Just to add a little. This is today's Age Editorial, one of Australia's major papers.
It is accompanied by the following header:
"The US alliance, not the strategic advice available to Australia's Government, is the main reason for our involvement in Afghanistan."
Cables undermine Australia's case for war
December 11, 2010
Red faces have abounded, but humour has not, among the world's political leaders and diplomats since WikiLeaks began publishing more than a quarter of a million secret US diplomatic cables earlier this month. The joke-free zone continued even when the US State Department this week announced, without apparent irony, that it will be pleased to host World Press Freedom Day in Washington next May. Meanwhile, an array of US politicians was baying for the blood of WikiLeaks co-founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange.
Republican Congressman Peter King called for his assassination, and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wants him hunted down like al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. A more restrained Senator Joe Lieberman argues that the US Espionage Act must be amended to ensure that Mr Assange can be prosecuted for receiving and publishing confidential government documents. Whether a revised law would be enough to satisfy the US Supreme Court that WikiLeaks does not enjoy the protection of the first amendment to the US constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press and has in the past allowed The New York Times and other mainstream media to publish leaked confidential documents, is not clear. And in any case, Mr Assange does not have to be hunted down because he is already in custody, in London's Wandsworth Prison. Swedish authorities are seeking his extradition on sexual assault charges.
Lawyers from several jurisdictions elsewhere in the world, including Australia, have expressed bafflement at the Swedish charges. What is not baffling is Mr Assange's legal standing with regard to WikiLeaks' publication of the US diplomatic cables. As Senator Lieberman's campaign for a tougher Espionage Act indicates, even in the US the possible grounds for prosecuting him are uncertain. Outside the US, it is difficult to see that there could be any grounds for prosecution. Yet Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Attorney-General Robert McClelland continue to use language implying that Mr Assange, an Australian citizen, is a criminal because of WikiLeaks' cable dump. They have not, however, been able to cite any Australian law he has broken. Nor has anyone else.
The Prime Minister is not ignorant of the law, and her attacks on Mr Assange can only strengthen perceptions that she is under pressure from the US on this matter. The considerable extent to which Australian politicians are willing to comply with US requests has been one of the revelations in the WikiLeaks cables relating to Australia, which began appearing exclusively in The Age this week. Indeed, the documents even identify Sports Minister and right-wing ALP powerbroker Mark Arbib as a ''protected source'' of information. The gulf between what politicians and diplomats say to each other and what they say to the public has been the motif linking the cables' revelations, and nowhere is that gulf more apparent than in those relating to the war in Afghanistan.
The cables show that senior Australian officials, such as special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan Ric Smith, are extremely sceptical about Australia's involvement in the war, and doubt whether some of the tasks of the Australians in Oruzgan, such as training Afghan police, are achievable. Kevin Rudd, as prime minister, confirmed to US congressmen that the Australian security establishment was pessimistic about the war, which, he confessed, ''scared the hell'' out of him. He also crassly ridiculed the work of French and German contingents in Afghanistan, although each has suffered fatality rates more than double those of Australia's forces.
None of this has been acknowledged in Mr Rudd's public rhetoric, as prime minister or since he became Foreign Minister, nor has there been a hint of it in Ms Gillard's comments. She still speaks of Australia's commitment to Afghanistan in open-ended terms, saying Australians may remain in the country for another decade, and still invokes the possibility of jihadist terrorism being exported from the region as a justification for the war. As The Age has noted before, the argument ignores the fact that terrorism is already global. Ms Gillard will no longer, however, be able to make this case with even the faint shred of credibility it had.
Federal Parliament's ''debate'' on the war has been revealed to be a duplicitious farce, because the government ministers who spoke in support of Australia's involvement relied on arguments rejected by their own advisers. But debate on the war will surely be revived outside Parliament, especially since the cables' portrayal of the war will be familiar to those who remember Vietnam - another foreign war in which Australia became involved at US behest.
Australians deserve honesty from their politicians when the lives of our soldiers are at stake, and we have not received it.
