacity? I’d say not. If not, then it follows that all capacity building aimed at this end is wasteful and irrational, much as if we decided to save on air travel to New Zealand by building a huge bridge from Sydney. It’s irrational to begin projects that you know can’t be done. It’s also irrational to continue projects to which you’ve already devoted considerable resources if you discover compelling evidence that they can’t be done or can only be done at unacceptable cost, even if this does help you to temporarily save face. We’ve seen a bit of this in defence. None of this reasoning depends at all on my general view about the capitalist armed forces. I could be a liberal and put this claim.
Nor is your outlandish and hectoring claim that I:
borne out in my text.
I would very much encourage them to focus as much as they can on working rationally to advance the well-being of those within their respective jurisdictions. Lavishing scarce resource on their military(ies) is a recipe for disaster. I’d say the same of the Chinese, and the Americans for that matter.
Nobody can say with any certainty what the politics of any of the powers of the region will be in 25 years time. If all of them sharply cut military spending then all of them will be better off. We only have to cast our eyes in the direction of countries like Burma, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and Indonesia (during the period from 1965-99) to that the military can itself be a serious threat to the peace of the countries it occupies.
It would be a very good thing if Australia scaled back its military to that which is required for civil defence, the maintenance of safety and lawful conduct within Australian waters and perhaps what might be needed in cases of civil disturbance in our immediate region where Australians and other refugees might need to be evacuated. But we ought to say plainly that we have no interest in occupying or invading other states or turning out their governments on our own or in concert with others, even if we find those governments objectionable. Rather, we see our role as assisting those in these states who favour human rights and inclusive governance or whose activities would support such ends. That, in my opinion, is the most cost-effective way of underpinning good human life-chance outcomes in our region.
Helen, the link you posted suggests that the soldiers are engaging in criminal activity well below the level seen in the ordinary Australian population. It seems in fact that if you swapped the population of Australia with a population of Marines, on a base, you would in fact be protecting the population” relative to the prior behavior of the “criminal layer of the population” (whoever they are).
Fran yours are wonderful thoughts. In a perfect world they would be wonderful things to do.
But in the real world are they practical? Are they even wonderful?
Back in 1999 our government had to make a hard call against its every instinct and against that of the official Opposition. The only case I can think of in this country’s history when the left and the right of its politics ganged up together against its centre.
Forced by the overwhelming opinion of the Australian people they made what was for them the hard call of demanding that Indonesia withdraw from East Timor.
They applied masterful diplomatic pressure (see UNSC Resolution 1254) to achieve that, backed up by our military force, and the presence, just over the horizon, of a Marine Brigade from a certain unspeakable foreign power, superbly orchestated by our diplomats, just in case the Indonesian government decided to disagree with what we had chosen to do.
But you it seems are all against that.
You, it seems, would want us to sit by, even in the case of East Timor, and let them fester in the sludge of Indonesian rule. At least now, thanks to our intervention, they have their freedom and they can make of their lives whatever they can.
But you, apparently, think that is a bad thing.
Not even a part of them? Or with a UNSC mandate?
Tough luck then to the East Timorese back in 1999 when we stepped up and put our military capacity behind our diplomacy to liberate them.
sg cites figures showing that the rate of crime of US servicemen off base in the Okinawa region is equal to or less than half of the rate of similar crimes in the Okinawan community. This is, as one commentor on Japan Today noted, hardly anything to boast about. Why are they commiting crimes at all?
In 2008, Rice apologised to the Japanese for American conduct off bases (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/28/japan.usa). The entire base of 45,000 troops had a curfew imposed at one point. This addressed the outrage in the Okinawan community. The Yanks were loated by the Okinawans as well as loathed by the civilian population around Subic Bay. They told me that personally.
The source I referenced before about Subic Bay (Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests, Andrew Yeo, viewable on Google Books) states that the US bases were the key structure propping up the Marcos.
The problem with bases is that they are staging posts in the imperial expansion of ruling US interests no matter where they are located. The histories of numerous south and latin american countries attest to the significance of bases especially as the ground station for organising local politics in ways that reflect those interests.
Then there are the domestic issues of which the Japanese Okinawan writer and activist Suzuyo Takasato of Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violencesays:
Okinawa is a place where the armed forces have
learnt how to kill and hurt people in close proximity
to the local population for more than 60 years.
This situation breeds a structural violence, rather
than one that can be understood simply in terms of
the crimes of individual soldiers.
When a 12-year-old girl was raped by three US
soldiers in September 1995, an infamous case, the
shock was too enormous for society to remain
silent. But there is a long history of violence and
harassment on Okinawa derived from the presence
of the US bases.
In the post-war period, including after the Battle
of Okinawa and during the Korean War, the whole
of Okinawa turned into a land without law. US soldiers
raped women, threatening them at gunpoint
in crop fields and on the streets, and even abducting
them in front of their families. Many unwanted
and forced pregnancies resulted as female
Okinawans of all ages were targeted. The victims of
sexual violence on the island included a nine-month
old baby in 1949 and a little girl of six years old,
who was raped and killed in 1955.
During the Vietnam War, the terrible violence
committed by US soldiers, operating in an extremely
unstable and frantic psychological condition was
also directed towards women working in areas surrounding
the US bases. At that time, two to four
people were strangled to death each year, and
many women in the area lived in fear of this fate.
Okinawa reverted to Japanese administration in
1972 but the violence continued, and even became
more chronic. There were a number of rapes and
attempted rapes, as well as sexual abuse in public
areas and even a case where a private house was
invaded. The victims included a 10 year-old girl and
a 14 year-old girl.
When the 1995 rape case of a girl happened, I
was hosting a workshop with other Okinawan
women at the Fourth World Conference on
Women in Beijing on the topic of ‘Military
Violence against Women in Okinawa’. When we
returned home and learnt more about the case,
we decided to break the silence that was a supplement
to the violence. We established ‘Okinawa
Women Act against Military Violence’, an association
to stop military power and violence. At the
same time, we opened the ‘Rape Emergency
Intervention Counseling Centre – Okinawa’, which
offers supports to the victims of sexual violence.
We made a chronology of sex crimes against
women by US soldiers in the post-war period,
which shed light on the previously unknown level
of this violence. We also organised a ‘Peace
Caravan to the USA’ in 1996 and 1998 to make US
citizens aware of the realities of their soldiers’
activities and discuss with them. In 1997, we
formed the ‘East Asia-US-Puerto Rico Women’s
Network Against Militarism’ together with women
from the Philippines, Korea, the USA and Puerto
Rico, where we share our experiences on the negative
impacts of the bases to women, children and
environment, learn collectively from our own activities,
and support each other. In Okinawa itself, 34
organisations came together in 1999 to launch the
‘Okinawa Citizens’ Network’, of which I am one of
the coordinators.
The bases remain, however, and a new ‘floating’
facility is being constructed in Henoko Bay, also in
Okinawa province, as a replacement for the dangerous
Futenma base. A citizens’ referendum
showed a clear ‘no’ to this new base, while various
citizens’ groups engaged in resistance actions on
the sea for more than 600 days, forcing construction
plans to stop. It was the victory of the power
of hope: believing in life, peace and co-existence.
(http://www.tni.org/archives/act/16374)
That’s the voice of genuine experience. I don’t know about your voice, sg, or whose it is, but to me to it lacks humanity.
Then there’s this abstract about the US military and trafficking women in and around bases in Korea: Modern-day comfort women: the U.S. Military, transnational crime, and the trafficking of women.
Hughes DM, Chon KY, Ellerman DP.
Source
And on the subject of the closure of Subic Bay base in the Philippines – it was because the Philippino senate voted to close it. On violence against women around Subic Bay:
(http://www.gmanews.tv/story/232573/nation/20-years-later-senators-who-rejected-us-bases-hailed-anew)
akn, I didn’t “cite figures.” I put figures presented by anti-base activists in their population context. I didn’t say crimes by US servicemen were lower than those in the surrounding Okinawan community. You’re welcome to dispute those figures, because they’re very rough, but don’t pretend they’re from me – Helen posted them.
But if the newcomers to a town like Darwin are historically famous for committing crimes at a much lower level than the community they’re entering, complaining about their “high crime” rate is just wrong. Can you reconcile your stance with these figures? Do you have a theoretical reason why US marines in Darwin should have a 0 crime rate, while non-US Marines shouldn’t? Does the same thing apply to other guest workers in that city? What about Asian sex workers in Darwin – there are quite a few. I guess they aren’t allowed to commit any crimes either?
In reality, I think you are claiming that US marines are especially sexually aggressive, contra the stats that Helen cites. Why do you think that is? Can you perhaps explain to the gallery what evidence you have for this claim? And note that single examples of sex crimes do not constitute evidence for this: we’re talking about relative levels of crime. You need to present something which contradicts the stats Helen presented, which show that US marines are much less likely than ordinary aussie men to commit crime.
Now, for another matter:
Is this actually true? I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but in every town that US soldiers are based, there is a group of women who absolutely love them, and can’t get enough of them. I’ve met these women in Japan. Where do these women rank in your analysis? What about this woman, who works tirelessly at age 80 to make Marines in Iwakuni feel welcome? Why do you think these people are so happy to meet, work with, and be with your supposed monsters?
sg – I don’t believe that you’ve read any of the content of my three posts. above each of which cites material that addresses exactly your complaints that I am presenting unsubstantiated grievances. Nor do I believe that I can convince you, even after posting reference material showing that there are long standing movements of opposition to US bases because of the local impact and because of opposition to US imperial presence. Moreover, the movements are in Okinawa, Subic Bay, South America. Or, in other words, pretty much wherever there are US bases and enough freedom of expression in the local political field for women to organise against them.
But you just ignore this evidence and refuse to comment on it.
Pathetic.
Maybe, akn, like you, those movements have valid geopolitical reasons for opposing the bases, but focus on local “women’s rights” issues instead because they’re easier to build a successful campaign on?
Oh Robert, pine crap sails on & on but now it’s about sex in the city or something.
At first I thought it would just be the incontinent set at the US leader sheep forum going lady G at the prospect of the World’s Grate Mates (what a double: the we we can: sheared values) taking a tumble in Darwin’s indigenous redacted wave pool and saving major Mitchell St. from imminent Chinese attack.
And then, perhaps politician plain packaging with mandatory pre commitment and rodent branding would be compulsory; you know they kill your dads brothers and mates & who knows how many ‘other’ people well anywhere etc. might get a run.
But then along comes the SBY & rogue element update
1) Red rodent: 3 speed boats, for business model clap trap; and TNI tax collection.
2) 27 hour Grate Mate in Chief: shut up about the blonde rodent’s stolen job & white paper for war with the Chinese; our saving Major Mitchell St & I’ll shut up the red rodent et al about a certain US gold mine & a bunch of really cranky provincial people…ok? Btw you’re the best this & that.…insert GPS & standard drone central rave of the day. All hit go.
But Robert, seriously, we’ve missed a holiday bonanza for working families here…eg.
The bombing of US shipping in Darwin harbour, followed by
The official first road race to Alice Springs
Afghan near beer day
Townsville wharf day, surely a sheared value winner there?
etc.
Sad really.
Oh, I see, you think that those women in Okinawa, Subic Bay and Puerto Rico as well as the women who were trafficked in and around South Korea, to all of whom I’ve provided links, are mere ‘common front’ or ‘popular front’ dupes. God, I’m such a wretched dupe, of course, they’re all front organisations for communist guerilla movements scattered around Asia and South East Asisa. Deep sleepers in vertically integrated cadres with underground tunnels linking them to Ho Chi Minh City and thence to North Korea. That’s so weird I’m thinking you must be working for DFAT. Totally in denial of the reality of people’s struggles for freedom from violence and only able to argue along the lines of “well, they’re criminals too” about local populations.
But you stay bent over for the Yanks mate. Someone has got to do it.
See akn, I would find it sooooo much easier to understand your anger if you didn’t finish your rants about the rights of women in SE Asia with sexually violent imagery like “you say bent over for the yanks mate.”
I have this suspicion – please, tell me I’m wrong – that your opinions on this matter would be more reliably liberationist if you weren’t so quick to characterize people who disagree with you as gay, or rape victims, or both.
Oh, so neither my opinions nor my vigorous and colourful workin’ class expressions are to your taste. And you’d find it sooooo much more easy to believe in me if I conformed to the petite rules of your linguistic perfumed garden. Not gonna happen.
In any event I don’t see anyone wanting it from the Yanks as much as you do as a victim. No-one who adopts tha’ position so readily is anything other than a practised professional. Smile, I hear the money’s worth it.
hahaha.
You see akn, the problem here isn’t “petite rules” in a “linguistic perfumed garden,” it’s a matter of basic respect. When you compare people who disagree with you about the rights of sex workers to sex workers; when you compare people who disagree with you about how bad a group of people are to gay men, or suggest we’re adopting “tha’ position”[sic], what you’re doing is undermining your own argument. Why should anyone really believe you respect women’s rights, or gay rights, or [heaven forbid!] the rights of sex workers, when your first, testy response to disagreement is to compare your interlocutor to a member of one of those groups, being f++ked? It kind of makes you look like you don’t care as much as you say you do.
Which may also have been mathew of darwin’s point a few tens of comments back.
Oh, and while I’m at it, I see you have failed to address the points I actually made – too busy comparing me to a man over a barrel. Perhaps you’d care to put aside the sexual frisson and have another go?
My comment to Fran @100.
Nothing from Fran since.
I know. It is wrong of me to say that.
dear akn
re: getting/being bent over.
once upon a time they used to add: “would sir like butter or lard with that?”
yours sincerely
alfred venison
GregM is correct:
Australia’s standing as a power that respects the rule of international law requires us to maintain some form of projectable military power for situations like East Timor, sanctioned as it was by the UN.
The practical task is to match our commitments with our resources and the willingness of the citizens to commit “until the job is done.”
Now, now sg, @ 106 you wrote:
I offered above three substantial citations from citizen movement activists deriving from Okinawa, Subic Bay and an international women’s rights campaign against violence and assault against women in and around US military bases. You don’t engage with any of this material and accuse me of not responding to your criticisms and accusations of bad faith.
For the record then and to emphasise that a US military base in the NT raises more issues than derive from geopolitics (a point I raised @ 7):
i) US bases are centres for criminal activity both on and off the base. They have been noted as significant centres for human trafficking. They have also been noted as centres of disgraceful contract hiring of foreign nationals as support workers. These people are employed at arms lentgh by military contractors. US bases are therefore also centres of anti-labour law practises.
ii) There is a long standing women’s movement with strong bases of support in the Philippines, Japan and Puerto Rico (at least) that opposes the siting of such bases because of the impact on women in the local community. They complain about the induction of young women into the sex industry, they complain about sex crimes and violent crimes against the local population. They cite local knowledge and statistics that defy official statistics.
iii) The NT base is liable to have the same sort of impact on the people of the NT especially on the most economically and culturally vulnerable who are Aboriginal and constitute about one third of the NT population.
iv) This new base, starting at 2,500 personnel but ending up who knows where, will more likely than not raise a whole new raft of quite significant social issues for the NT Aboriginal population. Off base management of these issues will be in the hands of the NT government which has proven so spectacularly incompetent at addressing Aboriginal needs that the last two Federal governments were driven to initiate programs that curtailed the liberties and rights of Aboriginal NT citizens. Known as ‘The Intervention’ these programs are a direct admission of abysmal policy failure over an extended period of time, whatever anyone thinks of the rights and wrongs of of things like ‘income quarantining’.
Into this mess, into a culture in great crisis, Gillard now announces a US base will be built with barely any public comment from the chattering classes about the social consequences of locating such a base, with well known attendant issues of crime, violent crime, sexual violence and the usual booming sex industry, amongst such a community.
To all of this you, sg, isolate with great indignation what appears to you to be some failure of pomo political correctness on my part when I fail some sort of litmus test of ideological purity apparently around my attitude to the sex industry.
Therefore, and further for the record, here are a list of professions that I hold in low regard: lawyers; plastic surgeons who do useless cosmetic work where none is needed; prostitutes and brothel owners all of whom could do productive work but choose to do sex work; Australian military mercenaries who undertake overseas military adventures for good pay but to no good political purpose and certainly not for purposes of national defence; dentists who overservice and overcharge and fight like the blazes to oppose Medicare rebates for dental work because it would require a level of surveillance and scheduling for costing what they do; pharmacists, all of whom engage in price setting and who have rorted the system for years; Australian architects who are redundant as designers of public buildings and spaces.
So, hookers are merely one group among many of whom I’ve a dim view. I wouldn’t wish sex work on my worst enemy (actually, I might) because it is, in my view and experience, demeaning, corrosive to the self and self respect, dangerous and dirty work. It is likely that the industry spokespersons who constitute the Scarlet Alliance will offer evidence to the contrary but that organisation is deeply compromised by the presence of brothel owners and offers highky suspect data and studies to constantly assert that all is well in the industry which has not been my professional and personal experience.
Now sir, would you like butter or lard with that?
GregM asked:
In a perfect world they’d already be moot, since there would be no objectionable governments or any question of armies or even police having any role at all to play in human affairs. My point would be: how does one approach a perfect world, save with the idea of the perfect world in mind and interim goals?
One doesn’t need to believe that the perfect world will be attainable in one’s own lifetime because provided the interim goals are plausible and in themselves worthy and at least as worth as any other excluding goals, the struggle to achieve them is warranted.
Good for them. I supported it then and I favoured Whitlam discouraging them from invading in 1975. The reality is though that had the Indonesians at the time bucked UNSC 1254 it was the world reaction rather than that of Australia that would have loomed largest in their minds. No military force that Australia could have brought to bear on that timeline would have been decisive. The reality was that the Indonesian regime itself was ambivalent about Timor L’Este carefully weighing the potential effect on other separatist movements with the role of its own military in Indonesian affairs.
For the record, I have no problem in principle with particiapation of Australian forces in attempts to underpin genuine self-determination where there can be no reasonable doubt that this is what is taking place.
Peacekeeping is a reasonable and laudable thing.
However, we don’t need much more than well trained and equipped police to do that. Arguably, Australia (along with a number of other international partners) ought to have had a substantial number of such police on the ground in the run-up to the referendum to ensure the safety of the civilian population both before and after the referendum. In that case, Australia (along with others) would not have been doing “regime change” but affirming a bona fide act of sovereignty.
Building submarines and buying joint strike fighters isn’t necessary.
akn, your three “substantial citations” don’t offer any evidence that US forces are more dangerous than the local community they live in. You have presented evidence that they commit crimes, but not that they commit more crimes than locals. In fact, Helen’s citation makes it fairly clear that compared to free-roaming Australians, marines are on a very tight leash. From the stats provided, US marines are much less likely to be on the NT ugly mug list than are local men.
You do know about “ugly mug” lists, right?
As to human trafficking and contract labour, I’m pretty sure that US forces employ local staff under local laws – I remember when I first moved to Japan reading a US marine guidance for marines on how to deal with Japanese colleagues, and one of the first points was that Japanese work shorter hours and have more holidays than their US colleagues. Please do ponder that. You are comparing a US base in Australia in 2011 with a US base in the Philipines in the 70s and 80s. You do remember what was going on in the Phillipines then, right? Are you expecting us to believe that the same governance issues and employment laws will apply to a US base in Darwin as it did in Subic bay 30 years ago? How do you think Aussie soldiers would have behaved in Subic bay in the 70s?
Your accusations of human trafficking are beneath contempt. If any human trafficking occurs in Darwin it will be the illegal movement of women into the off-base sex industry; it’s happened before and it will happen again. This is a serious crime, and is taken very seriously under domestic law. I don’t know how you think US soldiers will be able to do this, but I’m sure you have an example from 1970s Subic bay that will be entirely applicable.
I’ve no doubt you are completely unaware that the best prevention of human trafficking is a legal sex industry, just as you are no doubt completely unaware that “the induction of young women into the sex industry” has nothing to do with US forces and everything to do with local businesses offering local women work opportunities. If you knew anything about the Japanese sex industry, for example, or had spent even a single night in Shinjuku, you would be well aware of how women are “induced” into the sex industry here, and it is neither forcible nor involuntary. In Australia, any such “induction” would very rapidly lead to very serious charges being laid against the responsible owner.
This last fact, incidentally, is because police take crimes against sex workers seriously in Australia. They have this attitude entirely because of the work of organizations like the Scarlet Alliance, and very much against the efforts of people like you to pretend that you can just ignore the sex industry and make it go away.
So once again, if you have any actual evidence that US soldiers are more criminal than the community around them, then please present it. Not anecdotes, which are perfectly valid as evidence that some soldiers commit crime, but provide no support for your central assertion, which is that these soldiers will increase rates of crime in the NT.
Down and Out, Saigon – I note that Australians seem more obsessed with Canadians about the threat of invasion.
Yep. We know the biggest threat of invasion is from Canada. We’ve had out eye on you for sometimes. Seems so ‘pleasant’ and ‘polite’ and ‘reasonable’ but it’s all an act and it doesn’t fool us for a second.
I find that slightly ironic, as Canada has been invaded four times… another attempt from the Yanks during the war of 1812.
That was quite a while ago old bean. Canada was still free territory if you discounted the indigenous people which they did. There were sovereignty struggles between the US, Britain and France. They were resolved. Since then it’s enjoyed some geopolitical convenience.
What about Australia? 1788 [again if you count it as an invasion], and an invasion in utero courtesy of the Japanese in WWII. Bombing Darwin doesn’t count.
We also enjoy geopolitical convenience. The ‘yellow peril’ thing was a propaganda ploy by über-monarchists. Dumbarse’d Aussies fell for it. There’s a lot of talk here about Indonesia but the US Army are not being deployed because of Indonesia; this is about China. China is an explicitly expansionist state with a resource/population problem.
What are the hordes from the North going to grab from us – arable land?
Coal, uranium, control of the Pacific trade routes, space to stuff their surplus population and yes, arable land if AGW doesn’t kill it off.
It’s an old adage: you want peace you have to prepare for war. This is one of the metaphysical facts of life that I most hate, but it’s a fact nonetheless and I don’t believe you’ll render it historical by refusing to face it.
My point would be: how does one approach a perfect world, save with the idea of the perfect world in mind and interim goals?
Might be worth bearing in mind that history is ironical. And also the existence of human nature.
Oh right, there is no human nature.
Adrien said:
Ironical you say? How ironic! Do you have a point?
That’s not ‘ironical’ but a kind of imaginary … though the salience to my remarks is doubtful.
sg states:
I don’t have to refute this argument becasue its premises are unsound. The moral logic behind this thinking is fallible at best and despicable at worst. You are saying that it is ok to introduce another community into community social relations because they are no worse than the locals when it comes to crime. As I’ve already said, this is nothing to boast about. Why are they doing crime at all? Your logic is that because the locals already live with crocs it is ok to release piranhas into the streams. The problem for the local community, and this is basic sociology, is the increase in the concentration of crime and particular sorts of crime due to this military incursion.
In general, I dispute that this base is in the general interests of Australians. It is in the interests of US ruling interests as are all bases on foreign soil.
You say:
Flat out wrong and I’ll put the references up when I’ve time. Even the idea of employing contract foreign labour to service Afghanistan bases under ‘local laws’ (Afghani labour laws) is a joke.
You say:
Flat out wrong again. Human trafficking has been uncovered at US bases and UN bases in several spots including Latin and South America and South Korea (all US bases). But don’t let the facts get in the way of your moral indignation. It depends on which gangs of organised US crime are operating out of which bases.
Sex trafficking is a serious crime that flourishes in NSW and Victoria using mainly South East Asian women. I don’t know about the other states. A recent 4C titled “Sex Slavery” on Monday 10 October, 2011, makes this abundantly clear. Do watch it. It also makes clear that the sex industry remains plagued by violent crime and criminals. Nothing will change here and the NT government cannot be relied on to police it. Whatever the Scarlet Alliance do they don’t readily disclose how many industry representatives with business interests are active in establishing their agenda within S.A.
You are, quite bizarrely for someone who I assume is some sort of leftie, defending the honour of the least honourable of US institutions – the military. Like I said above, when I’ve further time I’ll throw some links in about ecological crimes committed on or around US bases.
Just a yarn to finish: during the Vietnam years the US wanted to test Agent Orange oin Cape York Peninsula and were not to be dissuaded from doing so by arguments about the welfare of the Aborigines on Cape York. It took the very determined efforts of a NP Senator to prevent it (personal conversation) because the Minister for Defence at the time, Alan Fairhall, didn’t give a stuff and would have let them do it.
These are your friends mate. Not mine. Never will be. Anyone who thinks the Yanks are our special friends is a galah.
No, the moral logic behind this is that US soldiers will not increase the crime rate in the community they enter. It’s not despicable to say that a foreign community will commit less crime than the local community – much less, in this case. What’s fallible is to claim crime rates are a good reason to refuse this base, because it’s blatantly, obviously, not true. Women in Darwin are at much greater risk from Australian men in Darwin than they will be from these marines. Your responsibility, if you want to float this completely pathetic argument, is to prove otherwise. Claiming that we shouldn’t have any foreigners in Darwin unless they commit 0 crime – and furthermore, suggesting that any other view is “despicable” – is ludicrous. On this grounds we should close the ports and the airports, because lord knows those sailors occasionally start a brawl, and who wants tourists? Do you know the trouble they get up to?
Yes yes, when you’ve time. Why are you conflating Afghan labour laws and Australian labour laws? Are we talking about Afghanistan or Darwin?
You do understand the difference between human trafficking and sex work, right? Because to the best of my knowledge the former is a crime in Australia, while the latter is not. And I think you’ll be hard pressed to find evidence linking the US military to either of these. There is evidence that contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan are engaging in human trafficking for on-base workers, but not for prostitution. In fact, the only (vague, unreferenced) articles on sex trafficking around US bases stumble to present any evidence at all that it’s happening, but have clear evidence that US marines are banned from visiting sex industry establishments. They also adopt the rather credulous view that sex work doesn’t exist in a country until the US turns up. Perhaps you’re not aware of the history of certain movements within feminism deciding to depict all sex workers as victims?
You should be more aware of the fraught history of over-egged claims on this issue, and the damage it does to sex worker rights when it is used to supposedly protect their interests.
Are you finally trying to claim that the Scarlet Alliance are being run by the mafia or something? This claim that sex worker organizations represent the interests of pimps and pornographers is the oldest misogynist slur in the book. It’s also obviously not true. It’s funny you accuse me of defending the honour of the US military, which is apparently a terrible thing for a leftie to do, while you charge about besmirching the honour not only of the individual, often working-class minority men and women in that force, but also the honour of sex workers and their representatives throughout the country.
But you’ve made clear what you think of sex workers – and you obviously consider their personal interests to be secondary to your political agenda.
sg, a fine display of dissembling using positivist methodologies that are now so much a part of your being that they are part of you and you no longer know how you are doing whatever it is that you are doing. Can’t see the forest for the trees? There is no problem with the globalised sex industry because you can’t see one?
Positivists always take refuge in the claim that they only give an account of what they find without, usually, addressing epistemological issues around what they see, what they claim they can see, what they can’t see because they’re not looking for it and why they didn’t think to look for it. It is deeply gendered, as Donna Haraway emphatically showed in her (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science.
Moreover I find your faith in the regulatory state very touching. Never was any crime and corruption around the sex industry. Never. Besides, it’s the very model of self regulation and worker’s participation these days. Even the Swedes could learn from them. Yeah, right professor, after you.
Human trafficking co-exists with the sex industry. Better watch that Four Corners programme I referred to above. Stating that doesn’t won’t make it so. Whatever the conditions of sex workers in Japan I’d be looking for an impartial source of information than you. According to you Fukushima is all apple blossoms and communal consciousness. In which case, I’ll do my own reading on the role of Japanese gangsters in the sex industry.
The matter of the political compromising of Scarlet Alliance is a matter of personnel who wear more than one hat and the public record of who they are and what they do in and out of Scarlet Alliance. One day I’ll link it all up for you.
I don’t care if you think that I’m a misogynist because I’m concerned about the impact of a vigorously re-criminalised Top End sex industry on Aboriginals and, by the way, on Asian sex workers. The trafficked ones who don’t exist according to Immigration, the Feds, the NSW coppers, the Victorian coppers, a few academics over at Uni NSW, the Scarlet Alliance shareholders and brothel owners mates and a few others in public health.
Finally, to reiterate, there is ample evidence that the US military are deeply infiltrated by all kinds of criminal elements. When it comes to the aactivities of Haliburton and Blackwater the normal business arrangements are a crime against democracy and civility. Mate, if you don’t see that then I’m askin’ whose side are you on?
Fran – How ironic!
If you’re asserting illiteracy then I obviously disagree. No matter if you were correct; there is no irony either way. I believe language an organic thing. I can assert such and such an utterance a word and do so from time to time.
Do you have a point?
Yes. It’s a little hard to believe that you would be open enough to accept in good faith considering your condescending pedantry. If you can get over yourself you may even have an interesting discussion.
That’s not ‘ironical’
I didn’t say it was. I said history had an irony woven thru it. of the ironies human nature’s ironies I said nothing. I merely asserted its existence.
but a kind of imaginary
The paradox of Marxists. They are atheists and believe in science but choose a most theological exceptionalism when dealing with the human animal. This in spite of certain apparent consistencies across eco-cultural diversities.
though the salience to my remarks is doubtful.
That is ironic. I am not deploying any pre-emptive block to your position. I’m well aware of it. I disagree. I say there is such a thing as human nature and that efforts to transcend it by ignoring it are doomed to failure. The Left persist in being disciples of Rousseau whether or no there’s consciousness of the condition. And then they wonder why so many think them ridiculous.
An example of irony surfeit of the ignorance of Nature, thus: 96 years and 11 months ago some people sought to create a place wherein everyone was equal. It became a nightmare reflection of that ideal. What actually happened was the opposite of what was intended.
Ironical ain’t it?
dear Adrien
Down & Out of Sai Gon may indeed have drawn a “long bow” with the french indian wars, but the war of 1812, while (excitingly) only a month away from its bi-centenary, remains one of the defining moments in canadian history/histoire canadienne.
there is no doubt but that the usa invaded in 1812 with intent to annex to their union upper & lower canada (modern ontario & quebec), nova scotia and new brunswick.
there is also no doubt but that the usa was famously repelled in this effort by a diverse assortment of english & french speaking people who called themselves canadian/canadien, british regulars & native auxiliaries.
The yanks meant to take canada & they didn’t/couldn’t; they never tried again. modern canadian identity was forged in that conflict.
this was the only war in which the territory of the usa was invaded by a foreign power. and this power occupied washington & burned the white house, in retaliation for the 1813 american looting & burning of gov’t & private buildings in york (modern toronto) at that time the capital of canada. i always have & always will remember the 24th of august 1814
& also that great canadian patriot/patriote canadienne laura secord. onya laura!
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Thanks Alfred, But that Canada has been invaded does not in any way detract from the imperitive to consider the possibility that it could happen here.
Fran Barlow @ (a long way back) – a country like Australia doesn’t necessarily need a defence force that can stop any invasion scenario. Maybe just enough to buy a decent amount of time for the UN to work out whether its going to intervene or not. If there were no defence force and the country were completely overrun before the UN could make its mind up it would be a much harder situation to reverse.
Oh akn …
No, I didn’t say there never was any crime and corruption in the sex industry; I said that decriminalization reduces it. And I nowhere claim it is “the very model of self regulation.” It clearly isn’t. It’s a model of government regulation of a highly unionized industry with significant workplace safety issues. Sounds very left-wing, doesn’t it?
It also coexists with the fishing industry and, if the reports you put up earlier are to be believed, hair-dressing. It’s not unique to the sex industry and attempting to regulate it as such misses the broader issues raised by the global movement of workers. But this is the whole point of the feminist anti-sex work movement: they want to use sex workers to attack the broader machinery of capitalism, just as you are using them (and other moral panics about Aborigines) to attack the broader issue of imperialism.
Doing so just makes it clear that these women (and for you, Indigenous people) don’t get a greater regard from you than as pawns in your broader political agenda. The same, too, for US marines, many of whom are poor, working class or ethnic minority men using the military to escape their poverty and/or get access to health care. Instead of villainizing these people as child r**ists you should consider looking for a broader critique of imperialism that grants them their humanity and considers their circumstances, before, during and after their military service.
ok, bit by bit.
You say:
Decriminalising the sale of sex and decriminalising the brothels is a noble intention. Decriminalising the industry would mean regulatiing the brothel owners and associated staff so that individuals with a criminal hisatory, especially those rleated to violent criome, sex assault, sex crimes of any sort and vioplence against women and, finally, violence against men and children, were barred from working in the industry.
That’s decriminalisation. As a sociologist you arent’ even scratching the surface. But aren’t you and epidemiologist? Sociology requires experience and social imagination. I don’t think epidimiology does.
Adrien tried:
Of course you can. I agree that you can use language as you please. You’d be better saving that defence for an occasion when it’s relevant rather than occasions when you’ve goofed however. The approach doesn’t flatter you.
“Theological exceptionalism”? Laughable. When in a hole, the best advice is to stop digging. Marxists may well fall victim to paradoxes, but this isn’t one of them.
Few who think us ridiculous could summarise Rousseau, and the bulk of those who think the left ridiculous have no business looking in a mirror without wincing at who stares back.
Another bit sg about self regulation and the sex industry:
You’re makin’ shit up. There are no figures on unionisation in the sex industry because there is no industrially registered union.
More later.
Would this also apply to me if I were to commit the solecism of spelling “defensive” as “defencive”
Or should I run the special pleading line of saying that I am running a personal campaign to change the spelling of the word and invite you to join me in that personal campaign?
I don’t think that approach would flatter me. I think that doing that would be goofing off at best.
We all make grammatical errors. Sensible people have the courtesy to overlook those of others unless they change the meaning of the text, and where it does they seek to clarify that only.
GregM said:
Almost certainly. Of course I’d never do that. Also, if I were going to imply someone else had done it in order to make a sarcastic point, I’d get my facts correct first.
As above …
Yes we do, and more often yet, we commit typos. It’s very annoying.
That’s certainly one option. Of course, if someone is taking a swing and talking tosh while doing it, one might take a gentle swing back.
akn, here is a plain english explanation of the NT’s brothel licensing laws. Do you see the bit about excluding people with a criminal record, and the discretion of the licensing authority?
Also, sex workers in Australia are covered by the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union. You didn’t know that did you?
sg, here’s what WikiP says about the NT sex industry:
There appears to be a factual gulf between what you say about the NT and the above. You really ought to stop makin’ shit up.
I agree that you can use language as you please.
Until the Revolution comes and you’ll be in charge of shooting everyone who doesn’t conform to your standards of literal minded pedantry.
You’d be better saving that defence for an occasion
Hahaha how ironical.
when it’s relevant
I was trying to discuss foreign policy. You’ve derailed this into one of your little scolding hissie fits. Do your students draw lots of funny pictures of you and call you stuff like Miss Barf-Oh?
rather than occasions when you’ve goofed
I haven’t goofed. I know when I take liberties with the language. I also know how to spell defense.
“Theological exceptionalism”? Laughable. When in a hole, the best advice is to stop digging. Marxists may well fall victim to paradoxes, but this isn’t one of them.
This is the central problem of Marxism. You think a human being is something that can be designed by legal decree. You have been proved wrong time and time and time again and you always evade the issue. Like now.
You’re just like Currency Lad you know. When you’re confronted with things for which you have no answer you simply say know you are but what am I and repeat it like a snotty little twerp. It’s not an argument. Grow up.
Few who think us ridiculous could summarise Rousseau
I could supply you with a reading list of those who accurately trace the errors of the Left back to Rousseau but I feel certain that the bulk of the literature would be on your list of proscribed texts.
I have tried to engage you in an intelligent conversation and you have proved yourself again to be a pedant and a coward. Forget it.
I’d complain, Adrien, that you had decided to turn tail and run while barking out insults, but since you were clearly attempting a threadjack, I won’t. You’re just a sad little right-of-centre troll with nothing useful to say on this matter who has turned to ignorant red-baiting to sound authoritative.
It is an amusing thing though that your behaviour here recalls that of my smallest and most timid dog, who will make a noise only when she thinks the big scary dog we passed on the walk is safely out of range.
But yes, by all means “forget it”.
Back on something relevant to this post …
http://nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/International/20-Nov-2011/US-to-stockpile-cluster-bombs-in-Australia
Interesting!
Yes akn, you can’t run a brothel, only an escort agency. Surely this doesn’t trouble you, since you think the whole industry should be banned? The link I put up gives you the conditions for management of an escort agency, and contains a great deal more detail about the situation than wikipedia.
Obviously it would be better for NT sex workers if brothels were legal. Hmmm, I wonder who would be advocating for that up there…?
And what mechanism do you propose by which the soldiers will get to visit these sex workers, if brothels are illegal? Perhaps they will call them onto the base?
You still have completely failed to produce any evidence that the marine base will make life less safe for the people of Darwin. More later, I guess…?
“And apparently, Darwin has above average rates of crime. So maybe Darwin needs more marines to bring its crime rate down?”
sg, we’ve been through this before, I think. Your assumption is that marines can simply be lumped in with the population of Darwin as a whole.
They can’t. To do this, you’d have to show that marines will also suffer as victims of crime at similar rates as the general population.
And that marine on marine crime will occur at similar rates as marine on general population.
If you can’t show these things, it’s quite clear the crime rate suffered by the general population (not the general population + new marines rotating in and out), will be higher than it was before.
You’re also neglecting the possibility of violence caused indirectly by the presence of marines. (You slept with that Sep! I’ll show you)
That said, I agree with many of your points, as well as many of akn’s.
Fran – I haven’t derailed anything. I honesty sought an intelligent conversation. You decided to make fun of me instead of addressing anything I was saying. It’s discourteous.
I haven’t turned tail or resorted to insults. I’ve simply responded in kind to your tone and level.
Adrien said:
A cursory look at the record above tells otherwise. Let’s recall the title of this topic: More foreign policy: US Marines and tripwires
@119 you quoted me:
I’d been responding to GregM’s claims that my big picture was unrealistic. Did you attempt to challenge that with a substantive claim?
Let’s see:
Putting aside the syntax, you are not making a substantive counter claim or a suporting claim or really, any claim salient to the discussion at all. You were trying a re-run of a previous exchange on human nature and as became clear, perhaps a revisiting of the debate over the Bolshevik overturn in 1917. That is an incipient threadjack. If you wanted either of those discussions, an open thread was the place for them.
I regard that as a breach of netiquette, this site’s rules and dismissive of the serious points I was making on topic. You’ve no business at all suggesting I’ve dealt unfairly with you. I should probably have treated your remark with the disdain it deserved, and for my failure to do so, I apologise to the others here, but you show bad faith by complaining as you have above. You can’t possibly look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself that you are in the right here. Your text above is scarcely worthy of a juvenile, so assuming you’re an adult, I feel sure at some point that you will wish not to have posted it.
You should take a serious step back, IMO, and consider how you’re interacting here. If you want to withdraw your remarks and apologise, then you and I can move on. We all have bad days from time to time.
It’s up to you. Until then, I’d discourage others from attaching any weight at all to that which you post.
Fran, What you persist in misunderstanding is that I agree with Greg M. You have this self-righteous notion of perfection that renders your contribution flawed. This notion is grounded in your inability to understand the flaws of your creed in addition to your blatant intolerance and animosity to anyone who might dare not share it. I simply asserted something that might be worth bearing mind.
My response was cheeky, I think your dismissal of human nature intellectual myopia. But my substantive point is that history displays irony. As in people set out to do something and end up going in the opposite direction.
Your reaction was, typically, one of poisonous intolerance and pedantry. I only apologize for wasting time in trying to reason with you. You’re simply closed for business. Sorry for breaching the rules. I know you’re crazy about rules. You must expend entire lonesome nights in devising new ones for everybody.
sg, I haven’t convinced you that a US base will bring a whole raft of specifically domestic issues with it. However, my purpose was to bring to attention, for general information, the issues that attended Subic Bay, Okinawa and others as, currently, in South Korea for which see ‘Sex Trafficking High Around US Military Bases Abroad’ (http://news.change.org/stories/sex-trafficking-high-around-us-military-bases-abroad).
More evidence you won’t want to see and therefore cannot.
For anyone not up to speed with the long standing Australian and international ‘anti-US bases’ campaign the following link (PDF) is a pretty standard, concise, anti-bases 101 introduction to the subject:
http://www.ipb.org/i/pdf-files/Gerson-Forum-Military-Bases.pdf
In general, though, even without consideration of the domestic consequences of a base in NT I’m opposed to a base in Australia, to fill out the other 800 foreign soil bases that the US runs, because I despise the institution of the US military not least because of what happened inside Abu Graib.
sg, if you don’t at least have reservations about imperial US military forces and the way they conduct themsleves then I ask again whose side are you on?
This thread seems to be awfully short on details about the social issues surrounding US bases in Germany & UK.
One would have thought they may be comparable to Australia, culturally, economically, & so on. Them also being economies where a grunt’s weekly pay isn’t higher than the annual salary, & thus isn’t going to tempt the virtue of a church-going virgin (or her parents).
Citizen Keating was very good tonight on Lateline, pointing out that the announcement of the basing arrangement would be entirely unremarkable, if it wasn’t co-incidentally caught up in some hard anti-China rhetoric that Obama apparently said in our parliament. That’s very interesting because I did not pay a lot of attention to Obama’s speech save for what was in the news. I’ll have to locate a transcript of the speech. Keating was right in that anything which limits our middle-power diplomatic options is undesirable, and a locking-in of the S.E. Asian area to a two-pole binary opposition will inevitably lead to destructive conflict. On the other hand I thought he was too benign in his reading of recent Chinese bad behaviour in the South China Sea. We have to find a way to convince them to accept a multi-polar region in which the United States is a significant player among many other national interests. Perhaps we need to convince the USA of this fact too.
Steve at Pub is correct in terms of comparisons of basing arrangements to comparable nations (which would include Japan, I would think). However we need to also consider the scope and scale of the basing arrangements. Some of those European ones have several brigades or entire divisions permanently present in them. There are dozens in Germany alone.
oh come on akn, that link is about sex trafficking around bases, not in them, which is what you claimed before. You’re retreating from all your claims.
Also, perhaps you should address SATP’s point…
dear Tyro Rex & Steve at the Pub
sex crimes by soldiers from us bases happen in germany too. this site has a search engine:-
http://www.militarysexoffendersregistry.com/foreign_crimes.html
yours sincerely
alfred venison
@akn in moderation: please rewrite your comment with an eye to the Comments Policy guidelines on overly lengthy comments. The place for article-length writing is on one’s own blog, not here.
sg, I’m having to spoon feed you little tit-bits of information that is reasonably well known to anyone who has ever been an active member of the peace movement. During the 70′s and 80′s, under the shadow of global nuclear war, a global citizen’s movement developed to provide some democratic counterpoint to the insanity that was developing. It reached a peak under Reagan’s rule (1981-1989).
The (em)zeitgeist</em) was best represented by the film "The Day After" (1983). The spirit of the times was how do humans co-exist with the constant threat of imminent global destruction. What galled a lot of people is that imminent cessation of all life on the planet might actually be brought on by a drooling hillbilly like Ronald Reagan.
You just don't know the social history of this stuff; of the peace movement and what we now know about how the US military operates. Because you don't know you mount absurd counter arguments that are readily contradicted by quick and dirty googling.
http://newsone.com/nation/astodghill/human-trafficking-u-s-military-implicated-in-luring-workers-into-forced-labor/
It took me 45 seconds to find that article.
the announcement of the basing arrangement would be entirely unremarkable, if it wasn’t co-incidentally caught up in some hard anti-China rhetoric that Obama apparently said in our parliament.
I’m not sure that’s true. Any sigbnificant new deployment of US troops in the PRC’s field of influence would cause waves. The ‘hard anti-China rhetoric’ was intentional. Obama’s speech actually barely mentions China.
It’s the usual bland stuff about co-operation and human rights. It extensively outline the historical alliance between Australia and America and underlines our mutual interests as democratic nations in the Asia-Pacific region. It then addresses a myriad of issues about the region and reiterates the dichotomy between authoritarian regimes like Burma and democratic ones like Japan, S Korea and Indonesia. It implies the possibility of future conflict. He talks the talk and the US deployment walks the walk.
Keating was right in that anything which limits our middle-power diplomatic options is undesirable, and a locking-in of the S.E. Asian area to a two-pole binary opposition will inevitably lead to destructive conflict.
In the first place Keating is way too soft on Asian authoritarians. Both major parties have been way too soft on the Chinese government which has behaved with a certain arrogance for some time now. Naturally they haven’t reach the heights of American arrogance as yet, but they aim to get there. It’s arguable that this sort of preparation for conflict might help abate it. But we’ve heard that one before haven’t we?
Keating doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact that the US isn’t the only dominator power in the region and our convenient middle-power status can be destroyed by the conflict of greater States than ours whether we like it or not. We might in future be forced to choose. Failing to consider these things inevitable means we will be forced to choose and at a time not necessarily convenient to us.
On the other hand I thought he was too benign in his reading of recent Chinese bad behaviour in the South China Sea.
Darwin is the PRC’s field of influence?
So, sg, when the peace movement refers to the US military it is in the knowledge that the US military is part of what Dwight Eisenhower described as ‘the military-industrial complex’. C Wright Mills expanded on this problem for democracy, the military industrial complex, is his (1956) ‘The Power Elite’ which explore the blurred boundaries between the Pentagon, the White House, all arms of the military and the industrial aggregations whose profit depends on military budgeting. The resulting ethics free nexus of profit and military logic was well satirised in Heller’s ‘Catch 22′ in the character and operations of Milo Minderbinder Enterprises. What once was quaintly called war profiteering is now just normal business. When it comes to the US military and the bases they run every type of corruption attends them. It even extends, as my last linked post shows, to human trafficking which would, on balance of probability, include sex trade trafficking as well.
Finally, sg, I wanted to address this comment of yours:
The emphasis on the domestic impact of US bases on foreign soil derives from the Greenham Commons Women’s Peace Camp. One of the core messages, one that introduced a radical feminist critique that did not have to kow-tow to Cold War ideologues because it had no commitment to Cold War divisions, is that women and children are disproportionately the victims of war and the war machine. Ignoring the domestic impact of bases on the social conditions of women and children would further normalise this backgrounding.
So, it’s not easier to advance such a critique, its valid to do so, even if it comes as such a surprise to people like you that they then accuse me of using women and children as an ideological stalking horse. Quite what world you inhabit where such bad faith is the norm I cannot imagine but I reckon you need some fresh air.
Darwin is the PRC’s field of influence?
The entire country is. China is our biggest trading partner.
But militarily Darwin is the closest Australian city to Chinese territory. Look at the chess board, see the pieces; what’s the strategy?
akn, I didn’t realize that this thread was still going, comments being buried in the pile-on over Mr. Rabbit.
At 150: the zeitgeist was not accurately captured by The Day After, but by its harder-hitting UK version, Threads. Don’t patronize me with the assumption that I don’t understand the history of opposition to US bases just because I disagree with you about something.
The link it took you “45 seconds” to find has been bandied about several times here already, and I have already mentioned it: yes, there is human trafficking of hairdressers by contractors on a base in Afghanistan. As I keep telling you, there is no reason to compare a base in Afghanistan with a base in Australia, and unless you can come up with something a little better than that, you have no evidence of sex trafficking in US bases. So any human trafficking you claim is happening has no relationship to the sex industry that you’re so sure develops around US bases. Furthermore, this “human trafficking” is well known about in US military circles, it’s official, and it has nothing to do with sex work.
This is a common trick of anti-sex work campaigners: conflate human trafficking and sex work, then pretend that the underlying problem is the sex industry rather than the broader machinery of capitalism.
At 153: we’re talking about whether marines will assault local women, we’re not talking about the military industrial complex. You entered this thread with the rather grand claim that the strategic implications are irrelevant compared to the immediate social effects. Since Helen posted up the stats showing that you’re wrong about the social effects, you’ve occasionally tried to do this retreat into discussion of structural violence. But that’s not what you originally wanted this to be about.
So once again: you need to find some solid evidence to support your claim that US marines will increase the rate of violence against women – or crime more generally – in Darwin.
And lastly …
At 154: trying to tie this in with radical feminist critiques of militarist ideology, and suggesting a link between this structural violence and sex work and women’s rights around bases, isn’t going to wash for several reasons. First of all, because radical feminism has nothing to say about sex work that is of any value – radical feminism is based on an essentialist, misogynist narrative about women’s sexuality that fundamentally disempowers women and is based in reactionary sexual morality. As an example, one leading radical feminist anti-sex work campaigner (Julie Bindel, I think, but it could be a different one) believes that all feminists should reject heterosexual relations in favor of political lesbianism. Is it any wonder these women treat sex workers as traitors and pawns in their political agenda?
Secondly, radical feminist anti-sex work activists have been consistently wrong about the statistics behind their human trafficking claims, and don’t accept any independent critique of their commentary on it. They certainly won’t listen to a sex worker representative, and you’ve made it clear you won’t either. You, after all, hold a “very dim view” of “hookers.
Thirdly, radical feminist anti-sex work activists have shown they’re willing to make fundamentally anti-woman alliances: with, e.g. born again christians (Dworkin and MacKinnon); with economic activists who support the dismantling of local labour rights and other interventions in favor of sweatshops and slavery (that loathsome “All of the Sky” book with Kristol); and with the machinery of US state power (the anti-sex trafficking institutions currently operating internationally are heavily connected with the US state dept). They are extremely mercenary in their political alliances, and happy to use the powers whose misogyny they decry to further their domestic agenda, even though often these same powers work against the interests of women in developing nations.
Finally, radical feminist critiques of militarism and sex work often show very little respect for class and race, for the role of national liberation movements, and for the different perspectives of feminists in developing nations. This is particularly problematic when directed against poor men joining the US military, and when these feminists have to interact with or consider the rights of women’s movements in post-colonial nations, whose culture they fundamentally don’t respect.
The movement is basically a western-centric, sexually repressed and sexually repressive revanche against the real gains of liberal feminism, that is remarkably ideologically blind, and often classist and racist. It’s also extremely US-centric, and uses US state power to project the sexual morals of white, middle-class American women onto poor and working US women (via e.g. Dworkin) and women in developing nations, especially sex workers (via the machinery of the State Dept).
Although I don’t have the evidence to hand, it is certainly the case (perhaps should be called a perception given that I don’t have the evidence) that when US military personnel come to Darwin there is an increase in sexual assaults on the women of Darwin. It is what we might call up here “common knowledge” for which the community is prepared. I am sure there is lots of consensual sex that people (US military personnel and locals) enjoy and find satisfying, however it is also the case that some of these encounters (that would otherwise not occur- how could they if the USMP weren’t present?) end up badly.
I’m not sure that they’re comparable, retronymical, because they’re usually shore leave incidents, which are a very different kettle of fish to a base. Shore leave is exactly the kind of situation where one would expect Helen’s “young men with a sense of entitlement” to put aside all respect for human decency – because they’ll be gone before they can be held accountable.
That may well be true sg. These visits by USMP do have a sense of the “exception rather than the norm (rule)’ about them which may predilect behaviour which would not be seen in a base situation.
This is a common trick of anti-sex work campaigners: conflate human trafficking and sex work, then pretend that the underlying problem is the sex industry rather than the broader machinery of capitalism.
But prostitution is much older than capitalism.
Secondly, radical feminist anti-sex work activists have been consistently wrong about the statistics behind their human trafficking claims, and don’t accept any independent critique of their commentary on it.
Yeah? Funny that.
sg, in bold so you can see it with your remaining eye – Ex-Prostitutes Say South Korea and U.S. Enabled Sex Trade Near Bases :
NYT, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/world/asia/08korea.html?pagewanted=all
sg @157 when I described the specifically feminist contribution to the peace movement at Greenham Common, I was referring not to the sub-branch of feminism now known as “radical feminism” but to feminism as a radical critique in and of itself. As it was in the 1970′s. So your entire frothing lecture @ 157 is redundant. And half-arsed.
sg, a 2006 Inspector General for the US Dept of Defense defines human trafficking in such a way as to incorporate sex trafficking; the US DoD does not differentiate between human trafficking and trafficking for purposes of sexual servitude (p 7). Page 15 provides a brief history of why the Inspector Genral surveyed the DoD which includes reports of extensive and apparently substantiated allegations of sexual trafficking to meet the needs of US servicmen in S-Korea along with the allegation of high level US command complicity with the practise.
PDF (http://www.dodig.mil/inspections/ie/Reports/TIP%20Final-E.pdf)
Moreover, a 2006 article in the Northwestern University Journal of International Human Rights on the issue titled “Significant Steps or Empty Rhetoric? Current Efforts by the United States to Combat Sexual Trafficking near Military Bases” makes similar claims with additional ones (emphasis added):
The author continues:
(http://www.law.northwestern.edu/journals/jihr/v4/n3/5/)
Then there’s Dyncorp – US military contractor guilty of child prostitution and human trafficking. The company has provided services for the U.S. military in several theaters, including Bolivia, Bosnia, Somalia, Angola, Haiti, Colombia, Kosovo and Kuwait. DynCorp International also provided much of the security for Afghan interim president Hamid Karzai’s presidential guard and trains much of Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s fledgling police force. In the late 1990s, according to whistleblower Ben Johnston, a former aircraft mechanic who worked for the company in Bosnia and Herzegovina, DynCorp employees and supervisors engaged in sex with 12 to 15 year old children, and sold them to each other as slaves.[30] Ben Johnston ended up fired, and later forced into protective custody. According to Johnston, none of the girls were from Bosnia and Herzegovina itself, but were kidnapped by DynCorp employees from Russia, Romania and other places.
Dyncorp has been up to its eyeballs in other nasties too.
Read it mate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynCorp
Finally, this little historical note from a 1993 article titled ‘The Forgotten Legacy of Subic Bay’ which contains this little gem:
(http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/5768)
Having trouble breathing sg? It’s because I’ve buried you under a mountain of evidence from easily available sources. Note that the above cited article notes that no-one wants to buy Subic Bay base, closed, because it is widely regarded as a toxic waste dump.
Of course, it was actually 100 years in a brothel. Except for the 3 years or so when the Sons of Heaven ruled the roost.
I’ve no doubt Sg has trouble breathing, as we all do. Your 10,000 words can be condensed (Barnaby Joyce style) into one phrase:
“Soldiers use hookers”
SATP: well, yes, I thought that was self evident and my concern was about the social consequences of the usual base industries in the NT where the Aboriginal population has already been subject to uncontrolled child abuse, violence and sexual violence. Mostly by Aboriginal men. So the base didn’t seem like a good idea to drop into that mix. However, sg insisted that US Marines are clean, nice, terribly polite people who would never be involved in unruly behaviour or do things to offend or harm the locals. All of which I thought was demonstrably a crock of shite. And have been at pains to point out using credible sources.
akn: Uncontrolled child abuse, violence & sexual violence against aboriginal women & children is happening in closed settlements, ones that require a permit to enter.
Are you seriously suggesting that US Marines will be travelling a few thousand km into the sticks to search out some aboriginal children for sexual violence?
I’ll concur that US Marines are extremely polite, clean young men. I’ve never seen a pub full of them do anything but spend money, teach everyone manners by example, & be thoroughly polite to all staff & fellow patrons. Child sex becoming rampant adjacent their barracks? I struggle with that concept.
Girls going weak in the knees at the presence of Marines? It’s odds on to happen. Girls, both professional & non-professional will converge for a piece of marine action. The working girls will resent those who do it free, the one who do it free will unhappily discover that men are pigs & their Marine really doesn’t want to marry them after all. (Some things never change.)
Sg suggested, as would any reasonable person, that hookers are adults too, and may make a conscious choice to ply their trade nearby to Marine bases.
Despite your War & Peace length postings, not all sexual intercourse by US Marines is with sex slaves who had believed they were being recruited for church work.
Some girls really do willingly hanker for sex with a Marine, either for feigned love, or for money.
Very few, if any, US Marines are going to hire a jeep & drive 500km to illegally enter a reservation in the NT to kidnap themselves an aboriginal child.
Anthony, don’t believe everything, or indeed anything, you read in Green Left Weekly (although in fairness to GLW the rest of the article is a pretty fair account of the problems facing Olongapo in the aftermath of the closure of the Subic Bay base).
That has been said of the Phillippines by others as an expression of contempt but would never be said by Fiipinos of themselves or of their country as their amor proprio or sense of self esteem or self respect would not permit them to use it.
They would see it as critical of themselves and they would find it insulting if someone said that of them or their country.
The term they use is “four hundred years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood”.
Also the GLW article was written in 1993 when the US base had been closed for less than two years.
So when you say:
“Note that the above cited article notes that no-one wants to buy Subic Bay base, closed, because it is widely regarded as a toxic waste dump.”
that may have been true then.
Since then the Port of Subic has become quite an economic success story.
You really should find out more about people you seem to care so much about. Then you’d avoid being offensive about them and get your facts right about them.
GregM: you’re the kind who attempts, and fails, to astroturf history. From 1986:
But it’s all good now, hey, because there’s a New Economic Zone!
In fact the reportage in GLW sometimes is as good as it used to be in Tribune which regularly used to break important stories well before the privately owned media.
You’re not making sense, akn. How does the events in 1986 contradict Subic Bay’s subsequent economic success? If anything, you’re supporting GregM’s point.
The fact that there are now industries in Subic Bay only means that someone bought it and redeveloped it. This doesn’t in any way reflect on the history of Subic Bay which I’ve been using to illustrate what happens when US bases are established on foreign soil. A massive sex industry, terrible labour conditions, organised paedophilia and undisclosed pollution of soil and water.
History hasn’t stopped. su and you appear to be suggesting that ‘it’s all different now’. It’s not and, moreover, the damage that has been done remains unaddressed. The allegation is made, for example, that the Philippines remains a major paedophile destination, that this industry developed in the period that the base was active and under the corrupt political control of the Marcos regime. Moreover, the allegation is also made (by I forget whom) that US military personnel constitute a major part of the Philippines paedophile trade after their initial experiences at Subic Bay.
All of which goes to my argument that siting a US base in the NT, already a faailed state in relation to Aborigines, is potentially highly likely to develop similar problems. Not the same, maybe not to the same degree, but out of the same conditions.
SATP:
It is not even true that there are no trafficked women or children in Australia SATP. Outside Australia there is so much evidence of the association between civil war, poverty and a rapid increase in human trafficking to all parts of the globe that I’m not even going to provide a link for you. So, some women may make that as a rational choice.
However, no choice can be considered rational in the absence of an equitable distribution of material and social goods (education, literacy, financial secuirty, the protection of the law). This means that women operating in conditions of oppression and poverty make an unfree choice when they decide to become sex workers.
Then there are the children sold into sex slavery or forced into it through debt bondage. No free choice there.
I missed the continuation of this thread after the deluge of post-Jenkins comments. I was also away for the weekend so only just got a chance to look at it.
akn, your comment at 162 links to a genuinely repulsive NY Times article. Not only does it conflate harm reduction measures for sex workers with “encouraging” the trade, but it compares women who openly admit they were not coerced or tricked into the trade with the comfort women of WW2, who (at least in US understanding of the term) were forced into prostitution. That’s not very polite. It also makes some pretty nasty assertions about e.g. attempts to ensure STIs weren’t spread by the trade. It’s a hatchet job on a nascent attempt to regulate sex work, wrapped in a nasty metaphor. Bear in mind that for most of history the military response to sex work has been to beat and imprison the workers. By comparison what that article describes is probably quite enlightened. Though compared to what would happen in Darwin it remains uncivilized.
Also, have you noticed how most of your links and evidence come from in or before 1995, often 1990? It’s almost as if the world has changed in the last 20 years, and you haven’t updated your understanding of sex work, sex trafficking, or military governance.
GregM is right, you need to learn more about the places you are talking about. Even your sources on the Philippines are a US group with no official connection to GABRIELA in the Philippines. I said before, a while back, when you were talking about development in China, that you would be well served avoiding giving your opinions on Asia, because it makes you look ill-informed and racist. I guess you should add “hookers” to the list of topics you need to learn more about before you comment.
sg – you make absurd assertions that this or that doesn’t exist, didn’t happen and never did. All I have to to do refute you is to point to evidence, evidence, mind, not a perfect politically correct source that meets your impeccably sanitary intellectual standards, that contradicts your statements. This is all I have done.
Time after time you take a mini-turn to castigating me for having improper attitudes, wrong thinking, towards the sex industry. What you really need to grasp is that I have different attitudes to yours.
This appears most to be the case around a contention that becoming a workin’ woman is a rational career choice deserving of respect. Some do, I daresay, make such a choice and about them I have no concern. I do have reasonable, humanist concerns about those women who are forced or trafficked: the 13 y.o. Tasmanian girl who was sold to more than a hundred men by her mother and her mother’s defacto; the tens of thousands (if not more) of women who are trafficked annually in a global trade, some of whom are in Australia (see the 4C edition previously referred to).
What appears to be at play, within your consciousness, is a very pallid form of dinner party feminism. It is the type learned at tertiary level after the schism between left feminists and others. It has a class base – many tertiary educated feminists, including those from the working class, were only too happy to put class concerns behind them. Subsequently, issues like working conditions within sweat shops here and elsewhere, OH+S and wages dropped off the agenda. Replacing this is the (not small ‘l’) liberal feminism mostly derived from US feminist ideologues for whom ‘class’ really is the c-word. The type who think it really is ok for Hilary to employ a non-green card Mexican or Latino for domestic purposes. Hell, she’s at the top of her game, why not?
From time to time, as well, you have a go at me over always raisng issues around Aborigines. Well, always did, always will. That’s what political allies do.
I haven’t met such a Stalinist consciousness as yours since the CPA collapsed out of irrelevance. But at least the Stalinists had a political project, ugly as it was. But I wonder what yours could possibly be?
which you have yet to do. You have posted up the same 3 or 4 links to a set of hazy assertions about what is happening in the sex industry around US bases, and you have put up some evidence of limited trafficking by contractors. i.e. not by US soldiers. You have made ludicrous claims about criminal gangs operating on US bases but when challenged all you can do is put up weak evidence about contractors.
… except that you admit you hold them in very low regard.
I pointed out above (in my “tirade”) that anti-sex work campaigners have signed up alongside the pro-sweat shop brigade, and that radical feminist critiques take no account of workplace politics. Perhaps you should answer those accusations before turning them around on me. Especially since my whole point here is that sex worker safety and rights (and the elimination of sex trafficking) are intricately connected with their workplace rights. It’s the opponents of sex work and the legalization of the industry who refuse to see the industry in terms of labour rights.
This is all stuff, incidentally, that I learnt from sex workers in my professional and private life. So you can spare me the “university-educated latte-sipping faux leftist” rubbish as well.