Australia is trying to have it both ways – placate a bellicose Donald Trump, while offering ‘minimal’ support for his war. But Marcus Strom argues you can’t be just a little bit at war.
The Albanese Labor government has chosen its side. By offering political support to the United States and Israel in their attack on Iran, and sending military assets to the region, Australia has aligned itself with an imperialist war that violates international law and threatens to inflame the entire Middle East.
Let’s be clear: providing diplomatic backing and material assistance is not neutrality. It is participation. By giving political cover to the adventurism of Donald Trump and the Israeli government, the Albanese government has made Australia part of this attack.
The government claims our contribution is limited and “defensive”. Yet it has deployed 85 ADF personnel, military ordnance and a Boeing E-7A Wedgetail surveillance aircraft to the region. Anyone with even a basic understanding of modern warfare knows that surveillance, logistics and targeting support are integral to offensive operations. The distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” support is a political fiction.
And this doesn’t even take into account the undoubted targeting role played by the US intelligence ground station at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory.
Further, the AUKUS pact has placed Australian sailors in the direct chain of military escalation. Under the training arrangements of the AUKUS security pact, Australian personnel were aboard the US nuclear submarine that torpedoed and sank the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena near Sri Lanka.
The Dena had recently been in India as part of the International Fleet Review as a guest of New Delhi – an exercise Australia itself took part in. The sinking of the vessel raises disturbing historical echoes of the British sinking of the Argentine ship the Belgrano during the Falklands/Malvinas war in 1982, which was outside the UK imposed exclusion zone at the time.
AUKUS means the Australian government dare not antagonise Washington. Having tied Australia’s strategic future to US military planning, the Albanese government now finds itself politically incapable of challenging Trump – even when he launches a war described by the United Nations as outside the realms of the UN Charter.
Apart from Ed Husic, who has said the attack is clearly outside international law, the silence from Labor MPs is deafening. They should be rebelling in caucus.
Trump’s act is the very erosion of the “international-rules-based order” that Anthony Albanese himself warned against as recently as last year. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, the Prime Minister declared: “If we allow any nation to imagine itself outside the rules, or above them, then the sovereignty of every nation is eroded.”
His words ring hollow today.
Of course, even a liberal imperialist politician like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney not only knows the ‘rules-based order’ is over, he told those assembled at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that it was ‘always a lie’. As we said last month, Albanese continues to live within that lie.
Marxists assess wars not on the basis of whether they are given a green light by the United Nations – but in whose class interests they serve. This war serves the interests of the global capitalist class. And it has side benefits, with the Financial Times reporting that US oil groups will reap a $US63 billion bonanza from the disruption caused by Trumps war on Iran.
Albanese once understood the dangers of following Washington into war. On 20 March 2003, condemning Australia’s participation in the invasion of Iraq, Anthony Albanese told parliament: “Our government is about to redefine us in the eyes of the world as willing backers of US militarism.”
Two decades later, his own government has done exactly that.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong has often described the genocide in Gaza as “complex” and distant from Australia’s shores. Yet when it comes to Iran, the government suddenly finds the issue simple and urgent enough to immediately back Trump and Israel, even while dodging questions on the ‘legality’ of the war by saying that is a matter for the US and Israel.
The South Coast Labor Council has rightly parodied the government’s logic. The political establishment has spent months attacking anti-genocide protesters for ‘bringing the Middle East to Australia’. Yet it is perfectly acceptable for Australia to send troops to the Middle East, it seems.
Labor members should reject this hypocrisy. A motion circulated by Labor Against War calls for Australia to withdraw support for the attack on Iran, bring home all ADF personnel and oppose the war. It should be supported.
Our solidarity lies with the Iranian people. Socialists oppose the repressive regime in Tehran – but we also oppose the imperialist assault on Iran. Being politically active in a country now part of the imperialist assault means our main enemy is at home. Our position is one of revolutionary defeatism towards the imperialist powers – including our own government – and revolutionary defencism in Iran.
Not defence of the Iranian regime, but support for the Iranian people in defending themselves against the US-Israeli onslaught while maintaining complete political independence from the reactionary Islamic Republic. The regime cannot effectively resist imperialism and will instead attempt to exploit the war to rally support for its own authoritarian Islamist rule, and will eventually seek accommodation with imperialism.
Exiled Iranian Marxist Yassamine Mather has argued this position. Writing from Britain, she calls for defending the population from imperialist attack while exposing the hypocrisy and incapacity of the regime.
Mather writes:
“Everyone in Iran tells me there are no adequate air-raid shelters – we must demand them. Open basements, underground carparks and the metro system.
“We should call for universal rationing, instead of the selective subsidies the Islamic Republic grants to its chosen friends and allies. People are already going hungry. There should be fair shares for all.
“The fortunes of the corrupt oligarchs should be immediately confiscated. Privatised industries put under state control so that the country can be organised to resist and survive. We must emphasise that the defeat of imperialism can only be achieved by fighting for extreme democracy. No to the rule of theocrats, generals, monarchists and capitalists.
“We demand the freeing of political prisoners currently held in Iranian prisons who want to resist the Israelis and the Americans. We must call for an armed popular militia.“There must be freedom of speech and the unrestricted right to demonstrate, assemble and organise.”
The lesson for Labor members is clear. The Albanese leadership has shown it is fully signed up to the machinery of imperialist conflict. Socialists – inside and outside the Labor Party – must fight together for a consistent internationalist and anti-imperialist alternative based on solidarity with working people everywhere, not loyalty to Washington’s wars.
This means demanding the Australian government withdraw its forces from the Gulf, condemns the US-Israel assault, cancel AUKUS and close all US bases in Australia.