What sucks more? That we're going to send troops back to Iraq again, or that we think it's going to be a long engagement? I'm sick of war, frankly. It's just been this horrible on-going aggravation for well over a decade, we just barely got out of the last fracas - knowing we'd be leaving behind a snake pit in Iraq, and hey presto, that's where we're going back to fight the next one which is a continuation of the last one.
One of the more pernicious things about this Forever War - and yes, it's turning in to exactly that - is that we're not even certain as to why we're fighting it and what we hope to achieve through fighting it. And war is like a corrupting influence on our society that erodes away our freedoms while claiming to protect them; erodes away our compassion when we most need to exercise it; erodes away hope in exchange for an imagined security; and erodes away aesthetics in favour of crude jingoistic symbolisms. And it seeps all over the place like some wretched ill-contained sticky oily fluid. It infects us, it coats us, it taints us.
I'm sick of the khaki and olive green and the grey marl and the bogus epaulettes on clothing. I'm sick of the movies that have good guys sporting military credentials and ranks and insignias. I'm sick of this statist claptrap that masquerades itself as 'security'. The rhetoric of war, the praise of the war dead, the erecting and commemorating of battles and things, are all killing us bit by bit. I'm not some peacenik either. I believe in the proper application of force where necessary but in this instance, I'm failing to see it. ISIL/ISOR are halfway across the planet and are yet to affect Australian interests. Yes, they've called for acts of terror on our soil but seriously, would that necessitate the expenditure we are about to make?
Even allowing for the possibility of it being a 'just war', there's the issue of us having spent the last decade fighting a war that was hardly just or called-for in Iraq. If this war is just now, it's only so because we screwed up Iraq so badly. This is going to be punishing exactly because it is punishment for our previous misdeeds.
Wartime Prime Minister? The Gods Laugh At Thee Abbott
If you asked any voter back in September 2013 as to whether anybody thought the last federal election was going to be about war, I doubt anybody sensible would have said 'yes'. I know Tony Abbott and his government have banged on about a mandate since that election, but I don't really recall the election being such a resounding win for Tony Abbott and the Coalition they could claim a mandate on anything, let alone going to war.
The turn of events that has led to this moment in history is deplorable, and by that I'm not talking about beheadings in the Levant, I'm talking about our idiotic polity. It's not just Tony Abbott or the Coalition, it's the ALP also and the previous governments of all Howard, Rudd, Gillard to boot. While we've been busy navel gazing, we've lost the ability to make mature nuanced decisions. Instead we've allowed ourselves to be led by stupid, simplistic slogans shouted by an eminently stupid sloganeer, and now we're about to send troops all over again to one of the shittiest places on the rump of the Earth.
Doubtless Tony Abbott thinks he's making history but I can assure you that he is more making-it-up-as-he-goes-along. What is going on is a travesty. That's right. Our government has gone from tragedy to comedy to farce, all the way down to unintelligible nonsense. Somewhere along the way, we have allowed people with the worst judgment to lead us into figurative political minefields, and there's no easy crawling out. This is a terrible war to be fighting and by the time when all is said and done, I'm pretty sure Tony Abbott's name will be mud in the history books. If he thinks this war is going to make him as a Prime Minister, I think he's going to be very surprised.
The Glorification Game
Pleiades sent in this article. It's about how militarisation has been creeping into our social fabric for some time. There is this paragraph that I think bears repeating:
Perhaps the most concerning feature of the spreading militarisation is the deliberate targeting of children. Schools across the nation are bombarded with free, professionally developed curriculum material including films, books, CDs and posters. Subsidies are provided for trips to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Essay competitions award winners with fully funded tours of European and Middle Eastern battlefields. There seems to be no reticence among the promoters of war as the defining national experience. They openly canvass the importance of reaching out to children from the earliest years of primary school and seem never to consider that their crusade is closer to propaganda than to pedagogy. And the sanctimony that pervades all treatment of the “fallen” stands in the way of healthy scepticism or dissident interpretations.It makes you wonder about what we have in Canberra. There are two cultural museums in Canberra - the War Memorial and the Australia Museum. The latter is like the product of political correctness gone wrong. It celebrates things like the Hills Hoist and refrigeration, together with commemorating unknown indigenous people. It's boring and tedious, forced and guilt-trip-enforcing. It's like the creation of leftist academia with an axe to grind about Australia's incontrovertible colonial (and colonial-ist) past. Trust me, I'm a regular pinko, and I found it boring as hell and borderline idiotic.
The War Memorial stands in stark contrast where everything in it is the glorification of war. The entire Australian self-image is constructed around the great conflicts in which Australia was a participant. It's macho, geeky, nerdy, un-apolgetically colonialist, backward-looking, and dripping with repressed homoeroticism. It is in short, just as disturbing as the Australia Museum, except it seems to have become the favourite toy of the sort of conservative you laugh at for wanting to talk about the war all the time. It's a place that shows you how disturbing human affairs are, when you look at it just through the prism of war.
Together they compete to paint a picture of our national identity, coming out of different corners of ideology, talking at cross-purposes and largely astigmatic about the way they come across. Combined, it gives us a fractured view of our polity. One side loves to hate on the white mainstream. The white mainstream just likes war for its own sake because that's the only thing that is given any historic meaning. It explains at once the ineptness of the ALP opposition at stopping us sliding into this war as well as the eagerness and ease with which the Coalition has shoved us back into a war.
On this issue of going to war with ISIL/ISOR, Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek have been utterly useless, with terrible judgment.