2015-11-26
On September 17 of this year, then defence minister Kevin Andrews tabled his first and as it turned out only Ministerial Statement on Australia's military deployments into Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
This document is what passes for Parliamentary consideration of one of the most important decisions any government can make. The document is anodyne, devoid of detail, and entirely absent any analysis of the political or humanitarian consequences of opening a new front in our endless wars in the Middle East. But it didn't particularly matter - it happened at the tail end of a week consumed by the overdue removal of the Prime Minister responsible for the deployment. The document was only given four minutes of debating time before the chamber clocks signalled it was time to talk about motor sports instead.
The Statement, now consigned to the irrelevance it deserves, is chiefly valuable for what it does not contain. Australia even today has no overarching plan or political strategy to bring peace to Syria or Iraq. We've outsourced it, as we have the larger fraction of our foreign and defence policy, to a conflicted and exhausted superpower that seems increasingly helpless as the ghosts of past decisions have proliferated into nightmares.
Tonight's debate takes place in the shadow of violent attacks on innocent people all over the world. We grieve with those families and friends who lost loved ones in the horrifying attacks on the people of Paris nearly two weeks ago. 130 people lost their lives, 368 people were injured. We offer our condolences for the families of those 43 people who lost their lives in twin bombings in a busy residential and commercial district in Beirut, Lebanon. To the 27 who died when gunmen opened fire at the Radisson Hotel in Bamako in Mali. To the 34 innocent people dead at a farmers market bombed in Yola, Nigeria. For the 224 innocent victims of the bombing of Russian Metrojet flight 9268 over the Sinai. The more than a hundred who died when suicide bombers attacked a peace rally in Ankara in Turkey.
These high profile attacks sieze the attention of the world's news organisations for a period of time; others barely break the surface tension. In October of this year, 714 Iraqis died in acts of violent terror. Our Parliament is unlikely to take the time to pause in condolence for these innocent lives lost, because this is the new normal in Iraq.
What unites these horrific attacks is that they are carried out against civilian targets - people going about their lives. Whether claimed by Al Qaeda affiliates, Boko Haram or Islamic State itself, these are not military targets - they are ordinary people in markets, live music venues or their own homes. What could possibly motivate these atrocities has long bewildered Western defence and security planners - most commonly they are described as senseless or simply incomprehensible.
There is however a cold logic at work. These attacks are not senseless. They are calculated. It is the same strategy that Al Qaeda in Iraq used to ignite a horrific sectarian war in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. Their attacks on Shi'a civilians was designed to provoke an escalation of violence against the Sunni, who would then, it was reasoned, turn to Al Qaeda for leadership.
David Kilcullen's brilliant and provocative Quarterly Essay Blood Year describes it in this way
... AQI's campaign was driven by a brutal political logic: in provoking the Shi'a, Zarqawi hoped to back the Sunni community into a corner, so that his group would be all that stood between Sunnis and the Shi'a death squads, giving people no choice but to support AQI, whatever they thought of its ideology. This cynical strategy - founded on a tacit recognition that AQI's beliefs were so alien to most Iraqis that they'd never find many takers unless backed by trickery and force - meant that Shi'a killing Sunni was actually good for AQI, and so they'd go out of their way to provoke the most horrific violence against their own people.
AQI was one of the progenitor organisations that went on to form the core of Islamic State. It may seem hard to accept that, but the long-range targets in the attacks on Paris are ordinary Muslims, whom Islamic State are desperately hoping will be now subjected to increased surveillance, harassment and violence at the hands of Western Governments. That is how Islamic State is attempting to claw its way from the extremist margins to a kind of twisted legitimacy as the most viable protector of Islam.
Waleed Aly must have hit something of a nerve last week when he called them out on this hideous strategy, because millions of people have shared his plea to focus our response, rather than engaging in precisely the kind of indiscriminate backlash that these violent criminals are trying to provoke.
To his credit, in his national security speech of a few days ago, Prime Minister Turnbull largely refused to take the bait. His contribution focused largely on unity, social cohesion and targeted intelligence gathering and disruption of violent extremist networks active here in Australia.
But the measure of the value of such a statement lies not just in the tone with which it is delivered, but the actions that underlie it. Boasting about the scale of our military involvement in Syria seems almost deliberately counterproductive. In 2015, thirteen countries engaged in bombing a country smaller than the State of Victoria, and the situation on the ground is more complex still as nuclear -armed superpowers and regional actors are drawn into an increasingly violent regional conflict.
Associate Professor of the Lowy Institute Rodger Shanahan, pointed out that Australia's announcement to bomb Syria was "long on rhetoric, but short on detail, and lacked any semblance of strategic vision or acknowledgment of the potential impact on the situation inside Syria".
Defence Minister Andrews himself conceded that he couldn't estimate how long the deployment would last, had no idea how the Syria conflict would end, and acknowledged that the West needs "a clearer strategy" for the Middle East.
To revisit the last time the West had a "clear strategy" for the Middle East, we could sample this quote attributed by General Wesley Clark to then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in 1991, on the subject of regime change in Iraq, Syria and Iran: "...We've got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes - Syria, Iran, Iraq - before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us."
The consequences of attempting to bomb liberal democracy or otherwise implant Western priorities into the ancient rivalries and allegiances of the modern Middle East now speaks for itself. Iraq is balanced on the edge of apocalypse, Libya is the world's newest failed state, and Syria is emptying into Europe as millions of refugees overwhelm its neighbours.
This is the edge of the abyss to which Bush/Howard/Blair war on terror has taken us, by taking the bait of a global war of civilisations offered by a tiny handful of Al Qaeda extremists. In responding to violence with escalated violence, this is where we now stand. Mr Tony Abbott, who sat in Cabinet when John Howard signed Australia up for the catastrophically misconceived and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, now demands a ground invasion of Syria from the backbench from where it is hoped he will never return.
Our military actions undermine the potential of our diplomatic role as an activist middle power. Australia has good diplomatic standing with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and more recently, thanks to recent interventions by Foreign Minister Bishop, Iran.
Australia has proved that we can be constructive diplomatic players in difficult and protracted conflicts. We've had successes at the United Nations Security Council under Foreign Ministers of both political stripes; most recently Ms Bishop who was able last year to co-author a unanimous Security Council resolution allowing access for cross-border humanitarian aid to Syria without the consent of the Assad Regime.
The recent Iranian nuclear agreement shows how progress on intractable problems can be made where coercion and threats of force have failed. This has opened new diplomatic space between Iran, Russia and the United States, the three countries that could arguably do the most from the outside to support expanded ceasefire zones inside Syria, enabling humanitarian assistance to be delivered, cutting off the supply of weapons and isolating Islamic State.
The single most urgent priority of the international community needs to be a political solution to the crisis in Syria and Iraq, because every military solution proposed thus far has simply made the situation worse.
Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey need to be key players in urgent deliberations, facilitated by a neutral party that can bring these parties together to expand the narrow common ground and restart the failed Geneva process of negotiations.
Our place as a US proxy probably means Australia can't be that neutral moderator, but we can still play an active part in encouraging these powers to come to the table. The bitter evacuation of hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe and the premeditated attacks in Paris have ironically breathed life into the so-called Vienna talks toward a peace settlement in Syria. On January 1 2016, these negotiations will be restarted, but this time, regional players including Iran will be at the table, and the intention is to have regime figures and opposition leaders in the room. We understand how formidable the hurdles are which lie in the way of such a process toward a ceasefire and political settlement in Syria, but it is equally obvious to all that there is no military solution to the violence in this tragic part of the world.
The criminals who are clearly attempting to provoke the world to greater violence in their own lands may have instead have moved the world closer to a peace settlement in Syria. Any such progress will be unspeakably fragile, but this is where Australia should play its part.
This space for resolution also needs to be created on the ground. Political negotiations will only bear fruit if and when the fighting stops on the ground. Localised truces offer a starting point for de-escalation, and when successful, allow much needed humanitarian aid to get to those in the midst of the conflict. Syrian civil society leader and astrophysicist Rim Turkmani has highlighted, a truce in Barzeh led by civilians resulted in tens of thousands of internally displaced people returning to their homeland: "many people went back to their areas after [the ceasefire]. They settled back in their houses. They're not IDPs anymore. There was a revival of modest economic activities. There was some progress."
It is obvious however, that groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic State will remain outside such ceasefire processes, and are likely to attempt to undermine any attempts at a peace settlement in Syria which might unite presently fractured parties against them. Islamic State has exploited the disintegration of Syria and the foreign boots on the ground in Iraq to stake its claim over a huge swathe of territory; the last thing it wants is for these warring factions to adopt a more singular focus on the territory it holds.
Unlike Al Qaeda's distributed franchise structure, Islamic State exists to hold territory; it is given life through a war economy heavily focussed on oil revenues and other illicit financial flows. In February 2015, the Financial Action Task Force based in the US reported on the "Financing of the Terrorist Organisation ISIL." They analysed how Islamic State aquits the monthly payroll of thousands of foreign fighters, how it generates funds, and proposed important measures for the international community to choke off the money supply. The FATF proposes a number of strategies for doing this, but they also point out that "a number of the funding tactics that ISIL employs have not yet been assessed." This is essential research which remains incomplete, and the strategies they outline have been thus far subordinated to reflexive demands for increasingly futile military escalation. The Financial Action Task Force annual budget of US$3.5 million represents about 120 hours flying time for a single global hawk UAV.
Australia can play a powerful role in ensuring Governments around the world follow through on UNSC resolutions making the financing of terrorist groups a crime, freezing the assets of those in the supply chain, and ending illegal oil sales by identifying customers and how they are trading it.[1]
The time for debating Australian deployments in theatres of war is before the deployment, not after, so that the Parliament and the public can weigh the benefits of military action against other actions which seek to de-escalate conflict.
No Coalition speaker will come into this Parliament and admit that they were wrong to carry us into war in Iraq. That in tearing down an inconvenient regime and leaving chaos in its wake provided the proving ground in which Islamic State gestated. The War on Terror has been a failure; we are less safe now than we were before President Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared mission accomplished.
The Liberal National Coaltion, having played their part in this vast escalation of violence around the world, now assure us that yet more violence is the only way to prevail.
Australia can be a key actor in moves to demilitarise this horrific conflict, but we need to put the needs of the region first. Rather than adding more fuel to the fire, we must encourage our allies and friends to once and for all cease the reflexive lunge to further militarise this conflict, actions for which ordinary Syrians and Iraqis continue to pay an unimaginable price.