Scott Burchill and Kristian Lewis, The Age, 8 January: The only rationale left for our involvement in Afghanistan is to restore Washington’s military credibility, which was badly tarnished in Iraq. As John Howard said recently, a withdrawal from Afghanistan would be “an enormous blow to American prestige”. For the same reasons it bombed Serbia in…
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Organising mass violence and Australia laps it up
Australian academic and writer Scott Burchill is one of the more astute commentators in the country. His latest missive is spot-on (see below). Why do we allow generals and men in uniform to keep on telling us that wars are noble and important? Jim Molan (ex-Australian military) is regularly in blogs and in the papers…
Afghanistan is a war with no end
Raja Anwar’s The Tragedy of Afghanistan (Verso, London 1988) has this revealing quote: In Afghanistan, settling a blood feud is an unemotional and impersonal act. It is like a sacred obligation which must be fulfilled. According to one Pashtun saying, ”˜a Pashtun curses himself for his hastiness even if the murder he has avenged took…
The price for Western crimes always ignored
I concur with leading Australia international relations expert Scott Burchill: Wissam Mahmoud Fattal, one of the men charged this week [in Australia] with preparing a terrorist act, told the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday he was not a terrorist and accused Australian troops of killing innocent people overseas. “You call me a terrorist but I’ve…
How to kill Persians with a smile
Deakin University’s Scott Burchill documents freaks of nature: Pomeranians are small, extroverted dogs with origins traceable to Egypt, who can develop the habit of barking excessively if their behaviour is rewarded (i.e. allowed to beg for food). Bombiranians are a small group of extroverted neo-cons, primarily Zionist and traceable to Israel and the US, who…
Spot the news story
My following article appears in today’s ABC Unleashed: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s overseas trip has been extensively covered in the mainstream media. From George W. Bush to Gordon Brown, the travelling journalists have given readers and viewers a running commentary of his daily meetings. Missing from the vast majority of the coverage, however, has been…
The view from the Murdoch perch
Scott Burchill, Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of International & Political Studies at Deakin University, comments on a Murdoch mouthpiece: Quote of the week goes to Liberal Party lunchalot and honorary Republican Party ambassador, Greg Sheridan. According to the Foreign Editor of The Australian, “Rudd will be a tremendous disappointment to the…
Can we bomb too?
During a press conference with US Vice-President Dick Cheney yesterday, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the following: “I don’t think there would be a country whose influence and potential clout would be more enhanced in that part of the world than Iran’s would be if the coalition was defeated in Iraq. I don’t think…
The blind leading the lame
“They [the Bush Administration] were an enormously formidable group of people, immensely experienced and, person-for-person, way better than their counterparts in the Clinton Administration. I have no doubt of their high competence, high integrity and goodness of heart. But somehow they were unbalanced.” The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan The Partnership (New South, Sydney 2006),…
Iraq’s civil war and the American response
My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: The war in Iraq is a debacle and no amount of semantic fudging can change that reality. While it is encouraging that a number of US media outlets have finally acknowledged that civil war is raging in the occupied nation, the Iraqi people have known this…