Kill anything that moves: the real American War in Vietnam

In a 14 January 2013 post in the US Veterans' blog Veterans Today, Sherwood Ross reviews Nick Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books), a book which argues that the My Lai Massacre was no isolated event. Ross begins:

"Massacres of civilians by U.S. forces in Vietnam were not rare aberrations but everyday occurrences, an authoritative new book on the subject charges.

"Worse, the massacres were a result of deliberate Pentagon policies handed down from the very top, often to build false “body count” figures that could lead an officer to promotion. The inflated body counts reported civilian dead as combatant Viet Cong when they were actually women, children and old men.

"The massacre of more than 500 civilians at My Lai on March 15, 1968, by the Americal division’s Charlie company, 1st battalion, 20th infantry, has long been portrayed as a solitary episode ordered by Lieutenant William Calley. He was the only one of 28 officers involved who was convicted and although sentenced to life imprisonment was paroled after just 40 months.

"Yet episodes of such barbarism “were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam,” writes Nick Turse in his new book, “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam”(Metropolitan Books). Turse is a fellow at The Nation Institute whose investigations of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam have gained him a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction and a fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He writes that he spoke with more than 100 American veterans across the country “both those who had witnessed atrocities and others who had personally committed terrible acts.”

"Turse reports the Pentagon has gone to great lengths to cover up the true record of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam: 'Indeed an astonishing number of Marine court-martial records of the era have apparently been destroyed or gone missing. Most Air Force and Navy criminal investigation files that may have existed seem to have met the same fate.' "

Read the full post at http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/01/14/many-u-s-my-lai-type-massacres-in-vietnam-covered-up-by-pentagon-reporter-charges.

Iain Cobain on Camp Nama

Iain Cobain of The Guardian writes that British soldiers and airmen who helped to operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion have, for the first time, spoken about abuses they witnessed there.

Read his account, published in the 1 April edition, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/01/camp-nama-iraq-human-rights-abuses.

I wonder what consideration our Government gave to the fact that this is not an aberration, but part and parcel of the American way of war. I think we must have had some understanding because my understanding is that, like the British, when we think we are likely to capture prisoners we like to take an American along to be the official captor, so that we don't find ourselves in the legal position of handing prisoners over to the Americans. That is a fig-leaf. The real question is, do we want to associate ourselves with this kind of behaviour, and do we think it contributes to the chances of success of whatever exercise we are engaged in?

Andrew Farran on the loss of the Australian grain industry

Below is the full text of a piece by my colleague Andrew Farran, of which an edited version was published in today's Weekly Times. It is a sad story of Governments paying insufficient attention to what is going on around them

In a later post I will explain the true intent of the Wheat Export Authority - established on my advice as a shield against the extra-territorial application of US anti-trust law, but rendered ineffective in that regard before it got under way, as a result of government succumbing to pressure from an uninformed industry.

The loss of the Australian Grain Industry – No Accident

by Andrew Farran

The loss of Australian control over the production and international marketing of grains, particularly wheat, is no accident and can be traced back to the establishment of the Australian Wheat Board and the ‘single desk’ for bulk exports in the late 1930s; to the mishandling of its later privatisation; to misconceived policy stances over free trade in international commodity negotiations; to a government failure to stand up for its trade interests in Iraq between the Gulf Wars; and finally to short-termism on the part of major Australian investors and superfunds.

In the late 1930s the government of the day established the Australian Wheat Board with the single desk for bulk wheat exports. This ensured that wheat growers, many of whom worked marginal farms, got a fair go with storage and trading. To some this looked like agrarian socialism rather than rural efficiency. Internationally, particularly among North Americans, the AWB and the single desk was anathema and became a target for destruction.

It took decades to destroy, regrettably with Australian government connivance (both sides of politics). Unlike the Reserve Price Scheme for wool market stabilisation in the 1980s, the Wheat Board was a success, both in terms of quality controls for exports and profitable marketing. Advised by the then Department of Trade it had access to the best market research and analysis available. This was done for the national benefit for a commodity that was critical to the well-being of the economy.

Now the industry has toppled. With the forthcoming third of the major disposals - GrainCorp to the US monolith Archer Daniels Midland - its control rests in foreign hands. This takeover means that 75% of eastern Australia’s grain production and 90% of Australia’s bulk grain exports are controlled from North America. The currency exchange advantage to the US will also disadvantage Australian wheat in international markets.

Shareholders and the major superfunds more interested in quick profits and short-term deals ensured this outcome. It is as if the nation’s assets were being capitalised in order that we might become rent-seekers dependent on foreign enterprise and investment rather than our own endeavours. 

How did this happen? First, in an environment of indiscriminate free trade, anything looking like agrarian socialism had become an anachronism, even if structured to rationalise the handling of specific aspects of a unique industry. The AWB as originally structured was not a socialist concept. It was a monopoly for the wider good, a rare type which nurtured farming enterprises, big and small, in its sector.  

Secondly, with privatization AWB’s monopoly over bulk exports was exposed to US anti-trust (monopolies) laws which were deemed to have extra-territorial reach. This could have been circumvented had the government of the day stuck with its plan to establish a Wheat Export Authority (WEA) as a government entity immune from US laws. This could then have directed the AWB’s international trading operations. But the government succumbed to grower pressure to drop the WEA without realizing the implications.

Meanwhile wheat farmers were being required to live on their wits with little government assistance while our trade negotiators persistently sought to leverage a free trade objective against agricultural protectionists in the then European Communities and the US. The futility of this policy was evidenced year after year by the refusal of those countries to yield an inch on protectionism except for unavoidable budgetary constraints. Meanwhile grain growers here were kept marginal without market support no matter how critical their overall importance was to the economy. Over time lay social and cultural failure quite apart from struggling family budgets.

Thirdly, while retaining many of its original features the single desk fell victim between the two Iraqi Wars which gave its enemies the chance they had waited for. Iraq had been a major established market for Australian grains but its market share was under siege by external interests that were virtually directing and funding the UN sanctions regime imposed on that country. For food exporters to Iraq there was no longer a level playing field. Australia was to be either cut down or cut out.

Meanwhile the Iraqi population, leaving aside Saddam Hussein with his non-existent weapons of mass destruction, had to be fed. If Australia were to be cut out others would be cut in - and that was what was to happen. Strategically the AWB negotiators had to find a way to stay in. Technically it involved some degradation of the sanctions regime, but this was happening everywhere at the time. The sanctions regime had in effect already failed. When AWB was ‘exposed’ the government went defensive, and into denial, instead of calling it for what it was. To have held ground shouldn’t have been too hard, at least for a government that subsequently lied in going to war a short time thereafter, in defiance of the UN and international law – a war in which the resulting levels of death and destruction made any kind of trade infraction a relatively trivial matter.

Not content to leave the structure of our wheat trade at risk to US pressure, both major parties then sought to make capital out of the AWB’s predicament, chipping away at it with, as it turned out, a largely nonsensical Royal Commission, with rising threats of criminal prosecutions (which by and large have fallen by the wayside for want of credible cause), and cranking up earlier arguments about ‘market forces’ against this one-time successful but now floundering international market manager.

In these circumstances AWB succumbed to its own take-over, and the subsequent inability of the surviving firms (that is, the former ABB Grains and GrainCorp) to hold their ground has led, or will lead, to the lot going over to the North Americans, just as planned decades ago. Yet we still regard ourselves, in international trade circles, as a foremost agricultural nation. Not for long it seems!

The University of New England Mace

This is beautiful silver mace was donated to the University of New England in 1957 by its then Deputy Chancellor, Phillip Arundel "P.A." Wright, a New England grazier and a great benefactor of the university.  I took this photo during the afternoon tea on the Southern Lawn which followed its first outing at the Graduation Ceremony in April 1957.

P.A. was a remarkable man, and his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography is well worth reading (see here). Among his other claims to fame, he led the campaign which led to the New England National Park being gazetted in 1934, and was the father of the great Australian poet Judith Wright.

He was a member of the committee that successfully campaigned for the establishment of a university in Armidale in the 1930s, was a foundation donor to the University College and a member of its Advisory Council from the time it was established in 1938, and of its Council from the time it became an autonomous institution in 1954. He was Chancellor in my time at the University in the early 1960s, succeeding the first Chancellor, Sir Earle Page.

My father carried the mace in university processions and on all academic occasions from the time it was donated until 1994, the year before he died. He had become the default person responsible for University ceremonial after helping to organise the 1955 ceremony at which Governor-General Sir William Slim installed the first Chancellor, Sir Earle Page, and in 1960 was appointed the University’s first Esquire Bedell, a ceremonial post that harks back to mediaeval times when University Chancellors were for very good reason preceded by a gentleman carrying a mace.

In our own more peaceful times, note the 1950s-style security on this valuable object – none, it’s just on public display on a table for the duration of the afternoon tea.

Defence Minister doesn’t get Defence timescales

In the course of an interview between ABC chief political correspondent Sabra Lane and Defence Minister Stephen Smith on Radio National’s PM program yesterday afternoon, the following exchange took place:

SABRA LANE: The Government says its spending on Defence will be increased to 2 per cent of GDP when the financial circumstances allow, got any rough idea as to when that might be?

STEPHEN SMITH: I'm not putting a timetable on it.

SABRA LANE: But you've got respected analysts like Peter Jennings who say it just shouldn't be left to chance you should be able to give people an idea of when that might be.

STEPHEN SMITH: Well I don't want to shop Peter, but Peter was intricately involved in a former life with the detailed working of the 2009 white paper, he was one of the people who thought that you could map out for Defence a guaranteed share of spending with dedicated growth paths from 2009 through to 2030 - over 21 years. Well life is not like that and the global financial crisis taught everyone that life is not like that.

I have news for the Defence Minister. When you are dealing with defence procurement and capability development, life is exactly like that, or at least it needs to be, because acquisition of a complex defence platform takes twenty years or more. In order to manage such projects and be in a position to enter legally binding contracts between the Commonwealth of Australia and the supplier, the Department of Defence needs to know how much money it is likely to have over the relevant timescale:

-  Planning for a replacement for the Oberon Class submarines began in the late 1970s, the winning design was announce in 1987, and the submarines were built between 1990 and 2003: major capital investment over a quarter of a century.

-  Planning for the replacement for Collins began not later than 2007. These boats will enter service in the 2030s.

-  Australia signed up to the Joint Strike Fighter program in 2002.  The first tranche of 14 aircraft will be delivered no earlier than about 2017-19, and it will be well into the 2020s by the time we have full capability. Meanwhile we will have to make a stop-gap purchase of Super Hornets.

All of these procurement projects require very substantial complementary expenditure on facilities, crews and crew training.

The fact is that if Governments want Defence to manage its procurement, facilities investment, through life support and training programs efficiently and effectively, it needs to give the Department reasonable predictability of funding. This is not a year-by-year business.

See the full interview at Sabra Lane - Stephen Smith interview, 3 May 2013.

Agriculture policy déjà vu.

It was with a weary feeling of déjà vu that I heard on ABC Radio National this morning that we are to have a new agricultural assistance policy to replace the Drought Exceptional Circumstances framework, a new policy that will emphasise encouraging farmers to be prepared for drought rather provision of assistance after disaster strikes.

Wear déjà vu because that is exactly what we thought we had achieved in the Department of Primary Industries and Energy in 1997, the second year of the Howard Government. After months of hard work and inter-departmental consultation by folks like Ken Matthews and Vanessa Tripp, National Party Leader and Minister for Primary Industries and Energy John Anderson put a submission to Cabinet which emphasised farmers accepting more responsibility for managing the risks involved in a business which is by definition prone to the vagaries of the weather and to natural disasters. The leitmotif of the submission was that farming is a business, not a lifestyle choice, and managing the business is in the first instance up to the farmer. Accordingly, the focus of Commonwealth policy would be on creating financial instruments which would enable farmers to even out their highly variable income from year to year, assisting marginal farmers off the land, and providing training and counselling for those who were forced to move off their farms.

One of the stellar achievements (we thought) was that Cabinet agreed that we would no longer be in the business of providing interest rate subsidies, spectacularly bad public policy which disproportionately channels funds to the most highly indebted farmers, some of whom should no doubt be assisted to move off the land rather than being assisted to remain on it.

Unfortunately this part of the package was blown away by President John Howard when it faced its first test. I say President because Prime Ministers are as their name suggests first among equals, people who run a Cabinet and consult their colleagues before making any important decision, after giving their colleagues due notice and giving them time to obtain advice from their departments; Presidents don’t need to bother with all that bureaucratic stuff, they get things done, they just issue Executive Orders.

Soon after the policy was adopted President Howard donned his Akubra and his elastic sided boots and went off to survey flood damage on the Namoi – in the heart of John Anderson’s electorate of Gwydir. At his caring and concerned best he spoke on camera to a local farmer and asked him how the Government could best help him. “We are really going to need an interest rate subsidy” said the farmer. “Done” said President Howard, with John Anderson standing at his side.

So we were back in the business of interest rate subsidies, but now we are going to change all that.

La plus ça change, la plus le même chose.

Iraq: a war widow’s view

On Saturday 27 April The Canberra Times published an opinion piece by Kellie Merritt, an Iraq war widow, social worker and mother. Her husband Flight Lieutenant Paul Pardoel was an Australian navigator who served with the RAAF for 15 years, before transferring to the RAF in 2002. Paul was killed with nine other British service members when their Hercules was shot down in Iraq on January 30, 2005.

It is a powerful and thoughtful piece with some important reflections on the responsibilities of governments contemplating deploying their armed forces into international armed conflict.

What price humanitarian war?

Justification for war in Iraq was tenuous in 2003. A decade later it is even more so, writes war widow KELLIE MERRITT.

 

I did what I did. It's all on the public record and I feel very good about it … If I had to do it over again, I'd do it in a minute.

- Dick Cheney

If we hadn't removed Saddam from power just think, what would be happening if these Arab revolutions were continuing now … Think of the consequences of leaving that regime in power.

- Tony Blair

That was the thing about the Howard government: we stood for something. And one of the things we stood for was freedom.

- Alexander Downer

Perhaps it is a little unfair to quote out of context, but these quotes illuminate the thinking of three men who dodged and re-shaped the principles, rules and norms that limit and define the justifications for waging war. Although their reflections mark the 10-year anniversary of the war they began, their reasoning seems more elusive than ever.

The fluid narrative of justification, liberation and self-congratulation is so removed from the reasons they gave 10 years ago and so oblivious to the consequences 10 years on, that it trivialises war. They ask us to consider the case for war on a humanitarian platform, but on scaffolding underpinned by only half of the human story. They use the misery of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein as a framework but refuse to balance the platform by acknowledging the Iraqis' suffering during and after the war; the result is a precarious structure.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. In 2006, one survey (The Lancet) estimated 654,965 deaths had resulted from the war; millions more have been injured. Close to 1.8 million Iraqis have fled their country since the war began.

Another 1.6 million make up the internally displaced. These ''humanitarian'' warriors view Iraq through such a narrow lens that the image portrayed is self-serving and deceptive. What about an authentic reflection on the reasons, both public and private, for the war and the human cost? Is it unfair to ask?

I watched, listened and read about the "shock and awe" campaign as it unfolded. I would do it in private, mostly at night while my three children were in bed. They missed their dad but they did not yet fear for his life. Paul had already been coming and going from Afghanistan. He was now in Iraq, a country he would ultimately not return alive from.

The experience of my husband serving in two distinct wars was about to become both a blur and a routine. On the home front, I buffered our children from unthinkable possibilities, while it seemed that our political leaders were doing their own form of buffering to all of us on the domestic and international fronts.

I was anxious, but my anxiety was tempered by my conscience - my home was not being bombed, my children were safe and my husband was a voluntary member of the military. Who was I to feel afraid or complain? Now, as a military war widow, a public conscience kicks in - what do I have to fear or complain about? The ceremonial acknowledgments of sacrifice and remembrance are not new to a war widow and not something to take for granted. However, I do wonder if I would sit more comfortably or graciously in these settings had Paul been killed in Afghanistan rather than Iraq?

Perhaps it is this discomfort that fuels my reflections on the Iraq war and the leaders who still do not seem to entertain any doubt about their decisions. I get that the military-political relationship is a central element of a functioning Western democracy. I know that the protection and promotion of democracy and effective use of the military falls to our elected politicians.

We have all seen governments call on their military to kill and be killed for political, ideological and moral reasons. The context of most wars is complex but the institutions and processes which transform disapproval into sanctions, sanctions into conflict and conflict into invasion seem all too malleable.

Even so, I still can't understand how the case for a unilateral pre-emptive war on Iraq was sustainable at the time, let alone with the benefit of hindsight. As ''meaningful'' factors - in the case of Iraq - such as, a UN Security Council resolution, continuing UN weapons inspections, evidence of al-Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction fell by the wayside, a vacuum was created. That vacuum was filled by political rhetoric and an artificial notion of urgency - and so the war proceeded. If my powers of comprehension were tested by the reasons for going to war, the deeply flawed and chaotic post-invasion nation-building strategy didn't help.

As my children and I have been forced to restructure our lives without Paul, I have watched the restructured Iraq still in turmoil and its wounded people still mired in confusion and dispossession. Free of the Saddam regime's brutality, certainly - but not of their own making - and by no means free of further conflict, bloodshed and uncertainty.

That this debacle could be one of the catalysts for the re-election of Howard, Bush and Blair was exasperating. It illustrated to me how pervasive a non-critical view of war could become when a nation's electorate is not - by and large - affected by its ravages; I finally got that I was naive.

In 2004, I started to reflect - in the context of Iraq - on the fairness of the military-political relationship. I began to struggle with the concept and implications of military service, balanced with the toll it took on our young family. Was it worth it … worth Paul's life? I talked with Paul about resigning - which he did - the resignation process would take 12 months. Paul died - with nine of his military friends - on his last deployment to Iraq on January 30, 2005. That day marked the first ''free'' election day in Iraq, a day of liberation, or so the politicians said in their condolence letters.

Paul's Hercules was shot down over the Tigris River, somewhere between Baghdad and Balad. Clearly, the virtues of democracy delivered by an occupying force were not worth celebrating for the Sunni Iraqis who pulled the trigger.

If I had responded to the condolence letters sent by various politicians I would have thanked them for their letters. I would have said that my family honoured the expectations and obligations that are implicit between military families and their governments; that we put the needs of country and defence before our own.

I would have said that, in turn, governments owe a duty of care to military families that was undermined in the pursuit of a pre-emptive war. I would have asked them why they didn't reaffirm the reasons they gave to invade Iraq.

I would have said that while I shared their noble hope that Iraq would be free and liberated, their post-invasion nation-building strategy was palpably inconsistent with this commitment. I would have said that the condolence that Paul died bringing peace and freedom to the Iraqi people would have been reassuring if it wasn't so misleading, but that my pride in Paul was unshakable.

We need to learn about what happened in Iraq and the reasoning behind it, because the reflections of Cheney, Blair and Downer (and Howard's reflections during his address at Lowy Institute more recently) 10 years on suggest that they have forgotten. It is no longer appropriate for these men to continue to shape and dominate the political and rhetorical landscape - on Iraq - as they did 10 years ago.

Their thoughts and recollections - 10 years on - only seem like attempts to shape their jealously guarded historical legacies. I think we deserve better than that.

The decision to wage war requires a nation's attention, (not just from its political elite). It is time now for the Australian people and their government to hold a transparent and frank inquiry into the Iraq War and to give that inquiry the attention it deserves.

Perhaps my imaginary letter back to government would also have included my hope for such an inquiry to be held; my hope that this inquiry leads to Australians reconsidering their acquiescence in this tragic war and my hope that such an inquiry bears witness to the war's human cost and brings some small redemption for those killed and injured in Iraq.

For the original article as published in the online version of The Canberra Times see What price humanitarian war?