[Vnbiz] Australia's warped war visions

[Phan, Tai]

Nov 30, 2006  
  

Australia's warped war visions
By Minh Bui Jones 

SYDNEY - During his first official trip to Vietnam to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit this month, conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard insulted his host and the memory of millions who died in the Vietnam War. 

On a visit to the site of the Battle of Long Tan, where 18 Australians died fighting the communist Vietcong, Howard, prompted by a reporter's question, said he believed his country's



decision to go to war in Vietnam more than four decades ago was the right one. "I supported our involvement at the time and I don't intend to recant that," he said. 

His US counterpart, President George W Bush, similarly commented that if the United States had stayed the course during the Vietnam War, the result may have been different. 

Howard's brusque comments about a war in which between 3 million and 5 million Vietnamese died were meant to be interpreted as an oblique allusion to his hardline position on Iraq: that is, the US and its allies, including Australia, should dig in for the long haul. 

Howard is one of the staunchest supporters of the US-led war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, he was quickly sold on the US-led project to remake the Middle East. Three days after the attacks on the US, Australia invoked the ANZUS Treaty - the military alliance among Australia, New Zealand and the US - for the first time in its history and became the first country to offer troops to Afghanistan. 

In 2003, Australian troops were already operating in Iraq before the US even formally launched the war. Today, Australia has 1,400 troops in Iraq and 360 in Afghanistan. Their numbers are small, but they are of enormous symbolic worth to the US. President Bush highly values Howard's unconditional support, once fawningly referring to him as "a man of steel". 

During the APEC meeting, Bush met with Howard twice to discuss tactics on Iraq. Howard is resistant to any talk of withdrawal from Iraq, even in the wake of the recent thumping Bush took at US congressional elections, which were widely viewed as a referendum against the war. Meanwhile, Howard rejected British Prime Minister Tony Blair's assessment of Iraq as a "disaster" and counseled against any fundamental change of strategy. 

"Let's not muck around on this," Howard said in Hanoi. "If the coalition were to go from Iraq in circumstances seen as a defeat, that would be a colossal blow. 

"If that were to happen, I think that would be very, very bad for stability in our own region. It would embolden the terrorists and it would deliver a colossal blow to American prestige." It was in this context that Howard's recalcitrant comments on the Vietnam War were made. 

Since the end of World War II, Australia has frequently gone to war to protect US prestige. The calculation behind this is simple: Australia's security is underwritten by the US, and so nothing must question the supremacy of the US military. But it's the same rationale that got the country bogged down in an unpopular war in Vietnam and it's happening again in Iraq and Afghanistan. 


Australia's Vietnam experience is an instructive lens through which to view its current entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The conventional wisdom today is that Australia's participation in the Vietnam War was a strategic miscalculation and moral blunder. Archival evidence has demonstrated that Australian leaders misconceived the nature of the conflict in Vietnam and their policy, in retrospect, was a disaster of the first magnitude. 

Beginning in 1962, the Liberal (Howard's political party) government sent a group of some 30 military instructors to South Vietnam to provide military training assistance. Ten years later, some 50,000 Australian troops were in South Vietnam as Canberra dispatched battalion after battalion to help the US halt the communist advance. Following the domino theory, Australian policymakers were concerned that if not stopped, communism would eventually spread its way Down Under. 

"The takeover of South Vietnam would be a direct military threat to Australia and all the countries of South and Southeast Asia," then prime minister Sir Robert Menzies told parliament in 1965. "It must be seen as part of a thrust by communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans." 

Then, many Australian politicians believed Vietnamese communists were actually foot soldiers in disguise for Chinese expansionism. Australia lost 520 soldiers in Vietnam, and only the reality check of the Vietcong's surprise Tet offensive in 1968, which helped to turn public opinion against the war, saved it from further losses. The Australian government then responded to growing public pessimism over whether a victory could ever be achieved and signaled an end to its commitment. 

In 1969, with anti-war protests gathering momentum, a public opinion poll indicated that 55% of Australians wanted their troops brought home. In May 1970, anti-Vietnam War protesters staged the first of three moratorium marches in Australian cities. The Australian Labor Party, which had campaigned against the war, was elected to office in December 1972. Within days, the curtain was brought down on the country's military involvement in Vietnam, in defeat and dishonor. 

The war polarized Australia, split the Labor Party, and started the culture war that is simmering to this day. Which brings us back to November 2006 and the conclusion that's increasingly hard to avoid: that is, if Howard supports the original decision to go to war in Vietnam, he must therefore support the premises on which that decision was based. 

Then, those premises were: that China was intent on regional conquest; that Hanoi was Beijing's puppet; that the Vietnam War was not a civil war; and that the Vietcong were made up of communist infiltrators from the north. Even at the time, it was known by sections of the political class that these premises were false, but they were nevertheless sold as facts to the Australian public. Like the US over Iraq, Australia wanted war, and every argument in favor of war was employed. 

Australia invited itself to the technological slaughterhouse of Vietnam to realize its strategic objective of placing the United States' military might between it and communist China. And by supporting the US in Vietnam, Australia was purchasing security insurance from its powerful ally. This has been the sole strategic aim of Australia's defense policy since the end of World War II. 

It was widely believed at the time that the US forced Australia into the war. The reverse was closer to the truth, however. As journalist Evan Whitton reported in 1975, "Indeed, documents in the US archives confirm that, when America appeared to be wavering ... on whether to commit ground troops, Australia applied pressure to involve the US more heavily in the war." 

Former Australian diplomat Gregory Clark underlined the significant role of Australia as warmonger during the Vietnam War: "On China/Vietnam, Australia actually stood to the right of the US. We skillfully lobbied the US right wing to encourage the greatest and firmest commitment possible in Vietnam. Australia was terrified that the US might one day go soft on China." 

Four decades later, Australia is similarly terrified that the US might go soft on Iraq and leave Australia exposed to the supposed new global threat of Islamic terrorism. That analysis goes a long way in explaining Howard's recent revisionist rants about the Vietnam War, and why Australia is doomed to repeat its mistakes alongside the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Minh Bui Jones is Asia Times Online's former news editor. He is currently a writer based in Sydney, Australia.