Why we're all the way with the USA
By Paul Sheehan
September 27, 2003
The big crowd at Yankee Stadium had no idea who they were standing for, but as the organist belted out Waltzing Matilda they got to their feet, applauding. When the musical interlude moved to Advance Australia Fair, it was the first time anyone could remember a foreign national anthem being played at the US's most fabled stadium.
The centre of the attention, the man whose face was up on the huge screen, the man singing a foreign anthem in the private box of the owner of the New York Yankees, was a nerdy bald guy with glasses. John somebody. It was Saturday night, May 3, 2003, and the only thing the crowd knew was that he was the leader of a country that Americans like, and one of the very few nations that had committed combat forces to fight beside US forces in "Operation Iraqi Freedom". That was all the crowd needed. They were up.
And they only knew the half of it.
Beyond the US, there are 188 sovereign nations (give or take a microstate or two) and only one of them has fought beside it in every one of the major international wars the Americans have waged over the past 100 years. In the US's seven wars of the past century (not counting numerous and sometimes bloody military actions in Panama, Grenada, Somalia, Bosnia, Guatemala and elsewhere) - World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan war, and the Iraq war - only Australia fought in all seven wars, and every one of them was fought far from Australia's shores.
In World War I, when the population was only 5 million, 300,000 men enlisted for duty and the majority, 216,000 of them, were either killed, wounded or captured. To put this in perspective, it was the equivalent of today's US (with 290 million people) suffering 12 million military casualties.
This did not prevent Australia from fully committing, less than a generation later, to World War II, well before Japan started the Pacific war and forced the US to engage. Another quarter of a million Australians were killed, wounded or captured. Thousands more casualties were later endured in Korea, in Malaya and in Vietnam. Then came combat in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and a military face-off with the world's largest Muslim nation in East Timor.
Nothing changed this year. In January, long before the diplomatic dramas that would play out at the United Nations, the Howard Government began to deploy Australian forces to the Persian Gulf. In February, when the American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was bombarded with complaints that the US would be isolated if it invaded Iraq, he responded, "Oh, I don't think we'll be going it alone." He already knew Australian and British forces were committed and in place. That same month, when the Gallup organisation conducted an international poll in 39 countries about attitudes to a war, Australia led the world in support for military action against Iraq.
Now, with the US engaged in what Washington calls a "war on terror", the Western democracy that so far has taken the most number of civilian casualties in this war, per capita, after the US and Israel, is Australia. Australia yet again. Three Australian civilians died in the World Trade Centre bombings on September 11, 2001. Another 88 were murdered by Islamic extremists in Bali one year ago. Again, to make an analogy with the US, it was a tragedy of the magnitude of 1300 Americans being killed.
Why are Australians again being killed? We are an island continent in the South Pacific far removed from the world's major trouble spots. Australia has no traditional enemies, is a wealthy democracy with no history of political instability, and is best known for its tourism, sport and natural beauty. Put another shrimp on the barbie.
Why would a nation so far from harm be so willing to fight? Two basic reasons. Australia is an altruistic nation. It stands for something. With allies, it is willing to fight expansive tyrannies. As for the other reason, when Howard committed Australia to the American cause in Iraq, he did so for the same reason five of his predecessors went to war: the need to be aligned with a superpower that can stop an invasion from Asia, and did stop an invasion from Asia. (It is not improbable that in the future Australia will seek such an alliance with China on the basis of this ingrained diplomatic doctrine.)
The Prime Minister has a very specific threat in mind when he makes more deposits in the American bank of military goodwill. He is thinking about Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation, one of the world's most precarious democracies, and one of the most violent. Political reality, namely the overriding need to keep the peace with the Indonesians, dictated that Howard cannot say what the electorate tacitly understands, which is that we live next to a nation with 200 million Muslims, with a history of political violence, a tradition of political corruption, an increasing level of Islamic militancy, a place where scores of Australians and hundreds of Christians have been murdered, a nation that could fall apart, or under the control of Islamic fundamentalism, or both.
In short, we need a great and muscular ally if the satay hits the fan.
No Australian politician can say what I have just written, but all are entitled to think it, just as any political leader would be imprudent not to cultivate good relations with Indonesia and give credit to the good job the Indonesians have done in bringing to justice the Bali murderers and rolling up terrorist networks in the country.
We live in hope. And because Australia is not a stupid country, it is widely understood that an unambiguous alignment with the US, while offering protection, also entails risks, and possibly entanglements. The most obvious risk is antagonising the atavistic bigots in the Muslim world currently looking for any excuse and any means to kill wealthy Westerners.
On foreign policy, governments make judgements, make choices and take calculated risks. People want leaders to lead. The public understands what Howard is doing. It also supports him on border security issues. He owns this territory.
Under Simon Crean, Labor criticised Howard for committing Australia to America's cause, while mouthing platitudes about the American alliance. Labor politicians lined up to attack President George Bush with a greater enmity than they ever expended on the mass-murderer Saddam Hussein. You can look it up. It's in Hansard.
That's why federal Labor's problems are deeper than the negative poll numbers of Crean, and why it is getting no traction over Iraq. The very reasons why Labor's warring factions can't replace the leader are symptoms of a deeper structural malaise. Crean is the son of a former Labor cabinet minister, replacing another son of another former Labor cabinet minister. Insularity runs deep.
Howard's strength rests in large part on this malaise, and on the electorate's memory of the hubris of the 13 years of Hawke-Keating governments, when immigration was plagued by widespread rorting, when the battle cry of "racism" came to be used with a hair-trigger zeal. The principal players in this particular miscalculation were Paul Keating, Gareth Evans, Robert Tickner, Nick Bolkus and Andrew Theophanous, men whose political careers came to abrupt ends in a variety of colourful and gruesome ways. Only Bolkus survived, to become an elected shadow.
The electorate remembers, which is why Howard has not been dragged down by the anarchy in Iraq. It is why Labor was so accommodating to the Government on the issue of border security during the last federal election when the Left was screaming for it to take on the Government. Labor's polling told it that if they repeated the tactic routinely deployed before 1996, and accused its opponents of "racism", it would pay as high a political price as it did five years earlier.
Nothing had changed. The cry of "racism" was poison. It is still poison.
This is much more visceral than debates over weapons of mass destruction and point-scoring over the bodies of young American soldiers in Iraq. That's why Howard has been coated with political teflon.
Even teflon can erode. A change of Labor leadership. A property crunch. An education war. A Medicare scare campaign. Terrorist bomb attacks. A collapse in the political fortunes of George Bush.
So strong is the alliance forged under Howard and Bush that the US President will visit Australia next month as a show of gratitude for Australia's unique and enduring solidarity with the US. The visit will wrap Howard even closer to the fortunes of this imperial presidency, and the embrace will not be nearly as comfortable as it was five months ago, in the bright glow of New York.