Australia in danger, as part of USA’s military machine
Is it time to downgrade US defence? Business Spectator, Jackson Hewett , 26 Sep 2012 Malcolm Fraser says it is time we end our “dangerous and foolish” complicity with US military policy in the Asian region and renegotiate the ANZUS treaty.
He calls Defence Minister Stephen Smith’s assertion that joint US Australian military operations are not bases as “political spin of the worst kind”, something that Professor Richard Tanter, the Director of the Nautilus Institute for security studies agrees with.
Fraser says that the 2500 marines on permanent rotation in the Northern Territory, proposed US surveillance bases in the Cocos Islands and expanded roles of Pine Gap linked to US bomber command in Hawaii, send a clear message that Australia is becoming the “the southern bastion of America’s re-arming in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia” – something that “spells danger for the entire region”. If citizens fully understood the level of US control over
military operations here, there would be “rage across Australia”.
Fraser is calling for a complete review of the ANZUS treaty and says that we have failed to work within the treaty’s stated aim of “consultation” on defence, and instead we have become “supplicants” who uncritically take part in American wars.
It is time, Fraser says, to show “the guts, the grit and the gumption” to communicate to the region that we are independent of America. Under current American policy, Fraser believes, our unwavering alliance with the US puts us in more danger than not….. http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/us-alliance-america-australia-china-foreign-policy-pd20120926-YH2Q9?OpenDocument&src=sph%20&src=rot
No comments yet.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 
Leave a comment