For a long time, I gave Prime Minister Anthony Albanese the benefit of the doubt in his dealings with US President Donald Trump. I might wish he were Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, standing up to the bully with wit and grit and stirring oratory. But Canada has paid a big price for that. Albo, I thought, is looking out for Australia’s interests. He doesn’t want the Eye of Sauron to turn to the Shire. But sometimes, even hobbits have to find their courage.
This monstrous war – this war of choice without legal sanction; this careless, indiscriminate war that kills schoolgirls and blasts apart world heritage sites – is such a time.
There is real depravity in this war, from the bogus and ever-changing justifications to the dehumanising language describing Iranians to the deplorable video put out by the White House using manga comics and movie clips interspersed with footage of real bombs that took real lives.
The prime minister has often berated those anguished about carnage elsewhere for bringing the problems of “over there back here”. And yet, he has done that very thing, and in ways far more consequential than chanting a slogan or attending a rally.
I am ashamed that Australia was one of the first countries to express support for this war. I am sorry that we entered the war, even if the aircraft we deployed are defensive. More concerning is the unwitting Australian role in aggression, through the madness of AUKUS, that terrible deal in which we pay billions for submarines we’ll probably never see, give away our sovereignty and put our service personnel in harm’s way.
Australian submariners should not have been part of a lethal attack on an Iranian ship in international waters in an undeclared war. An attack that cost at least 80 lives, some of them likely conscripts who deplore the regime they are obliged by law to serve. A “quiet death”, said US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, that Ken doll from hell who speaks in childish slogans about human life and suffering. Well, Ken, there’s nothing quiet about being blasted to smithereens by a torpedo. The quiet death is the death by moral injury to which he may have subjected young men who did not sign up to be stealth killers in another nation’s illegal war. Who were surely not consulted and perhaps not even informed of the attack.
I first travelled to Iran in 1988 and 1989. In those days, I used to be amused at the Iranian state media’s coverage of us, the international press corps. We were the “trumpets of arrogance”.
But now that epithet – arrogance – seems stunningly accurate. Ignorance has a price. The rest of the world is paying the price for Trump’s astonishingly arrogant ignorance of the enemy he so fecklessly engaged. While his cronies in the fossil fuel and armaments industry will make billions, everyone from Australian farmers to besieged Ukrainians to impoverished Americans will suffer from the economic chaos this war has engendered. And innocent Iranian civilians die. Their skies turn toxic from bombed refineries. Their civilian infrastructure is destroyed.
The Islamic Republic is brutal, rotten and deeply hated by its own people. But it is run by an elite that is shrewd, deeply entrenched and desperate. To think you could overthrow it by martyring an ailing 86-year-old is to be stupid or manipulated.
Israel’s intelligence is not ignorant of the nature of its long-time Iranian enemy. The lethal attacks Israel has mounted on nuclear scientists over the past decades prove that it knows every iota of information, down to the route each individual takes to work. For 40 years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly desired the war that is now under way. Which is why he lobbied so hard against US leaders who favoured diplomacy, such as Barack Obama, until he finally got a patsy like Trump elected.
And now Trump, having declared the war won, the Iranian navy destroyed – without admitting that in fact neither of the statements is true – bullies other nations, including ours, into solving the problem he created. Having spat on NATO, he now seeks its ships and its minesweepers to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
There is a need for minesweepers because the US, in a spectacular but sadly not unusual feat of incompetence, decommissioned its own, in favour of an unproven and less effective technology. In January – just two months before launching this war – the four Avenger-class minesweepers that had kept the Persian Gulf safe for decades were sent back to Philadelphia to be scrapped.
At least Australia isn’t falling in line on this one. We will send no ships. The hobbits, it seems, will keep their frigates – and the young Australians aboard them – closer to home, looking after the interests of the Shire.
It could be a moment for the prime minister to speak eloquently about the clean energy transition, of the urgent need to move away from dependence on foreign oil. About why this turbulent moment shows how essential it is to invest in charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.
In China, battery-electric and hybrid trucks now outsell conventional trucks, accounting for 54 per cent of the market in December. I guess their farmers are a lot less worried than ours are right now about where the next tank of diesel is coming from.
Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist.
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