The Abuse Of Courage And Trust
Corporal Dan Keighran, by all accounts, well and truly deserved the highest military honour the nation can bestow, the Victoria Cross. Absolutely.
His is the third Victoria Cross awarded to soldiers who fought in the Afghanistan War.
At the award ceremony, Prime Minister Julia Gillard is reported to have said (in part): "We acknowledge them because it is always important to accurately record the history of our nation and what makes our nation and these acts of courage speak to who we are as Australians."
Well, well, well... "...to accurately record the history of our nation..."
OK then, let me do my bit to accurately record the history of our nation. Let me go into those great internet archives with these words:
We should never have joined the Americans in that evil war. The Afghanistan War was an act of retribution and revenge for another evil act. An act that should have been dealt with very differently. An act for which the Afghan people (who had nothing to do with al Qaeda) did not deserve to die in the hundreds of thousands.
America likes to think of itself as a Christian country and yet there is nothing Christian about waging war. Especially a war driven by the lust for revenge and retribution. And Australia's history is forever tarnished by our participation in that war.
It is a gross abuse of our soldiers' courage and trust to send them into wars they should not be sent into. Our politicians, and the Generals who did their bidding, should be held in disgrace for having sent Australian soldiers into the following follies of America's self-serving foreign policy:
The Vietnam War
The First Gulf War
The Second Gulf War
The Afghanistan War
Let the history of our nation record this too, Prime Minister Gillard!
And please stop telling all those lies, Prime Minister Gillard. You're no better than John HoWARd and his war glorifying and war justifying predecessors. STOP IT, PLEASE !!!
His is the third Victoria Cross awarded to soldiers who fought in the Afghanistan War.
At the award ceremony, Prime Minister Julia Gillard is reported to have said (in part): "We acknowledge them because it is always important to accurately record the history of our nation and what makes our nation and these acts of courage speak to who we are as Australians."
Well, well, well... "...to accurately record the history of our nation..."
OK then, let me do my bit to accurately record the history of our nation. Let me go into those great internet archives with these words:
We should never have joined the Americans in that evil war. The Afghanistan War was an act of retribution and revenge for another evil act. An act that should have been dealt with very differently. An act for which the Afghan people (who had nothing to do with al Qaeda) did not deserve to die in the hundreds of thousands.
America likes to think of itself as a Christian country and yet there is nothing Christian about waging war. Especially a war driven by the lust for revenge and retribution. And Australia's history is forever tarnished by our participation in that war.
It is a gross abuse of our soldiers' courage and trust to send them into wars they should not be sent into. Our politicians, and the Generals who did their bidding, should be held in disgrace for having sent Australian soldiers into the following follies of America's self-serving foreign policy:
The Vietnam War
The First Gulf War
The Second Gulf War
The Afghanistan War
Let the history of our nation record this too, Prime Minister Gillard!
And please stop telling all those lies, Prime Minister Gillard. You're no better than John HoWARd and his war glorifying and war justifying predecessors. STOP IT, PLEASE !!!
posted by The Editor at
3:51 AM
6 Comments:
Interesting concept.
Most warmongers are a bunch of 'Chicken hawks' who never become personally involved.
Long gone are the days when our leaders led by example with the vanguard.
Good post Gerry.
OK, I'll bite. Banana bin Laden sends civilian aircraft into several buildings in eastern USA, killing thousands of innocent people. He plans this act of war in an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, which has been given shelter by the government of the day, the Taliban.
And the correct USA response, in your view, is?
@Vest: Thanks, Vesty.
@AndrewM: An authoritative history of the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks has yet to be written.
OBL, as I understand it, gave his blessing and support to the plan but the actual panning, training, and execution was carried out in Germany and the US. A vast majority of the terrorists involved were Saudis.
When the US demanded that OBL be handed over to them, the Afghan Taliban regime quite correctly asked for evidence of his involvement to be presented to them before they would consider extradition. The US ignored this request and invaded. Impatient, knee-jerky, and way too heavy-handed.
How did the Bali bombings get handled?
How did they actually get OBL in the end?
Think about these two questions and you might find better solutions than a full-on invasion of a country, and a 13-year war, and all that this entails.
Using Dubbya's reasoning, given that the School of the Americas was where a huge amount of South American right wing terrorists, assassins, and dictators received their training, the US should have been invaded by a "coalition of the willing" of South America, with full NATO support.
Careful how much propaganda you osmote, Andrew... :-)
It's just occurred to me to send the body of this blogpost to the Prime Minister as a letter.
I also added this paragraph at the end:
"Prime Minister, please get your government to redefine the AUS/US Alliance so that we will not in future find our courageous and trusting service personnel sucked into yet another of the US's war crimes grotesquely dressed up as altruistic foreign policy."
I'll let you know what, if any, replies I get.
Update: Other than an automated reply telling me that the PM's office has received my email, nothing further has yet been heard.
I was kind of hoping she'd personally invite me to The Lodge for Christmas pudding...
After all I've done for the old girl... :-(
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