Bloomberg reporter Katrina Manson’s Project Maven tells the story of how, over the past decade, the US military has developed AI-targeting tools. Manson, an experienced technology and national security journalist, focuses primarily on the period 2016–21 and the titular project, which was led by US Marine Colonel Drew Cukor.

From the start, Cukor believed AI should be used in warfare only if two conditions were met: humans would still make the final decisions about targeting, and the laws of war would regulate AI in the same way as other methods of waging war. By the end of the book, when Manson brings the reader right up to 2026, that vision seems almost quaint.

Cukor is no longer in the US military, and nor is he associated with military research on AI. Military use of AI now includes autonomous weapons, the so-called “killer robots” deplored by human rights campaigners and condemned by UN secretary-general António Guterres. Governments seem uninterested in regulating or banning this new technology, with American defense secretary Pete Hegseth going as far as rejecting all international law–based rules of engagement in favour of a “warrior” culture.

At the heart of the debate is targeting, a key issue in international humanitarian law that regulates armed conflict. (Although many of the rules of war are set out in the Geneva Conventions and its protocols, the law is grounded in customary rules, some of which are based on centuries-long practice.) One of the first principles of contemporary customary international humanitarian law is the principle of distinction, which states that military attacks must only be directed at military targets and not at civilians. The principle may be widely accepted, but its application is often contested. Who is a civilian? How many civilian deaths (often referred to as “collateral damage”) are acceptable when armies attack a military target?

Careless or malign targeting isn’t new, of course. Manson notes American targeting failures in the pre-AI 1990s and 2000s. Proponents of AI, particularly the Mavenites, have argued that AI will reduce errors in targeting. But not all civilian casualties result from errors: even in the AI age, civilian targets are attacked, sometimes deliberately, and some countries locate civilian infrastructure near military installations in an attempt to immunise them from attack.

In the Middle East, for example, Israel has argued that Hamas uses hospitals — which international law says cannot be targeted — to conceal its operations. The Israeli military has thus targeted hospitals in Gaza, resulting in what Médecins Sans Frontières has described as a dismantling of the health system, leaving many without access to healthcare. In February 2026, the United States bombed a school in Iran, killing nearly 200 adults and children. In that case AI targeting may well have worked as intended, with the United States willing to accept a high risk of civilian casualties to hit an important military target, although recent reports suggest the databases of intelligence on Iran may have been out of date.

Manson argues that pointing to policy choices about acceptable targets and civilian casualties shifts responsibility away from the designers and users of AI. I disagree with her characterisation of the problem, largely because I don’t think these are separate exercises. Settings on AI-supported weapons and autonomous weapons result from the choices of human designers and human users.

But the story Manson tells in Project Maven begins at a different technological moment. Cukor, stationed in Afghanistan in the 2000s, despaired of the inadequacy of the technology available to him. Poor intelligence was leading to flawed identification of targets. American service personnel and civilians alike were unnecessarily killed. Cukor wanted better intelligence. Later, as he sought support to research AI use in the military, he focused on its use for intelligence rather than targeting. Nonetheless, the logical endpoint of improved intelligence was improved targeting. The Mavenites’ main goal in improving targeting was preventing loss of life among soldiers; they don’t seem to have devoted much attention to reducing civilian casualties.

Cukor and his team are the protagonists of Project Maven. But one important strand of the book is the role of the Big Tech companies. As Manson shows, Google (and particularly its employees) was initially reluctant to participate in military research. Over time, that reluctance disappeared internally rather than being overcome by Project Maven. Google and other large technology companies became part of Maven’s network of operations as they developed and tested AI tools.

More significant than this vanishing opposition is the consistent enthusiastic participation in developing AI for military use by the increasingly powerful data company Palantir. Manson’s final mention of Palantir, in the last pages of the final chapter, highlights the company’s involvement with the Israel Defence Force, or IDF, as well as the US military. While Microsoft disabled some cloud services to the IDF late last year, Manson notes, Palantir’s Alex Karp seems much more comfortable with the level of civilian deaths in IDF operations, despite Cukor’s evident discomfort with Karp’s statements.

Project Maven is structured around the three-part targeting process — “find; fix; finish” — plus a fourth section called “feedback.” There, Manson discusses ethics and accountability, including regulation of AI in weapons in international law. She occasionally refers to the Geneva Conventions or the law of armed conflict in the first three sections of the book, and some of her interviewees note that they could break military law and possibly wind up in jail if they target civilians. In the fourth section, she dives deeper into the question of regulation.

AI creates problems of accountability. If an algorithm determines what should be targeted, who is responsible? At the level of state responsibility, there is probably no difference between attributing the conduct of a soldier to the state that issues the orders and attributing the output of technology to the state that used it. When we move to the level of individual accountability, the problem is more acute.

Australia is currently discovering how difficult it is to ensure responsibility for alleged war crimes where direct person-to-person conduct is involved. But determining responsibility for targeting decisions would be even more complex. At least since the end of the second world war, “just following orders” is not a defence, so in principle doing what the AI instructed would not deflect responsibility. But it might be difficult to locate the specific human or humans ultimately responsible. If the soldier firing the weapon doesn’t have the information or the agency to challenge an AI-selected target, does responsibility shift upwards in the chain of command, and if so, where does it land?

Some of the people Manson quotes, as well as many governments, are confident that the existing law of armed conflict is adequate to regulate the use of AI for targeting. Indeed, some of them believe AI targeting already conforms with international law. That view is not universally accepted, however, even among governments, and some argue for new agreements to define acceptable use of AI. In the absence of comprehensive approach to regulation, two strands have emerged: a push to ban autonomous weapons and attempts to ensure that human soldiers retain control of AI-supported weapons. Neither seems likely to succeed in the near future.

Campaigners including Human Rights Watch’s Mary Wareham believe autonomous weapons should be banned by treaty. While Secretary-General Guterres supports an international ban on autonomous weapons, not enough governments want action. Wareham analogises efforts to ban autonomous weapons to the 1990s campaign for a treaty banning the use of landmines, which succeeded in 1997 and now numbers about three-quarters of countries as parties. But recent developments suggests that treaty is not a useful precedent for advocates of banning autonomous weapons. Ukraine and five other European states have withdrawn or declared an intention to withdraw, citing the fact that Russia is not a party and has used landmines in Ukraine.

The other strand for potential regulation of AI weaponry is a requirement for “meaningful human control.” The concept was initially proposed in 2016 by civil society group Article 36, named for Article 36 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions that requires governments to ensure that new weapons are consistent with international law. Article 36 presented meaningful human control as a framework requiring transparency, accurate information, opportunities for human intervention, and accountability.

Although Manson doesn’t discuss meaningful human control extensively in Project Maven, some experts, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, believe it would be a useful supplement to existing rules. The threshold requirement for the legal use of AI in targeting would be that the human soldier retains control over the decision to use the weapon. It is impossible to define meaningful human control exhaustively, but based on Article 36’s framework it means more than human decision-making as a backup for automated targeting.

Possibly the best we can expect is for governments to agree on some red lines for AI use overing cases where human decision-making is obviously absent, for example, or is too insignificant to the process. Nonetheless, like a ban on autonomous weapons, any agreement to subject military AI to meaningful human control seems unlikely at present. Unsurprisingly, in submissions to a UN report on military use of AI published in 2025, none of the three key members of the UN Security Council — the United States, China and Russia — advocated new regulation based on meaningful human control of AI use.

Without rules specifically banning autonomous weapons or regulating AI targeting, governments can only fall back on the existing law of armed conflict, including the principle of distinction, with all the uncertainty within those rules.

As the reader progresses through Project Maven, Manson’s concern about regulation and accountability becomes more evident. She seems to regard Cukor and at least most of the Mavenites as good-faith advocates of AI that supports rather than replaces human judgements about targeting. But developments after Cukor’s departure, particularly in the second Trump administration, raise doubts both for Manson and for Cukor himself. The question now is whether regulation under international law can catch up, even as some commentators declare the death of international law.

One final reflection: the back cover of Project Maven includes eight enthusiastic endorsements. Most reveal as much about the authors of the endorsers as they do about the book itself. Some liken the book to a gripping thriller; others see it as a warning about the dangers of AI. I would instead characterise it as a book of reportage, based on extensive research and interviewing, as well as years of experience reporting on the role of technology in security.

Unlike a thriller or a polemic, this book requires close attention from the reader but repays that attention with a detailed and insightful account of how we got here and where the technology might take us. Ironically, one of the by-products of the ubiquity of AI, the increased use of AI-generated news stories to replace human journalists, means that we may have less reporting of this quality in the future. Appreciate this book while you can. •

Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team and the Dawn of AI Warfare
By Katrina Manson | W.W. Norton & Company | $52.95 | 406 pages

The post Rules of engagement appeared first on Inside Story.

Brigham was adopted into a working-class family in upstate New York. Feeling rootless and defective, he concocted fantasy lives for his birth parents, building a social worker’s stray comment about Vietnam into a conviction that his father fought there. From his early teens, he became consumed with the desire to find traces of his parents, poring over public records and visiting country graveyards. His search continued for decades in the face of incomprehension and resistance.

Brigham entered college keen to learn about the war, a fascination that merged with the quest for his birth father to create a career-defining white whale. College was followed by grad school, academic positions, travels to Indochina and successful books. Meanwhile, promising leads in his search for his parents kept turning into dead ends. Finally, commercial DNA testing cracked open the case and Brigham discovered the identity of both parents, now sadly deceased, and the grim circumstances that brought them together.

The book is a powerful testament to the emotional dislocations that adoptees can face. According to Brigham, the 1960s were adoption’s perfect storm, a time when sexual attitudes had liberalised but attitudes to illegitimacy had not. Vast numbers of American children were given up for adoption in that decade, and many had difficult lives, shuttled between neglectful and abusive foster homes or often, in rural areas, treated as unpaid farm labourers. Brigham claims that half of America’s homeless people have experienced foster care.

Writing of his own experience, he identifies adoption as a “primal wound.” As a child he feels shame and abandonment and a hunger for an ancestral identity, vividly imagining the “Ghost Kingdom” of his missing family. He is impatient with the frequent suggestion that he should be grateful for landing in a caring adoptive family. This view centres the perspective of the adoptive parents and mythologises the sacrifice of the birth mother, he argues, while dismissing the experience of the child. Even so, he acknowledges his experience is not universal: his adopted sister Jane doesn’t share his need to clarify her origins.

For Brigham, however, the search for a lineage is obsessive. Preoccupied with finding family resemblances, he writes off possible relatives for having body shapes dissimilar to his own but is then surprised when actual relatives look different. The urgent need for what he calls “genetic mirroring” produces a kind of essentialism. When he learns that an ancestor of his birth mother had migrated from the Shetland Islands 160 years earlier, he declares himself a Scot, observes that he too loves the sea, and hunts down island namesakes. Although the passing of generations has diluted any meaningful genetic connection, a rock-solid ancestral base has been found in a sea of uncertainty.

This is a True War Story has a satisfying arc. Brigham finds the family connection he longed for and loses some of the unsettled desperation that roughened his edges during his years of searching. There is a striking coincidence at the root of the book — that the combat photographer Bruce Atwell, whose work Brigham first wrote about in college, turns out to be his father — and it offers an emotional resolution when it is revealed. Like his father, he has become a storyteller of the war. Unfortunately, that revelation comes with almost a third of the book still to run. It drags a little as the author recounts the process of connecting with a large extended family.

Brigham makes extensive use of reconstructed dialogue that can sometimes sound forced. Children speak with maturity and perspective that belies their years and adults offer plainspoken wisdom straight from a country pulpit. Permeating everything is a folksy earnestness that may seem jarring to Australian readers. Brigham teaches at an elite college, but he is channelling the experience of the rural poor, who disproportionately struggle financially, die young, and serve in foreign wars. Urban irony and self-distancing are not central to their experience.

This is a True War Story mixes factual reporting with generous descriptions of family, friends and colleagues and occasional discussions of politics. Brigham’s story speaks to the intergenerational impact of social class in a country that “fights its battles on the backs of the poor.” His birth parents’ experiences of poverty and foster care made it more likely that he would experience them too. Breaking the cycle is a challenge, but the book presents an uplifting story of how it happened in one tenacious man’s life. •

This is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam
By Robert K. Brigham | University of Chicago Press | $45.99 | 264 pages

The post Ghost family appeared first on Inside Story.

Janet Flanner is not a familiar name today, but by any measure her career is worth knowing about. Born in Indianapolis in 1892, she saw in her hometown’s endless tabletop of corn fields a life of excruciating boredom. At age twenty, she reacted to her father’s suicide by choosing to live wildly, careering out of her university studies and into a succession of journalism jobs she swiftly made her own. Unwisely married, she escaped to New York and then into a relationship with actress and writer Solita Solano, with whom she decided to emigrate to Paris in 1922.

Like so many other young Americans, Flanner was intent on writing about “beauty with a capital B” in the City of Light. With aspirations on a level with Henry James, Laurence Sterne and “any of the Brontës,” she picked up the odd bit of journalism while pouring her early energies into a novel. Cubicle City (1926) was the result. Though it has since been grouped with landmark works of queer literature including Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Djuna Barnes’s The Ladies Almanac (1928), its lack of contemporary success tempered Flanner’s willingness to persevere with fiction. As a friend said, her desire to write fiction exceeded her talent at it.

But Flanner’s ability with the real was something else. Her letters about life in Paris to family and friends back in the United States sparkled. Whether she described the people strolling through the Tuileries Gardens, what was being said around the nightclubs and galleries, or the dramas and scandals of the American expatriates who increasingly crowded the cafes and bistros, she had a talent. As friend Jane Grant said, Flanner’s letters were “so gay and attractive.”

Moreover, in Grant’s view, such letters would fill a vital gap in the new, weekly magazine her husband had recently founded. “The New Yorker,” Harold Ross famously declared, “will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers.”

Finding a Paris correspondent was part and parcel of such a pitch: Ross expected his readers to be versed in all things French and regard Paris as the world’s centre of art and fashion. For them, Flanner’s letters — as Grant soon wrote to her — were “just the thing.” Thus, for $40 a pop, she should commence sending to the magazine 1000-word letters containing “anecdotal and incidental stuff familiar to Americans… Dope on fields of the arts and a little on fashion, perhaps… There should be lots of chat about people seem [sic] about and in it all he [Ross] wants a definite personality injected.”

Flanner swiftly realised that tone and voice were more important than subject matter. Ross was an editor obsessed with finding the precise word, with prose that was direct and as tight as a drum. Thus, Flanner’s voice became cultivated but detached, wry and often pithy. It resulted in letters that were endlessly amusing. Ulysses, she wrote, was the book “the civilised half of a half-civilised world has long been humbly waiting.” The dadaist writer Tristan Tzara was “a great man of small stature.” A book by Jean Cocteau provided “an hour’s delight” and a memorial to the inventor of camembert cheese unfortunately resembled “a slice of gruyere.” “There is no justice,” she added.

Signed “Genêt,” Flanner’s letters began appearing in September 1925. She would continue filing them — albeit with breaks — for another fifty years. And the magazine she likened at this time to an “oversized minnow learning how to swim” soon became the blue whale of the literary and publishing world.

Mark Braude’s Typewriter and the Guillotine tells the story of that evolution through Flanner’s experiences and work. It is the most notable and most interesting thread of his book, and if it is a story told before — in Brenda Wineapple’s fine biography of Flanner (1989) and in Ben Yagoda’s comprehensive history of the New Yorker, About Town (2000) — it gets a welcome retelling here.

Perhaps most refreshing is Braude’s focus on the women in that “Lost Generation” of artists in Paris. While Hemingway, Joyce and the others make their due appearances, Braude pays more attention to the innovative women also working at their craft and enjoying life on the continent. Cameo appearances by Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Nancy Cunard, Collette, Edith Wharton and more are enlivened by striking details: Djuna Barnes’s preference for nude suntanning, for example, or Toklas’s single-minded interest in herbs.

A central conceit of the book is that the New Yorker’s evolution paralleled an evolution in Flanner’s work. At first, Braude writes, Flanner wrote in a “casual, loose style,” conversational and reminiscent of the cafes in which she gathered information, and left it to editors to refine her prose. Soon, however, she was doing that herself.

The context of her work also evolved. If the Paris she initially wrote of was simultaneously elegant and rough, glittering and squalid, it was also an old-world metropolis in a period of sustained change, where iconic cafes were unceremoniously shuttered and new fashions and ideas in art were constantly swirling. But Flanner rarely wrote about the “lingering sense of mourning” that abided in Paris. Exacerbated by Europe’s economic uncertainty and social unrest, the trauma of the first world war arguably lay at the root of the hedonism and pursuit of abandon charted by Flanner’s letters.

This was not a subject Flanner was prepared to probe: as Wineapple wrote, she believed her Genêt persona was “a high-class gossip columnist.” It couldn’t do that kind of work. Nor was the New Yorker pushing Flanner to do so. As magazine colleague E.B. White once joked, the only strong political stance the New Yorker took in the 1930s was on a proposal to relocate the information booth at Pennsylvania Station. It simply was not part of the magazine’s outlook to be overtly political or so engaged.

This began to change in the 1930s, when Flanner started regularly visiting Germany. At first, her attention to the darkness amid the glitter was fleeting: writing in 1931, she acknowledged that Germany had produced “workers without work and capitalists without capital,” that there was “terrible want in certain quarters.” But, as Braude notes, Flanner then “moved quickly from that gloomy material” to the giddy decadence of the Weimar Republic’s restaurants and cabarets and general party atmosphere.

Two years later — by which time Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s chancellor — the darker facets of the country were clear. Signs outside towns announced that Jews were not welcome, Nazi flags were everywhere, and the harassment of foreigners and Jews was not even disguised. During one trip, Flanner saw a Jewish boy “being marched down the street with a placard around his neck, confessing to the sin of kissing a non-Jewish girl.” And yet still her despatches shied away. As she wrote lightly, “All over Europe, 1933 has been a worrying kind of year.”

The New Yorker didn’t want her to look closer. “AVOID DANGER TAKE NO CHANCES,” the magazine telegrammed when news of riots in Paris reached American shores. The magazine needn’t have bothered: when she realised she couldn’t get through the crowded streets to see the action, Flanner left to have a beer at a brasserie with friends.

As time went on, though, that detachment, that deliberate inattention, became untenable. Flanner’s friends and social circles increasingly acknowledged there might be another war in Europe, and the social unrest evident in those riots continued to swell. By the second half of 1934, convinced Germany was going to “come and gobble France as sure as we sit here,” Flanner was pitching to Harold Ross a profile of the German chancellor. She was second-guessing herself, conscious of her limits and uncertain whether she could transcend them to write about such an important subject. Ross, meanwhile, was reluctant: he had earlier vetoed an interview with Mussolini as “out of bounds for us” and thought serious current affairs material was ill-suited for what he persisted in calling a “humour magazine.”

When it went ahead, the resulting three-part profile didn’t entirely vindicate either Flanner or Ross. Flanner had been fascinated by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and aroused by the magnitude and precision of the German military she saw at the Nuremberg rally in 1935. But conversations with everyday Germans and a prolonged period of reading Hitler’s speeches and writings, including Mein Kampf, convinced Flanner that Hitler was a fanatic, that Germans were crazy, that war was likely, and that she shared all anti-Nazi attitudes. And yet she feared a profile saying as much would be used as crude anti-Nazi propaganda. As Braude writes, keenly, “She was a writer, not a publicist. She was certainly no diplomat.”

And so Flanner decided to write that profile in the style she would use for anybody, writing of Hitler’s life without any mention of whether people might agree with his views. She included a considerable amount of information about Nazi dogma, the number of bodies Hitler had climbed over in his scramble for power, and the violent outlook at the heart of the Nazi regime. Yet there was also a measure of detachment and wryness that seemed incongruous. As it began: “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaller, non-smoker and celibate.”

It marked a change nonetheless. In 1936, when he asked Flanner to cover the Berlin Olympics, Ross added a new request — that she “get something of the [German] political and economic situation” into her work. And, particularly once the Spanish civil war broke out, Flanner focused more and more on political and military developments in Europe. Over the next three years, the tone of detachment faded and a sense of immediacy and presence took root. “It’s melancholic to see,” she wrote in May 1938, “how quickly humanity, if left free after its initial success, deserts the early, earnest union that gave its cause strength and squabbles itself to bits.”

Within two years, recognising the Genêt persona and style was now fundamentally wrong for the moment, Flanner began signing her columns with her own name. She would not return to Genêt until after Paris had been liberated.

Braude tells this story well, with evocative prose and a sharp eye for the tangible detail: readers will encounter many smells and tastes in this book. Less successfully, he also tries to graft another story onto Flanner’s life — that of German serial killer Eugen Weidmann.

In short, fragmentary chapters spliced between chapters about Flanner, creating an ominous drum beat through the book’s first two-thirds, Braude tells of how this social outcast and misfit turned criminal. Imprisoned in Germany for theft, Weidmann and several accomplices escaped to Paris with a plan to enrich themselves by kidnapping and ransoming rich foreigners.

The men were inept, and soon turned to murder. Weidmann killed six people, including a young American woman, Jean De Koven, unleashing a short and dramatic police hunt in the latter half of 1937 that ended with a shoot-out at a villa just outside Paris. Tried and convicted — a task made easier by his willingness to confess — Weidmann was executed, in public, by guillotine, in June 1939.

Given the geopolitical tensions and anxieties as well as the American press attention engendered by De Koven’s murder, it was no surprise that the trial took on a broader significance than its senseless and squalid crimes deserved. The prosecution and defence, for example, tried to claim Weidmann was representative of a broader German outlook and nature — of violence, bloodthirstiness and depravity. Told in hasty and cluttered chapters, the story of Weidmann’s trial is profoundly anti-climactic, not the least because of Braude’s decision to open the book with the scene of Weidmann’s execution.

According to Braude, strong parallels in Flanner and Weidmann’s lives warrant their stories being told together. But the parallels are generic and strained: “Both were foreigners in France… Both adapted quickly to their new surroundings… Both longed for beauty.” The intersection of their lives, meanwhile, is momentary. While Flanner reported on Weidmann’s trial and execution, nothing suggests it left a deep impression on her.

As a mark of her evolution, the fact she covered the trial is telling. As Braude writes, “She hadn’t come [to Paris] to write about decapitated murderers.” But the more important mark is surely that of her engagement with the looming Nazi shadow in the lead-up to the second world war.

Flanner certainly saw that. Her coverage of war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, her reportage of the Nuremberg trials and her work on the Nazi looting of priceless cultural artefacts were indefatigable. And they inflected the New Yorker’s style and outlook thereafter.

As Ross wrote to her, in June 1946, “I think our transition to peace, art, amusement, frivolity, etc, will be gradual, and probably the magazine will never get back to where it was.” •

The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII
By Mark Braude | Grand Central Publishing | $65.99 | 421 pages

The post Just the thing appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite commanding the world’s most powerful military, Trump looks like achieving, at best, the agreement Barack Obama secured with Iran — the one Trump tore up in his first term on the ground that it was the worst deal ever. Consider the cost in human lives, to the world’s economy and to the vestiges of Middle East stability of his reckless aggression.

In her new book Done in a Day, Elisa Tamarkin wants us to remember how badly an earlier war, in Vietnam, went for the US — not to mention for the millions of Vietnamese killed and injured — and how little politicians, and the public, seem to have absorbed its lessons.

Tamarkin brings an interesting dual perspective to her task. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the daughter of Bob Tamarkin, a foreign correspondent with the Chicago Daily News. Her family arrived in Vietnam early in January 1975 and her father was on the last helicopter out of Saigon on 30 April. Elisa, then aged four, had been evacuated with her mother to Hong Kong on 10 April.

Tamarkin has both real affection for journalism of the kind her father practised and a critical awareness of its shortcomings. Her book is richly illustrated with photos showing the innards of news work: the reams of telexes, the telegrams between her father and his editors, the final front pages of more than twenty American newspapers between 1978, when the Chicago Daily News closed, and 2025.

There is nostalgia in this and also, remembering the word’s Greek roots, pain (álgos) as Tamarkin recalls the proud history of the News’s early, deep commitment to reporting foreign news. As long ago as 1901 the newspaper’s publisher, Victor Lawson, had set up bureaus in Tokyo, Peking, Egypt, South Africa, Latin America, Australia and various cities in Europe, pioneering the comprehensive surveilling of world affairs that took grip during the twentieth century.

Lawson wanted a “man on the spot” (and they were almost all men) in each of these cities, living in foreign capitals rather than flying in and out. That way they would learn the local context, cultivate local contacts and anticipate events, equipping them to recognise a real scoop when it came their way. By the first world war, the paper had thirty resident reporters covering events from the front lines.

All this cost a lot. But it yielded other dividends: apart from strong coverage of breaking news, the News specialised in what one of its correspondents called “side-light stories” — “the unexpected, incidental angles on events that you could never drop in to find.”

By the time the paper closed in 1978, the amount of foreign news carried by it and its fellow American papers was in decline. In 1970, Tamarkin reports, foreign news occupied 11 per cent of the “news hole” in daily newspapers. By the time the Vietnam war ended the figure had dropped to 6.3 per cent. A decade later, after big companies began buying up newspapers in individual cities and consolidating them into chains, the figure had fallen even further to 1.8 per cent. Today, only the most resilient of the world’s legacy media, like the New York Times, can afford to run foreign bureaus.

Foreign reporting is not without its problems: newspaper publishers’ interests, whether ideological or commercial, are often aligned with their government’s foreign policies, as Tamarkin shows was the case with Lawson. Foreign postings were keenly sought after in newsrooms, leading to a certain arrogance among the species. As a character in Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play Night and Day remarks: “A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”

From the vantage point of 2026, it is also clear something has been lost. Ideally, foreign correspondents go out into the world, get to know other places and people and then translate what they find for their audience at home. They are an inoculation against the kind of news and opinion silos created and then cemented by the digital age.

Tamarkin’s book is carefully researched and genuinely thought-provoking, but it is also dense and allusive. Five extended chapters each cover several meaty topics with digressions into, say, Thomas A. Harris’s 1969 book about transactional analysis, I’m OK — You’re OK, or an early twentieth century “cine-poem,” The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre-Dame.

That aside, the most important theme of the book for me was Tamarkin’s complicating of the history of the Vietnam war. She begins by focusing intently on the final days of a conflict that had begun as a civil war in 1955 and ended in 1973 with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Saigon’s fall to North Vietnamese forces prompted the largest evacuation by helicopter of Americans and selected foreign nationals from the US embassy, though not, sadly, many of the Vietnamese who had fought with and supported the Americans.

How the war ended, though, is just the starting point for the author’s meditation on how political leaders think about wars and how the public’s perception of war is shaped by the news media.

Done in a Day also reaches beyond most media history by asking how the interaction between political leaders and the public shapes what each did next, especially after it became blindingly clear to anyone paying attention that the war was going disastrously for the Americans yet the nation’s political leaders kept it going for year after year.

Tamarkin points to Daniel Ellsberg’s famous leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg had been among the authors of a secret forty-seven-volume history of America’s political and military involvement in Vietnam since 1945, which had been commissioned by defense secretary Robert McNamara.

Although the New York Times published only part of the 3000-page narrative, writes Tamarkin, it was more than enough to make clear how the public “had been deceived by four presidents who knew from the start that the war would never end until it was lost, even as they continued to drop millions of tons of bombs.”

Even by 1970, before Ellsberg’s leak, there had been no shortage of information about the war’s disastrous progress in news reports and in books by journalists who reported from Vietnam, among them Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in the Lake, 1972) and David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest, 1972).

Ellsberg lamented the “endless, escalating stalemate” that first the Johnson and then the Nixon administrations allowed to continue. In his 1972 book, Papers on the War, he argued that members of the executive branch of government and in congress “had neglected totally to unlock and study its own copies” of the history of the war.

Ellsberg had tried in 1970 to persuade the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to skim the study or assign it to an assistant to read it for him, to which Kissinger replied, “Is there really much to be learned from that?” Tamarkin comments: “We know now there probably wasn’t much for Kissinger to learn, since he had been striding toward failure all along with a realist’s resolve, eyes wide open, hoping just to hold it back until… the next election.”

Ellsberg had also revealed parts of the secret history to a Senate foreign relations committee, but with little impact, and later in 1970, presenting a paper at an academic conference, he saw that even political scientists were largely unaware of its contents. As he acidly remarked, “An expert — I once heard — is a man [sic] who has read a book that no one else has read.”

Meanwhile, as Tamarkin notes, another million ton of bombs had been dropped, and hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos had died, along with 10,000 Americans. She quotes Hannah Arendt, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1971: “The public had access for years to material that the government vainly tried to keep from it,” which underscored the news media’s power but also a willingness to turn a blind eye for more than two decades “as though a fact is safely removed from the world if only enough people believe in its nonexistence.”

It is hard to ignore the present-day parallels. I can’t be the only person to have noticed that the news media’s rush to quote Donald Trump’s latest utterance about the war in Iran doesn’t exactly meet the definition of news — reporting something new — but instead underscores how easily the convention of seeking the views of those in power can be gamed by politicians.

Nor can I be the only one to have noticed that journalists reporting for the ABC’s metropolitan stations here in Australia don’t seems to have been listening to the first hour of Radio National Breakfast when various experts have been saying for months that the American president’s war in Iran was ill-conceived, ill-informed and illegitimate.

Either the journalists are not doing their job properly or their deference to power is growing, despite all their protests to the contrary. When the role of journalism is under multiple threats — many of them aggressively shaped by Donald Trump — we don’t need more deference to power, not least because those in power, like Trump, are abusing their positions and damaging so many in the process.

If it is dispiriting to see how easily and thoroughly the lessons of history are erased or forgotten, it is welcome, and bracing, to have them put before us so carefully and thoughtfully as Elisa Tamarkin has in Done in a Day. •

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon
By Elisa Tamarkin | University of Chicago Press | $46.95 | 300 pages

The post The last helicopter appeared first on Inside Story.

Once, an interviewer asked me a much more interesting question: why does Hitler still exercise such a fascination and loom so large in our culture? I responded with something along these lines: in an era in which there is less consensus about traditional religious definitions of what we should consider to be good, there is a broad secular consensus that Hitler (along with Nazism and the Holocaust) represents a definition of absolute evil.

My vague intuition has received a more developed and thoughtful articulation in a short book (or long essay) by Alec Ryrie, professor of the history of Christianity at Britain’s Durham University. In The Age of Hitler: How We Will Survive It, Ryrie argues that the Christian narratives and moral teachings that were hegemonic in Western societies until the second world war have been replaced. Since the war, he says, “we have all been living through the age of Hitler… the age in which our public morals have come to be defined with reference to the Nazis.”

Ryrie provides a concise sketch of how often references to Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust appear in popular culture. Initially he seems to be covering similar terrain to Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s 2013 book, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, which surveys popular culture’s treatments of Third Reich historical themes. Think of all the internet parodies of Hitler’s ranting in the bunker in the 2004 film Downfall. Indeed, analogies with Hitler and Nazism became so ubiquitous online that “Godwin’s Law” — which essentially says that the first person to introduce a Hitler analogy into an online argument loses — became a popular means of trying to stem the tide. But Ryrie soon veers in a different direction.

If Hitler represented absolute evil then the war the Allies fought to resist his aggression and defeat his regime was in some senses a “good war.” The title of Studs Terkel’s 1984 people’s oral history of the conflict, The Good War, might have contained a strong dose of irony given that the accounts he gathered didn’t shy away from the grisly aspects of the conflict. But there was no irony in the celebration of the (mostly) men who fought in that conflict as “the greatest generation” during the Reagan years, even though President Reagan himself spent the war in the studio lots of Hollywood.

As Ryrie justifiably points out, however, a war is a questionable thing to base a set of moral values on. I grew up on a diet of wholesome, morally unambiguous tales of wartime heroism (books like The Dam Busters and Colditz, for instance) but historians have since arrived at much more complex accounts of the war. The mass fire-bombing of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the racism and sexual violence, the grimmer aspects of Stalin’s conduct on the Eastern front — all received more attention as time went on. The Allies’ less praiseworthy acts don’t diminish the evil of Nazism, but they do blur the moral certainties of older narratives.

We also risk drawing lessons from the war that aren’t applicable to present dilemmas. Ryrie justifiably points to the inflationary use of the term “appeasement” in international crises. A respectable body of international relations literature has been devoted to the use and misuse of the “Munich” analogy in debates about how to deal with belligerent countries.

This is not to deny that Western societies drew important lessons from that war, notably the ideal of universal human rights. As Ryrie writes, “we cannot imagine our modern faith in human rights without the experience of the second world war.” Among other things, the post-1945 emphasis on universally valid human rights has energised anti-racist and anti-colonialist movements. But Ryrie sees our “faith in human rights” as flawed, because it is grounded in historical experience that is losing its salience in our culture.

It’s possible to show, on the other hand, that our contemporary concept of human rights has roots much further back than 1945 — at least as far back as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. Ideas of human rights are grounded in ethics and philosophy, not just historical precedents and memory.

Ryrie argues that the “age of Hitler” is coming to an end, which he doesn’t view as a bad thing. It’s also inevitable, he says, as the remaining number of living witnesses to wartime events shrinks and societies or cultures with different memories of that period make increasing claims on our attention.

Just over twenty years ago, in an important essay on the Crisis of Antifascism (2004), the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto diagnosed the waning hold anti-fascism had as a founding ideology of the postwar Italian Republic. The passing of the generation of protagonists of the struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, the banalisation of the memory industry, and the active efforts of elements of the Italian right to trivialise and relativise the crimes of Mussolini’s regime had all contributed to the weakening of the tradition of anti-fascism as a way of mobilising democratic politics.

Today Italy is governed by a party that is a direct linear descendant of the neo-fascist party founded in Italy after 1945 by unrepentant functionaries of Mussolini’s Fascist party. Europe-wide, far-right parties have secured large segments of the electorate. In Germany, the inoculation against the far right lasted longer than in many other countries, but the extremist Alternative for Germany is today polling as the most popular party in the country.

Ryrie doesn’t really engage greatly with political-historical analysis of the kind that Luzzatto practises. Instead, he proceeds to argue that it is time for the culture wars that divide contemporary Western societies to give way to a new synthesis of moral values. To get there, “progressive secularists” will need to learn from the positive dimensions of rooted religious traditions and “conservative traditionalists” will need to relearn the values of humility and repentance.

Ryrie’s argumentation doesn’t take account of the corrosive effects of a generation of neoliberalism, with its elevation of self-interest and its tendency to dissolve older sources of social solidarity. Names like Thatcher, Reagan and Hayek are missing from his book, despite its engagingly wide set of cultural references. He tends to be dismissive of class or economic factors, and it is frustrating to read an essay on contemporary history that has so little to say about actual power relations in society.

It is hard to argue against the value of dialogue with people of differing views, in the abstract. But when peaceful protesters tried to reason with Trumpist paramilitaries in the state of Minnesota in January this year, two of them were shot dead. •

The Age of Hitler: How We Will Survive It
By Alec Ryrie | Reaktion | $34.95 | 160 pages

The post Are we still living in the Age of Hitler? appeared first on Inside Story.

As Hitler prepared for war, the Lüneburg Heath region on the northwestern German flatlands was increasingly used for military exercises, with army barracks built in the area around the small town of Bergen and the nearby village of Belsen. After war broke out in September 1939 the army used these barracks as prisoner-of-war camps. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Belsen POW camp and its environs held tens of thousands of Soviet POWs who suffered a horrendous mortality rate from disease, hunger, overwork and mistreatment. Around 50,000 Soviet POWs died in Belsen and the camps in its vicinity.

In the spring of 1943 the SS acquired part of the POW camp to use as a special camp for foreign Jews. This plan for a Bergen-Belsen concentration camp originated in a cynical calculation by SS chief Heinrich Himmler: with Germany chronically short of hard currency to finance its war effort, individual Jews could be ransomed to foreign countries, such as neutral Sweden or even the United States, where Himmler assumed many European Jews had wealthy relatives prepared to pay large sums for their release.

Belsen was thus intended as a transit camp for a relatively privileged group of Jews selected as potential hostages for exchange. (Jews for sale, to borrow the title of Yehuda Bauer’s book on the subject.) Conditions were intended to be more survivable than in the death camps in occupied Poland. The camp was supposed to hold up to 3000 prisoners.

In the last few months of the war, however, the Belsen transit camp was overtaken by the conditions that prevailed in the death camps in the East. As advancing Soviet troops approached, prisoners were evacuated westwards, typically on gruelling death marches during which many died or were murdered outright. Some prisoners and guards from Auschwitz, including its last commandant, Josef Kramer, ended up in Belsen. The overcrowded camp was inadequately supplied with food, medicine, and other necessities and, by the time it was liberated by British troops, was ravaged with typhus that had already killed thousands. The SS and the local German army authorities even negotiated with the British army a peaceful handover of the camp in an effort to quarantine the contagion.

The dramatic British takeover of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is vividly narrated in close detail in the first part of Nadia Wheatley’s new book, Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom. The scene that confronted the British liberators of the camp earned Belsen the name of a “Horror Camp.” Newsreel footage and still photographs of thousands of emaciated, unburied corpses being thrown and even bulldozed into mass graves, with SS guards pressed into service for the task, went around the world.

The British subsequently burned down all the camp’s huts, which were rife with typhus, and moved the surviving inmates to neighbouring barracks and camp facilities. An estimated 52,000 prisoners died at Belsen, with 14,000 lives lost after liberation as a result of the typhus, malnutrition, and other conditions.

Wheatley’s Strange New World then moves to a thoroughly researched and fine-grained account of the year that followed the camp’s liberation. Her work on the book stretched over at least a decade, including her attendance at ceremonies marking the seventieth and eightieth anniversaries of the camp’s liberation, where she became acquainted with the site and with survivors (including some born after liberation in the displaced persons’ camp at Belsen). In between, she also attended the seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration, which was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wheatley’s focus is on the Jewish survivors and how they sought first to survive and then to try to negotiate some kind of future with their British liberators turned captors, as the displaced persons, or DP, camp took shape next to the former concentration camp. (She has little to say about the fate of the Russian POWs, or about the 10,000 Polish DPs who were temporarily accommodated in the Belsen camp complex, except in so far as their actions impinged on the Jewish survivors.)

Among many other sources, the book draws on the diaries and letters of nurses, including civilian volunteers, doctors and medical students who were recruited to try to care for the camp’s survivors, and who initially had to work under catastrophic conditions. Remarkably quickly, some of the former prisoners who had trained as nurses or doctors also assisted, once they had had enough to eat and were provided with new clothing.

Wheatley quotes the ranking British Royal Army Medical Corps officer at Belsen making contemptuous comments about the prisoner nurses being untrustworthy as they stole other prisoners’ food. She argues that this only applied in the first days after liberation when all prisoners were near starvation. Soon after they were able to eat again, prisoners started to care for each other, with remarkable cases of compassion being recorded.

With evident sympathy, Wheatley describes the compassion of the volunteer nurses and British medical students who ministered to the surviving Belsen Jews. She is critical, indeed scathing, about the shortcomings of the British authorities at Belsen, starting with their underestimation of the degree of emergency medical assistance needed by tens of thousands of starving inmates in an overcrowded camp ravaged by typhus.

A failure to enforce quarantine restrictions on the newly liberated inmates resulted in typhus infections continuing to spread for days, causing a spike in deaths from the disease eighteen days after liberation. An experimental attempt to administer a protein called hydrolysate to emaciated prisoners caused some violent reactions among patients and seems to have done more harm than good.

Prisoners also reacted violently when German nurses and army doctors were pressed into service by the British army to help care for survivors. The German army doctors still wore their Wehrmacht uniforms under their white coats, and the prospect of receiving an injection from a uniformed German could cause panic among camp survivors.

One of the British army doctors who favoured the employment of German army doctors and German nurses in the Belsen DP camp was one John Norman Wheatley, who became medical superintendent in September 1945. (His appointment came after a brief appearance at Belsen by the Queensland tropical diseases specialist Raphael Cilento, who Wheatley describes — accurately — as a sympathiser with fascism and an antisemite.) Wheatley, as it happens, was the author’s father, which lends her account an unusual personal perspective.

Nadia Wheatley has already described her (non-)relationship with her father in her memoir Her Mother’s Daughter. In this book, she confines herself to noting that her father signed letters to members of his own family with the formal “J.N. Wheatley.” But she is unsparing in her account of the blind spots of the British medical and military hierarchy.

As the Jewish DPs at Belsen succeeded in establishing some semblance of a normal life as a community while waiting for the chance to leave Germany, leaders and spokespeople emerged, a community newspaper was published, and Jewish ceremonies and festivals could be observed. For a time, Belsen’s Jewish DP camp (which took on that identity against the initial resistance of the British authorities) even attracted Jewish DPs from elsewhere in Germany.

The British refused to recognise Jews as a national group, instead seeking to repatriate them to their countries of origin. But Polish Jews were unwilling to return to Poland, where some Jews who had sought to recover their prewar homes were met with pogroms (most notoriously, in Kielce in July 1946). Nor did many German-Jewish survivors wish to remain much longer in the land of the perpetrators of the Shoah.

While many Jews were attracted to the prospect of emigration to the United States, or other distant destinations like Canada or Australia, migration to Palestine increasingly offered the prospect of a safe haven for Jews and a place where Jewish communities could be rebuilt. Overwhelmingly, Belsen’s survivors became Zionists.

The commemoration of the first anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp in April 1945 coincided with the Passover festival. A German Jew, Norbert Wolheim, the deputy of the Jewish DP camp council’s leader, gave a speech in English aimed as much at the British soldiers present as at the 7000 Jewish DPs gathered there, in which he emphasised that the Jews’ liberation was still incomplete and called on the British to open the gates of Palestine. Several weeks later, British troops were deploying fire hoses to quell unrest in the camp.

Wheatley’s book is both deeply researched and acutely sensitive to the human dimension of her subject. Her account of Jewish survival and self-reassertion concludes by relating the baby boom that occurred exactly nine months after the liberation of the concentration camp. Wheatley got to know a few of the surviving “babies,” now elderly, on her anniversary commemoration visits to Belsen. The book thus ends by reasserting the agency of the Belsen survivors. The survivors were more than the passive victims they first appeared as upon their liberation. The birth of babies within sight of the former Horror Camp testified to the survivors’ determination to defy the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate a whole people. •

Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom
By Nadia Wheatley | Monash University Publishing | $39.99 | 416 pages

The post Liberated but not yet free appeared first on Inside Story.

As it happens, the blinking had occurred sometime before. Almost as soon as Moscow learned of the blockade it ordered Soviet ships to stay clear. Contrary to the apprehensions of Kennedy and his advisers, all Soviet ships were far away from the quarantine line by the time Rusk made his comment.

Nor was that the moment of greatest danger. More blinking would be done before the crisis was over. The big test was getting the Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Nonetheless, that moment showed the crisis was potentially manageable and the Soviets were wary about escalation.

Not one but two blockades are currently in place in the Strait of Hormuz. The first, imposed by the Iranians in response to the initial US–Israeli strikes, effectively shut the Strait. Iran’s leaders did, however, intend to allow their own and other favoured ships through, as well as those prepared to pay a toll to Tehran. That led to the second blockade, this one imposed by the Trump administration to deny Iran those benefits. Both blockades are being enforced, with merchant ships fired on and Iranian vessels seized.

In 1962 the world watched the developing crisis in the Caribbean with anxiety. Everything was dependent on decisions being made by a few people in Washington and Moscow. If the crisis got out of hand then all would suffer the consequences of what could be a nuclear war. In 2026 the world watches a contest of wills between Tehran and Washington, also with anxiety. Much economic damage has already been done: the longer the standoff the greater the prospective chaos.

For the standoff to end both sides must blink together to end their respective blockades. That might have happened on 17 April when Iran announced that the Strait was open. Trump welcomed the move but still decided to keep his blockade going to demonstrate the US had the upper hand. Iran immediately reimposed its blockade. Trump appeared to think the pressure on Iran would increase if it could not export its oil. It would have to keep more in storage tanks, which would soon fill up, and shut its oil wells. This has not happened.

The formal positions of the two sides on peace negotiations still seem to be far apart. Yet Trump on Tuesday suggested that “tremendous progress” was being made towards a deal. We have been here many times before, with Trump claiming some imminent breakthrough only for imminent peace to turn out to have largely been in his imagination. From the start Trump’s utterances on this war have sown confusion and got in the way of serious peace-making. (The Washington Post has a useful compilation of his many and inconsistent claims on the timeline of the war and the likely prospects for peace).

Yet that burst of optimism from Trump was combined with statements to the effect that the active stage of the war was over. After looking at whether Trump has started blinking, I’ll consider in this post the incentives for the Iranians to do some blinking of their own, and the possibility that the Strait might be opened soon.

Trump blinks first

On 3 May Trump announced yet another initiative — somewhat unoriginally named “Operation Project Freedom” — intended to undermine the Iranian blockade. The US would “guide” ships through the Strait of Hormuz from the next day, with a warning to Tehran that any attempt to prevent them getting through would be met by force. This was presented as a “humanitarian” move. On Truth Social, Trump said:

The Ships movement is merely meant to free up people, companies, and Countries that have done absolutely nothing wrong — They are victims of circumstance. This is a Humanitarian gesture on behalf of the United States, Middle Eastern Countries but, in particular, the Country of Iran.

We have told these Countries that we will guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business.

If, in any way, this Humanitarian process is interfered with, that interference will, unfortunately, have to be dealt with forcefully.

The humanitarian issue is real enough. The International Maritime Organization, in passing a resolution condemning Iran’s blockade, noted the threat posed to the “welfare of seafarers” as well as the danger to life and the “serious risk to the marine environment.” The Pentagon says 22,500 mariners have been stuck on 1550 vessels for more than nine weeks.

In the event, two US-flagged tankers that had been trapped were guided through the Strait. But compared with the scale of the problem this was of only modest value. Without Iranian cooperation, which was never likely, ships’ vulnerability to drones or sea-skimming missiles, even if they stayed close to the Omani coast, was enough to deter commercial vessels from taking any risks. Other than guidance the idea was that the US would use all its available assets to create some sort of security “umbrella.”

Seven Iranian small boats were sunk and some Iranian cruise missiles and drones were intercepted, but Iran still made its point by attacking several merchant ships and an oil port in the United Arab Emirates. So despite the US secretary of defense claiming a path had been secured and that commercial ships were lining up to pass through, the reality was much more precarious. Then, after forty-eight hours, Trump paused the operation, ostensibly because of progress in the negotiations, but also because it was not going to provide a way out of the impasse. The Iranians gloated that they had thwarted yet another American attempt to gain the upper hand.

The move certainly underlined just how much the administration wants to get out of this mess of its own making, preferably without losing too much face. Pete Hegseth was at pains to stress that none of the drama around “Project Freedom” affected the ceasefire. We were then told that active operations were effectively over, and so the ceasefire was effectively permanent. This was also in line with Trump’s insistence that he could ignore the sixty-day limit in the War Powers Act because the ceasefire meant that the war was over.

With the blockade still in place, however, this is not the case, as a blockade is an act of war. Trump said “It’s a very friendly blockade. Nobody is even challenging it,” but by 6 May he seemed to be having second thoughts about whether he really wanted to take the option of a return to bombing off the table.

Despite his apparent insouciance Trump doesn’t want this situation to continue for much longer. The war is unpopular in the United States. If it was successful then the political and economic price being paid might be acceptable. But so far this war has been far from successful, with many negative consequences and no positives. This became painfully apparent during last week’s congressional hearings when Hegseth acknowledged that the war had already cost $25 billion.

Hegseth sought to hide its limited achievements by engaging in a rhetorical confrontation with Democrats, at one point accusing them of being the enemy within. He praised Trump for his “bravery” in taking on the Iranians, explained how the Iranians had been allowed to do terrible things against the US for forty-seven years without anybody doing anything about it, and mentioned how dangerous it would be if the regime getting nuclear weapons. He emphasised that the regime has lost layers of leaders, along with lots of ships, missiles and other military capabilities.

But any boasts seem more than premature when the regime appears to be in a stronger position internally than it was in February and is far from being fully disarmed, with the status of its nuclear program thus far unaffected. The main change is that the Strait of Hormuz was open in February and isn’t now. The other difference is that US relations with its allies have deteriorated badly because Trump blames them for insufficient support. This is not what a victory looks like.

When he launched the war he seemed to have had in his head the Venezuelan model in which, once he had abducted president Nicolás Maduro, everyone left in the government was happy to work with the US to ensure their own survival. The differences with the Iranian situation are too numerous to mention. Trump’s key difficulty is that, having presented Epic Fury as a stunning victory for the US that left him with “all the cards” in the negotiations, Iran has clearly not been defeated and has a bargaining position that cannot be ignored if the aim is to bring the war to a close.

Will the Iranians blink?

Part of Trump’s preferred narrative is that the Iranians are desperate for a deal, and are only held back by splits within the regime and a consequential inability to take the hard decisions. Differences of opinion undoubtedly exist inside the regime, but not fragmentation. The IRGC (revolutionary guards) has used the war (as they used the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s) to consolidate its position and suppress dissent. It is riding high on its defiance of the Americans, which has done wonders for its international reputation, at least among those sections of the international community deeply hostile to the United States.

And yet. The immiseration of the Iranian people continues. People must scramble for the essentials of life. Many are not getting paid, cash is hard to come by, and inflation is out of control. The regime’s supporters have been energised by the conflict but a large portion of the population remains disaffected, suffering in silence, unable to share their thoughts because of fear of the IRGC. The internet is still down.

The American blockade has emphasised the difficulty of turning Iran’s control over the Strait into a money-making venture, but it does allow the IRGC to sustain a state of emergency and maintain its grip over the country. It must wonder about what will happen when it must declare the war over and the dire state of the country can no longer be ignored. With no quick fixes to Iran’s internal problems, perhaps that is one reason why the its leaders have had few incentives to make big compromises to end the conflict. The IRGC’s determination to show no sign of weakness is why it responded so vigorously to the American attempt to find a way to break the blockade.

But they can’t sustain the current position indefinitely. Many of those who are pleased to see the American embarrassed are being hurt by the closure. This includes China, which is getting increasingly nervous about the long-term impact of the Strait — through which it imports about a third of its oil and gas — staying shut. President Xi Jinping will soon welcome Trump to Beijing and doesn’t want the summit to be dominated by this issue. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi has recently been in Beijing.

Iran’s attacks on its neighbours have also left it regionally isolated. Few in the Gulf region are disposed to help it out of its troubles given the harm already caused to their own economies.

Fitful negotiations

Iran’s demands have been as maximalist as Trump’s. The Trump administration’s proposals start with Iran’s nuclear activities. It seeks severe limits on uranium enrichment, verifiable guarantees Iran will not develop nuclear weapons and long-term monitoring of nuclear facilities, as well as a re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and no Iranian control over shipping passing through.

The key feature of Iran’s response was to postpone the nuclear issue until everything else was sorted to its satisfaction. This would require the US to withdraw all its forces from near Iran’s borders and end its blockade of Iranian ports, and for all hostilities — including Israel’s offensive in Lebanon — to cease. It wants guarantees of no future US or Israeli attacks and also reparations for the damage caused, it wants sanctions lifted and billions of dollars of frozen assets released, and it still wants to manage shipping through the Strait. Only then could discussions begin on its nuclear program (without which there is no prospect of sanctions relief). It will not abandon uranium enrichment but does seem ready for a long moratorium.

When this latest Iranian proposal was received, via Pakistan, last week Trump dismissed it. He could not “imagine that it would be acceptable.” He wrote in a post on Truth Social on 2 May, suggesting that Iran deserved punishment: “They have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years.”

Nonetheless, last Sunday the US sent another proposal, and Trump spoke of “very positive discussions.” Presumably “Project Freedom” was designed to strengthen the US position and force the Iranians to take its proposal more seriously. Yet now Trump is signalling he has had enough. His position had been that if there was no deal “fighting resumes.” He appeared to have taken this threat off the table but then on Wednesday he put it back on again. In a post on Truth Social he said that failure to agree a deal will result in bombardments “at a much higher level and intensity” than Epic Fury.

Meanwhile, secretary of state Marco Rubio, who has not played a prominent part in the administration’s presentation of its case until now, has suggested the blockade was sufficient to keep up the pressure because it denied Iran revenue for “whatever remains of their frail economy.” He insisted that “we’re done with Epic Fury” and are on to “Project Freedom.” Unfortunately for Rubio’s credibility, Trump immediately paused Project Freedom and promised yet more bombing at a greater intensity than before if the peace plan was rejected.

Blinking at last?

Anything Trump says on peace deals as well as his more lurid threats must be discounted. There are other reasons for some optimism. Despite Monday’s events, and despite a flare-up on Thursday, the Iranians want to sustain the ceasefire and foreign minister Araghchi has also said that “talks are making progress.” A number of other countries, including Saudi Arabia and China, are now part of the conversation. International pressure to get this sorted is growing. The Iranians have now said that the Strait of Hormuz could be reopened if there was an “end of the aggressors’ threats,” but without specifying whether all ships could pass through and whether it would still want to collect tolls. (The IRGC statement refers to “the shadow of new procedures”).

The current focus is reportedly on a one-page memorandum which includes, according to Axios, a suspension of Iranian nuclear enrichment, the lifting of sanctions, and a restoration of free transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Rubio has suggested the nuclear clauses will be more of an agreed general framework for further discussions rather than a final agreement.

“We don’t have to have the actual agreement written out in one day,” he said. “This is highly complex and highly technical. We have to have a diplomatic solution that is very clear about the topics that they’re willing to negotiate on and the concessions they are willing to make at the front end in order to make those talks worthwhile.”

This is sensible enough, although clearly far from what the administration originally wanted. If that is all the Americans get out of this war — about the same as they could have got without its attack — then it will be even harder for the administration to brag about a great victory.

Internationally the nuclear issue will attract far less attention than whether the Strait can be opened and ships can start moving again. Even if there is a negotiating breakthrough it is unlikely to come quickly. Everything is going through the Pakistanis. There are no current plans for direct talks.

We have probably reached the stage where both sides are dissatisfied with what the other is proposing but neither wants the talks to collapse. External pressure to get the Strait opened is becoming more persistent. Conceptually it is not hard to work out what needs to be done, but the detail is difficult and any engagement by Trump can scuttle a promising initiative. We are probably inching towards a deal. But for now it is more a wink than a blink. •

The post Who will blink first? appeared first on Inside Story.

In the shade of Gallipoli, what hope was there for the celebration of another, earlier feat of arms in which Australian soldiers and sailors inflicted one of Germany’s first defeats of the war, swiftly securing a territorial prize that would entrench and enrich Australia as a regional colonial power for much of the next century.

In September 1914, barely a month after the outbreak of war and six months before Australians had ever heard of Gallipoli, the battle cruiser HMAS Australia — flagship of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force — led the biggest armada assembled in Australian history into the waters off Rabaul in New Guinea. Australia was accompanied by the cruisers Sydney, Encounter and Pioneer, the destroyers Yarra, Warrego and Parramatta, the submarines AE1 and AE2 and a volunteer force of about 1500 men.

Their task was to seize New Guinea, the northeastern mainland of what is now Papua New Guinea, along with present-day New Britain, New Ireland and the Bismarck Archipelago. It had been a German protectorate since 1884, the same year Britain took control of Papua, the southeastern portion of the mainland that it would cede to Australia in 1902.

The battle was over almost as soon as it had begun. Arriving on 11 September 1914 the ANMEF landed virtually unopposed, capturing within two days the two main German garrisons at Rabaul and Herbertshohe (Kokopo) on New Britain. The only serious fighting was on the road to Bita Paka, about forty-five kilometres south of Rabaul, where the force captured the wireless station and tower that provided vital communications for the German East Asia naval squadron. Six Australians were dead and four wounded against their opponent’s casualties of thirty-one dead (all but one of them New Guineans) and eleven wounded.

On 17 September Germany’s acting government signed “terms of capitulation” that gave Australia control of all the resource-rich territories of New Guinea and its 400,000 people — control that would continue in various forms until Papua New Guinea achieved its independence in 1975. The Battle of Bita Paka was a one-day wonder, but it became Australia’s first victory of the war and its first as a sovereign nation.

The fall of Rabaul might well be celebrated as a mostly seamless military success, despite the fact that the defenders of that outpost of the Kaiser’s far-flung empire were massively outnumbered and outgunned. Indeed, the attacking force was significantly bigger than the territory’s entire European population, which numbered fewer than 1300. The German garrison comprised just sixty-one men supported by about 240 native police.

In his new book, New Feller Master, Canberra-based archivist Michael Piggott concedes that “the ANMEF presence in New Guinea pales to near invisibility compared with the AIF in Gallipoli, France, Belgium and Palestine.” But is the comparison fair or even relevant? Why should the New Guinea operations be considered, let alone judged, in the context of events that followed on the other side of the world?

The author himself seems ambivalent on the point. He laments the lack of attention to the capture of New Guinea in the annals of Australian military history and widespread ignorance about the events, while also ridiculing the veterans (many of whom went on the serve at Gallipoli and in France) who struggled vainly for greater recognition of their contribution to the war effort in its opening weeks.

Piggott notes the fixation with “firsts” among those determined to cast the operations at Rabaul in a more heroic light: “The first to depart for war, the first success against the enemy and, crucially, the nation’s first casualties of the war.” And there were more added to the list as the special pleading became more intense: “First burial at sea, first female Navy entrants, first hospital ship, first joint operation, first ship to fire in anger, first boat to be lost, first Allied submarine to be lost…”

“Yet even the participants in those events could not assuage their own sense of inferiority compared to the much greater and more costly confrontations with the enemy that followed from 1915,” he writes, later adding: “Harping on being first only reinforced the implication there was nothing more to it than the capture of a radio tower.”

Those Australians lamenting the lack of recognition for their achievements in the capture of New Guinea might have been more careful what they wished for.

Previous histories have documented the extent to which the record of the ANMEF victory and its aftermath was sullied by the often industrial-scale looting and souveniring of German and New Guinean property by soldiers, officers and even some of the most senior officials. Piggott’s book, augmenting and amplifying that of earlier historians, reveals in disturbing detail the brutal and often lawless methods employed to control, subjugate and exploit the people of New Guinea. Of what in many respects amounted to Australia’s heart of darkness, Piggott describes Australians encountering their “racial inferiors” and reacting “with disgust, mockery, exploitation, corporal punishment and rape.”

The pervasive institutional racism of the new administration in Rabaul was hardly surprising given the attitudes that prevailed in “White Australia” before and after the first world war, but its callous implementation was. “Kanaka, coon, the bucks, duskies and nigger were the standard epithets,” says Piggott. “Almost nowhere in the Rabaul Record or the soldiers’ diaries and letters can a positive or sympathetic sentence be found.”

The attitudes towards New Guinean women were especially appalling. Major Harry Ogilvy, head of the native affairs department, wrote in 1915: “The beauteous damsel… is non-existent… I have seen more fascinating pigs than most of the ladies.” Sergeant Ernest Baker wrote to his sister that the women “give me horrible shudders down the spine.” And, in an ANMEF souvenir publication, “Mayo” wrote: “Like most of the south sea islanders, the males are awfully simple. On the other hand, the females are simply awful.”

Despite such declarations of revulsion, there were repeated incidents of sexual abuse and rape against New Guinean women. Captain Jens Lyng, who served as interpreter with the first Australian administration, wrote in his 1925 memoir about the rape of a local woman who had been locked up for two months by the ANMEF in a male prison. Other documented rape cases led to modest and begrudging official action.

In 1920 Lieutenant Benjamin Singleton, the acting officer in charge on Manus Island, took a group of women and children hostage to try to induce the surrender of the killers of a white settler. Piggott recounts how Singleton then “selected the best looking of the women and divided them amongst the white soldiers.” Singleton later admitted his guilt, as did Captain Charles Wittkopp, the district officer, who in mitigation stated that he had held one of the women in his tent with intent to rape but had not proceeded with the assault.

The then administrator, Brigadier-General Thomas Griffiths, was more concerned with covering up the scandal than punishing the rapists. Seeking to “avoid the publicity that would be entailed, and the loss of prestige of Australia if such stories were noised abroad,” Griffiths offered Singleton the opportunity to resign rather than face a court martial. “He did not appear to consider that he had done anything very wrong in violating the women held by us as hostages,” the general recorded. “I was unable to relieve the other men concerned as I had nobody to replace them at the time.”

Physical abuse was endemic against both the male and female population. Until it was outlawed in 1919, flogging was frequently used to punish offences including “gross insubordination” and the breaking of labour contracts. “District officers could authorise such punishment when planters and missionaries bothered to seek permission,” Piggott writes. “Beyond the law, the belief that New Guineans responded to a good ‘licking’ was commonly held by Australians.”

Many patrols to outlying villages turned into violent punitive expeditions. Soon after a garrison was established at Kavieng in New Ireland, patrols were sent into the interior requiring “stringent measures with the natives” described by German historian Hermann Hiery as “downright orgies of beating.” In one village, between twenty-five and thirty “boys” each received more than 400 strokes with rope whips.

Piggott estimates that more than seventy New Guineans were killed during such expeditions in the first year alone after the capture of Rabaul, and dozens more in the years that followed. In May 1915, two expeditions to investigate the murder of the master of a coastal vessel and a labour recruiter in southern New Britain “resulted in at least sixteen New Guineans killed; severed heads were displayed as a warning.”

While the Australian government appears to have been wilfully ignorant of or complicit in much of the serious misconduct of its personnel in New Guinea, an especially infamous episode would scandalise the territory, raise alarm back in Australia and trigger a diplomatic crisis that reverberated to Europe.

In late October 1914, senior Methodist missionary William Cox was visiting a mission station near Namatanai, New Ireland, shortly before the Australians took control of the island. He was confronted by a group of drunk and armed German residents who accused him of spying and summarily stretched him over a wash tub and delivered about twenty strokes of the cane.

When news of the incident finally reached Rabaul, Colonel William Holmes, the ANMEF commander who had been appointed as the first administrator of the territory, was outraged. An expedition led by Major Alexander Ralston, was dispatched to New Ireland to apprehend the culprits. After a brief investigation, Ralston reported back to Holmes, who dispensed with a formal trial and ordered the public flogging of Cox’s three assailants and two accomplices.

Mid-morning on 30 November the prisoners were marched to the centre of Proclamation Square, Rabaul, held face down over a trunk with handcuffs and legs tied to tent pegs and “caned with great enthusiasm” by four soldiers — each prisoner receiving up to thirty strokes. To reinforce the spectacle and compound the men’s humiliation, Holmes had assembled all available troops with bayonets fixed and ordered all male German residents to be present. Countless New Guineans also looked on, presumably in shock and awe.

The summary justice outraged the German population of New Guinea. Flogging the locals to enforce servitude and obedience was one thing but flogging white men was beyond the pale. When the news reached Australia there were questions in parliament and political embarrassment. When the news reached Europe there were fierce protests by the German government and fears that the episode might affect the treatment of British POWs in Germany.

In an attempt to defuse the diplomatic row, the Australian government advised London to tell the Germans the assailants had been tried by court martial. Charles Bean, who had to fight to have the truth told in his official history, advised the Defence Department’s chief clerk that the Germans were very angry about the public punishment without trial, adding “it was always said that if Holmes fell into their hands in France he would be tried.”

Holmes was spared that fate by one much worse. On 2 July 1917, by then commander of the Australian Fourth Division, he was mortally wounded while escorting NSW premier William Holman on a tour of the battlefield at Messines. His dishonour would be expunged by his martyrdom as the most senior Australian officer to be killed in the first world war. •

New Feller Master: Beyond the Trenches Australia’s Neglected WWI Story
By Michael Piggott | Big Sky Publishing | $36.99 | 384 pages

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Yet within hours, any hope the precise decapitation strikes would limit the scope of the war was dashed. Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones not only at Israel but also across the Gulf. Air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Missiles slammed into interceptors over Doha and Abu Dhabi. At Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar — the forward headquarters of US Central Command — personnel took shelter as interceptors streaked overhead. Air defences flashed into action at US bases at Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates and Ali Al Salem in Kuwait. Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia reported incoming drones. Near the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, naval forces were placed on heightened alert.

The Iranian response has had enormous ramifications for the Gulf, killing civilians, shuttering airports, threatening shipping and oil exports, and tarnishing the region’s image of stability and safety. An iconic hotel on the waterfront in Dubai caught fire after debris from an intercepted drone fell into its upper floors. Kuwaiti authorities reported damage near civilian airport facilities. According to news reports, several tankers have been struck near the Strait of Hormuz, prompting a spike in insurance premiums for shipping through the Gulf. Soon after the conflict erupted, oil futures jumped sharply as traders priced in the risk of sustained disruption to one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints.

Iran’s strikes cannot be dismissed as acts of scattered retaliation, the flailing lashing out of a dying regime. Rather, they represent a strategy of horizontal escalation, a bid to transform the stakes of a conflict by widening its scope and extending its duration. Such a strategy allows a weaker combatant to alter the calculus of a more powerful foe. And it has worked in the past, to the detriment of the United States. In Vietnam and Serbia, US adversaries responded to overwhelming displays of American airpower with horizontal escalation, eventually leading to American defeat, in the former case, and, in the latter, frustrating US war aims and spurring the worst episode of ethnic cleansing in Europe since the second world war.

Decapitation strikes, in particular, create powerful incentives for horizontal escalation: when a regime survives the loss of its leader, it must demonstrate resilience quickly by widening the conflict. Although the United States has hugely battered Iran, it must reckon with the implications of Iran’s response. Otherwise, it will find itself losing control of the war it started.

Horizontal escalation occurs when a state widens the geographic and political scope of a conflict rather than intensifying it vertically in a single theatre. It is especially appealing as a strategy for the weaker parties in a military contest. Instead of trying to defeat a stronger adversary head-on, the weaker side multiplies arenas of risk — drawing additional states, economic sectors, and domestic publics into the remit of the conflict. Iran cannot defeat the United States or Israel in a conventional military contest. It does not need to. Its objective is to gain greater political leverage.

The strategy of horizontal escalation follows a recognisable pattern. First, Iran has demonstrated resilience. US decapitation strikes intended to paralyse the Iranian military. By launching large-scale retaliation within hours of losing the supreme leader and many senior commanders, Tehran signalled continuity of command and operational capacity.

Second, Iran has widened the conflict well beyond Iranian territory, effecting what scholars call “multiplication of exposure.” Rather than confining retaliation to just Israel, Iran struck or aimed at targets in at least nine countries, most hosting US forces: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Greece, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The message was unmistakable: those countries that host American forces would face severe consequences and the war Israel and the United States started will spread.

Third, Iran has politicised the conflict through its strikes. Its retaliation has resulted in the closure of airports, the burning of commercial property, the killing of foreign workers, and the disruption of energy and insurance markets. Gulf leaders have been forced to reassure foreign investors and tourists. The war has migrated into boardrooms and parliamentary chambers. In the United States, the widening scope of the war has alarmed members of Congress. Numerous actors have now entered the conflict, each pursuing distinct interests, none fully coordinated, and all capable of altering the trajectory of escalation beyond Washington’s control.

The final dimension of Iran’s strategy is time. The longer multiple states feel pressure, the more politics both within and among regional states can intensify the conflict. Without a version of NATO in the Middle East or a single American general effectively running the military operation for all the countries targeted by Iran, there is a high risk of wires getting crossed.

US officials have, for instance, floated the idea of stoking an ethnic rebellion in Kurdish parts of Iran to help target the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But that might provoke responses from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, countries that would not welcome a powerful Kurdish insurgency in the region. The recent downing of three US jets in a friendly-fire incident over Kuwait also illustrates the logistical and coordination problems that bedevil any attempt to fend off Iran’s escalation in the Gulf.

Iran’s foreign ministry reinforced this logic publicly, framing the missile barrages as legitimate responses against all “hostile forces” in the region. The phrasing has widened responsibility for the attack on Iran beyond Israel and the United States to encompass the broader US–aligned order in the Gulf. Although Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has apologised to Gulf neighbours for the attacks, the installation of a new supreme leader aligned closely with the Revolutionary Guard suggests such gestures are tactical rather than a signal Tehran intends to abandon its strategy of horizontal escalation.

Fundamentally, Iran’s horizontal escalation is a political strategy. It plays directly to the audience Iran seeks to persuade: the Muslim populations across the region that might not be ideologically aligned with Iran but are generally poorly disposed toward Israel.

Operation Epic Fury is certainly not the first time the United States has acted out of the belief that overwhelming airpower can compel rapid political collapse. The US war in Vietnam exposed the limits of this assumption.

By 1967, the United States had dropped three times more tonnage worth of bombs on North Vietnam than it had used in the second world war. Operation Rolling Thunder, launched in 1965, was designed to break Hanoi’s will and destroy its capacity to wage war. Washington possessed tremendous air superiority and apparent escalation dominance, meaning North Vietnam could not hope to match the United States blow for blow as Washington ramped up the conflict. By the northern autumn of 1967, US airpower had devastated the crucial communication, military, and industrial centres and arteries on which North Vietnamese military power was thought to rest.

But just a few months later, in January 1968, North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces launched coordinated attacks on more than 100 cities and towns across South Vietnam. They breached the US embassy compound in Saigon. They fought for weeks in Hue. They struck provincial capitals simultaneously. Although the offensive was costly for communist forces, it shattered the perception that a South Vietnamese and American victory was near.

President Lyndon Johnson soon announced he would not seek re-election. Public confidence in the prosecution of the war eroded. The war’s political trajectory shifted, even as American firepower remained dominant.

The lesson was not that bombing failed tactically. It was that Hanoi escalated horizontally, widening the conflict beyond rural battlefields into South Vietnam’s cities and political nerve centres, transforming a military contest into nationwide political upheaval, and reshaping domestic calculations in Washington. In Vietnam, the United States never lost a battle — but it still lost a war.

Three decades later, NATO relied on a different theory of airpower in the Kosovo conflict. Operation Allied Force, in 1999 — originally planned as a three-day air campaign to hit fifty-one targets in and around the Serbian capital, Belgrade — emphasised precision strikes against Serbian military assets and leadership targets. Western leaders expected a swift, successful campaign. The regime would weaken, if not collapse. Bombs even fell on the residence of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Instead, Belgrade ordered 30,000 Serbian troops to sweep into Kosovo, forcing more than a million Kosovar Albanian civilians, half the province’s population, from the territory. That exodus strained European governments and tested the cohesion of the NATO alliance. The United States and NATO lacked the large tactical airpower, much less the ground forces, to put a stop to the devastating ethnic cleansing. For weeks, as Serbian forces drove civilians from Kosovo, NATO debated escalation options. It ultimately mobilised nearly 40,000 ground troops for a major offensive to take Kosovo. Only at this point — and only after 78 days of sustained crisis, diplomatic pressure from Russia (a long-standing Serbian ally), and the threat of NATO invasion — did Milosevic concede.

Kosovo ended successfully for NATO — but not quickly, and not just through the use of precision strikes. Political endurance and alliance management proved decisive. Across both cases — the mass bombardment of Vietnam and the precision strikes on Serbia — airpower shocked and disrupted, but it did not automatically determine political outcomes. Adversaries widened the conflict’s scope or prolonged it by adopting horizontal escalation. Iran now appears to be applying that lesson to the Gulf.

Iran’s retaliation has clear political objectives. First, Tehran wants to puncture perceptions of the Gulf’s invulnerability. Cities such as Dubai and Doha market themselves to the world as secure hubs of finance, tourism, and logistics. When missile alerts interrupt operations at Dubai International Airport — one of the busiest in the world — the reputational cost is far greater than whatever physical damage Iran inflicts. The reported deaths of foreign workers in the United Arab Emirates underscore that civilians are no longer safe in Gulf states. The spectacle of interceptors exploding in the skies above these entrepôts might make investors skittish.

Second, Iran has raised the political cost for Gulf countries of hosting US forces. By striking near American bases at Al Udeid, Al Dhafra, and Prince Sultan, Tehran signalled that alignment with Washington entails exposure to attack. Gulf leaders must balance alliance commitments against domestic and economic stability.

Third, Tehran is shaping a narrative about the regional order. By portraying its actions as resistance to a US–Israeli campaign aimed at regional dominance, Iran seeks to drive a wedge between the Gulf country leaders and their publics — a wedge that could grow depending on how long the conflict persists.

Fourth, Iran is leveraging economic chokepoints. Roughly a fifth of global oil shipments transit the Strait of Hormuz. Early shipping data suggests traffic through the strait has fallen by about 75 per cent since the war began. Even a partial form of lasting disruption — through missile strikes, naval incidents, or rising insurance costs — produces immediate global ripple effects, fuelling concerns about inflation and domestic political pressure in the United States and Europe. None of these objectives require battlefield victories. They just require Iran’s endurance.

Horizontal escalation is not simply about hitting a wider array of targets. Its deeper effect is to change how a foe perceives risks. In a short war, risk is measured in sorties and intercept rates. In a prolonged conflict, risks extend to the political sphere. A protracted conflict forces difficult choices.

If this war drags on, Gulf governments that have quietly expanded security cooperation with Israel might have to make that alignment more visible. That clarity is dangerous. Arab publics remain deeply opposed to Israel’s aggressive military posture in the region. The longer the conflict continues, the harder it becomes for rulers to sustain that partnership with Israel without sacrificing legitimacy at home. Horizontal escalation presses on the soft seams between governments and their societies.

A protracted war would also reshape American politics. A sudden decapitation strike can galvanise support behind the US president, at least temporarily — although polling suggests most Americans are already opposed to the war even just one week in. A grinding regional war marked by energy price spikes, US casualties, and uncertain objectives will cause disquiet at home. Sizable elements of President Donald Trump’s political coalition have been wary of Middle Eastern entanglements and have accused US leaders of simply following Israel’s lead. The longer US military operations continue, the more fractures could widen within Trump’s own base.

Transatlantic strains could follow. European governments are acutely exposed to energy volatility and migration pressures. If Washington escalates while European capitals want to rein in the conflict, the two sides could diverge as Europeans try to keep themselves at arm’s length from the war. As Kosovo demonstrated, alliance unity requires constant political management. The United States would find the challenges of sustained bombing immense if European states decided to constrain use of their territory for logistics and tanker refuelling flights. Britain is already uncomfortable about the long-standing policy of American military aircraft conducting operations from the British possession of Diego Garcia. In exchange for European support in its campaign against Iran, Washington might have to commit more to European military objectives in Ukraine — at the risk of further irking the president’s MAGA base.

Finally, prolonging the war multiplies asymmetric threats. An extended conflict in the Gulf would likely see the involvement of nonstate actors, especially if US ground forces got involved in even a limited fashion. New and existing militant groups seeking to exploit regional anger might target leaders visibly aligned with US operations. What began as interstate missile exchanges could evolve into a wider tableau of violence and upheaval.

If Iran’s strategy is to widen and politicise the conflict, the United States faces a choice. One path is doubling down: the United States could ramp up its airpower campaign by bringing additional air assets into the fight to suppress Iranian launch capabilities and create the conditions for extending aerial control over the skies and surveillance on the ground. As with the imposition of no-fly zones against Iraq in the 1990s, doubling down to re-establish escalation dominance and control can be tantamount to a strategy of permanent aggressive military containment and control over Iranian airspace, one that could last for years.

The adoption of precisely this extended aerial control and surveillance approach with Iraq in the 1990s only set the stage for the 2003 US ground invasion. Permanent aerial occupation does not lead to political control, and without greater political control, Iran will still continue to pose a plausible threat to US interests — especially since its nuclear program persists in some form or another. In this way, an ostensibly restrained policy could actually precipitate greater commitment.

The alternative is ending the military commitment: Washington could declare objectives have been “met” and stand down its tremendous air and naval forces assembled near Iran. In the short term, the Trump administration would face the intense political criticism that it might have left the job unfinished. This policy, however, would allow the administration to move on to other issues, such as addressing economic needs at home, and limit the political blowback of its decision to attack Iran.

Trump is thus on the horns of a dilemma, having to judge whether Washington should deal with short but limited political costs now or more protracted and more uncertain political costs later. There is no golden off-ramp, one that increases the political benefits for Washington. Every option now carries political costs and risks; the initial strike might have solved a tactical problem, but it created a strategic one. Given these realities, the wisest choice might well be for the United States to accept a limited loss now rather than risk compounding losses later.

The strikes that have killed Iran’s leadership demonstrated tactical mastery. Tactical mastery, however, is not strategy. Iran’s retaliation — geographically broad, economically disruptive, and politically calibrated — aims to reshape the conflict’s structure. By widening the theatre and prolonging the war, Tehran is shifting the contest from a battle of military capabilities to one of political endurance.

As in Vietnam, the United States might win most engagements. As in Serbia, it might ultimately prevail after sustained pressure. But in both cases, the decisive arena was not the initial shock of airpower. It was the politics of an expanding war.

The decisive phase of this war began not with the first strike but with the regional crisis that followed — air defences activated across multiple capitals, airports suspended, markets jolted, and alliance politics strained. Whether this conflict is merely a contained episode or it becomes a prolonged strategic setback for the United States will depend not on the next volley of missiles but on whether Washington recognises the enemy’s unfolding strategy — and responds with one of equal clarity. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2026 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

The post Why escalation favours Iran appeared first on Inside Story.

This great-uncle was an unlikely subject for a seven-year obsession. Gaskill never met Ralph Corps (pronounced “Corr”), who died in 1980. Ralph and his wife Flo had no children, and memories of them had dimmed within the family. Their surviving relatives, principally Gaskill’s mother Audrey and her cousin Pauline, didn’t even much like the couple. Ralph and Flo, it seems, were not very nice people.

A chance conversation with Audrey in 2017 fired up Gaskill’s curiosity. Audrey had had a dream about her uncle Ralph in which he “stepped out of the shadows and held me by the arm — as if pulling me back.” Back to where she was not sure, but she and Gaskill sensed this was not random flotsam of the unconscious but more like a haunting or a visitation: the past calling on the present, as he puts it.

The little Gaskill knew about Ralph, gleaned from his grandmother, was that he had been a military policeman in North Africa who, as a POW in Italy, had punched an Italian officer, breaking his nose. He knew of a wildly improbable story that Ralph had made an escape through the floor of a train using just a knife and fork, and was later hidden in a hayloft while a local family nursed him to health.

Added to these scraps of family lore were the war comics, the old films and playground wargames Gaskill remembered from his childhood. A seed of curiosity was sown but remained dormant. As an academic historian, Gaskill made the social history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not the second world war, the focus of his career.

However, he tells us, in that field he explored inner lives and extracted emotion from the archives, and this kind of attentiveness might have been what heightened his sensitivity to his mother’s dream and sent him on a journey to learn more. The result is a very fine new book, The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy.

Gaskill’s title is inspired by W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Borrowing Sebald’s image of a glass mountain as a cloudy prism, he continues:

You can know the past, the mountain promises, but only imperfectly. Nothing on the other side remains intact, and it’s up to us to find the pieces, in the dim light and in the darkness, and make from them a story that in good conscience feels real.

Gaskill won’t therefore be following Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum that the writing of history should show the past “as it actually was.” That is impossible because history is “locked in time’s glacier, a frozen shower of distorted fragments.”

Locating and piecing together these fragments is what gives this book its very considerable narrative drive. It swings back and forth between the present and the past because discovery matters as much for Gaskill as the wartime events revealed. He finds himself “sitting in far-flung libraries and archives, hiking up rocky hillsides, splashing through autumn mud, sheltering from storms.” He visits old barracks and remote farms, and meets Italians with long memories who share their stories.

Slowly he learns that Ralph, a South Yorkshireman born in 1914 and a police officer in civilian life, was captured in Libya in one of the western desert battles of 1942 and transported to Italy, where he was imprisoned initially at Camp 65 Gravina, near the town of Altamura in southern Italy.

There he met and formed a deep friendship with a fellow prisoner, Royal Air Force pilot Charlie West. In March 1943 the pair plotted and effected an escape, only to be recaptured and returned after a few days. In May they were among a group of prisoners transferred to Camp 52 Chiavari in the north of the country, close to the coastal resort town of that name.

After Italy’s surrender to the Allies in September 1943, a cohort of Camp 52 prisoners including Ralph and Charlie were packed onto a train bound for Germany. But the indefatigable escapees had their own plans. As the train came to a halt near the town of Dolcè, twenty miles northwest of Verona, they managed to lever up the rotting floorboards of a wagon using — yes — a knife and fork. Each man dropped through the hole onto the track below and rolled down an embankment to freedom.

What “freedom” actually meant for Ralph and Charlie was twenty-one desperately dangerous months, until the war ended in May 1945, evading the German forces occupying northern Italy, assisted by Italian fascist collaborators.

Thus far, Gaskill had been guided in his research by a memoir Ralph made (which had ended up in the possession of his mother’s cousin, Pauline) describing his experiences in Camp 65 and Camp 52. He supplemented this with a thorough immersion in the published and archival sources on POWs in Italy, and these camps in particular. The result is several chapters examining the organisation, economic life, politics and psychology of the camps, and the privations, sufferings and (occasional) joys and creativity expressed by the men held in them.

The memoir peters out before Ralph and Charlie’s escape from the train, forcing Gaskill to piece together the rest of the story from myriad official and personal records held in archives in Italy, Britain and the United States. Gradually he comes to understand the web of relationships in the towns and villages around Lake Garda where Ralph and Charlie found shelter and safety during the latter part of the war.

Shortly after their escape the two men decided to go their separate ways. Charlie eventually joined bands of partisans operating further north near Monte Baldo on the eastern side of Lake Garda. Ralph, meanwhile, found himself near the village of Paitone, west of the lake. Sick, exhausted and starving, he would probably have met his end right there except for the courage and generosity of several local families who opened their doors to him. He did briefly live in a hayloft while he recovered; that part of the story also turned out to be true.

Ralph saw out the rest of the war at Paitone, shedding his identity as a British soldier and becoming “Rodolpho,” a contadino, a peasant. He wore the clothes, adopted the loping gait and, in addition to fluent Italian, learned the local dialect of the region. Here also, in relative tranquillity, he wrote his memoir of his experiences in Camp 65 and his arrival at Camp 52, using three exercise books pilfered for him by a local schoolteacher.

Malcolm Gaskill’s claim that discovery is as important as the events discovered puts him and his relationship with his great-uncle very much at the heart of this book. In essence, it follows the writer’s ardent commitment to understanding another human being. No source is left unexplored: not just traditional library and archival material but also family history sites, Google maps, Facebook, conversations with informants, anything. The prose is vivid, lit up with the warmth of Gaskill’s own personality. I enjoyed it from the first word to the last.

The friend who queried Gaskill’s obsession was Domenico (Dom) Bolognese, an Italian man living in Altamura, three miles from the site of Camp 65. Dom’s father had been a POW and he has made himself a local expert in the camp’s history. Malcolm and Dom made contact through Facebook but had to wait until Covid restrictions had lifted before they could meet. By then Gaskill was all impatience to get to Italy, to walk the ground, to feel, imagine and deploy “the archive of the feet.” Dom eventually became his guide, interpreter and companion during this and all Gaskill’s subsequent visits to Italy.

For his first visit to Camp 65, however, Gaskill needed to be alone. Stepping onto seventy acres of dusty ground, thistles and ruined buildings was like “landing on a barren planet and discovering the ruins of a failed colony.” The sun was ferocious, he was dive-bombed by insects, he had not brought enough water. (I’d like to think that no Australian historian would make this elementary mistake.) But he got what he came for — the ghostly “frisson” of the prisoners who had been there before him. Standing where Ralph and Charlie had stood made Gaskill’s spine “tingle.”

In a later expedition Malcolm and Dom visit Camp 52 in the north, although they knew that all remnants have been removed from the site. They go anyway, as eager as ever to carry their “present-centred lives into someone else’s past.” Here they admire the beauty and verdancy of the landscape compared the arid plain on which Camp 65 had been built. Even without fences and crumbling huts, at Camp 52, “phantoms” still thronged in the “thick air.”

Gaskill is extraordinarily sensitive to the “affective” power of archives, artefacts and places. “Affect” in this context refers not just to emotion, but an emotional reaction felt in the body. Many historians (and biographers especially) experience it even if some are leery of admitting it in print. Not Malcolm Gaskill. His spine tingles, the hair on his neck prickles, he gets butterflies, he longs to put his body where Ralph’s had been so he can see and feel with him. When cousin Pauline lets him borrow Ralph’s memoir, he feels its “radiant presence” on the front seat of his car on the way home and is gripped with “spooky anticipation” as to what it might reveal.

An extension of this is Gaskill’s capacity to obtain the trust of his informants: descendants, usually, of Italian families who had harboured Ralph. Instead of putting his phone in front of them and subjecting them to an “oral history” interview, they sit down for a meal together and enter into the fellowship that was once extended to Ralph. “All this,” says Dom on one occasion, looking around at the company eating and chatting. “This is what Ralph felt. Incredible.”

Was it what Ralph had felt? We can’t say, and Gaskill knows this. Even with his visceral responses to evidence of the past, he maintains his core professional objectivity with Ralph. He is strongly aware of his relatives’ dislike for Ralph and Flo, but his own duty as a historian is to contextualise their lives and understand the choices that had been available to them. He judges Ralph to have been ambitious but reserved and unemotional; a man too fond of exercising authority (when he had any) and, later in life, maintaining his status in the eyes of others, to be a good leader.

Pauline went further. Ralph and his wife Flo were a pair of cold fishes: snooty, upper-crust and fake. “You could be writing a book about a very gallant man,” she told Gaskill. “But he wasn’t one.” Furthermore, she said, the war didn’t change him. The character he was before the war was the character he came back with, she believed.

Gaskill could see beyond this to the tough, brave side of Ralph’s character that the war had brought out, and knew there was a softer, romantic side too. He knew also that Ralph had been a tender friend to Charlie and was deeply respected (if not quite loved) by his Italian saviours. “I neither liked nor disliked Ralph,” he concludes, “nor did he disappoint me.”

In the family papers kept by Pauline he found a letter from his grandmother to Flo, saying that “the boy” — Malcolm himself — was thrilled to hear about Ralph’s war. It was a heart-stopping moment for him to learn that he had always been there, right in the heart of the archive. After all his journeying, he had returned to where it all began. “Tutto torna,” as his friend Dom liked to say: everything returns to its beginning. •

The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy
By Malcolm Gaskill | Allen Lane | $55 | 416 pages

The post Are you obsessed or what? appeared first on Inside Story.

Free is charmingly told from the perspective of a child reared by society to venerate communism, Stalin and most of all “Uncle Enver” Hoxha, Albania’s communist dictator. Hoxha’s death in 1985 marked the beginning of the end of communist rule, and when it finally collapsed in 1990–91 teenaged Ypi was forced to reckon with shattered illusions, family truths and the onset of capitalism, all alongside the usual adolescent torments. Until then her family — and most of all, her beloved French-speaking paternal grandmother Leman, whom she calls Nini — had protected her from what was really going on.

Ypi’s award-winning memoir has since been translated into more than thirty languages and a friend who not long ago visited Albania’s capital Tirana reports that Free is prominently displayed all over town, clearly pitched at tourists as the book to help them comprehend the country they are visiting.

Inside Albania and across the Albanian diaspora, Ypi’s reputation as an authority on the country she left as a young woman is — not surprisingly — mixed. To at least one critic, she’s an apologist for communism and a denigrator of capitalism who has turned her own critique into a commodity. Here I’m paraphrasing an online response to a long-lost photograph not of Ypi, but of her grandparents Leman and Asllan. The photo came to her attention after a stranger shared it on social media.

Ypi had never seen the photo before, but from her grandmother’s stories she knew it showed the couple on their honeymoon in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Alps, where her grandmother “felt the happiest woman alive.” The year was 1941 and war was engulfing Europe. Yet this “young, glamorous couple,” the woman clad in a “long white fur coat,” are “relaxing on sun lounges in front of a luxury hotel.” A pair of skis is propped behind them.

As she tells us in the prologue of her ambitious new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, Ypi was soon absorbed by the question of “what it meant to feel the happiest person alive in the winter of 1941.” Further unsettled by another commentator’s suggestion that Leman was “a communist spy” and “before that, a fascist collaborator,” Ypi set out to defend her late grandmother’s dignity and to find out more. Well aware that these are possibly irreconcilable motivations, Ypi presents her quest in two different registers.

In the first person, in a recognisable present-day, Ypi visits archives in Albania and Greece and ponders historical silences and archival gatekeepers. Some of her reflections are banal — for instance, as historians tell her, the “best kept secret about archives” is that “it’s more about what you don’t find rather than what you do.” Elsewhere, her frustrations are vividly presented: “I am lost in my grandmother’s files as if in a labyrinth of sophisms.”

Selected historical documents are interspersed throughout, inviting contemplation of which histories can and cannot be told through archival traces. A historical timeline commences with the Ottoman colonisation of the Balkan peninsula, which began in Albania in 1468, swiftly covers the pertinent Ottoman-related events of the nineteenth century, and devotes most attention to the twentieth century up to 1946 and the beginning of communism in Albania. The entangled histories of Turkey, Greece and Albania are foregrounded, as is Albania’s second world war, when it fell under fascist then Nazi control.

As the subtitle suggests, however, most of Indignity unfolds like a novel, with Ypi “reimagining” her grandmother’s life from her childhood in the Greek city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki), where she lived with her extended family in privileged exile. In 1936, with war threatening, Leman — the Albanian who had never been to Albania — moved there just after her eighteenth birthday. While she could easily have followed school friends to France, Italy or Austria, in the “disjuncture between what the country was called by foreigners (Albania) and how its own people referred to it (Shqipëria),” she “hoped to find the truth about herself.”

In a queue, Leman meets earnest idealist Asllan Ypi, a cousin of her best friend Cocotte, who is keen to fight fascism and distinguish himself from his hard-headed politician father, Xhafer Ypi. From here, the narrative accelerates, the couple’s lives entangled with the march of history. On Friday nights at the Café Kursal, they drink and gossip with the city’s intelligentsia, among them Enver Hoxha, an acquaintance of Asllan’s from their student days in Paris at the Lycée. Hoxha smells of onion and lavender and pours scorn on Asllan’s faith in democratic elections.

Leman and Asllan attend the bizarre wedding of Albania’s self-appointed monarch King Zog and the much younger Geraldine, a “destitute Catholic Hungarian-American countess.” Here, Ypi the first-person narrator interrupts with family lore. At the wedding — in the midst of discussing “the King’s relations with Italy and Hitler’s annexation of Austria and whether it would change Europe” and Asllan asking Leman whether she’d come across “an interesting book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes” (she hadn’t) — her grandmother proposed to her grandfather.

The honeymoon glimpsed in the photograph comes not long after Mussolini’s invasion of Albania and the violent death of Asllan’s father. Jolted by the proximity of these events to their marriage, Ypi is struck by the “apprehension on their faces” and how “Asllan looked especially sad.” She wonders who is behind the camera. Perhaps it was the French-speaking Englishman Vandeleur Robinson, who next travelled to Albania to “take part in a secret operation to support Balkan antifascist resistance.”

After an “excruciating” thirty-hour labour, as the Nazis occupation of Albania begins, Leman gives birth to her son Xhafer, or Zafo for short, who is destined to be Lea Ypi’s father. For a while “the alternative time zone of motherhood” eclipses the war outside. But when Hoxha’s Albanian Communist Party breaks away from the rest of the Albanian resistance movement and assumes power, Asllan is arrested, charged with espionage, and sentenced to twenty years in prison with hard labour.

With Indignity, Ypi once again succeeds in making Albania palpable, this time from the perspective of a fallen elite, among them her paternal grandparents. Whether or not her grandmother felt the “happiest person alive” on their honeymoon is a question she inevitably cannot answer. Once the honeymoon passes, the “life re-imagined” begins to run out of steam, despite the tragic events that unfold. The grandmother to whom she was so close while she was alive is sometimes elusive and inert on the page, despite Ypi’s admirable and rather dogged attempt to access her interiority and understand her motivations.

One of the most powerful scenes in the book is Ypi’s “reimagining” of the arrival of her family doctor Elias Levy, fatally ill, from Salonica, where he had been detained for despatching to a Nazi concentration camp. Seeking out the Jewish cemetery in present-day Thessaloniki, Ypi is guided by Dimitrios, who turns out to be Albanian, real name Denis. He reflects on the fact that “Albania was the only European country with more Jews at the end of the second world war than it had before.” When Ypi the scholar suggests it was because Albanians were mostly illiterate and did not read antisemitic literature, Denis counters with another explanation: “the old tradition of besa, the oath of hospitality.” When they stop to read the memorial plaques, their conversation tapers to silence.

As they part, Denis, undertaking a history PhD, gives Ypi some advice about the archives: don’t waste time asking about her mother specifically, instead ask about the men in her family. “I gave up researching women. Women and archives. Good luck with that. You’re better off writing a novel.”

Indignity, though, is not a novel, even when it presents as an approximation of one. It comes most alive when Ypi is writing as herself, when she opens out to contemplate what we owe the dead, and to our own shifting investments in the past. In a passage that recalls the warmth and intimacy of Free, Ypi recounts the time when her grandmother, inspired by an episode of the American soap opera The Bold and The Beautiful, asked Ypi to speak at her funeral. When Leman died in 2006, Ypi went through the grief-struck motions as requested. Twenty years later, she writes, “I am still trying to correct my mistakes, to find the right words, to mark her passing in the right way.” •

Indignity: A Life Reimagined
By Lea Ypi | Allen Lane | $36.99 | 368 pages

The post Finding the right words appeared first on Inside Story.

Historically, the tests were meant to do two things: ensure readiness for a third world war and signal toughness. These elements were brought together in the idea of deterrence. Tests demonstrated a capacity and willingness to prevent Armageddon by means of a balance of terror.

As a result, more than 2000 nuclear explosives were detonated, about half by the US and most of the rest by the Soviet Union, France, Britain and China. The biggest test, by the Soviet Union in 1961, was roughly fifty megatons, approximately 3000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

The end of the cold war went a long way towards stopping the folly, notwithstanding a few reckless tests by India, Pakistan and North Korea. By the end of the 1990s it was widely accepted that testing was environmentally risky and so dangerous for international security that it should be prohibited. At least for established players, testing also seemed unnecessary given the calmer global setting, the amount of overkill in the system, the masses of test data already collected, and advances in computer modelling.

So it wasn’t surprising that the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty soon gathered more than 100 signatory countries. But it never came into legal effect.

For that, there was plenty of blame to go around, especially in Delhi, Islamabad and Pyongyang. Washington, initially supportive of the treaty, also ended up being a spoiler. In 2008, for example, it was the only member of the UN to vote against the treaty’s entry into force (168 voted in favour, and three abstained). Times had changed, with George W. Bush’s Republican administration opposing constraints on US freedom of manoeuvre by global institutions.

Since then, despite keeping its nuclear powder dry, Washington has kept its distance from the test ban treaty. Even Democratic administrations have held back, constrained by a sceptical congress and stringent conditions for treaty ratification that give a minority of senators considerable blocking power.

Today, the most dangerous drivers of nuclear strategy are persistent regional rivalries. The main concerns are: (a) Russia’s ambitions in Eastern Europe; (b) China’s territorial claims on Taiwan, the South China Sea and some Japanese islands; (c) the Korean peninsula; and (d) the India–Pakistan feud. Overlaying this is US–Russian–Chinese great power rivalry.

And, of course, we must now include the Trump factor. While liking to present as a master of political chess, Trump doesn’t have a traditional approach to statecraft or a Kissinger-type handle on world and military affairs. He often seems moved more by whim and ego. So, what are we to make of his announcement? Here are three possible explanations.

First, we must consider Trump’s tendency to bloviate. Maybe last week’s statement was essentially theatrical, empty of substance.

This overlaps with a second possible explanation. Perhaps Trump didn’t fully understand what he was saying. Some well-informed critics have been scathing about his imprecision. Hans Kristensen from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says, “It’s hard to know what he means. As usual, he’s unclear, all over the map, and wrong.” Trump’s attempts to clarify the situation have been confusing. Even his officials seem unsure, with nuclear weapons expert Jeffrey Lewis claiming, “they are just making this up as they go along.”

Scrambling to catch up a few days later, energy secretary Chris Wright suggested Trump meant conducting a round of non-nuclear explosions, presumably to test the viability of nuclear weapons. Maybe the line between what the US weapons establishment calls “subcritical experiments” (for instance, assessing the impact of high explosives on nuclear material) and what is commonly understood as a nuclear test might have been lost on Trump in his social media moment.

There’s also a good chance Trump meant testing “delivery systems” — the bombers, submarines, and missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads — rather than testing the warheads themselves. This would fit his idea of matching Russian and Chinese modernisation programs. But the US already tests these delivery vehicles as a matter of routine. In September, for example, the US Navy test-fired four nuclear-capable (but unarmed) Trident missiles as part of a longstanding program.

A third possible explanation is that Trump is not as muddled as critics believe and is indeed set on resuming nuclear test explosions. Why would he do that? Arguments in favour of tests include enhancing warhead safety, confirming stockpile reliability and facilitating the on-going generational modernisation of America’s nuclear deterrent by better fine-tuning new warheads. Critics suggest testing would also fit well with Project 2025, the hardline conservative blueprint that calls (among many other things) for a much-expanded nuclear weapons program.

It’s difficult to assess Trump’s policies without reference to his personality. Historically, nuclear tests often had a dramatic element to them, and Trump is nothing if not performative. This is not a trivial matter. Former Trump cabinet picks including defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, secretary of state Rex Tillerson, chief of staff John F. Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton have presented an unflattering picture of an immature and impulsive POTUS. Some of Trump’s public statements and numerous social media posts appear to confirm the judgement.

Understanding the man and his policies requires a psychologist as much as it does a strategic analyst. Here is a world leader who has worried about perceptions of his hand size and has boasted about the bigness of his nuclear button. Adding to the psychodrama is the tagging of Trump with the TACO meme (“Trump always chickens out”). Although it originated with his erratic tariff policy, the meme perhaps plays on his mind in other areas. Countering the TACO jibe might help explain the US attack on Iran, for instance. God forbid if it also edges Trump towards a nuclear test.

The whole testing business might simply fizzle out, of course — and there are good reasons for it to do so. Most experts believe the political and strategic costs of new American tests would outweigh the marginal technical gains. (Indeed, China might benefit significantly more from a collapse of the de facto ban because it possesses less historical test data and is expanding its arsenal more than any other country.)

Another reason for Washington to back off is that a new round of tests would worsen global and regional arms-racing. Moscow has already signalled a readiness to counter-test — to take “appropriate retaliatory steps,” in Vladimir Putin’s words this week — and the knock-on effects could easily spread to China, then India, then Pakistan.

US testing could also increase pressure on the nuclear weapons non-proliferation regime. Turbulent American leadership and Trump’s ambivalence, sometimes even hostility, towards allies provides a worrying context. If current concerns about the robustness of alliances are compounded by US nuclear test explosions reciprocated by Russia and China, it could spur vulnerable countries to acquire independent deterrents. The most often mentioned candidates here are Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, but perhaps others, such as Poland, might join the list.

It’s also easy to imagine tests intensifying global anti-Trump antagonism and perhaps anti-Americanism. The prospect must give the US state department nightmares. Old-timers will recall when NATO nuclear modernisation in the early 1980s boosted the anti-Reagan peace movement and threatened the political foundations of the Western alliance.

Trump’s loose wording, frequently cavalier attitude and tendency to bluster make it tempting to discount his declarations as background noise. With his pronouncements giving plenty of wriggle-room, only time will tell if his reflections on nuclear tests amount to anything.

The question now is whether anyone in Trump’s circle has the authority to impress on him that a resumption of nuclear explosive tests would likely spark a train of unintended consequences contrary to US national interests and global order. •

The post Testing times appeared first on Inside Story.

I was less than a year old when Germany invaded Poland and the second world war began, and not quite two when in June 1940 the Wehrmacht invaded France, occupying its northern regions and soon establishing the puppet Vichy state in the south. By that time many of Hitler’s designated enemies — artists, writers and leftists, a good proportion of whom were Jewish — had sought refuge in France but now found themselves trapped there.

Across the Atlantic, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had begun his third presidential term but hesitated to extend emergency visas while American isolationist sentiment remained strong. That’s when Eleanor — FDR’s better angel — entered, and the result of her efforts was the small, modestly funded Emergency Rescue Committee, or ERC.

Uwe Wittstock’s Marseille 1940 is the fascinating account of the thousands of rescues conducted by this committee — and most particularly by its indefatigable leader, a man scarcely known today and seemingly unsuited for the task. Wittstock admits that while this group is his focus, “countless unknown persons faced the same dangers, but the traces of their lives have been lost in the chaos of war and flight.” I’d add that his story of desperate refugees has resonance for us today — an assertion I’ll return to later.

Varian Mackey Fry is a name reeking of American East Coast establishment. But, as Wittstock tells us, its owner had an “unpredictable, rebellious side” and was “not one for compromise.” Arguably the book’s hero, Fry was an early predicter of the dangers posed by Europe’s rising fascism.

In 1935, aged twenty-five, he sent the New York Times an eyewitness account of a brutal Nazi attack on a group of Berliner Jews — an attack a Nazi press officer took pains to inform him had been fomented by party provocateurs. It was the government’s firm policy to rid Germany of its Jews one way or another, the press officer hinted. This searing event preceded Kristallnacht by three years, yet until Fry’s dispatch no mainstream American news outlet had been prepared to make much of a possible European war while the United States was reeling from the severity of the Depression.

By May 1940, with Germany poised to invade France, Fry was back in Manhattan as chief editor for the Foreign Policy Association, publishing a range of political books including several by himself. It was the perfect job for him, intellectually rigorous yet well-enough funded that he didn’t need to bother about sales. Then, out of the blue, he received a phone call that would change that cushy trajectory forever. An escaped German-Jewish psychoanalyst using the pseudonym Paul Hagen, founder of the fledgling American Friends of German Freedom, told him what was happening as Germany swept across Europe:

In the wake of the advancing military, Gestapo search parties systematically comb through the country. Furnished with prepared lists, they track down Hitler’s adversaries, arrest them, deport them to concentration camps, or murder them then and there. In Poland, which Germany invaded the previous year, they have now proceeded to kill off not just the resistance fighters, but also the country’s entire elite: physicians, teachers, merchants, politicians, engineers. Only a nation of worker-slaves is meant to survive.

Fry readily understood that a generation of European cultural stars was in danger. Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers, Alfred Döblin and Walter Mehring were among the names he and Hagen discussed. Others, such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, will come to readers’ minds.

Fry knew he had to act quickly, but how? By June the Gestapo had entered Paris. Unoccupied Vichy appeared the only answer. Through a network of connections, including Heinrich Mann’s brother Thomas, who was safely working in Princeton, a fundraising event was organised. More money was raised in Hollywood, Eleanor Roosevelt was conscripted, and the ERC was born.

Fry and Hagen knew they had to set up in Vichy, for as soon as word of the ERC’s existence spread through the underground the hunted would find their way to them. The Foreign Policy Association gave Fry a few weeks leave, and by mid August 1940 he was in Marseille looking for a place to house the ERC headquarters, meeting some of the people whose rescue he was to organise, and enlisting the people who could help him.

It all sounds so easy, but it was anything but. Neither, I imagine, was Wittstock’s task in putting it all together in Marseille 1940. For this is a marvel of narrative art: over the 291 pages through which he weaves his story, there’s not a page where my interest flagged, and this in a text with a veritable cavalcade of characters, each of whose stories warrants a book in itself, and in many cases actually have.

Many of those rescued had first to escape from France’s hideously barbaric detention centres before they could reach Marseille. Most were without papers. The American consul himself was notably uncooperative, even if some of his staff were accommodating.

There were only two routes for fleeing — on land through the rugged Pyrenees or by sea from Marseille, itself often blocked. Either way was dangerous, and some indeed perished; one, famously, by his own hand. And it’s more than likely that few of us would have heard of Walter Benjamin if Hannah Arendt hadn’t grabbed the precious manuscript he’d been carrying and taken it with her to America.

Arendt became a noted public intellectual in America, influential for The Origins of Totalitarianism and other publications and because of her apposite warning that if Jews were to establish a state of their own in historic Palestine it would necessarily become another Sparta. Today we are witness to the tragic accuracy of her prescience. Although the phrase “Never Again” has been the catch-cry, for Israel and its supporters the lesson of the Holocaust seems to be for Jews alone, not for the rest of humanity.

My own researches for my last novel brought me to the same conclusion, which is why a decade ago I joined a small group called the Northern Beaches Committee for Palestine with a simple task: to train two lifesavers from Gaza at Manly’s North Steyne Surf Lifesaving Club so they could establish a Nippers program at home. Israel’s periodic “mowing the lawn” had destroyed most of Gaza’s recreational facilities and some young people were drowning on its beaches.

The lifesavers went back, started up two programs, and were well on their way to building their own surf club. Then came 7 October and Israel’s illegal and wildly disproportionate retribution. Within days, two young members of the Nippers were killed, along with their families. The lifesavers and their families, forced out of Gaza’s north, were living in tents in Rafah.

Before long came the news that the father of one of our members had died from an unattended heart attack. We directed our efforts to doing what we could to get our lifesavers and their children out and bring them to Australia. With the help of our local MP and the previous immigration minister, one of the lifesavers was able to leave with his wife and three children the day before Israel closed the Rafah crossing. After being shunted hither and thither, our other lifesaver was last heard trying to buy another tent in Rafah.

It was a small operation, scarcely comparable with what Varian Fry pulled off from Vichy eighty-four years ago. Yet there are things I’ve learned from it. First, about wars being progenitors of their successors. If there hadn’t been a Holocaust, there might never have been an apartheid Israel; there might indeed have never been another genocide. Second, go with your heart and sense of justice. As an old kabbalist wrote, “the source of all evil in the world is too much head, and not enough heart.”

This is what Uwe Wittstock has done with Marseille 1940, which is not to say a lot of meticulous research hasn’t gone into writing it. As for me, the reader, it has it all — characters, stories, places, history. What happened to Varian Fry? Buy the book and see. Take my word for it: it’s the very best book I’ve read for quite a while. •

Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature
By Uwe Wittstock | Translated by Daniel Bowles | Polity Press | $51.95 | 319 pages

The post Perilous refuge appeared first on Inside Story.

Operation Hamkari was a concerted effort by Australian and Afghan government forces, backed by US air power, to break a Taliban stronghold northeast of Kandahar and end a long-running security threat to Afghanistan’s second largest city.

The operation began when soldiers from Australia’s 2nd Commando Regiment launched an initial raid on the village of Chenartu, seventy-five kilometres from Kandahar, forcing Taliban fighters to retreat. The next morning, four US Black Hawk helicopters descended at dawn on the nearby village of Tizak, carrying twenty-five SAS troopers and additional Afghan soldiers.

According to the official account, the Australians came under heavy fire from the moment they landed at the edge of Tizak. It would later be estimated that they faced more than one hundred Taliban, including some of the enemy’s most experienced and tenacious fighters.

As the Australians desperately sought shelter, they were strafed by machine guns positioned on nearby higher ground and fire from snipers with AK-47s. Under cover of protective fire from armoured Apache helicopters hovering above, three of the Australians managed to get within forty metres of a mud-walled compound later identified as a mosque.

Now too close to the compound to be helped by the helicopters, the trio began to crawl through the dirt, one taking turns to shoot back while the others scrambled forward on their elbows towards the mosque, each convinced that they might be killed at any moment. “I had an absolute feeling of dread and fear due to the amount of fire that we were receiving,” Trooper Justin Percy later recounted. “And that is not only accurate fire but sustained, effective fire.”

A corporal accompanying Percy then made a bold decision to break the deadly standoff, a decision author Aaron Patrick says turned him into the most famous Australian soldier alive: “It might have killed him. Instead, it ruined his life.”

With covering fire from Percy, Ben Roberts-Smith dashed towards an empty barn to be confronted by a Taliban fighter pointing a grenade launcher through a window. After shooting the Taliban, Roberts-Smith saw two more fighters with machine guns moving along the wall of the mosque courtyard firing towards him. He threw a grenade that failed to detonate.

As Sergeant Philip O’Connor and two other troopers rushed forward to join him, O’Connor thew another grenade. This one worked but failed to silence the machine guns. Roberts-Smith then charged toward the courtyard wall, shooting one of the machine gunners twice through the head as he was turning to fire at him. The Australian then entered the courtyard to find a second machine gunner, a boy he reckoned was only fifteen. “I just moved a little further along the wall, dropped down and killed him as well,” he would recall.

Moments later, Roberts-Smith burst into the mosque with two other Australians and shot another armed Taliban. Entering a small room to his left, he faced yet another insurgent standing with a rifle and ammunition pouches. This time his Mk 14 battle rifle jammed. As Roberts-Smith sidestepped to distract the Talib, Justin Percy fired three rounds, killing him instantly.

The confrontation — which became known as the Battle of Shah Wali Kot — was the turning point in a battle that might easily have ended in disaster for the Australians.

Patrick provides a gripping reconstruction of that confrontation in his new book, The Last Battle. Yet although the Australian army considers it the greatest victory in its longest war, he writes, few Australians have ever heard of it. This alone would seem ample reason for Patrick’s meticulous reconstruction of the events based on extensive interviews with many of those who were there. But that was not the journalist’s sole motivation, perhaps not even the primary one.

For his actions at Tizak, Ben Roberts-Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest and most venerated award available to a member of the Australian military. Fifteen years on, that medal is indelibly stained. In June 2023, Judge Anthony Besanko of the NSW Supreme Court found that Roberts-Smith had committed or was complicit in the murder of four Afghan prisoners (in actions separate from the Battle of Shah Wali Kot). The case was a defamation action brought by Roberts-Smith against Fairfax newspapers and journalists Chris Masters and Nick McKenzie, whose reporting had first revealed alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

In May this year, the Full Court of the Federal Court rejected an appeal brought by Roberts-Smith against the Besanko judgement, unanimously dismissing all sixteen grounds. The verdict of the three judges was damning: “The burden of proving that his honour [Besanko] erred on appeal rested with the appellant. The appellant has not discharged that burden. What is more, we are satisfied that his honour’s conclusions with respect to the substantial truth of the relevant imputations conveyed by the respondents’ articles were correct.”

Early last month, the High Court slammed the final door on Roberts-Smith’s legal efforts to clear his name when it rejected a special leave application for him to challenge the Federal Court decisions. This emphatic conclusion to the disgraced soldier’s seven-year legal crusade against his accusers might have convinced most observers of the sordid saga that enough was more enough on the matter of Ben Roberts-Smith and his VC. But not Aaron Patrick.

In a post on LinkedIn earlier this month, Patrick declared: “If you’re interested in learning what the former SAS soldier did to deserve the medal, this book is for you. But The Last Battle is about a lot more than him. Some 150 Australian soldiers directly participated. His story is important. So are the other soldiers. I hope my book can help Australians better understand how our men and women fought in Afghanistan, and why they deserve our respect, gratitude and understanding. It’s also one hell of a war story.”

When it was first learned that Patrick was writing the book, there was scepticism about his intentions, not least at the Australian Financial Review, where he had worked for some years as a senior correspondent. Under the headline, “Ben Roberts-Smith Gets Another (Positive) Chapter Written,” the Fin’s popular Rear Window column began an item last March: “Over at Kerry Stokes’ Seven West Media, efforts to rehabilitate the reputation of former employee and war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith continue.”

Columnist Hannah Wootton noted that Patrick had recently joined Seven West’s daily digital newspaper, the Nightly, as chief writer, after writing occasional opinion and news pieces for the outlet while penning his book.

Kerry Stokes is, of course, the most ardent supporter of Ben Roberts-Smith, whom he once employed to run Seven’s TV operations in Queensland. Early last month, the multimillionaire was ordered by the Federal Court to pay $13.5 million in costs incurred by the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in their successful defence of his protégé’s defamation case. The total costs of the proceedings — including money spent by Stokes underwriting Roberts-Smith’s legal team — have been estimated at between $30 million and $40 million. At Seven West’s annual general meeting in 2022, Stokes famously declared: “Ben Roberts-Smith is innocent and deserves legal representation and… scumbag journalists should be held to account.”

Hannah Wootton quoted Patrick as saying the war in Afghanistan was not understood by a lot of Australians and his book about the Battle of Shah Wali Kot was “a really great way to tell the story of what the soldiers did over there,” before adding: “This is not a war crimes book.” Wootton concluded: “A book painting a picture of his [Roberts-Smith’s] bravery… without diving into those pesky war crimes, is bound to please Patrick’s new boss.”

In fact, The Last Battle does deal with the pesky war crimes matters, though with kid gloves. Patrick writes at some length about the efforts of Roberts-Smith’s lawyers to “demonstrate their client’s bravery and professionalism” and to denigrate the journalists who exposed the unlawful killings (The Full Court rejected the attacks on Nick McKenzie, saying the appellant failed to establish that he had engaged in any misconduct.)

Patrick prefaces his brief account of the devastating Besanko judgement by trumpeting that the judge “did not question his bravery at Tizak or his right to the Victoria Cross.” He quickly summarises the killing of prisoners before adding: “Roberts-Smith’s medals were never revoked. The Australian War Memorial kept them and his uniform in the Hall of Valour, a section of the museum that commemorates Victoria Cross recipients.” He then indulges Roberts-Smith by quoting him saying: “Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant, and I believe one day soon the truth will prevail.”

Patrick repeatedly styles Roberts-Smith as a victim — of a public that doesn’t appreciate the dangers and pressures on a soldier in battle, of military colleagues jealous of another’s success and medals, and of the kind of journalists his new boss derides as scumbags.

Patrick writes of the 2018 Sixty Minutes program, presented by Nick McKenzie, in which a disguised senior SAS soldier gave a detailed account of how Roberts-Smith had in 2012 kicked a handcuffed Afghan prisoner off a small cliff before ordering his execution. He laments that the “allegations” in the program and related newspaper reports had “destroyed” Roberts-Smith’s hard-won reputation: “He was shunned by military and civic organisations. No Anzac Day marches wanted him to speak. Charities cut ties. He lost the opportunity of becoming a partner of PwC, a large financial services firm. Instead of embodying courage in war, he became a symbol of its capacity for personal destruction.”

A more realistic explanation of the cause Roberts-Smith’s downfall might have been to quote directly from the Besanko judgement. The judge found that the soldier had indeed kicked the handcuffed villager, Ali Jan, off the cliff before directing another soldier dubbed “Person 11” to shoot him, that Roberts-Smith had falsely claimed Ali Jan was a Taliban fighter who had been engaged in combat rather than an innocent farmer, and that Roberts-Smith had “aided, abetted, counselled or procured Person 11 in the murder of Ali Jan.” Patrick might equally have given a detailed account of the three other killings in which the judge found Roberts-Smith to be a war criminal involved in unlawful executions.

If Patrick’s primary intention was indeed to mitigate Roberts-Smith’s rogue actions in Afghanistan by recasting them in the golden light of the heroic events at Tizak in 2010, he has failed dismally. Even while skirting most of the shocking evidence that emerged during the defamation case, the book still amounts to a damning portrait of the principal character of the tale.

Rather than the intrigues of scumbag journalists, it was the disgust of fellow soldiers — at his unauthorised actions on the battlefield and the merits of his Victoria Cross award — that ultimately brought Ben Roberts-Smith undone. McKenzie and Masters have rightly applauded the actions of the numerous special forces soldiers, many of whom gave evidence reluctantly, whose truth-telling enabled the truth defence to prevail in the defamation case.

A total of twenty-two soldiers were nominated for bravery medals for their valour in the Battle of Shah Wali Kot. Only three were awarded. In addition to Roberts-Smith’s VC, Philip O’Connor was awarded the Star of Gallantry and Justin Percy received the Medal of Gallantry, but only after an outcry, a review and a two-year wait. The bureaucratic parsimony triggered immediate resentment in the special forces ranks and a widespread belief that Roberts-Smith had been singled out for special treatment. “The army needed a positive message from the messy and confusing war,” Patrick concedes. “In the 202-centimetre-tall son of a general, was a hero who could deliver it.”

Almost as soon as it was published, the details of the VC citation were being picked apart, and revealed as deeply flawed by some of the soldiers who fought with Roberts-Smith that day. Sergeant Kenneth Barber — who would become the anonymous witness on the Sixty Minutes program (with defence department approval) — told Chris Masters that every aspect of the official account of Roberts-Smith’s actions was flawed and the citation contained “lies and embellishments.”

Barber argued that the fighting at the mosque was not particularly daring or dangerous and the intensity of Taliban firing was “minimal.” He said the insurgent purportedly killed by Roberts-Smith while pointing a grenade launcher at the two other troopers was in fact unarmed, his RPG leaning against a wall. And he said the reason the grenade Roberts-Smith threw at the attackers in the mosque failed to explode was not because it was a dud but because the corporal had failed to remove the safety clip necessary to arm it.

Barber claimed the pivotal moment of the battle — when Roberts-Smith is credited as having run into the courtyard killing two Taliban machine gunners — did not happen. He said the pair had been driven inside by helicopter fire and the corporal and the other troopers entered the compound without being shot at: “He did not charge in on his own and save blokes lives. They all ran together.” Percy, who was beside Roberts-Smith throughout the action at the mosque — and who Roberts-Smith concedes saved his life when his gun jammed — also argued strongly that he did not deserve the VC.

In the end, it was the awarding of the VC that unravelled the once brilliant career of Ben Roberts-Smith — and the once inviolable code of solidarity and secrecy in the Australian SAS Regiment. The griping about the fairness of the award lead to loose talk about the corporal’s history of bulling and brutality that eventually spilled into the media. It gave momentum to events that triggered the four-year inquiry by Defence Force inspector general Paul Brereton, who found in November 2020 that twenty-five members of the Australian special forces were involved in the killing of thirty-nine prisoners and civilians in Afghanistan. None of the twenty-five were named in the Brereton report, although four of them were SAS troopers who fought at Tizak. It was Roberts-Smith’s decision to sue the Fairfax newspapers that brought the house of cards crashing onto his own head.

Aaron Patrick laments that the medals awarded after the Battle of Shah Wali Kot — and especially the Victoria Cross — became a focus of disappointment and rancour rather than a celebration of service. “After the initial adulation, Ben Roberts-Smith found himself a target. Without it [the medal], his identity would not have been disclosed and he would have had no public reputation to destroy,” he writes.

In defence of his thesis that the genuine heroism of Shah Wali Kot deserves to be honoured and celebrated despite the scandals that have now engulfed the record of Australia’s engagement in Afghanistan, Patrick argues: “Whether Afghanistan was the right war at the right time was irrelevant to the men of the Special Operations Task Group, the commando and SASR force in Afghanistan. They did their duty. Some died. Others came back badly injured, physically and psychologically. All were shaped by the experience. They deserve recognition for their sacrifice, praise for their courage.”

Unfortunately for all those who served with honour and dedication in that ultimately pointless war, the gross misconduct of a few has permanently tarnished the record of the entire deployment. And when the intensive war crimes prosecutions process initiated by the Brereton inquiry is eventually concluded, Ben Roberts-Smith will not be the only Afghan veteran left with nowhere to take cover. •

The Last Battle: Australian SAS, Commandos and Our Greatest Victory in Our Longest War
By Aaron Patrick | Macmillan Australia | $36.99 | 304 pages

The post One hell of a story appeared first on Inside Story.

There is much in the Trump plan that is implausible, contrived and, as with many Robinson cartoons, more than just a bit absurd. We might applaud the American president for bringing a pause to the slaughter in Gaza and for the return of Israeli hostages. Quite possibly, no one else could have done that right now. Remember, though, it was the second Trump administration which continued to underwrite that slaughter, providing massive amounts of lethal materiel to Israel.

We should certainly applaud the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for not giving this year’s award to the Trump. At a stretch he might be a more credible contender in 2026, though that should depend on what happens with his twenty-point plan.

And the plan is just the problem. At best, it offers a respite in Gaza. It is not a blueprint for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. For two million–plus Gazans it might move the dial of daily hardship from starvation to subsistence. But it overflows with empty assertions, with the term “will be” worked to the point of exhaustion.

Are we meant to be comforted that a “Board of Peace,” under the direction of Trump and Tony Blair, will oversee the creation of “New Gaza”? Trump’s erratic behaviour and Blair’s dubious record as a Middle East peace envoy aside, this still amounts to an “unmistakable colonial framework,” in the words prominent Middle East experts Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares. And there is not a single reference in the plan to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, home to three million Palestinians who are subject to constant harassment from 450,000 Israeli settlers, long aided and abetted by the Netanyahu government. (Another 230,000 Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem.)

As for “New Gaza,” Trump’s new plan at least populates that devastated territory with Palestinians. Point 12 states: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza.” Those who wish to go will be free to do so and to return. Contrast this with Trump’s remarks in February 2025 that the United States would take “a long-term ownership position” in the territory, expelling Gazans to “a fresh piece of land” in either Jordan or Egypt and creating a “Riviera of the Middle East… something that could be so magnificent.”

Point 19 of the Trump plan deals with Palestinian statehood as follows: “While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the Palestinian Authority reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognise as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.” As ever, statehood is held out as a reward for Palestinian good behaviour. Bad behaviour by others that affects prospects for Palestinian statehood is somehow irrelevant.

And who will judge if and when Palestinians have met their obligations: Donald Trump, with a record of capricious behaviour second to none; Tony Blair, whose lies about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are a matter of record; and possibly Benjamin Netanyahu, whose life’s mission has been to deny to Palestinians what Israelis regard as a birthright — a state of their own?

The plan’s first point deserves a motherhood award for aspiration: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.” How this might happen can be gleaned from point 6, which gives amnesty to Hamas members who commit to peaceful coexistence, and point 13, which excludes Hamas from any role in the governance of Gaza.

The critical question is who will make it happen? The answer, in point 15, is a temporary International Stabilisation Force, or ISF, which will “immediately deploy in Gaza” to train and support vetted Palestinian police in consultation with Jordan and Egypt. The ABC’s Middle East correspondent, Eric Tlozek, has commented that this will be one of the most crucial and difficult parts of the plan, with the makeup, legal status and rules of engagement yet to be defined. He quoted Andreas Krieg from the School of Security at King’s College, London, as saying that without a UN Security Council mandate the legitimacy of such a deployment would be contested and that Arab/Muslim contributors would be wary of being seen as subcontractors for Israel. A potential further complication, of course, is Trump’s poisonous relationship with the UN.

One worthy element of the plan (Point 18) deals with changing “mindsets and narratives,” long recognised as major obstacles to peace-making in the region. Dehumanisation of the other through racist and incendiary rhetoric infects Israelis and Palestinians alike. In his fine book, The Hundred Years War on Palestine, the prominent Palestinian-American scholar Rashid Khalidi wrote of the thorny issue of weaning Israelis from their attachment to inequality and “a reflexive dogma of aggressive nationalism whose tenacious hold will be hard to break.” Palestinians too, he wrote, needed weaning from a pernicious delusion — rooted in the colonial nature of their encounter with Zionism and in its denial of Palestinian peoplehood — that Jewish Israelis are not “real” people.

Israel has pulverised Gaza, killing some 70,000 Palestinians (the majority of them women and children) and Hamas’s top military leadership in the territory. The greater the pulverisation, the greater the formal support for a Palestinian state from countries who previously might have lacked the courage to make the call. By mid-October 2025, when Trump declared the “end” of the Gaza war, 80 per cent of UN members had formally recognised a Palestinian state, the newcomers including Belgium, Canada, France, Portugal, and Britain as well as Australia.

Ami Ayalon, a former leader of the Israeli Labor Party and one-time head of the Israeli internal security agency, Shin Bet, commented recently that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would not end until “we achieve a political agreement that ends Israel’s occupation and creates two states side by side.” Many now rightly question the viability of a two-state solution but struggle to come up with better idea.

Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in early 2024 the late Martin Indyk, twice American ambassador to Israel, argued that 7 October had resurrected the “allegedly dead two-state solution.” The explanation, he said, was simple, a lack of possible alternatives: the Hamas solution was the destruction of Israel; the Israeli ultra-right solution was annexation of the West Bank, dismantling of the Palestinian Authority and deportation of Palestinians to other countries; the “conflict management” approach long pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu was aimed at maintaining the status quo indefinitely and the world had “seen how that worked out.” Added to this list was the idea of a binational state, in which Jews would become a minority, thus ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. None of those alternatives, Indyk wrote, would resolve the conflict — at least not without causing even greater calamities. If the conflict was to be resolved peacefully, “the two-state solution was the only idea left standing.”

Now that Australia has formally recognised a Palestinian state, what will it do to help create it and build the structures of statehood? Are there lessons from Australia’s leading role in the 1990s peace-making in Cambodia — including communications and election management — that might apply to Palestine? Are there NGOs that can marshal important expertise that could help the Palestinians?

In the mid-1990s prominent Australian lawyers, working under the auspices of the Australian International Legal Resources NGO, helped draft guidelines for the operation of the Palestinian legislative council and also helped create a forensic laboratory. Could Australia engage more closely on Palestine with regional countries — including Indonesia, which is already involved in Middle East peace-keeping? Its president, Prabowo Subianto, recently offered another 20,000 troops for UN peace-keeping operations, including in Gaza.

The only certainty in the days ahead is more talk. Much of it will be empty, and posturing won’t bring peace. Perhaps Australia, with its current bid for a non-permanent UN Security Council seat in mind, can at least work to focus the debate on action? •

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“We’re brothers, we help one another,” the Israeli prime minister replied. “You recognise a truth that everybody should recognise, but few governments have so far — that this has been our capital for 3000 years, since the days of King David.”

According to Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, “we have an alliance of believers between Jews and Christians, based on deep faith and biblical roots. We are opening a new, historic chapter in our relations.”

Fiji’s recent diplomatic support for Israel contrasts with international condemnation of Israeli policy in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Just before Rabuka inaugurated the embassy, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. And he’s far from the only Pacific leader to throw their support behind Israel.

Netanyahu’s welcome to Rabuka highlights his own international isolation since the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli leader. Successive US presidents have welcomed Netanyahu to Washington, and he has been feted by congressional leaders, yet his arrest warrant alleges “war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

So why do so many Pacific island leaders stand with a man accused of genocide and crimes against humanity, and a nation at war with Palestinians and itself?

Rabuka was in Israel the week after the fifty-fourth Pacific Islands Forum leaders meeting. Gathered in Solomon Islands between 8–12 September, regional leaders had adopted a declaration recognising the Blue Pacific as an “Ocean of Peace.” The concept was first proposed by Rabuka, who reiterated the importance of regional solidarity, non-alignment and collective security in a 2023 address to the UN General Assembly.

As he welcomed the launch of the Ocean of Peace Declaration in Honiara on 10 September, Rabuka stressed: “The world knows that we, the Pasifika people, mean business and it starts here with us.” But for many Pacific church and community leaders, this rhetoric is undercut by support for Israel’s unremitting attack on Palestinians, even though US president Donald Trump has called for an end to Israeli military operations in Gaza under a new peace deal announced this month.

During the Forum meeting, the Pacific Conference of Churches, or PCC, called on Pacific governments to “safeguard civilians; support an enforceable ceasefire and humanitarian access; pursue accountability under international law and refrain from actions that pre-judge final status issues; recognise Palestine; and invest in a just peace worthy of our Ocean of Peace.” The PCC unites thirty-five national denominations and eleven National Councils of Churches across the region.

“We have to be clear,” says the PCC’s general secretary, Reverend James Bhagwan. “If we are to be gathering at a time talking about an ‘Ocean of Peace,’ we cannot talk about peace in our region and then support people who do war, do murder and do harm on others.”

Palestine is not high on the Forum’s agenda, but after the Hamas attacks and hostage-taking of 7 October 2023, the debate could not be avoided.

Pacific leaders gathered the following month in Rarotonga, Cook Islands, at the 52nd Pacific Islands Forum. Mobilised by the early reports of civilian casualties during Israel’s reprisals in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Cook Islands women rallied outside the November 2023 Forum, with a banner calling on Pacific leaders to “please condemn the killing of displaced Palestinians and God’s innocent children in Gaza.”

Israel retained widespread community support after 7 October 2023, drawing on historic traditions of Christian Zionism. Since then, however, civil society groups across the Pacific islands’ region — from Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands to Fiji, Tonga, Sāmoa and New Caledonia — have protested against the Israeli massacre in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Through petitions, vigils and rallies, activists have condemned Israel’s attacks in Gaza, and criticised the death of Palestinian civilians and non-combatants. Though small, the diversity, reach and passion of these protests is unprecedented in the islands, as elsewhere across the globe.

For Reverend Bhagwan, the crisis in the Middle East has been a moral turning point, in a world torn apart by geopolitical competition and government attacks on human rights and international law. “We grieve every life taken and reject every hatred — antisemitism, anti–Arab racism, and Islamophobia. We pray for and accompany Palestinian Christians and all communities affected by violence. Peace requires justice, reconciliation requires truth, security requires equal rights and the end of collective punishment and occupation.”

For many years, Western powers followed US policy to defer recognition of Palestine, but Israel’s massacre and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza and provocations in the West Bank have broken the dam. At last month’s eightieth session of the UN General Assembly, ten Western states (France, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Portugal, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Andorra and Belgium) announced recognition of Palestinian statehood.

While welcoming their belated decision, many civil society groups have pushed governments to back their rhetoric with concrete action, through sanctions on the Netanyahu government and an end to arms sales to Israel. But such sentiments are often a minority opinion across the Pacific islands.

Support for Israel among conservative Christians has been boosted by groups such as the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. Established in 1980, the ICEJ claims to represent evangelical Christians around the world “who stand with Israel and the Jewish people based on biblical principles and promises.” ICEJ has branches in ninety countries, including five in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Sāmoa and Cook Islands).

PCC’s James Bhagwan acknowledges the support for Israel among many Pacific Christians, but says: “The Pacific Conference of Churches is very concerned about the narratives around Christian Zionism that are being pushed, to gain political traction around the Pacific for the support of Israel. But it is wrong theology — it is theology being twisted for political purposes. It’s the same when theology gets twisted for ethnonationalism, for racism, or as an excuse to neglect or even harm the marginalised communities in our region.”

Across the region, only Vanuatu has formally recognised Palestinian statehood. Other states have provided diplomatic support to Israel for decades. For some governments, this public commitment has deep roots: in line with US policy, the Federated States of Micronesia has not cast a single UN vote critical of Israeli policy in the past ten years.

As he was sworn in to office in September 2025, Sāmoa’s incoming prime minister Laaulialemalietoa Leuatea Polataivao Fosi Schmidt said Sāmoa was founded as a nation under the “God of Israel.” Leuatea wore a scarf with the colours of the Israeli flag, and held a shofar, the ram’s horn used in Jewish rituals. Years ago, Leuatea was baptised in the Jordan River and, assuming office, he pledged: “I stand for Israel, the land of God. It doesn’t matter if the entire world is unhappy about it, that’s up to them, but Sāmoa will stand with the land of God.”

Some governments have also cracked down on pro-Palestine protests. In Fiji, police have refused permits for Palestine support rallies, even as marches for Israel have been approved. The carrying of Palestinian flags and symbols has been banned at some events.

At a time of diplomatic isolation, Israel has welcomed the votes of Pacific governments in the UN General Assembly. At the start of the current crisis in October 2023, the vote on a General Assembly resolution for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians passed 124–14. Six of the fourteen No votes came from Pacific Island states. A resolution in June 2024 calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was overwhelmingly approved, with 149 countries voting in favour. Of the twelve states that voted against the resolution, seven — Fiji, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Tuvalu — were Pacific nations.

In February this year, Fiji’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Filipo Tarakinikini delivered an oral submission to the International Court of Justice urging the court refuse a UN General Assembly request for a non-binding ruling on the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Fiji’s former Labour prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry, deposed in a 2000 coup, noted that “Fiji is the only country, aside from the United States, to lend support to Israel in the current proceedings. To end this decades-old conflict, majority world opinion favours the Palestinians getting their occupied territories back, with full recognition as an independent sovereign state.”

On 12 September, the UN General Assembly voted 142–10 to adopt a resolution on the peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine  and the implementation of the two-state solution. Following the usual pattern, six of the ten No votes came from Pacific island states, with Fiji and Sāmoa also abstaining. Less than a week later, prime minister Rabuka flew to Jerusalem to open Fiji’s embassy.

Palestinians have long argued that East Jerusalem should be the capital of an independent Palestinian state. The status of Jerusalem has been contested under international law since Israel occupied the city during the 1967 war. In 1980 UN Security Council Resolution 478 reaffirmed that East Jerusalem is an occupied territory and called on all UN member states to withdraw diplomatic missions from the city.

This policy was maintained until 2017, when Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv. The Trump administration was isolated in a 14–1 vote at the UN Security Council, but the resolution that criticised the decision was vetoed by America’s then UN ambassador Nikki Haley.

In a subsequent emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly — a rare occasion — UN members voted 128–35 to ask nations not to establish diplomatic missions in Jerusalem. Only seven other countries joined the United States and Israel to vote against the resolution, including four island nations. Papua New Guinea voted in favour of this resolution — only to change its policy six years later. In 2023 PNG prime minister James Marape announced that his nation would open an embassy in Jerusalem, recognising it as Israel’s capital.

“For the first three years, the nation of Israel is paying for the cost of the embassy,” Marape told the ABC. “But going forward, they’ve indicated land available for us and we look forward to proceeding, setting up our permanent mission there.” The PNG government had made a “conscious choice,” he said. “This has been the universal capital of the nation and people of Israel. For us to call ourselves Christian, paying respect to God will not be possible without recognising that Jerusalem is the universal capital of the people and nation of Israel.”

In October 2024, the Israel Knesset legislated to prohibit consulates rather than embassies being established in Jerusalem. By then, the United States had been followed by Honduras, Guatemala, Kosovo, the Czech Republic, Papua New Guinea and Paraguay to open embassies in Jerusalem.

First floated at a 2023 meeting between Rabuka and Netanyahu, the Fiji government’s decision to open an embassy in Jerusalem sparked anger amongst church and civil society groups. Fiji’s NGO Coalition on Human Rights said Rabuka was “callously ignoring the unfolding famine and mass starvation in Gaza that is being deliberately orchestrated by the state of Israel.” Leading feminist Shamima Ali, chair of the NGO Coalition, condemned the Fiji delegation for standing alongside Netanyahu, “who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, including starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity.”

Rabuka, in turn, condemned her remarks, but also took aim at the leading daily Fiji Times for reporting them: “It is unbecoming of the major newspaper of an emerging power in the Pacific.” Editor-in-chief Fred Wesley responded: “While many people in Fiji venerate Israel and Mr Netanyahu, it is very important that we all understand that much of the world does not see them in a good light. Much of the world agrees with the view that the NGO Coalition has expressed. It is important that we all know this fact and reflect on it.”

Israel is one of six nations that has an application pending for Dialogue Partner status with the Pacific Islands Forum (a relationship that currently links twenty-one countries — the United States, China, France and Japan among them — with the eighteen-member regional organisation).

Alongside Ukraine and Saudi Arabia, Israel wants the partnership status that gives access to the annual Forum summit of regional leaders. But all Dialogue Partner applications were frozen in late 2023, pending a new partnership policy that would determine which countries actively support Forum policies and priorities, compared to those mainly hunting for UN votes.

As the diplomatic tide turns, and the International Court of Justice continues its investigation into presumed genocide in Gaza, the Netanyahu government is expending diplomatic capital to reinforce the shrinking number of countries that will support it in the United Nations. In a statement on 21 August, Israel’s foreign ministry announced that Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel will prepare an official tour of Pacific Island states, including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu and Tonga, which support Israel and the United States at the United Nations.

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar said his deputy “will lead the delegation to engage in discussions aimed at deepening and advancing Israel–Pacific relations in a wide range of bilateral, multilateral, and strategic fields.” Scheduled for this month, the tour reflects “Israel’s profound appreciation for the Pacific Island states and underscores Israel’s commitment to strengthening cooperation with them.”

This debate will continue until there is a ceasefire and political settlement in Gaza, and civil society organisations across the Pacific will maintain their pressure on their governments.

“Regarding the plans by some Pacific countries to shift embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, we counsel restraint,” said PCC’s Reverend James Bhagwan. “Such moves sit uneasily with our Ocean of Peace vision and with international law. We urge governments to avoid steps that pre-ajudge Jerusalem’s final status or normalise ongoing violations. Keep missions in Tel Aviv until a just and negotiated settlement is reached.” •

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Taking refuge, like many others, in a bomb shelter, I followed news of a massive wave of drones moving westward across Ukraine. Soon, news channels were reporting that several had crossed into Poland and Rzeszów airport, in Poland’s southeast, had been closed for security reasons. By early morning, news reached us that airports in Warsaw and Lublin had also been shut down.

The fact that many of the drones were unarmed didn’t lessen their significance. Some recent Western intelligence sources have suggested that they may simply have been sent off their course by Ukraine’s jamming — a theory also advanced by intelligence sources in Russia’s ally, Belarus — but events since then strongly suggest the incursions were deliberate.

Experts note that Russia could have been targeting Poland strategically to disrupt logistical support for Ukraine, given that Poland’s border regions are crucial transport arteries. The drones’ route followed logistics corridors to Ukraine, particularly targeting Rzeszów airport, a vital hub for military and humanitarian aid. By threatening Poland, Russia could also be seeking to undermine NATO’s credibility and pressure Kyiv towards unrealistic peace talks. Equally troubling, Russia has now tested NATO’s response times and decision-making processes, exposing vulnerabilities it could exploit in the near future.

Later that week, on 13 September, Russian drones crossed into Romania. Moscow dismissed them as “unidentified flying objects.” Romanian F-16s tracked them but did not engage. Then, on 19 September, Russian fighter jets breached Estonian airspace, lingering twelve minutes before Italian jets responded. Estonia has now also invoked Article 4, another sign of growing alarm.

Equally ominously, Russian and Belarusian forces have launched a series of Zapad-2025 (West-2025) military training drills near Lithuania’s border. Does anyone still remember the similar drills on Ukraine’s border in December 2021 — drills that supposedly “meant nothing”? It is now a rhetorical question: ask Ukrainians who are still fighting and living through this war.

The danger lies not only in the drones themselves but also in the political hesitancy they have highlighted across Europe. Ukraine’s experience should be a warning: the danger signs began with Russia’s unidentified “green men” in Crimea in 2014 and continued with the so-called “hybrid war” in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. They culminated in the West’s slow response to Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Each time, the caution emboldened the aggressor, becoming a weakness.

Yet many European and world politicians remain reluctant to acknowledge this. Such blindness is dangerous: what starts as an incident involving “unidentified drones” or an “unintentional” violation of airspace could escalate into a mass-scale strike on critical infrastructure, government buildings and the peaceful population sleeping at night.

Although Polish authorities initially referred to the drones as “objects,” their attitude hardened the following day. The government declared a no-fly zone within thirteen kilometres of the Ukrainian border, closed the border with Belarus, and imposed airspace restrictions in Poland’s eastern regions until 9 December. Prime minister Donald Tusk told parliament that the country faced an “enemy that did not hide its hostile intentions” and his government invoked Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, requesting security guarantees. An important step, yes — but it comes in the fourth year of Russia’s full-scale war in neighbouring Ukraine. Poland also successfully requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council to discuss the violation of its airspace.

Polish authorities have since announced that their anti-drone units will receive training in Ukraine, drawing on the extensive experience accumulated by military forces there. But is this enough, given Russia’s history of aggression and its capacity to send up to 500 drones per day in the near future?

Among the incident’s other consequences was the activation of high-level NATO discussions and public statements. Member states quickly realised that one of their allies could be under threat. Yet no decisive action followed — not for NATO’s collective protection, not even in the form of additional sanctions or clear deadlines.

Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski floated the idea that NATO should begin shooting down Russian drones over Ukrainian territory. Russia immediately declared that such a move would mean open war with NATO. This is hardly the first time Moscow has issued such an ultimatum: it has threatened war against NATO if its members sent weapons to Ukraine or if Ukraine attacked targets inside Russia — both “red lines” that have since been crossed. The real question is why the option of intercepting drones over Ukraine was not discussed seriously well before those nineteen drones entered Poland. How many Ukrainian lives could have been saved?

This is precisely the moment to recognise the shift in Russia’s war against Ukraine: it is no longer contained within Ukrainian borders but has already become a war against Europe. Russia is testing NATO, probing the defences of its member states, and signalling its imperialistic view that no Eastern European country is beyond reach. Whether Europe treats this as a wake-up call or another passing headline may shape the continent’s security for years to come.

NATO’s and Poland’s “concerns” have continued to mount. What comes next, and at what scale, if Russian drones can target Poland’s capital, where one of last week’s drones was shot down — something few could have imagined when missiles, bombs and drones first began falling over Kyiv?

Is Poland ready for hybrid or even full-scale war with Russia? Is Europe? The evidence suggests otherwise. Of the nineteen drones, only four were destroyed in the air. Former Polish president Andrzej Duda conceded Poland lacks adequate counter-drone systems, relying instead on aircraft interception, an inefficient and outdated response to the speed and scale of the modern drone warfare.

Looking back ten days later, the separate incursions appear to have been part of a series of well-planned acts of hybrid warfare. For three and a half years, Ukraine has borne the brunt of Russia’s full-scale war. Now the focus has shifted westward. Russia is probing NATO’s weak points, testing whether symbolic gestures and verbal reassurances will continue substituting for real defence measures. So far, neither Poland, Romania nor Estonia has responded decisively.

As Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stressed, these are systematic actions demanding a systematic, collective response. At this week’s emergency UN Security Council session, Sikorsky foreshadowed that any Russian missile or aircraft entering NATO airspace “either deliberately or by mistake” would be shot down. The European Union is preparing to meet with Ukraine and other Eastern European countries to discuss the creation of a “drone wall” along its eastern border, but experts warn that building such defence system might take at least a year.

Will Europe and NATO be ready for the next “incursion”? What role will the United States take in shaping collective security along the eastern borders of NATO? Why, despite support for Ukraine’s war effort, has nothing been done over the past three and a half years to prepare for such an eventuality, especially given the murderous, mass-scale, drone attacks already carried out against Ukraine? Why was Europe not been more concerned by the hundreds of armed drones flying daily over the heads of Ukrainians?

The uncomfortable truth is that NATO countries have not adequately prepared for such incidents, nor learned from Ukraine’s hard-earned experience in countering drone warfare. With limited resources, Ukraine has already developed a layered, adaptive defence system. NATO states, with much greater political and economic means, lag behind. Unless Europe, Ukraine and NATO work quickly on political unity, coordinating defence systems, and rapid decision-making, the question will not be whether but when Russia escalates further against NATO infrastructure — and how devastating its consequences will be for Europe and especially for Ukraine. •

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Sosnowski is based at Melbourne University’s Law School and engaged in a study of “the legal afterlife of war and revolution.” Her work brings law and anthropology together in ways that challenge the assumptions of both disciplines. Her new book, 58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution, is both analytic and deeply personal.

Any review of this book must acknowledge that it is partly a confessional story, and one that deserves a personal response. In fact, it is a more challenging and innovative book than the subtitle suggests — though “58 facets” gives us a clue. Essentially a string of short episodes and observations, it is held together by Sosnowki’s deep involvement with the Syrian opposition to the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was overthrown last year, but also by her willingness to explore her own traumas and uncertainties.

At the same time it is an exercise in family history, for Sosnowski, like many of us, is in Australia as the result of Nazi persecution. Her grandfather arrived from the Netherlands in 1947, having escaped Europe only to be imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in Java before finally landing in Brisbane. Others of her family settled in Israel, one of them governing Gaza for a short time.

Reading 58 Facets is to be confronted by the parallels between Europe in the 1930s and the Middle East today. It is Sosnowski’s strength as a writer that she lets the reader draw these parallels as she recounts her own experiences of working with exiled Syrians and hearing their hopes for a better future.

What her experience of Syria suggests — and by extension what the sad story of dispossessed Palestinians bears out — is that revolution is complex, messy and at once personal and political. “Revolutionary acts can happen at any time, any place,” she writes. “They can sneak up on you in online meetings or over lunch with a friend. This is because in every place, in every society, the law and violence are inextricably conjoined, and revolution is, in turn, inextricably looped into this triumvirate.”

I thought of these words following the weekend of neo-Nazi demonstrations in Australian cities, which highlighted the precariousness of liberal-democratic assumptions in the face of direct confrontation. Of course the thugs in black who took to our streets needed only slight bravado; the Syrians who resisted Assad risked torture and death.

There are moments of anguish in this book, as well as moments of hope it moves towards Assad’s overthrow and the unknown future facing Syrians. Sosnowski writes about the reality of camps, whether the death camps of the Nazi extermination or the moveable camps of Israel’s war in Gaza. As I read this I thought of the new moves by the Australian government to pay once again for detention camps in Nauru.

As a lawyer, Sosnowski is very aware of how our lives depend on producing the right paperwork. She gives a fascinating account of how the Syrian resistance created their own records of births and residence in preparation for a post-Assad government. Although she doesn’t refer to the United States, the increasingly brutal immigration raids under Trump only highlight the universality of her argument.

As the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Sosnowski is attuned to how traumas carry across generations and how they are experienced by so many Australians, beginning, most obviously, with members of our First Nations. “We are all wounded,” she writes. “Pulling large sacks of despicable acts tied with invisible threads behind us like a ball and chain. But, she adds: “Bringing the ball and chain above the horizons of history allows us… to open our hears to the woundedness of ourselves and others, to how similar our stories really are, to the great potential we all carry for acts of everyday revolution.”

I am saddened that so many of my fellow Jews, traumatised by the legacy of the Holocaust and shocked by the Hamas attacks of October 2023, have lost the ability to see the human suffering of Palestinians, as if even young children deserve to die in retribution. There are Knesset members who have proclaimed that all inhabitants of Gaza are guilty and deserve to be killed.

Back in 1956, the year Israel colluded with Britain and France in the Suez invasion, the Knesset adopted a Names Law, essential for denying Arabs who had fled during the 1948 war while allowing Jews like me, with no connection to Israel other than a set of Biblical stories, to enter and claim citizenship.

Central to the most important ceremony of Judaism, the Passover seder, is the expression, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Some years ago I wrote an article in which I said I could not say those worlds without a sense of horror at the hypocrisy involved. Sosnowski, who is more of a practising Jew than I, has a different view: “When we say ‘Next Year in Jerusalem!’ it is not something to be taken literally… That ‘Jerusalem’ will always and ever be ‘next year.’ That the journey is the important part, not the destination.”

I wish I could share her optimism. The original UN plan for a “special international regime” for Jerusalem — a holy city for three monotheistic religions — has long vanished. Both the Netanyahu and Trump regimes see the city as firmly and forever under Israeli control.

58 Facets is a short book but a profound one. My ambition for it imagines a reading group of Palestinian and Israeli partisans who might inch towards an understanding of the common humanity without which no solution to this ongoing tragedy is possible. •

58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution
By Marika Sosnowski | Melbourne University Press | $29.99 | 199 pages

The post Everyday revolutions appeared first on Inside Story.

Under the leadership of Bob Greenwood QC and the Australian Federal Police’s Graham Blewitt, the SIU gathered an impressive team of police investigators, most of whom might have heard only vaguely about the Holocaust and never have left Australia. They worked alongside historians, archaeologists, translators, researchers and lawyers to uncover the forensic history of the “Holocaust by bullets,” the mass extermination of Jews in mass graves across a region that encompassed the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland and ex-Yugoslavia. The newly released Nazis in Australia, compiled by Blewitt and edited by Aarons, is a deeply reflective account by some of the key players involved in the SIU during its five-year history.

We are accustomed to thinking of that history as a failure. Of the 841 cases of suspected war criminals opened by the SIU, only three were committed to trial and none were punished. The unit was abruptly closed down just when it was about to submit its biggest mass murderer to the Commonwealth director of public prosecutions. Its final report was quietly buried by a Keating government unwilling to alert the public to its decision to abandon the search for justice.

But the SIU was in many ways groundbreaking. Bob Greenwood QC secured a mutual assistance treaty with the Soviet war crimes procurator — the formidable Natalia Kolesnikova, infamous for her unbending attitude to Western investigators — that gave his investigators access to archives, eyewitnesses and the hidden crime scenes of the second world war. It was a cold war precedent that neither the Washington-based Office of Special Investigations nor the Canadian war crimes unit had been able to achieve, and facilitated a rare moment of cooperation between Australians, Ukrainians and Soviet officials. It also gave Australian researchers access to archives never before visited by Western historians.

The SIU also set a precedent in Australian criminal legal history, establishing for the first time the ability of a jury trial to prosecute international war crimes. In further firsts, mass graves were located and excavated, bodies exhumed and victims finally given a decent burial. Eyewitnesses were finally able to speak about atrocities they had seen unfold, or even participated in, forty-five years earlier. Some left their villages for the first time to travel halfway across the world to give their testimony in a Western courtroom: also a world first. Interpreters and translators rewrote the rule book for assisting in war crimes trials off the back of these events.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the SIU showed it was possible to investigate war criminals for crimes committed outside Australia in conflicts without Australian involvement. This entailed amending the War Crimes Act, originally legislated in 1945 to prosecute Japanese war criminals, and inserting a new section that mandated a fair trial, a requirement missing from the original legislation.

When it came to finding justice for their victims, however, the SIU’s record is more complicated. Of the hundreds of names it investigated, only three cases were formally recommended for prosecution, Ivan Polyukovich, Heinrich Wagner, and Mikolay Berezowsky, each of whom was alleged to have committed atrocities in the Ukraine.

Polyukhovich, a forest warden working for the Germans in a village called Serniki, deep in the Ukrainian marshes, was alleged to have been intimately involved in the murder of between 553 and 850 Jewish locals. “As the bodies were exposed,” Australian archaeologist Richard Wright writes, “it was clear the murdered Jews were made to lie down like sardines in a tin before being shot.”

Wagner, a member of the local gendarmerie in a village called Ustinovka, allegedly organised the digging of a mass grave, participated in the killing of adult Jews into the pit, and then ordered all the children of Jewish descent in the village to be rounded up and thrown on top of the adults, where they were shot.

Berezowsky, head of the local police in Gnivan (now Hnivan), near Vinnytsia, was allegedly involved in the mass murder of the Jewish population of Gnivan, mainly women, children and the elderly, between March and July 1942. One eyewitness claimed he had rifle-butted a baby to death in its mother’s arms.

These three men, and other alleged war criminals discussed in this book, all arrived in Australia as part of the mass postwar immigration scheme designed by Ben Chifley’s Labor government to help fill the shortfall in manpower required for Australia’s postwar reconstruction program and counteract what appeared to be a declining birthrate. Between 1947 and 1952, more than 170,000 people came to Australia via the “displaced persons,” or DP, camps of postwar Germany. There, around one and a half million Eastern Europeans remained under Allied care after refusing to return to their countries of origin now under Communist rule. Many had been victims of the Nazis, but others had slipped into the camps after retreating with the Germans from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and then lied about their past activities.

Before being accepted for immigration to Australia, DPs were required to pass security and medical screenings by the Allied-run International Refugee Organization and then by Australian officials. Germans, war criminals and Nazi collaborators were ineligible for DP status under IRO rules, but in reality plenty were able to slip through the net, claiming to have lost their identity papers, for example, and lying about their whereabouts during the war.

Moreover, Australian selection officers were less interested in candidates’ recent pasts than whether they were a suitable “type” of migrant. Equipped with a strong sense of national responsibility but a vague knowledge of European politics, European languages and complicated European geography, officers relied heavily on the IRO’s security screenings, flawed foreign intelligence and doubtful interview techniques.

Most of the Australian migration selection officers had military backgrounds and received little if any training before arriving in Europe. Australian ex-serviceman Mort Barwick was among them. “There were no specific instructions as to what type of person we should take,” he recalled, “provided they were of reasonable standard and in your opinion could assimilate into your community, then it was a question of, if you were satisfied, select them.”

The emphasis was on those who, on the face of it, wouldn’t threaten the White Australia demographic. Those from the Baltic nations (Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians), along with Ukrainians (a dubious category at the time), were considered most desirable. Jews were placed at the bottom, with Poles somewhere in between.

By the late 1940s, the deepening cold war was shifting the priorities of the Allies away from punishing West Germany to encouraging its peacetime reconstruction. It was also redefining the category of refugee. By the end of the decade, a professed fear of communism weighed more in a DP’s favour than proof of actual persecution under the Nazis. Those who may once have been condemned on the grounds of Nazi collaboration, for example, could now find themselves reassessed as heroic freedom fighters against communist tyranny.

Australian migration officers were encouraged to participate in this wilful revisioning of history. As historians have correctly observed, most recently Jayne Persian in her excellent book on the topic, Fascists in Exile, security screening was notoriously lax. Australian selection teams focused on admitting preferred racial types (fair-skinned) with the correct anti-communist views. Consequently, a number of fascists, war criminals and Nazi collaborators were able to come to Australia as DPs without fear of prosecution. Most did not even bother to change their names.

Combined with political inertia, it was this kind of wilful ignorance that determined attitudes to alleged war criminals. During the 1950s, allegations mainly from the Jewish community that Nazis who had participated in mass killings were living in Australia largely fell on deaf ears. In 1961, when the Soviet government requested the extradition of an Estonian man for war crimes, attorney-general Garfield Barwick called for an amnesty, telling the Australian parliament “the time has come to close the chapters on war crimes.”

Yet the shift that eventually led to the creation of the SIU was already in train. Accusations from overseas about Australia’s harbouring of alleged war criminals were becoming harder to ignore. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the publication of Raul Hilberg’s groundbreaking The Destruction of the Jews and other new histories, and a generational shift in the 1960s and seventies were all increasing the pressure. By the mid 1980s, when Aarons broadcast his explosive five-part series on ABC radio, Australia was starting to look like an outlier among Western nations that were already acting to bring war criminals to account. Hawke commissioned an official inquiry in 1986 under Andrew Menzies; the SIU was established following the release of its report, which found seventy suspects who warranted further investigation.

Of the three men eventually recommended to the director of public prosecutions, only Polyukhovich made it to trial. Heinrich Wagner suffered a heart attack during the committal hearing, and his case was dismissed on the grounds that, according to the trial judge, “the risk of Mr Wagner dying in the course of his trial is, in my opinion, too great.” A disappointed John Ralston, the lead investigator in Wagner’s case, believed the proper route would have been a temporary stay of proceedings to see whether Wagner could recover to stand trial. Mikolay Berezowsky’s case was dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence, another disappointment discussed in a chapter by Graham Blewitt.

Ivan Polyukhovich’s case is perhaps most revealing of why Australia appeared unable to provide just outcomes. A lot appeared to go wrong. For a start, only two of the original thirteen charges were allowed to proceed. The judge severely limited the evidence that could be shown to the jury and, worse, restricted the matters on which the historical experts could opine. The Ukrainian witnesses, who had travelled to Adelaide to participate in the trial, were bewildered by the process, contradicting their own statements in court and confused by the cross-examination. But perhaps most damaging to the prosecution was the summing up by Justice Cox, who all but prejudiced jury members against a guilty verdict, openly telling them it would be dangerous to convict after all these years.

Blewitt is perhaps the bluntest in his account of the judge’s conduct. “I thought we didn’t get a fair deal at the trial,” he has stated. In prosecutor Grant Niemann’s words, Cox “summed up to the jury for an acquittal, and that is what they did.” In the space of an hour, the jury found Polyukhovich not guilty on both counts. He was free to go.

Niemann and other contributors to Nazis in Australia believe the problem was larger than Cox. A jury trial, Niemann writes, was an unsuitable vehicle for a Nazi war crimes trial. “No matter how egregious Hitler’s ‘final solution’ was, it might be difficult for an Adelaide jury to relate to something that happened in German-occupied Ukraine nearly fifty years earlier,” he argues, “during the course of a war only remotely connected to them, and in a theatre of war in which Australia played no part.” Instead, the jury saw a sick, old man.

As Jürgen Matthäus, an expert historian, writes, “the media-driven image of agile Nazi perpetrators in black uniforms and animated by murderous fervour clashed with the portrayal of alleged war criminals as elderly, polite and inconspicuous neighbours whose normal postwar life made their association with Hitler’s mass murderers seem dubious.”

Indeed, it was these attitudes that drove the hostility of the media towards the trial — then, and since. Twenty years after the SIU was shut down, I investigated the case of Károly Zentai, an Australian man wanted for extradition for war crimes in his country of origin, Hungary. I found that the general attitude of the Australian media and the public was of sympathy for Zentai, portrayed as frail and elderly, who had led a largely blameless life in Australia and was being pursued for something that may or may not have happened a long time ago. As I wrote in Inside Story, the links that were forged in the postwar era between Australia and Eastern Europe via its mass migration schemes were also bonds of complicity in the project of forgetting and denial that has governed the politics of justice.

An investigation of a Latvian man called Karl Ozols was almost complete when Paul Keating decided to end the work of the SIU in 1992. Ozols was perhaps the most serious war criminal investigated by the SIU, and his was the case that might have come closest to a guilty verdict. He was a commander of a particularly murderous Latvian SS unit believed responsible for around 30,000 deaths. Another alleged war criminal, Argods Fricsons, head of Riga’s Kurzeme District Latvian Political Police, was accused of directly participating in the murder of 40,000 people in Liepāja. Both men were allowed to live out their lives without seeing the inside of a courtroom. Ozols died at eighty-eight in 2001, Fricsons at seventy-five in 1990.

There is a sense that this book has been a long time coming — that the time has come to break the silence about what the SIU experienced at the hands of a hostile media and judiciary, and about the short-sighted politics that led to the unit’s closure. Although careful in their accounts, the participants’ disappointment is palpable. Yet all remain convinced that it was the right thing to do. The work was clearly life-changing for all involved, deeply affecting both professionally and personally. Some went on to  work for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Blewitt became its deputy prosecutor.

Australia has still not developed the legal framework or the investigatory resources needed to find and prosecute people who have committed war crimes in any conflict overseas. In a report for the Lowy Institute, former diplomat Fergus Hansen noted that this country “has inadvertently become a safe haven for war criminals.” This is certainly the impression Australia has been giving the world, and presumably its war criminals, for quite some time. •

Nazis in Australia: The Special Investigations Unit, 1987–1994
Complied by Graham Blewitt, edited by Mark Aarons | Black Inc. | $39.99 | 320 pages

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“Comfort women” is a euphemism for women who were prostituted by the Japanese army during the war. Across Asia, hundreds of thousands of them were taken from their homes or workplaces and press-ganged into service in “comfort stations” attached to Japanese garrisons or military supply stations. Dutch-Australian Jan Ruff-O’Herne was among the victims and in later life was prominent among activists pressing the Japanese government to accept legal responsibility for the system.

The plaits on this statue differentiate it from its Korean counterpart, which has bobbed hair. There are two Korean comfort women statues in Australia, one in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, the other in the grounds of the Korean Society of Victoria building in Oakleigh. Worldwide, more than seventy such statues provide evidence of an unresolved trauma in Korean history and — despite some significant bilateral agreements — an enduring problem in Korean–Japanese relations. The first of them was erected in Seoul, opposite the Japanese embassy.

A girl with plaits or a bob offers a very different image from a soldier with a gun. She doesn’t say “Look what we can do to you” but rather “Look what you did to us.” For Australians, it is as if a statue depicting the skeletal figure of a survivor of a Japanese POW camp were to be erected somewhere — perhaps in front of the Japanese Embassy in Canberra. But Korean- and Chinese-Australians are of course Australians themselves. The comfort woman statues are a reminder that new generations of migrants bring to this country different legacies of war.

This is especially true of migrants from the People’s Republic of China. Unknown but certainly large numbers of Chinese women were pressed into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. The survivors carried a significant legacy of trauma into the postwar years, their health and often their lives altogether ruined. Yet after the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, memories of the war years came close to being obliterated by the sound and fury of mass campaigns targeting domestic “enemies of the revolution.” “Remembering the bitter past” was a collective activity focused on Chinese landlords or capitalists. It was only in the 1980s that this sort of memory work began to be reoriented towards Japan.

Once given their heads, historians in China had plenty of material to work with. The Anti-Japanese War was much longer than the Pacific War and entailed Japan’s occupation of a vast swathe of Chinese territory. The Nanjing massacre of 1937 was the largest single atrocity committed by Japanese forces anywhere. Oral histories, the creation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, the publication in translation of The Rape of Nanjing by Chinese-American Iris Chang, movies, television series, and now an annual day of mourning — all these have together generated a collective memory of wartime atrocities that feeds into anti-Japanese nationalism in China.

Like the war itself, the comfort women system was deemed a proper subject for historical research in China only decades after the communist takeover in 1949. Ironically, it was exposure to Japanese research on the topic, along with direct action by South Korean victims, that inspired China’s leading historian of the comfort women system, Su Zhiliang. China now has two museums dedicated to the comfort women, one in Nanjing and one at Su Zhiliang’s home institution, Shanghai Normal University.

In South Korea, democratisation meant space for freewheeling social movements, including feminist movements, capable of pursuing human rights issues independently of positions taken by the government. China has no such space. Entry to the museums is restricted, and in recent years the Chinese government has withdrawn support from an international movement to have the Voices of Comfort Women placed on the UNESCO “Memory of the World Register.”

Outside China, this is a free-floating issue that can easily find fertile soil in diasporic communities. But it has been taken up by other interest groups, too. In Berlin, the installation of a Korean comfort woman statue was supported by a coalition of civic groups of mixed ethnic and national origins with shared interests in crimes of sexual violence, particularly but not only in the context of war. As Japanese demands for the statue’s removal show, however, commemorations invariably have a geopolitical context. The transnational, universalist meanings attached to the peace statues do not exclude their particular, nationalist meanings.

Why such a statue in Melbourne? And why now? The formation of the Chinese-Australians for Peace Association, apparently for the purpose of sponsoring the “peace statue” (heping tongxiang), implies the existence or threat of war, possibly the remembered war that ended in 1945 but also, again possibly, the war that may yet happen if China decides to take Taiwan. The threat is not imminent, but since Russia’s assault on Ukraine it has become a constant in Australian discussions about security in the Pacific.

The founder of the Peace Association is Jimmy Li (Li Jianmin). Li is a good citizen: president of the Chinese Community Council of Australia (Victorian chapter) and a member of the Monash Multicultural Advisory Committee. He supported recognition of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. He promotes Chinese ethnic engagement in local society and politics. His organisation is not like the Australian Council for the Peaceful Reunification, which has been listed by the Australian government as a body exercising foreign influence. It looks more like a community expression of hope that history will not repeat itself and that a war in Europe will not again have a parallel in Asia.

Yet, corresponding as it does with this week’s huge military parade in Beijing marking the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war, the unveiling of the Oakleigh statue can also read as aligning Chinese-Australian interests with China’s. Koreans in Victoria understand the optics. Their representative society, the Korean Society of Victoria, has given permission for the use of their premises for the ceremony on Saturday so that the Chinese and the Korean statues can sit side by side for the day. But they have refused permission for the Chinese statue to be installed there permanently. In this, says KSV president Chang Suk Lee, they are “influenced in part by the prevailing political landscape.”

To the extent that he means the geopolitical landscape, this statement reflects awareness of the difficult relations between South Korea and China in recent years and also of the realities of a regional order in which South Korea is aligned not only with Australia but also with Japan. In anti-Japanese sentiment, South Korea has long outranked China, but in his Liberation Day speech this year South Korean president Lee Jae Myung made reference to Japan as “our neighbour” and our “partner in our economic development.”

Is it possible to disentangle awareness of this difficult history from nationalist sentiments? Searching for a space separate from the spheres controlled by the state in China, ANU researcher Yujie Zhu has emphasised the relative independence of the research and historical memory work undertaken by Su Zhiliang. But the fact that Su’s research wasn’t conducted at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t rule out nationalist readings.

Among Su’s findings are that Chinese victims of the comfort women system numbered no less than 200,000, accounting for half of all comfort women across Asia. These huge numbers, varying greatly from all other scholarly estimates, are characteristic of patriotic history in China. Comparably, in a statement redacted in the English-language version of the ABC report, Chinese-American documentary film-maker Leo Shi Young states: “Comfort women were not just Koreans; there were even more Chinese.

Unsurprisingly, comments by local visitors to the comfort women museum in Shanghai show that the exhibits reinforce the Chinese nationalist narrative and anti-Japanese feeling. There is a risk that the Chinese Australian for Peace Association’s statue will stir up tensions within Australian communities with links to the region.

There is one other noteworthy thing about Chinese comfort women: the consistency with which men figure in reports about documentation, exhibitions and commemorations.

This is not the case elsewhere. In South Korea, the first name to come to mind (apart from any of the many victim activists) is probably Yun Chung-ok, an English literature professor at Ewha Women’s University, who in 1990 did much to educate the public about the comfort women system through a series of newspaper articles on the subject. In Japan, it is Yayori Matsui, daughter of a Christian pacifist, inspiration for the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo, and an early adviser to Yun Chung-ok.

In China, however, the obvious name is that of male historian Su Zhiliang. Close on his heels is the filmmaker redacted from the ABC report, Leo Shi Young, who is in the forefront of efforts to create Chinese statues to accompany Korean ones. In Australia, Jimmy Li is following in Young’s footsteps.

A movement for recognition of war crimes perpetrated against women, driven by women, necessarily changes character when it’s led by men. With the best will in the world, male activists cannot avoid lending a different aura to the movement. After Fadime Şahindal, a Swedish national of Kurdish origin, died at the hands of her father in a so-called “honour killing” in 2002, she was carried to her grave by women. As Swedish MP Nalin Pekgul, herself of Kurih origin, remarked, “The most important thing was that it was not her male relatives who laid her to rest.”

Pekgul’s point was that the male relatives unavoidably personified the system that resulted in Şahindal’s death. It would overstate the case to claim that the men who have taken the lead in propagating knowledge of China’s comfort women in themselves embody the state-based system of national rivalry that underpins war and war crimes. Nonetheless, once it was felt necessary — by Young — to create a Chinese statue as well as a Korean one, the Korean statue lost something of its universal symbolism as a monument to the sufferings of women through rape in war. Once Young emphatically stated that there were more Chinese victims than Korean, the comfort women issue seemed in danger of being hijacked by competitive narratives of victimhood. It might now be difficult for the Chinese Australians for Peace Association to avoid their no doubt heartfelt gesture of commemoration becoming hostage to these narratives.

The tensions over the installation of peace statues are sometimes represented as a case of right-wing Japanese nationalists versus transnational feminist and human rights activists. But Japan has a strong tradition of activism around the comfort women system, which had its Japanese victims too. The Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo is a fine example of commemorative activity, asking visitors to reflect on the past and on Japan’s responsibility for the system. It’s the sort of internal critique that is hardly possible in today’s China. •

The post Commemorating the peace or remembering the war? appeared first on Inside Story.

Many observers have interpreted Hamas’s immediate endorsement as a sign of weakness, if not desperation. In this reading, after nearly two years of unremitting Israeli bombardment and siege of Gaza, the assassination of Hamas’s top leaders, and devastating attacks on the group’s allies around the region, including Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas has few options left.

But Hamas’s rapid acceptance of the deal may be as much a strategic ploy as a symptom of duress. After nearly two years of war, Hamas’s political organization has suffered severe blows and its remit over war-torn Gaza is tenuous. Yet despite the growing devastation of Gaza, Hamas’s fighters have shown continued strength. Since the spring of 2025, they have stepped up offensive attacks on Israeli forces across the strip, including a large-scale assault on an Israeli base on 20 August, and other operations in June and July in which multiple Israeli soldiers were killed.

At the same time, Hamas has increased coordination with other armed groups in Gaza and replenished its ranks, even amid the widespread starvation of the population. Behind its resilience is an evolution in its approach to the war that has further raised the stakes and that could make Israel’s controversial new campaign to seize Gaza City a military, as well as humanitarian, disaster.

To understand Hamas’s survival strategy, it is crucial to trace the way its aims have evolved. When it launched its 7 October attacks, Hamas’s Gaza leadership assumed that the operation would quickly draw in allies across the region, and cause Palestinians and even the Arab public to collectively rise up. In essence, it expected a replay of May 2021, when Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem provoked an unprecedented collective response: Palestinians rose up across the West Bank and in Israeli cities, Hezbollah and other allied groups fired rockets from Lebanon and Syria, and Hamas itself launched an intense barrage of rockets from Gaza. October 7 was intended to replicate this joining of the fronts but on a much larger scale.

After nearly 700 days of war, those aims have dramatically failed. Following Hamas’s unilateral attack from Gaza, Palestinians in Israel did not mobilise, while those in the West Bank found themselves surrounded by an intense Israeli crackdown. Most of Hamas’s regional allies remained on the sidelines. Despite its formidable arsenal in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah sought to contain rather than expand the conflict; then, in September 2024, it succumbed to Israel’s pager operation and decapitation of its leadership. In December, the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime closed off crucial military supply routes.

The collapse of these external fronts was compounded by the difficulties Hamas faced in Gaza. After breaking the ceasefire in March 2025, Israel initially focused on aerial bombardments, keeping ground incursions strictly limited. The lack of fighting in urban centres prevented Hamas from taking the initiative, often leaving it a passive bystander to the massacres of Palestinians. Meanwhile, Israeli forces reoccupied large parts of the strip. Combined with the Israeli cut-off of all aid in March, the new offensive greatly increased the ordeal in Gaza and Gazans began to publicly protest against Hamas.

Hamas’s forces in Gaza began to change their approach. On 20 April a small group of fighters staged an ambush from a tunnel in Beit Hanoun, an Israeli-held “buffer zone.” Using rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs, they overturned an Israeli military vehicle, killed an Israel soldier, and left several others wounded. Since then, groups of fighters have been ramping up similar actions across Gaza. On 24 June, fighters from the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, killed seven Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis. On 7 July, again in Beit Hanoun, a group of fighters assaulted a convoy of tanks just a few metres from the border, killing five soldiers and wounding fourteen others. On 15 July, in the northern enclave of Jabaliya, three more soldiers were killed in an ambush targeting an Israeli engineering team that had been sent to clear roads for Israeli forces. On 22 July, in Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the strip, a Hamas operation targeted an Israeli military convoy and a Merkava tank.

In recent weeks, these pressure attacks have become bolder. By mid-August, when the Israeli army resumed its incursions in into residential areas, Hamas’s offensive operations were multiplying in eastern Gaza City, especially in the neighbourhoods of Tuffah, Zaytoun and Shujaiyya. The al-Qassam Brigades have also been active in the south, as the unusual 20 August attack on an Israeli military encampment in Khan Younis attests: no fewer than eighteen fighters attacked the base with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at close range. Such a large-scale operation, which Israeli officials concluded may have been an attempt to capture new soldiers, would have required significant preparation, coordination, and intelligence.

In fact, these operations are part of a tactical reassessment by Hamas, which has sought to turn Israel’s expanded war aims to its own advantage. Despite Israel’s overwhelmingly stronger military resources, Hamas has drawn on the potential of asymmetrical warfare and the singular determination of its fighters. When Israeli soldiers began to limit ground incursions in urban areas, Hamas fighters began to seek out and target them in the “buffer zones.” As Israeli officials have acknowledged, Hamas was able to adapt and rebuild its forces in areas that Israeli forces had previously “cleared.”

Now, as the Israeli government has set out to seize and control large parts of Gaza City, Israeli forces must contend with urban guerrilla warfare in a terrain that Hamas knows by heart. These tactics could prove especially effective in the labyrinthine ruins of Gaza City, where Hamas is believed to still have a significant network and where Israeli forces have until now mostly avoided major incursions.

Even as Hamas has been cut off from external support and come under growing pressure in Gaza, its fighters have shown surprising strength. Hamas’s ability to renew its manpower has long been a defining feature of the group, which has for years managed to maintain a very strong foothold in Palestinian society even after severe setbacks. The current war is no exception. The loss of a significant number of top leaders — including Yahya Sinwar, the overall leader of Hamas in Gaza and mastermind of the 7 October attacks, Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’s armed wing, and Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing — has had little visible effect on its capacity to fight.

The overall manpower of Hamas’s brigades remains unclear. In the summer of 2024, Israeli sources claimed that some 17,000 Hamas militants had been killed since October 2023, including “half of the leadership” of Hamas’s military. But as of May 2025, Israeli intelligence officials assessed that just 8900 named fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad had been killed, according to a classified database newly revealed by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian news organization +972 Magazine. US intelligence officials concluded in January that Hamas may have added as many as 15,000 additional fighters since the war began. Gazan officials and the United Nations do not distinguish between civilians and fighters in their total count of fatalities, but if the Israeli database is correct, it would mean that more than 80 per cent of the 53,000 believed to have been killed as of May 2025 were civilians.

Paradoxically, Israel’s relentless escalation may be fuelling Hamas’s resilience. To an extent, the growing desperation of Gaza’s civilians has fed public opposition to Hamas. After Israel’s total aid blockade began in March, Gazans began staging anti-Hamas protests in the northern part of the strip, calling for the immediate entry of aid and for Hamas to relinquish power. Hamas’s response fluctuated between allowing discontent and repressing the demonstrations. Although Hamas has always faced significant opposition to its rule in Gaza, public protests have previously been rare. Their appearance in March appears to be a direct response to the extremity of the situation in Gaza amid the Israeli cut-off of aid.

Opposition to Hamas has also been encouraged by Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and has tried to exploit Gazan anger and position itself to govern postwar Gaza. Meanwhile, Israel has advanced its own strategy to fragment the social fabric, including by backing and arming an anti-Hamas militia in Rafah controlled by Yasser Abu Shabab, a strongman and drug trafficker who escaped from a Hamas prison in October 2023 and who also has ties to Fatah. According to UN officials and international aid workers, the Abu Shabab militia has been looting aid convoys.

The strategy appears to be aimed at making Gazans believe that Hamas is stealing their food — as Israeli officials have long claimed, without furnishing evidence — and to sow chaos. For Israel, it also may be a way to impose the idea that it can place its own men in a position of control and power in the enclave, in preparation for the “day after” in Gaza. After Israel’s arming of the militia was revealed in early June, Netanyahu publicly defended the practice. (“What’s wrong with this? It saves IDF soldiers’ lives,” he said.)

Yet this divide-and-conquer approach, combined with the relentless attacks on civilians, has also entrenched resistance among ordinary Gazans, who now perceive Israel as undertaking a war of extermination. In southern Gaza, the Abu Shabab militia is widely reviled, and Abu Shabab’s own family has disassociated itself from him and called for his death. Meanwhile, there are indications, including on social media, that growing numbers of young Palestinians with no prior training have been joining the al-Qassam Brigades and carrying out guerrilla actions. Although the intensive bombardments and the territorial division of almost the entire Gaza Strip has weakened the coordination between the groups of fighters, who are acting increasingly autonomously, it has not buried their capacity for action.

Another crucial factor in Hamas’s staying power is its tunnel network. Even now, after months of intense bombardment and the use of advanced technologies, Israeli forces have been unable to destroy significant parts of this underground city, allowing Hamas to continue to hide the remaining hostages and prisoners, protect its fighters, and provide bases for watching and attacking Israeli forces.

Israel’s inability to control the depths of the earth highlights the asymmetrical nature of the conflict, which increasingly pits sophisticated and highly expensive weapons systems, many of them acquired from Western countries, against ersatz, locally made rockets, explosives, and tunnels.

The recent Hamas ambushes have also raised growing concerns among Israeli military officials that more soldiers could be captured. In July, the army implemented the so-called Hannibal directive, which requires the military to use all means necessary to prevent soldiers from being taken by the enemy, even if such use of force leads to soldiers’ death. Indeed, out of the 205 hostages and prisoners that have been released since the war began, only eight have been freed as a result of Israeli–American rescue operations — and these six were in buildings above ground and not in underground tunnels. On 8 June, an Israeli military operation to rescue four hostages from a building in the Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza led to the massacre of 274 civilians, among them sixty children.

Israel’s inability to destroy Hamas’s tunnels has led increasingly to efforts to obliterate everything above ground in Gaza. As early as October 2023, Israel began targeting displacement camps, schools and hospitals with the aim of turning the population against Hamas and forcing surrender. Although that objective failed, the Israeli government has doubled down on this strategy since resuming the war in March, enforcing a total cut-off of aid for eleven weeks, and then, starting in late May, taking effective control of aid delivery through the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has led to hundreds of Gazans being killed by Israeli forces at humanitarian distribution points, one of which an IDF soldier described to Israeli newspaper Haaretz in June as a “killing field.”

Hamas has long emphasised the sacrificial dimension of its liberation project, which has helped it push Gaza back to the centre of the Palestinian cause. Unlike their counterparts in other Palestinian regions, Gazans are primarily attached to their land not because of their historical presence there but because of its status as a place of refuge. Almost all Gazans are descendants of refugees from 1948, when some 250,000 Palestinians were expelled to Gaza from their towns and villages during Israel’s founding, and they have passed down stories of past massacres and dispossessions. Hamas sees the current war as part of that tradition.

In light of the extraordinary privations and mass killing of Gaza’s civilian population in the current war, Hamas’s external leader, Khaled Meshaal, has likened Gaza to Algeria, where independence was achieved only after the death of more than a million civilians.

Although Hamas’s leaders counted on regional allies joining with them in the war after 7 October, from the outset they viewed Hamas’s Gaza organisation as autonomous. It did not share the specific planning and details of the 7 October attacks with other members of the axis and it was the sole instigator. In compensation, Hamas’s brigades have relied on — and increased — ties to other militant groups within Gaza, some of which were already established before 7 October.

Particularly important has been Hamas’s longstanding entente with Islamic Jihad. In 2022, Israel sought to divide the two groups by launching a heavy campaign exclusively against Islamic Jihad. At the time, the strategy appeared to work, with Hamas lying low and many Israeli officials concluding that it was weak. In retrospect, Hamas’s decision to stay out of the 2022 confrontation appears to have been a division of labour agreed upon with Islamic Jihad — one that allowed Hamas more freedom to prepare for the 7 October attacks.

Since the war began, Hamas has remained closely allied with Islamic Jihad, which as of this summer continued to hold one of the remaining Israeli captives, Rom Braslavski. Coordination between the groups’ armed wings has also grown, including in a number of recent joint attacks in Khan Yunis. These attacks have in part been orchestrated by the joint operations room, an organization created by Hamas and Islamic Jihad back in 2006, but which officially emerged years later, during the 2018 Great March of Return, a series of popular protests by Gazans on the Gazan–Israeli border. Today, the joint operations room brings together twelve Palestinian armed factions — including, alongside Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Saraya al-Quds, al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Mujahideen Brigades, and Omar al-Qasim Brigades — and has become the place where many decisions about the war and negotiations are made.

In recent weeks, there are signs that this broader front may be crumbling. Members of the joint operations room have called on Hamas to end the war. During a meeting with the head of Egyptian intelligence, some of these factions also criticised Hamas’s procrastination on reaching a ceasefire — which may account for Hamas’s immediate approval of the 18 August proposal without amendments. Still, these cracks in the coalition have not caused a shift in the brigades’ determination to fight. There is actually a consensus among the factions that surrender or capitulation is unthinkable.

As the core members of the Qassam Brigades see it, only continued attacks on Israeli troops will force Netanyahu to agree to another ceasefire and end the siege. In their view, it was military pressure by Hamas — including significant setbacks for Israel in Rafah and in Jabaliyya in November and December of 2024, as well as knife attacks in both Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun that caused the deaths of several soldiers in January 2025 — that finally led Netanyahu to sign the US-backed ceasefire in mid-January. By continuing to launch major operations, the Qassam Brigades hope to increase the pressure on Netanyahu, including from his own military. One such case was the 7 July killing of the five Israeli soldiers in Beit Hanoun, which caused some Israeli military and political figures, both on the right and in the opposition, to press the government to allow soldiers to return to their camps and to accelerate efforts to reach a ceasefire.

After nearly two years of war, the strengths and weaknesses of Hamas are almost the inverse of Israel’s. Where Israel has extraordinary military resources but has struggled to find the tens of thousands of additional troops it needs for its massive Gaza City invasion, Hamas, despite huge losses of forces, continues to recruit new fighters. Meanwhile, as Hamas expands operations, Israel is also losing more soldiers on the ground. It also faces increasing difficulty in getting reservists to show up for duty.

The 18 August ceasefire proposal is not new. Based on a previous proposal put forward by US president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, it calls for the total withdrawal of Israeli troops, and, like the January ceasefire, allows Israel to resume its war against Gaza at the end of the sixty-day period. Hamas had accepted earlier versions of this proposal even before its response to the new one on 18 August. Netanyahu has approached the ceasefire proposals not as negotiations, but as a way to achieve what Israel has been unable to through force. In late August, he and other Israeli government officials called instead for an all-or-nothing deal that negotiators have said is unreachable.

Netanyahu is now trying to push Israeli forces into the tunnels of Gaza City, despite strong opposition from the Israeli military. The army has said a takeover could take more than a year to complete and would be highly dangerous, and that it prefers to use every possibility to negotiate before undertaking such an assault. In 2024, Netanyahu and the military establishment sought to vanquish Hamas’s regional allies, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon. But now, with the military’s continued failure to achieve its stated objectives against Hamas itself, it has stepped up attacks in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. By promoting its actions on these other fronts, including against Iran in June, the government can downplay the actual situation in Gaza. Increasingly, an enormous gap has emerged between the image of the conflict the Israeli government is trying to convey and the reality on the ground. •

This article first appeared in Foreign Affairs. © 2025 Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency

The post The new Hamas insurgency appeared first on Inside Story.

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin shared the prize in 1978 for agreeing a treaty, urged on by US president Jimmy Carter. This treaty lasted, although Sadat was assassinated for his troubles in 1981. But to get Begin to agree Sadat had to set the Palestinian issue aside.

Sorting out the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip then became the main challenge. There was an apparent breakthrough in the early 1990s, based on the Oslo peace accords, leading in 1994 to another peace prize. It was shared by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin for agreeing a road map to a two-state solution in 1994.

The next year Rabin was assassinated, and the prospects never looked quite so bright again, although Bill Clinton put a substantial effort into coming up with a comprehensive solution at the dog end of his presidency in 2000. Attempts to find a way for Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist that have ended in failure, disappointment and disillusion. Many ceasefires have been agreed but their number only reflects the regular resort to violence.

Meanwhile, the effort to forge relations between Israel and the Arab states that for decades have refused to acknowledge its existence has been more successful. Trump believed that his success in getting a number to sign up to peace treaties with Israel in 2020 — the Abraham Accords — was another good reason for him to get the Peace Prize. Saudi Arabia is the most important country yet to sign up, and that is conditional on progress on the Palestinian issue.

Another reason why it could seem timely to address this issue is that over the past twelve months, Israel has also seen its most deadly enemies of recent years — Iran and Hezbollah — knocked back and an old enemy — Syria — under new management. Its security environment in principle is more benign than ever before.

This assessment could even be extended to Gaza, where Hamas as a military force is a shadow of its former self. If Netanyahu had chosen to cash in his winnings he could have offered Israel a more hopeful, and more peaceful, future. But he has spent his political career doing his best to thwart such a deal, and he is now in coalition with extremists whose “solution” to this problem would be to see Palestinians expelled from all the occupied territories to make room for more settlers.

The result of the path he has chosen has been to create conditions that make it easier for Hamas to survive and are steadily turning Israel into an international pariah. The idea of a separate Palestinian state is now being embraced by countries, including Britain, that until recently accepted it only as a pleasant but unrealistic idea.

I wrote last year explaining my scepticism about a two-state solution — not because this would be an undesirable outcome but because there was no plausible way to get there. I saw the most important and immediate task as addressing the dire conditions in Gaza, establishing effective governance in the Strip, and making progress on reconstruction. Since I wrote that, however, the situation inside Gaza has deteriorated further, and recognition of a Palestinian state, as a political project if not yet a functioning entity, is now firmly on the international agenda, presented as the only route to a lasting peace.

There are still grounds for scepticism. This is not going to lead to a Palestinian state any time soon, yet the immediate needs of Gaza require urgent attention. But the idea of a Palestinian state, which was accepted by past Israeli governments, has now become a way of warning the current government about the extent of its international isolation.

This is a symptom of a fundamental crisis in Israeli strategy. Netanyahu’s government has set itself objectives it cannot reach while ruling out any political role for Palestinian representatives. But without negotiations it lacks a means of stabilising the situation, let alone getting its hostages back. So long as it has American support the government may take the view that it can resist any pressure to change course. It is unclear whether Trump will back the Israelis in its current strategy for much longer. But what should be of even more concern for Israel is what support it will get following Trump.

At the start of 2025 there were grounds for optimism that the war would soon end. A deal was reached just before Trump’s inauguration, and Israel and Hamas began to swap hostages for prisoners. This process lasted for two months. For each of the thirty-three hostages returned from captivity some fifty Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons. Humanitarian aid was allowed to enter Gaza to enable displaced Palestinians to return to their homes. There were supposed to be talks leading to a permanent ceasefire, which in turn was supposed to set the conditions for a second stage in which all the remaining living hostages, military as well as civilian, would be exchanged for yet more prisoners. The third stage would see the remains of the deceased hostages released.

But allegations of non-compliance went back and forth from the start. In mid-February Hamas briefly suspended the release of hostages because of continued Israeli military action and a lack of sufficient aid. The process resumed but with constant accusations of bad faith.

On 1 March, when the first phase was due to end, Israel proposed that it should simply be extended, but Hamas rejected this because it wanted to move to the second stage which would see the war come to a complete end. Netanyahu wanted to retain the option of resuming military operations. When Hamas refused to accept his proposal, Israel blocked the entry of aid to Gaza and also the supply of electricity. On 18 March, it resumed airstrikes on Gaza.

In May, Israel began another military offensive, this one named Gideon’s Chariots. The plan pointed towards occupying all of Gaza, with the declared twin aim of defeating Hamas and releasing the hostages. A push would concentrate the population in the south and then deny Hamas leverage over the population by controlling the supplies of humanitarian aid. Two months on, this offensive is being wound down. Hamas has not been defeated, the hostages have not been released, the population is more or less where it was before, and the distribution of food and other assistance has been a complete and catastrophic shambles leading to famine conditions in Gaza.

The backlash against Israeli policies has left it isolated internationally. It is running out of options. The hardliners want to continue to occupy all of Gaza, even if this means sacrificing the hostages, and the government has decided to proceed along this path with yet another offensive, making the same claim as before that this will produce total victory.

One reason why Hamas is feeling stronger is because of the anger that has been directed at Israel as the Palestinian population suffers. The problem Israel sought to solve (and how much of a problem it actually was has been questioned) was Hamas’s ability to steal from international agencies as food was being delivered, and then to use this to gain influence over Gaza’s population. Israel’s alternative approach limited the amount of aid going into Gaza and changed the method of distribution. This involved an organisation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, apparently designed for the situation but evidently not fit for purpose. The idea was to distribute aid directly to Palestinians at four sites — three in south Gaza (to where Israel wanted people to relocate) and one more centrally, instead of moving the aid to where it was needed.

The scheme has been described, including in the Israeli press, as a colossal failure, with desperate scenes as Palestinians scramble for whatever sustenance they can find, malnourished children, shootings close to the distribution sites, and still no practical means of checking whether Hamas operatives were taking advantage.

Israel blames Hamas for the famine conditions, moans about fake videos and wilful exaggerations, but it is complaining largely to itself. As the occupying power it is responsible and it adopted what was widely recognised to be a scheme that was ineffective and harmful. Statements by Israeli ministers suggested a coercive element as well as incompetence. National security minister Itmar Ben-Gvir declared, “The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is to completely stop the ‘humanitarian’ aid, conquer the entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration.”

The Israeli government has belatedly appreciated the political damage caused by images of a starving population. The aid is moving again, and the UN is once again involved, although the levels are still too small. Tellingly, the Economist observed that:

Mr Netanyahu promised in a statement in English that Israel “will continue to work with international agencies” and “ensure that large amounts of humanitarian aid flows into the Gaza Strip.” In Hebrew he was much less emollient, promising his base that “in Gaza we are continuing to fight” and that “we will achieve our aim of destroying Hamas.” The aid entering Gaza, he said, would be “minimal.”

The humanitarian crisis, along with moves, led by militant settlers, to take more territory from Palestinians in the West Bank, and talk of annexations, put European governments under enormous domestic political pressure to denounce Israel’s actions and urge it to reverse course. This is what led to the push for a Palestinian state, starting with French president Macron with others, including the British government, following behind.

Israel complains that international moves to recognise a Palestinian state reward Hamas. That was not, in fact, one of Hamas’s objectives when it rampaged into southern Israel on 7 October 2023. It then had a variety of possible motives: inflicting pain on Israelis as an act of “resistance”; responding to settler activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem; demonstrating that it was putting up more of a fight than the hapless Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah; obstructing the proposed “normalisation” of Israeli–Saudi relations; and, high up on the list, taking as many hostages as possible to swap for Palestinian militants stuck in Israeli jails. There was no demand to adopt a “two-state” solution because that was not its policy.

It has on occasion said that it would not oppose a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza but its own demand is for all of Israel and not just the occupied bits. That is what the chant of “from the river to the sea” is all about. For Netanyahu, this lack of interest in a separate Palestinian state was one of Hamas’s most attractive features. It was why he was content to leave it in charge in Gaza, assuming that there was little harm it could do other than send an occasional barrage of missiles into Israel. It kept the Palestinians divided and rendered negotiations impractical.

In the aftermath of the attacks, which disqualified Hamas from running Gaza in the future, Netanyahu went out of his way to avoid addressing the question of who would replace it. Any serious non-Hamas, non-Israeli arrangement is bound to involve Palestinians and would be unpopular among the hardline elements of his own coalition. These elements still hanker to expel the Palestinians altogether, or squeeze them into a small enclave, to enable them to resettle the abandoned land.

The Israeli government is now discussing yet another new offensive, this time one that would have the IDF push into the remaining 25 per cent of the territory to seek out and destroy the remaining pockets of Hamas’s strength. This would be done without regard for the hostages, the humanitarian situation, and the even stronger international objections that would result.

The UN is already warning about “catastrophic consequences.” Of more concern to the government are the well-publicised objections of IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir that not only will an attempt at full occupation endanger the remaining hostages, as fighting moves close to where they are held, but it will also stretch further the IDF, already exhausted after almost two years of fighting. The alternative military option is not exactly promising. Encircling Hamas-held areas without entering them in force would likely lead to an attritional guerrilla war. The prospect either way is of a forever war without any obvious conclusion.

Because Netanyahu has no credible policy of his own for the long-term it is not surprising that the gap is being filled by the only political option that commands widespread international support. Recognising a Palestinian state can be dismissed as little more than a gesture as there is little there to be recognised. For now it is best seen as a protest against a reckless and self-defeating Israeli policy. If nothing else it tells the Israelis how much they have lost the “narrative battle” in Europe, having already lost it in much of the southern hemisphere a long time ago. Already, 147 states are signed up to recognition.

The difference Britain and France make is that they are both permanent members of the Security Council. If they supported a resolution backing a Palestinian state then it would leave the United States exercising its veto. This Trump would probably do. Unlike Biden, who supported the two-state policy, he does not. Nor is he influenced by the same considerations as Europeans, such as appeals to international law and human rights. When Canada joined proposals to recognise a Palestinian state he claimed this as justification to raise tariffs.

His view of the Middle East is, however, different from that of Netanyahu. He has not bothered to align other policies with Israel — on the Houthis or the ending of the war with Iran, and he has taken different stances on Turkey and Syria. He puts a high priority on his relations with the Gulf monarchies. And most of all he dislikes wars that go on forever and cannot be concluded quickly. He may not want to break with Israel over Gaza but he does not appear to be impressed and has expressed concern about the humanitarian situation.

If he really wants to take an initiative he has been handed an opportunity by Arab countries. At a UN conference on a two-state solution, which the United States did not attend, the twenty-two members of the Arab League unanimously supported a declaration, signed also by Britain and members of the European Union, that called for Hamas to lay down its weapons, release all hostages and end its rule of the Gaza Strip, as essential pre-conditions for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“In the context of ending the war in Gaza,” it read, “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objectives of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.”

As important, the declaration also called for the deployment of “a temporary international stabilisation mission,” invited by the Palestinian Authority, and ‘under the aegis of the United Nations.”

Israel made its customary denunciation of calls for a Palestinian state as supporting Hamas, although Hamas was none too pleased by the document’s boost to the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank, let alone the demands that it disarm. The document’s call to normalise relations with Israel elicited from Hamas a mirror image of Israel’s complaints about calls for a Palestinian state: “Talk about integrating the Zionist entity into the region is a reward to the enemy for its crimes.”

US negotiator Steve Witkoff reportedly told hostage families that the United States is developing a new position involving an ultimatum to Hamas to release all the hostages at once, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, followed by complete disarmament in return for the end of Israel’s military operation. If it refused the Israeli campaign would continue. Hamas has long said it will not disarm (and even if it did it is not clear how this could be implemented and monitored) and has now added that it would only do so if a Palestinian state were established. (Its language could be taken to mean that it was still after all of Israel and not just the occupied territories.)

For Israel this just shows how Hamas is exploiting the Europeans naivete in recognising a Palestinian state. Hamas is undoubtedly being opportunistic, but it is Netanyahu that has given them the opportunity. His insistence on a total victory over Hamas mean that all Hamas needs to do to claim its own victory is to survive while using the distressed state of the population as a weapon against Israel. Without serious governance arrangements in Gaza the situation there will remain violent and anarchic, allowing Hamas to keep going. But any new arrangements will involve Arab and European states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, and will nod in the direction of a future Palestine state.

As before, except now in much more desperate circumstances, the rejectionist policies of Hamas and the Israeli government feed off one another, providing each with an excuse not to make concessions.

Within Israel opposition to the government’s policies is growing, especially among the diplomatic and security community, who can see no credible end game and worry about Israel’s increasing international isolation. The generation in the US and Europe that saw Israel as the underdog — a small, beleaguered state in a sea of hostility — has been replaced by one that sees it as cruel and heartless.

Whatever position Trump decides to adopt, support for Israel has been haemorrhaging on both the left and right of American politics, and that will influence the policies of his successor. A Pew poll in April found that about 53 per cent of US adults now express an unfavourable opinion of Israel, up from 42 per cent before the Hamas attack. Another Pew poll, conducted in June found that in twenty of twenty-four countries surveyed, half or more of adults had an unfavourable view of Israel. The figures are higher among younger people. One of the largest gaps in the United States is between young and old. There, alienation from Israel is also becoming apparent in the Jewish community.

Taking a long view, peace diplomacy, in all its forms, has by and large served Israel well. It can claim that it has demonstrated the benefits of peace through strength. By showing resilience and military prowess, it convinced past enemies that there was no point in preparing for a war none wished to fight. Now it has put itself in an even better position by coming out on top in its recent battles with Iran and its proxies. Yet it simply does not know what to do with Gaza.

Israel does not have a sure military route to free the hostages. They are the last serious bargaining card that Hamas has and they will not play it until Israeli military operations stop. Yet Israel does not need Hamas to make a push to ease the humanitarian distress in Gaza, and nor does it need Hamas to agree a plan for Gaza’s future governance and reconstruction. For that it will have willing partners in the Gulf and Europe. These measures will undercut Hamas more than yet another offensive, for they will weaken its political base and not just its military base.

It is important not to underestimate the challenge of developing new governance and security structures in a situation, full of trauma and suspicion, involving many external actors with their own agendas. Nor can we expect Netanyahu to embrace the challenge, not least because to do so would be to break his coalition. But continuing with the current policies requires Israel to accept responsibility for the progressive immiseration of the Palestinian people without it ever being sure that it has truly eliminated Hamas, while further straining relations not only with its old friends in the West but its new friends in the Arab world.

Trump’s most recent comments don’t offer a ringing endorsement of Israeli strategy. He wants the United States to take bigger role in handling the humanitarian aspects of the crisis. The Gazans, “are obviously not doing too well with the food,” he has noted, adding that “Israel is going to help us with that in terms of distribution and also money.” That is his focus. “As far as the rest of it, I really can’t say, that’s going to be pretty much up to Israel.”

Whether or not this will get him his Nobel Prize, if he is really concerned to preserve and extend the Abraham Accords as well as prevent the humanitarian situation getting even worse, then Israel’s next steps should concern him greatly. Israel is divided on its next steps. Netanyahu needs the extremists to keep him in power but they do not offer a tenable prospectus. A forever war means constant insecurity and increasing isolation. Many Israelis, including in the IDF and the intelligence agencies, know this and are pushing back. Trump would do well to join them. •

The post Israel’s forever war appeared first on Inside Story.

We now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been to catastrophe… In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.

The following month, some observers breathed a small sigh of relief as newly elected Donald Trump proclaimed that he wanted to restart nuclear arms control talks with Russia and China with a view to reducing nuclear arsenals worldwide. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons, we already have so many,” said Trump. “We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive.” He was planning to start negotiations, he explained, once “we straighten it all out” in the Middle East and Ukraine — a process which, he assured US voters, would be completed within weeks if not days of the start of his presidency.

Six months on, the violence in the Middle East and Ukraine had gone from grim to appalling, and the US had already committed $25 billion (out of an estimated total of $175 billion) towards Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defence system, which, as Harvard security expert Matthew Bunn warns, “is likely to provoke even larger arms buildups, derail already-dim prospects for any negotiated nuclear arms restraint, and perhaps even increase the chances of nuclear war.”

Meanwhile, the United States and Russia are engaging in a dangerous exchange of mutual nuclear threats, Russia and China are expanding their nuclear arsenals, and NATO’s secretary-general has called on member countries to turbo-charge their military spending and “shift to a wartime mindset.” Britain’s most recent National Security Strategy, released in June, offers graphic warnings of a possible impending military attack on the UK: a threat the British government plans to counter by “increasing the lethality of our armed forces” and remobilising the bulldog national spirit that saw the nation through the Blitz.

Political leaders, it seems, have been seized by the sort of collective insanity that led a previous generation to sleepwalk into the horrors of the first world war. Now, though, the horrors facing us are not tanks and trenches but some 12,500 nuclear warheads with enough power to wipe out human civilisation and devastate our natural environment.

DeCroes Jacobs’s 90 Seconds to Midnight should be required reading for any incumbent or aspiring political leader. It is not an analytical or theoretically sophisticated book, but rather a simple, straightforward account of the life of one woman: Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow, still alive today at ninety-three, who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the age of thirteen and has devoted most of her adult life to the cause of nuclear disarmament.

In August 1945, Setsuko Nakamura was an eighth-grade student at a Methodist mission school in Hiroshima but, like many other schoolchildren at that time, had been recruited to war work — performing routine decoding tasks in an army building not far from the centre of the city. The nuclear blast destroyed the building where she was working, trapping her under the rubble. With the encouragement of a stranger who kept calling to her from the speck of light that marked a gap in the ruins, she managed to crawl out, escaping the fire which then consumed everything that remained. Her sister, nephew and 351 of her schoolmates were among those killed by the bomb — some instantly, others agonisingly during the days and weeks that followed.

Setsuko’s indelible memories of the aftermath of the atomic explosion provide a chilling antidote to the nostalgic fantasy images of war evoked by documents like Britain’s National Security Strategy. Stunned by the blast, she wandered through streets filled with naked or semi-naked people, their clothes torn off by the force of the bomb.

Strips of skin and flesh hung like ribbons from their bones. Many held their arms up in front of their bodies, palms down to ease the pain from the raw flesh of their arms rubbing against their chests… Some held their eyeballs, blown from their sockets, in their hands. Every few steps, someone silently collapsed.

The fabric of society was in ruins. There were no emergency services and — until a few brave volunteers took up the task — no surviving systems of local government. There was no proper way to bury the dead. Some parents burnt their children’s bodies in the ruins of their gardens; others watched their relatives’ bodies being thrown into ditches for mass cremation. Others again had no bodies to bury: whole families and neighbourhoods had been vaporised by the blast. Even today, the total number of killed by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs is unknown and unknowable, though it was certainly in the hundreds of thousands.

That was the effect of a single 15 kiloton atomic bomb. The most powerful nuclear weapon today has an explosive yield more than three thousand times greater.

Setsuko Nakamura suffered radiation sickness as a result of her exposure to the bomb, but recovered and went on to study English literature at college in Japan and sociology at Lynchburg College in the United States. She married a Canadian teacher, James Thurlow, and settled with him in Toronto. As the couple’s children grew up, she became increasingly active in the international campaign against nuclear weapons. She played a central part in the Japanese Peace Boat movement, which uses educational cruises to link ordinary people worldwide in the cause of peace, and later became a key figure in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN.

90 Seconds to Midnight not only recounts Setsuko Thurlow’s life but it also traces campaigns by ICAN and other groups to ban the bomb. This is a story of untiring work by civil society organisations, intermittently backed by a few non-nuclear states, in the face of the unrelenting hypocrisy of the governments of the growing number of nuclear armed nations and many of their allies.

Although major powers like the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France have repeatedly paid lip service to the aspiration for a world without nuclear weapons, they have also repeatedly blocked steps towards nuclear disarmament and are doing their best to derail the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was created with substantial input from ICAN. Despite this, the treaty — which bans the development, testing, production and possession of nuclear weapons — was opened for signing in 2017 and entered into force in 2021. It has been comprehensively ignored by the world’s nuclear powers ever since.

In her many speeches to UN and other gatherings on nuclear weapons, Setsuko Thurlow has always emphasised that the humanitarian and environmental impact of nuclear weapons must be central to all debate about arms limitation and disarmament. Her raw testimony about her own experience provides a stark reminder of the extent to which “realist” strategic debates about the importance of deterrence are wilfully blind to the realities of nuclear war. Receiving the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of ICAN, alongside the organisation’s director Beatrice Fihn, she said:

When I was a thirteen-year-old girl, trapped in the smouldering rubble, I kept pushing. I kept moving towards the light. And I survived. Our light now is the Ban Treaty. To all in this hall and all listening around the world, I repeat those words that I heard in the ruins of Hiroshima: “Don’t give up. Keep pushing. Keep moving. See the light? Crawl towards it.”

Eighty years after the atomic bombings, as the nuclear clock clicks down towards zero, this appeal for perseverance and renewed anti-nuclear action has a profound resonance for every one of us. It is a call that cannot be ignored. •

90 Seconds to Midnight: A Hiroshima Survivor’s Nuclear Odyssey
By Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 325 pages

The post Eighty-nine seconds and counting… appeared first on Inside Story.

Indigenous Chamorro in the Marianas Islands have bitter family memories of the wartime fight between Japan and the United States to control their islands. The clash of imperial powers in the 1940s has echoes today in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI — of which Tinian is one of three principal islands — at a time of strategic competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

Tinian’s crucial role is often ignored in commemorations of the atomic bombings in 1945. Fighting their way across the Pacific, US marines defeated Japanese forces on the island in July 1944. They soon transformed the island into an airbase for striking targets in Japan, 2400 kilometres away. The refurbished North Field airstrip was the largest in the world at the time, with four 8500-foot runways and facilities to support more than 40,000 personnel.

The island served as the key base for the incendiary bombing of Japanese cities by the 313th Bombardment Wing, including the firebombing of Tokyo on 9 March 1945. An estimated 100,000 people died in that one attack, after more than 300 US aircraft bombed civilian housing. In Operation Starvation, the same force mined Japanese shipping lanes to reduce civilian access to already limited food supplies.

Months before atomic bombs were ready for use, the US high command proposed using airbases on Guam for a nuclear attack on Japanese cities. But an air force memo to the Manhattan Project in late February 1945 advised it now saw Tinian as “the most desirable island to base the 509th Composite Group.” In July, following the first successful detonation of an atomic device, known as the Trinity test, the US military prepared an arsenal of nuclear weapons to attack Japan. The initial target list included Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki.

In the early hours of 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, took off from Tinian for Hiroshima. At 8.15am, Captain Paul Tibbets ordered the release of an atomic bomb, codenamed “Little Boy,” over the Japanese city. The city of Kokura was scheduled for the next attack, but when bad weather intervened on 9 August the Bockscar flew instead from Tinian to Nagasaki, which was destroyed by the “Fat Man” bomb.

Most of the people killed in these two attacks were civilian non-combatants. By year’s end, an estimated 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. An estimated 38,000 of the dead were children.

A month after the attacks, General Leslie Groves, the head of America’s Manhattan project, misled Congress by declaring there was “no radioactive residue” in the two devastated cities. Contradicting evidence gathered in Japan by his own staff, Groves said that people exposed to radiation from the atomic blasts would not face “undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”

In reality, many nuclear survivors, known as hibakusha, lived on for decades, stricken by cancer, leukemia and other diseases caused by exposure to ionising radiation.

After the war, the United States administered these and surrounding islands in the northern Pacific as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the only strategic trusteeship created by the United Nations. Micronesia was still recovering from the wartime damage from US Marines fighting their way across scattered atolls and the US forces bombarding Japanese installations, with islanders trapped between the two imperial powers.

In 1946, soon after the Japanese surrender, the US military began to test nuclear weapons, with sixty-seven atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. Following Britain’s hydrogen bomb tests on Christmas (Kiritimati) Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, the United States conducted another twenty-four nuclear tests on the island in 1962, using the old British airstrip and military base.

Eighty years after planes from flew Tinian to bomb Japan, the United States still administers some of these Micronesian islands as a colonial power. In the south of the Marianas archipelago, the US Indo-Pacific Command controls more than a quarter of Guahan (Guam). The US territory hosts key American military bases, including Apra Harbour Naval Station, Andersen Air Force Base and Camp Blaz, a new US Marine Corps base. Further north in the archipelago are Tinian, Saipan and Rota, the three largest of thirteen islands in the CNMI, an unincorporated territory of the United States created in 1975.

These bases are central to US plans to contain China in the western Pacific. Because Guam is within range of North Korean and Chinese missiles, the Obama, Biden and Trump administrations have spent billions of dollars upgrading airfields and dispersing fuel and ammunition supplies to neighbouring Micronesian nations.

Washington’s ambitions in the region aren’t going unopposed. Among the groups challenging the dominant narrative of the Micronesian islands as “the tip of the spear” for the US military in the western Pacific is Our Commonwealth 670.

“Our group is linking what we see as increased militarisation in CNMI to the ongoing militarisation of Guam, the desecration of indigenous lands and denial of indigenous rights,” Saipan-born educator and activist Theresa “Isa” Arriola, a member of Our Commonwealth and a leading voice questioning the military build-up in the islands.

“We formed because we wanted to educate the community and bring awareness to the narratives that so often surround the islands — that we are strategic locations. There’s a kind of geographic determinism that follows that logic, which says ‘you must be used for war in this broader war machine.’ So we want to push back on that, and link militarisation with demilitarisation, indigenous sovereignty and indigenous rights.”

For Chamorro people, the growing militarisation of Tinian reopens mental and physical scars. “The presence of World War Two is still very much a part of our community’s collective consciousness,” says Arriola. “Our grandparents talk about their experiences with the war. We also see it in the physical landscape: there’s unexploded ordnance still left on Tinian from World War Two. When they’re refurbishing the runway or other military projects, they find that old ordnance.”

As a child, Arriola found scraps of bombs on the beaches of Saipan. Today, unexploded ordnance, or UXO, remains a hazard in most wartime battlegrounds across the Pacific Islands. People are still being killed or maimed when they disturb ageing US and Japanese bombs, grenades and ammunition in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and CNMI.

On Tinian, a US navy team disposes of UXO on land leased by the US Defence Department. But UXO outside these military leases is the responsibility of the local CNMI government. It must seek grants from the US Environment Protection Agency Brownfields program or finance under the US Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which provides grants for disposal of hazardous materials. These programs have been gutted as the Trump administration reduces funding to the EPA and other environmental agencies.

Under a program known as Agile Combat Employment, the US government has begun to refurbish second world war airbases in CNMI, the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau. In April last year, the US Air Force announced a US$409 million contract for Texan construction firm Fluor to refurbish and extend the old North Field airfield on Tinian. The Guam-based construction company Black Micro was also awarded a US$220 million contract to extend a cargo pad, taxiway extension, fuel tanks, roads and maintenance facilities on the island.

The US Defence Department has recently released environmental impact statements seeking public comment on further military expansion in Tinian, which would include live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure and a biosecurity facility.

It’s a decade since the US military announced plans to use the CNMI island of Pagan for weapons testing, causing uproar in the community. In 2015, a draft EIS received more than 30,000 public comments in opposition. In response, the US defence department halted proposed military activity on Pagan and withdrew proposals for artillery, rocket and mortar exercises on Tinian.

The Pagan campaign linked community elders with younger activists, says Theresa Arriola, who are now opposing renewed plans for a military build-up on Saipan and Tinian. As the US military releases new EIS for public comment, community groups like Our Commonwealth, Marianas for Palestine and Prutehi Guahan are mounting community education programs but also demonstrating again militarisation of the islands.

“Right now on Tinian, they’re reconstructing the same runway they used in 1945 and there is the concurrent release of two major environmental impact statements,” Arriola says. “One is the CNMI Joint Military Training EIS, that outlines a lot of major changes on the island of Tinian, including live-fire training, public access restrictions and other hazards.”

In June, activists interrupted a public meeting on the proposed military training expansion in Tinian, chanting “No build-up!,” “No war!” and “Free, free, Palestine!” Chamorro activist Anufat Pangelinan told the Marianas Press: “We don’t want to be part of a war we don’t support. The Marianas shouldn’t be a tip of the spear — we should be a bridge for peace.”

Community groups questioned military plans to build a fuel pipeline over Tinian’s aquifer, the only potable source of water on the island. They raised potential hazards to fishing boats travelling between Saipan and Tinian during live-fire exercises. US Marine Corps Forces Pacific executive director Mark Hashimoto acknowledged that “the top five concerns that the community still has include water resources, solid waste, noise, the impact on police, fire, and medical capabilities, and also access to the military lease area.”

For Arriola, the EIS process doesn’t provide sufficient evidence for decision-makers, and downplays concerns over indigenous land and culture. “That’s what everybody is talking about — the land, and the health of the land for future generations and the ability to maintain indigenous sovereignty,” she says.

“Our community is suffering,” Arriola adds, “but most people aren’t reading through these extremely tedious, very cumbersome Environmental Impact Statements. It’s really complicated, and an undue burden that’s consistently placed on us, especially when multiple EIS are released. They don’t address a lot of our questions, they don’t have proper baseline data, they don’t have proper mitigation plans in place. We have a long history of seeing the skirting of environmental regulation or not properly implementing the EPA process.”

The challenge for community activists is the strong military culture across Guam and CNMI, and a long tradition of Micronesians joining the US armed forces to obtain training and economic opportunity.

The significant US presence means communities are economically linked to the military, says Arriola. “So it’s hard to say ‘I’m an activist and I disagree with someone joining the military.’ There are so many people amongst our friends and our family that are already in the military. It’s so much a part of the fabric of our everyday lives. So it’s not about faulting people for joining the military, but it is about critiquing the military-industrial complex that is keeping us so closely tied to the military as a form of survival.”

The upgrading of the wartime airstrip and other military plans for Tinian are often presented as a bonanza for local businesses. With hundreds of US contractors already on the island, cafe owner Marie Rose Bunao told local media that “business is mostly driven by department of defence projects. The military money goes into the community. Whatever they spend stays here.”

These resources can help replace reduced tourism since the Covid pandemic, amid scandals surrounding the collapse of a hotel and casino operation in Saipan. (An exclusive gambling license was issued in 2014 to Hong Kong–based Imperial Pacific International, which was soon embroiled in disputes over corruption, delayed construction and abuse of workers’ rights.)

Although the CNMI government is still owed US$160 million in back taxes from the casino fiasco, supporters of US military construction predict a new bonanza of investment. Tinian mayor Edwin Aldan says the current military expansion could bring over a billion dollars in investment over the next fifteen to twenty years.

“We are in a very tight economic situation right now,” Arriola acknowledges. “Civilian and military infrastructure are becoming so interlinked that you can’t uncouple them. But around the dinner table, you’re not talking about geopolitics,” she stressed. “You’re asking: Will we be disrupted by the noise with the planes flying overhead? Can I farm on my land? Should we worry about the water being contaminated? People worry about fishing access, and whether they’ll be able to access certain places in the water during training exercises. Will the ordnance disrupt the health of the environment and the water around us?”

The debate in Tinian has echoed across Micronesia since the Pentagon announced a new Guam-based military taskforce to coordinate defence operations in the northern Pacific.

As US media spruik the China threat, Ken Gofigan Kuper, co-founder of the Pacific Center on Island Security on Guam, says that his think tank aims to ensure that islanders themselves have a voice “amongst the cacophony that is geopolitical posturing.”

“Island security is very different from using islands for your security,” Kuper says. “We are trying to open up debate about what is considered islands security and believe much of the security conversation should be coming from islanders themselves, without having the terms dictated by Washington DC, by Beijing, by Australia.”

For Theresa Arriola, “it’s about re-framing the narratives about our islands. When you hear the word ‘strategic,’ let’s break that down. What does that mean? Do we want to engage with this level of military training because we’re being framed as strategic? What is that going to do to our environment and our culture in the long-term?  These are all questions we’re grappling with.” •

The post Tip of the spear appeared first on Inside Story.

Segal suggests, at the very least by inference, that antisemitism is the most dangerous form of racism in contemporary Australia. Accordingly, her report calls for action against antisemitism in ways that go beyond any protections offered any other group. This “privileging” of antisemitism is absurd. The most dangerous form of racism in Australian history and in contemporary Australia is anti-Indigenous racism, something one still reads about every day.

The settlement of Australia involved the near-destruction of Aboriginal society. By contrast there is probably no country in the world — including even the United States — where Jews have been treated more justly and equally than Australia. Isaac Isaacs, a Jew, was one of the original High Court judges. Later he became Australian governor-general. Our most revered soldier is probably John Monash, a Jew. Shortly before the outbreak of the second world war, following the vicious anti-Jewish action in Germany, “Kristallnacht,” and the German annexation of Austria, Australia offered refuge for up to 15,000 refugees from Germany and Austria. The chief sponsor of this offer was the Australian high commissioner in London, the former old-fashioned “liberal” prime minister, Stanley Bruce. Both my parents, who met in Australia, were beneficiaries.

If I might speak personally, even though I was involved in two controversies that concerned Australia and the Jews — the Helen Demidenko Affair and the question of the Hawke Government’s war crimes legislation — I have experienced antisemitic attacks in my life only twice.

The first occurred when, in my late teens, I part-owned a rental house. One of the tenants, who was a criminal, called me a “Jewboy” when I came around to collect unpaid rent.

The second occasion occurred in 1989 when I was co-editor of Quadrant. After I wrote “Left of the Urals,” a short article opposing the Hawke government’s war crimes legislation, principally on the grounds that Japanese war criminals were excluded, I was accused of being a (Jewish) antisemite by Isi Leibler, the most powerful figure in the Jewish community at that time.

I know from talking to Jewish friends that others’ experience of antisemitism was greater than mine. Nonetheless I’m sure that the antisemitic-free air I have breathed in throughout my life in Australia was by no means unique. The most reliable index of social attitudes in Australia — the Scanlon Report — shows that following 7 October and its aftermath negative images of Jews have risen from 9 per cent to 13 per cent.

It is obviously true, as the Segal report suggests, that over the past twenty months there has been a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents. The putatively most important instance of them was a hoax. The two other important actions so far have been two arson attacks on synagogues. Thankfully, so far as I am aware, there has not been even one case of a physical attack on a Jew. What is however remarkable about the Segal report is that in its entirety there is not one word about the cause of this rise in antisemitic incidents following the Israeli response to the vicious Hamas-led attack on Israelis of 7 October 2023.

On that day, 1200 Israeli Jews were murdered and 250 taken as hostages. In response the Israeli armed forces have slaughtered at least 60,000 Gazan Palestinians, and more likely 100,000, the majority of whom were entirely innocent women and children and also men. More than double that number have been seriously wounded with only the slimmest hope of medical aid. The modus operandi of the Israeli armed forces, the self-congratulatory supposed “most moral army” in the world, has seen ratios of up to fifty innocent Gazans killed, as regrettable “collateral damage,” in pursuit of one member of Hamas. Food, fuel, water, medical supplies have been cut off for significant periods of time. Seventy per cent of buildings in Gaza, including hospitals, universities, schools and administrative facilities have been systematically reduced to rubble.

Australians have been able to observe what Israel has done to Gaza on social media and on their television screens, even though journalists are forbidden entry into Gaza, for their protection of course. The more politically engaged or savvy among them will have noticed that not one of the many powerful Jewish organisations in Australia — including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, on whose board Jillian Segal once served as president — has condemned or even questioned the almost unbelievably pitiless brutality of the post–7 October Israeli destruction of Gaza.

Having failed to mention the self-evident cause of the relatively modest rise in antisemitic feeling, antisemitism is treated in Segal’s report as the most dangerous and insidious form of racism in contemporary Australia. Accordingly, the Segal report suggests measures whose censoriousness goes beyond anything in Australian legal history.

Australian law outlines powerful and once controversial protection against all forms of hate speech in article 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act. This is not sufficient protection, according to Segal. What she proposes is not only individual but also organisational responsibility for any antisemitism in speech or action discovered on their turf. According to her proposal some unidentified body, perhaps made up of members of the Jewish community, should monitor both public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, and every university and cultural institution in Australia, for any instance of antisemitism. Segal proposes that some of their government funding be taken away from public broadcasters or universities (including protests) or cultural institutions if some so far unidentified body decides that in action or speech such an incident has occurred.

So far as I am aware, nothing like this has ever before been proposed in Australian history. It comes straight from the contemporary playbook of president Donald Trump.

There is no suggestion in the Segal report that government funding should also be stripped from universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions if instances of First Nations racism, Islamophobia, misogyny or homophobia are discovered there. The choice Segal offers is stark. Either the only form of bigotry to be monitored and punished in universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions by loss of government funds is antisemitism, or bigotry directed against indigenous Australians, Muslims, women and gays should also be monitored in publicly funded institutions and where appropriate punished. According to Segal either antisemitism is the only truly serious form of bigotry in Australia, or universities, public broadcasters and cultural institutions will become subject to a regime of censoriousness without parallel in Australian history.

As we have recently discovered because of the investigative journalism of the independent online media platform, the Klaxon, the man to whom Jillian Segal is married is the partner with his brother of a trust that in 2023 and 2024 donated $50,000 to “Advance,” the most significant mainstream far right movement in Australia, that led the campaign against the indigenous Voice to Parliament and that has described Prime Minister Albanese as “weak, woke and broke.” Taking cover behind political correctness, Segal has claimed she had nothing to do with her husband’s political activities or he with hers, and that it was outrageous to suggest otherwise. She refused to tell the Guardian whether she knew about the $50,000 donation or what she thinks about “Advance.”

Segal’s thoughts about “Advance” and her husband’s $50,000 donation matter. Segal’s desire to monitor the ABC and SBS and to strip them of funds if they are found to have allowed antisemitic content onto their programs is consistent with one of the most conspicuous perennial demands of the mainstream far right in Australia, the attack on the ABC. I am now a devoted listener to the most politically sophisticated arm of the ABC, Radio National. In several years I have not even once encountered a program that could even remotely be regarded as antisemitic.

How will the existence of antisemitic content be discovered? Here we arrive at another novel and extraordinary suggestion. Segal believes that a 2016 definition of antisemitism, developed at a conference in Bucharest — “the IHRA non-legally binding definition of antisemitism” — should become mandatory for all individuals and organisations in Australia. So far as I am aware we do not live in a totalitarian country. Accordingly, we are free to decide for ourselves our own definition of what constitutes antisemitism and even to decide that definitions are not the best way of deciding whether an antisemitic incident in speech or action has occurred.

As it happens, the IHRA definition, which was drafted six years before 7 October and its aftermath, is replete with references to the relation of antisemitism and Israel. The definition concedes that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” However it then asserts that it is antisemitic to claim that Israel invents or exaggerates the Holocaust; that it is antisemitic to claim that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country where they live; that it is antisemitic to compare the actions of Israel to the actions of the Nazis; and that it is antisemitic to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”

In general, I agree with these claims and the other parts of the definition. However, I believe that it is wrong to make such a definition mandatory on individuals and organisations and to go beyond the 2016 Bucharest conference participants by rendering the definition “legally binding.” There is more than enough wriggle room in the IHRA definition to allow a clever lawyer to present a case that an entirely legitimate discussion about Israel in general and, in particular, Israel-in-Gaza is antisemitic.

Let one example suffice. There are scores of genocide scholars who believe, as I do, that since the Hamas atrocity of 7 October 2023 Israel has been carrying out policies of both ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinian peoples of Gaza.

By slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children; by withholding altogether or restricting radically supplies of food, water, fuel, medicines and medical supplies; by reducing to rubble most of the buildings in Gaza — what Israel is telling the Palestinians of Gaza by its unmistakable action is: you have no future in Gaza. President Trump’s fleeting fancy about transforming Gaza into the Middle Eastern Riviera was music to Israeli ears. The current ethnic-cleansing fantasy action plan is to collect all the Palestinian people of Gaza inside a massive tent city on the ruins of Rafah where they might find food and medicine and freedom from bomb attack but from where, until transported to another country, they would not be permitted to leave.

Even as it pulverises Gaza, Israel prides itself on having the world’s “most moral army.” In a rare example of black humour, Israel’s great oppositional newspaper, Ha’aretz, recently described this latest means for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as “the world’s most moral concentration camp.”

The second half of this claim — the overlapping claim of genocide — is also strong. According to the international convention, the crime of genocide occurs when a state attempts to eliminate or destroy a nation, race, ethnicity or religion “in whole or in part.” The Palestinian nation is principally concentrated in two localities — in Gaza and on the West Bank. To eliminate Palestinian existence in Gaza involves the destruction of the Palestinian people “in part.”

Unlike ethnic cleansing, the charge of genocide relies on intentions as well as actions. For the crime of genocide to be proven what must be demonstrated is that beyond the actions taken to ethnically cleanse Gaza the intention to destroy the Palestinian people in whole or in part can be found. Especially in the early days, following 7 October, president Isaac Herzog, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant, and two far-right members of cabinet, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, all spoke in ways that unambiguously suggested genocidal intent, as did scores of Israeli commentators. The Israeli public was now frequently reminded that God had required his people to exterminate the enemy of the Israelites, the Amalekites.

Because concentration camps and genocide are (wrongly) associated in the public mind almost exclusively with the Holocaust, I believe a clever lawyer would be able to use one detail of the mandatory IHRA definition — “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” — to “prove” that anyone who argues that Israel is establishing concentration camps in preparation for ethnic cleansing in Gaza or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza is an antisemite.

Another kind of discussion, one concerned not with the IHRA definition but with the difficult issue of “balance,” might lead to a similar outcome. During the debate about climate change a seminal article showed how “balance” could be “bias.” Similarly in a discussion of, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, balance does not mean putting the case for Russia and for Ukraine in equal measure. It involves condemnation of the unprovoked Russian invasion. Balance does not rest on false equivalences but on judgment.

In my judgement, any discussion of 7 October and its aftermath that denied the evil of the Hamas attack on the Israeli Jews and concentrated exclusively on the Israeli actions since the Hamas atrocity could reasonably be said to lack balance and even be open to the charge of antisemitism. However, an unvarnished discussion of the evil that Israel has done to the innocent people of Gaza following but also preceding the horror of 7 October is not antisemitic but the truth. These include the occupation policies of 1967 to 2005; the short military interventions that Israelis call “mowing the grass” after their supposed departure in 2005; and the ethnic cleansing and the genocide post–October 2023 in the war/slaughter against Hamas. It is the evil of these policies that climaxed following the horror of 7 October that Jillian Segal’s report into combating antisemitism is trying to deny, with the apparent support of most of the organised Jewish community in Australia. If her report is adopted by the Albanese government, it will not only strike the most serious blow against both freedom of speech and academic freedom in Australia in recent decades. It will also almost certainly strengthen rather than combat the post–7 October growth of antisemitism in Australia.

Hannah Arendt once confessed that the crimes and mistakes of her own people, the Jews, were more painful to her than the crimes and mistakes of others. That is how I feel. The former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, who is certainly no dove, recently wrote that the actions of Israel-in-Gaza caused him to feel “heart-broken and ashamed.” That is also precisely how I feel. •

This article first appeared in Robert Manne’s Substack, Thermidor: Cultural Counter-Revolution in the Age of Trump.

The post The wrong way to respond to antisemitism appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor and the Coalition agree on the potential threat of Iran’s nuclear program. It’s the danger of Donald Trump where the split opens.

For nearly eighty-five years, when the United States swung the hammer, Australia was willing to hold the nail. The Coalition sticks to that traditional job, while Labor is hesitant about the president wielding the hammer.

When crisis hits, it’s worth watching the Canberra optics: what’s said, what’s not said, and who does or doesn’t say it. So it was on Sunday when news broke that US planes had bombed three nuclear sites in Iran.

No Australian cabinet minister fronted up with a comment (a blessing of Sunday). The press gallery doyen, Michelle Grattan, noted the “muted” response of the Albanese government. The official words offered came from a “government spokesman,” issued out of the prime minister’s office. Those words didn’t characterise the US attack.

The spokesman said Australia had been clear that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program “has been a threat to international peace and security.” Then the government line went pure diplo-speak: “We note the US President’s statement that now is the time for peace. The security situation in the region is highly volatile. We continue to call for de-escalation, dialogue and diplomacy.”

Fair enough, as far as it goes, which is not far. This is a government tip-toeing around Trump.

Monday was front-foot time. Foreign minister Penny Wong faced the microphone to back the attack: “The world has agreed Iran cannot be allowed to get a nuclear weapon, so yes, we support action to prevent that, and that is what this is.” Then she piled on the caveats of deep concern about what happens next and the escalation dangers: “It’s obviously a very precarious, risky and dangerous moment the world faces.”

No such hesitation from the new leader of the Liberal Party, Sussan Ley. The Liberals may have suffered in May’s election from being too Trumpist in their economic and social language. But when it comes to war and peace, the Libs always want to own the alliance.

Ley issued a joint statement with Andrew Hastie, the acting shadow foreign minister. Hastie, a former army officer, was previously shadow defence minister and in Ley’s new frontbench he is shadow minister for home affairs. In looking at the Ley–Hastie words, credit Hastie with the geopolitics and Ley with a focus on the politics of the alliance. The Coalition had no doubts about embracing the “proactive” US attack:

The world can never accept a nuclear-armed Iranian regime and today the United States military has taken proactive action to ensure that we never need to. A nuclear armed Iranian regime would be a serious and direct threat to world peace and stability, especially as it continues to engage in terrorism including by supporting its proxies: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

The Coalition shows a firm grip on habits of alliance, along with a certain amnesia about how Australia was nailed by the previous preventive war in the Middle East — the Howard government joining the Iraq invasion in search of nuclear weapons that didn’t exist. (See last month’s Inside Story essay on the archives record of Howard’s masterful blunder in service of the alliance.) US hubris in invading Iraq was massive, as was the agony of what became one of America’s greatest strategic disasters. Perhaps this time will be different.

What does war against Iran mean for US allies like Australia?

“Just because the US administration thinks it is done with Iran for now, that does not mean the Iranians are done with America,” is an astute line from the retired Australian major-general, Mick Ryan, who observes: “Regardless of whether the US administration sees this as a ‘one and done’ raid or something else, Iran (and its friends) will now see this as a war between Iran on one side, and Israel, the United States and the West more broadly on the other side.”

Australia is in that line-up both as a US ally and part of the West — and with a significant part of our polity backing the attack on Iran.

Turn from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific, where Australia must find its future. Our story in “our region” is always shaped by our alliance with the US and our Western history. The Albanese government’s cautious call for dialogue and diplomacy in the Middle East is the tip-toe of a Canberra pondering the dangers as well as the many benefits of the alliance. Embracing the US is no longer an easy or even comfortable policy.

The great and powerful friend is not as powerful (relatively) as it once was. What Trump does with US greatness is a great question of our age. Wholehearted support for what Trump does is risky because we don’t know what he’ll do next.

Hesitating about going all the way with the USA is a novel conundrum for Canberra. Not least because it’s such a break with tradition. Trump forces us to ponder how close we want to stand to the US. How to love the alliance but not the president? Australia’s allegiance to the alliance must be tempered by the times. •

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The trooping of the colour in London won the Anglosphere pomp prize, marking the monarch’s official birthday. And the official reason the tanks rolled in Washington last Saturday was the 250th anniversary of the US Army. But for the president taking the salute in his red Republican tie it was all about his seventy-ninth birthday: Long live The Donald!

“No Kings” was the vivid response of protest rallies across America opposing the Trump trooping. The monarchic moment underlines today’s challenges to the king’s traditional job of guarding the borders and protecting the currency. Both parades honoured a great epigram, “War made the state and the state made war.” Charles Tilly’s line distills how bloody battle was transformed into law and legitimacy in the formation of nations, as brigands became barons and warlords became kings.

Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, because it’s a dangerous job being a warlord or king. The supreme leader of Iran may still be alive only because the United States vetoed Israel’s assassination plan on day one of its attack.

Exploding missiles are the example and military parades are the symbol of today’s reality. Defence policy has marched to the top of the policy agenda — and the front of the budget queue — in our new age of uncertainty and war. The threat jostles with one of the defining norms of the last eighty years: the golden age of sovereign states.

As the king was sovereign, so the state has sovereignty. After the cataclysm of the second world war, respecting sovereignty and the sanctity of borders made for a safer world. Decolonisation and then the collapse of the cold war created 195 recognised countries. Modernity and globalisation built on their stability.

Sovereignty’s golden age delivered norms of legality and legitimacy for the smallest, least powerful states. Wars tended to be within nations and among their peoples: Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Nigeria, Myanmar.

The holiday from history is such that the bloodiest conflict since 1945 is a forgotten war that killed 5.4 million people, primarily through disease and hunger — the second Congo war (1998–2003). That Great African War involved nine states, showing again the duality of borders. The border defines economic and ethnic identity and a nation’s legal existence, yet it is also the starting line for battle.

The big exception to this story of civil and border wars is the state so powerful that it decided old limitations and balances no longer applied. But Washington’s unipolar moment suffered hard lessons in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hubris is ever a kingly failing.

The American agony should have been a warning to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Instead, the only lesson he took was a version of Thucydides: “The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”

Putin ushered in brutal power politics by invading and annexing Crimea in 2014. Russia suffered sanctions, was expelled from the G8, and then the rest of the world sighed, tut-tutted, and tried to carry on as before. But the golden age of sovereignty was strained and suffering.

The new cold war got its official start date when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. What Putin thought he could conquer in a few weeks has become a long war; the brutal realist made a disastrous misjudgement about the Ukrainian reality.

Yet empire thinking is back and so are power blocs. In the first months of his second presidency Donald Trump could casually muse about taking Canada or Greenland or the Panama Canal. If you have the power, nations bend to your will and borders shift. Choose your sides and sharpen swords.

The arms-race measure becomes the percentage of your GDP spent on defence. The nations that suffered the harshest twentieth-century lessons about the danger of militarism — Germany and Japan — scramble to rebuild their military. Germany now has the world’s fourth-biggest defence budget.

Bloc politics can draw up the order of battle. That’s the high-risk prospect of the United States, Britain and France lining up against the authoritarian coalition of Iran, China, Russia and North Korea. Surveying that prospect, the British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard observes: “The hybrid struggle between two rival blocs resembles the treacherous landscape before the Thirty Years War in 1618, and the First World War in 1914. All it takes is hubris and a few more errors to set off this slow-burning fuse.”

The military strategy for such a confrontation emerges. Less clear is the political and diplomatic strategy to handle the tensions.

The parade in Washington last Saturday shows what happens when a radical performance artist has command of an army. Expect no grand strategy from Donald Trump. He is a performer not a planner. Our hope must be that he prefers trade wars to the expense of real wars. •

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Courtesy of the National Archive’s annual release of official papers, we also know that the cabinet record was unusually sparse. Before the conflict, not a single submission went to cabinet making the case for or against war, and none assessing the strength of intelligence reports on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. In the three months prior to the war, Iraq generated twenty-four pages of cabinet paperwork, less than ministers would expect for a minor change to a federal law.

Iraq was prime minister John Howard’s great international blunder, but his political execution was masterful. A strong leader worked his cabinet, controlled his party and dominated the bureaucracy.

That mastery was built on the political fib that Howard was deeply pondering the option of not joining the United States in attacking Iraq. The fib was a function of the core reason Australia went to war — to serve its alliance with America. Howard treated any doubts about the Iraq commitment as a questioning of that irreplaceable strategic prize. In retirement, he declared it “inconceivable” that Australia would fail to enlist in a US war.

Howard took Australia to its “greatest” war of choice. All wars are a mix of necessity and choice, but Iraq is further out on the choice axis than any other Australia has fought. It makes Iraq the example of the prime minister’s prerogative to send Australia to war.

Not asked for advice, the public service didn’t speak. Written submissions pondering the life-and-death decision would have fuelled debate within the government and party and have been explosive if leaked.

The five-year path to war

Australia’s self-invitation to Iraq began five years before the war, at the start of 1998, when Canberra signed on to US military planning for Iraq. After Saddam Hussein had suspended cooperation with UN inspectors attempting to monitor Iraq’s biological, chemical and missile capabilities, the United States and Britain threatened military retaliation and began building up forces in the Persian Gulf.

Early in February of that year, Howard briefed cabinet on his Iraq discussions with US president Bill Clinton and the prime ministers of Canada and New Zealand, and on “recent decisions” taken by cabinet’s National Security Committee. Cabinet affirmed the NSC’s decision to “offer military support to the United States’ coalition,” namely special forces personnel, two air-to-air refuelling aircraft, and medical and intelligence specialists. For Howard, that “offer” became a firm commitment to all that followed.

Cabinet granted the NSC authority to alter the mix of military forces to provide “support of a similar magnitude” if what was offered “cannot be incorporated into US plans.” On 20 February, the NSC approved two sets of rules of engagement, or ROE, “a defensive ROE applying during peacetime and the second, if necessary, an operational ROE for use during conflict.” Both sets of rules provided for integration into a coalition force, with the Australian Defence Force under the “direction of the coalition force commander, with ADF elements to remain under national command.”

The 1998 push to war reversed after UN secretary-general Kofi Annan swung into action and Iraq stepped back. By March, the NSC noted Iraq’s “current cooperative approach” and the failure of fresh inspections to find evidence of WMD. In May, nevertheless, cabinet considered options for Australian military support for operations in the Gulf. The starting point was that the United States should maintain its commitment to the military coalition. ADF liaison officers should be integrated into the US land headquarters in Kuwait, the special forces headquarters in Kuwait, the air operations headquarters in Saudi Arabia, and the US Central Command in Florida. Australian officers would help the US plan to fight Iraq.

Alliance insurance is served by military integration. Yet integration can define and drive commitment. Once you’re in, you’re in. And by 2002 war with Iraq was looming.

Howard begins the Iraq chapter of his memoir with this sentence: “Speaking to the General Assembly on 12 September 2002, George Bush not only recited Iraq’s long record of defying the demands of the United Nations but made it clear that if the United Nations did not act, the United States would.” Parse the alliance grammar: the US is both the subject and verb. And for Howard, the United States was always the central object. US actions would drive Australia’s response.

The archive trail includes a two-sentence minute from 10 September 2002, two days before Bush spoke to the UN, noting that Howard gave cabinet an oral report on his discussions with the president “on the American position in relation to efforts by Iraq to secure and maintain weapons of mass destruction. The cabinet also noted that the US intended to make appropriate use of United Nations forums and processes in seeking to resolve the issue.”

The archive record is that of a government determined to act, marching to an alliance beat, working on how to go to war, not whether to go. The tempo of the march was set by Howard’s innovation in the machinery of cabinet — the National Security Committee.

When Howard took government in 1996, he created the NSC as the peak decision-making body for national security and foreign policy. Marking a significant shift in cabinet structure, it has been retained by subsequent governments. Unlike those of other cabinet committees, NSC decisions needn’t go to full cabinet for approval. Also unusually, ministers are joined at its meetings by senior officials, including the secretaries of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Defence and Foreign Affairs, the chief of the Australian Defence Force, and the head of the Office of National Intelligence.

As the authors of a history of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet comment: “At NSC, the officials sat at table in the cabinet room with ministers, even if on the other side, and could participate in discussions — although those discussions were led by, and the decisions were made by, the ministers. Howard wanted his ministers to hear the views of the defence and intelligence chiefs.” The gathering of ministers and officials in the cabinet room makes the NSC a strong and effective instrument, especially for a powerful prime minister with a clear objective.

The NSC was “meeting frequently” in the five months leading to the start of the Iraq invasion, according to defence secretary Ric Smith. “But it did not, in my time at least, address the big issue because by then the prime minister and ministers seemed to have a firm view about where they were going and why.”

On Iraq, a single omnibus cabinet document in 2003 tracks the detail of the NSC trek to Howard’s alliance objective. Titled “Iraq: Australian Contingency Arrangements for Possible Military Action,” the file contains a series of ministerial letters and NSC decisions covering the period from 10 January to 5 March.

The eighteen-page file records decisions on “contingency arrangements for possible Australian military involvement in any future United States-led military action against Iraq” (10 January); rules of engagement, policy on military targeting and the NSC’s agreement that the defence budget should be supplemented by $467 million to meet the costs of the Middle East deployment (18 February); arrangements following an invasion, when Australia should “promote a strong and visible UN involvement in the post-conflict management of Iraq” and “encourage coherent planning and sound policy settings for reconstruction, including by early engagement with international financial institutions” (5 March).

The decisions were based not on departmental submissions but on oral briefings and “letters” from ministers. On 27 February, foreign minister Alexander Downer wrote to the prime minister, copying the letter to other NSC ministers, about dealing with Iraq after “military action” and “conflict” (words such as “invasion,” “war” and “occupation” do not appear). Commenting on “US Phase V” planning for the administration of a defeated Iraq, Downer observed:

Our starting point has been that, while Australia will do its fair share, we do not have the resources to do the “heavy lifting” on Iraq reconstruction. You have made clear to President Bush that Australia will not be in a position to contribute to a post-conflict or peacekeeping or stabilisation force. There are however significant Australian commercial interests in Iraq which we would want to advance. And we have a strong political interest in ensuring that the institutional arrangements in post-conflict Iraq are credible and effective.

US Phase IV planning is now well advanced. It is increasingly clear that the US envisages a dominant role for itself in all sectors in post-conflict Iraq for as long as eighteen months, while relegating the UN to a subsidiary role, primarily through its humanitarian agencies. This position was reaffirmed to me by [US secretary of state] Colin Powell in Seoul on 25 February.

I doubt that the US position is sustainable and much will eventually depend on whether any US-led military action goes forward under UN cover. The UK shares our view that there needs to be a strong and visible UN involvement in the post-conflict running of Iraq and we should continue to work with the UK to press this position in Washington.

Downer’s two-page letter is as close as the cabinet documents come to discussing the meaning of the planned conquest, but it still doesn’t stray anywhere near the merits of the war.

With all the preliminary work done by the NSC, the one substantial document generated by the full cabinet before the war began was dated 18 March 2003. The six-page cabinet decision, “Iraq: Authority for Australian Defence Force Military Action,” has to do a lot of work as a key piece of documentary history on Australia’s choice for war.

The next day, 19 March, the bombing campaign started; the day after that, 20 March, the ground invasion began.

The cabinet minute notes “oral reports” by Howard on his “extensive discussions” with the US president and British prime minister about the use of force against Iraq. On the morning cabinet met, President Bush had requested Australia join “military action by a coalition to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.” The rest of the minute is about accepting the Bush case for war — Iraq’s WMD were “a real and unacceptable threat to international peace and security” — and the mechanics of Australia’s military role. The cabinet decision is the final step in Australia’s march to war.

In making the Iraq commitment, Howard sidelined the governor-general, Peter Hollingworth, who has the constitutional power to declare war. The National Archives historian David Lee reports that Howard had originally planned to follow the constitution and take the decision to Hollingworth “for noting.” But Howard was worried by Hollingworth’s request for further advice on international law. Instead, the legal step was taken without reference to the governor-general using the ministerial powers of the Defence Act.

The intelligence agencies

Howard’s lingering mastery means his argument for joining a preventive war based on intelligence still gets a run. Two decades after the war, Australia’s defence minister in 2003, Robert Hill, maintained: “On the basis of the information we had at the time, we made what we believe was the right decision, and I still believe on the basis of that information that was the right decision.”

Such forgetting must overlook the conclusions of two Canberra inquiries: the joint parliamentary intelligence committee’s Inquiry into Intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and the specially commissioned Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies.

Both reports showed Howard had little support from Australian intelligence agencies in deciding on war. The prime minister got just enough cover from the Office of National Assessments, or ONA, to meet political needs; beyond politics, the intelligence — as a basis for war — was thin. Parliament’s intelligence committee found that the Defence Intelligence Organisation was sceptical throughout about Iraq’s weapons, while the ONA, located within the Prime Minister’s Department, hardened its line as Howard marched to invasion. The committee commented on a sudden shift “in the nature and tone” of ONA’s view of Iraq’s WMD in September 2002: “It is so sudden a change in judgement that it appears ONA, at least unconsciously, might have been responding to ‘policy running strong.’”

To see how “policy running strong” bulldozes counter-arguments and unhelpful evidence, turn to a fine public servant who spent many years serving parliamentary inquiries — and writing much of what came to be tabled as committee findings. Margaret Swieringa was secretary of the parliamentary intelligence committee from 2002 to 2007 and put together its Iraq report. In retirement, she offered a withering analysis of Howard’s arguments about Iraq’s WMD. “None of the government’s arguments,” she wrote, “were supported by the intelligence presented to it by its own agencies. None of these arguments were true.”

Here is how Swieringa summarised the findings of the parliamentary inquiry she served:

• The scale of threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was less than it had been a decade earlier.

• Under sanctions that prevailed at the time, Iraq’s military capability remained limited and the country’s infrastructure was still in decline.

• The nuclear program was unlikely to be far advanced. Iraq was unlikely to have obtained fissile material.

• Iraq had no ballistic missiles that could reach the US. Most if not all of the few SCUDS that were hidden away were likely to be in poor condition.

• There was no known chemical weapons production.

• There was no specific evidence of resumed biological weapons production.

• There was no known biological weapons testing or evaluation since 1991.

• There was no known Iraq offensive research since 1991.

• Iraq did not have nuclear weapons.

• There was no evidence that chemical weapon warheads for Al Samoud or other ballistic missiles had been developed.

• No intelligence had accurately pointed to the location of weapans of mass destruction.

When the parliamentary committee report was released, Patrick Walters’ front page story in the Australian was headlined “PM’s Spin Sexed-up Iraq Threat,” a vivid rendering of what happens when a prime minister is running strong.

Howard could not allow that damning headline to stick. Hurt by one inquiry, a political master responds with another investigation with refined terms of reference. The PM called in a former diplomatic mandarin, Philip Flood, to inspect a failure — the failure of the intelligence agencies, that is. Flood’s conclusion began: “There has been a failure of intelligence on Iraq WMD. Intelligence was thin, ambiguous and incomplete.” He lamented a lack of rigour in challenging preconceptions or assumptions about the Iraq’s intentions. Sticking to his brief, his focus had to be on intelligence errors, not any blunders by political masters.

The old intelligence lessons of contestability and care endure. Intelligence is always partial, and partially wrong. The stuff that seems too good to be true can look good because it isn’t true (a truth as important for politicians or journalists as it is for analysts). Howard used the Flood report to blame failure on the Australian intelligence community. The punishment? Big increases in funding to do a better job.

The Iraq fib

John Howard’s story to the Australian people as he headed to war used a fib as a fig-leaf. The fib was deployed throughout 2002 and all the way to the moment of invasion in 2003. Australia had an open mind, said the fib. It was weighing the options and had yet to commit to a US-led attack. Even at the time, the fib was transparent. In the history of the open secret, it is a fine example.

I’ve used the word “fib” instead of “lie.” This political distinction is best not used when disciplining children or giving evidence under oath. The fib in its political garb is a thing of sophistry and silences. Some truth resides within it, but it is not wholly true. It is the politics-as-usual version of being economical with the truth. Neither a bent untruth nor a straight lie, the fib contains many shades of shadiness.

The truth in Howard’s fib was that if Saddam Hussein had totally surrendered — if he had revealed to everyone’s satisfaction that Iraq had no WMD — Australia would, indeed, not go to war. Saddam, though, would have had to convince the United States: not a simple task given the ambition and hubris of the Bush administration after what seemed like a successful invasion of Afghanistan.

Howard sets the terms of the fib in a brisk chapter on Iraq in his autobiography. The book recounts his White House talks in June 2002, where President Bush was given to understood that he “would keep my options open until the time when a final decision was needed.” But Howard writes that Bush also understood that “close discussions were under way between the US military and their Australian counterparts.” Bush was “entitled to assume on the basis of that, and also the tenor of our discussions” that he could rely on Australia’s military commitment. The “tenor” of that White House deal was a promise of support from Howard. Later, on the eve of the war, Howard gave a further personal pledge to Bush: “George, if it comes to this, I pledge to you that Australian troops will fight if necessary.”

The commitment to Bush was not, however, the story Howard gave Australia all the way to the invasion. The fib that Australia could step back and not join an American invasion was the public version.

The fib miasma held the government together, sidelined the public service, and provided that fig-leaf of cover as Australian public opinion turned decisively against the Iraq war. “Our decision to go into Iraq was against the weight of public opinion,” Howard wrote in his memoir. By January 2003, he noted, one poll showed that only 6 per cent of Australians supported joining an invasion of Iraq without a specific UN resolution.

Right up to the moment the guns started firing in March, Howard maintained that Australia had not made up its mind. In a statement to parliament on 4 February 2003, he again promised that “the government will not make a final decision to commit to military conflict unless and until it is satisfied that all achievable options for a peaceful resolution have been explored.”

Strange that a government agonising over such a choice asked no questions of its senior public service advisers. The reality was that all sides of Australian politics — and most of the Australian people — knew the commitment had long since been made. The ADF was deeply involved in US planning for the war and Australia was in.

American versions of the Iraq decision-making paint Howard as urging Bush, not cautioning him. In his memoir, Bush describes Howard as committed to action against Iraq, although preferably with UN backing; he writes that “almost every ally I consulted — even staunch advocates of confronting Saddam like prime minister John Howard of Australia — told me a UN resolution was essential to win public support in their country.” Bush lauded this staunch advocate as “a man of steel” and Howard steeled Bush to act.

When Howard appears in Bob Woodward’s account of the US invasion, the prime minister is urging Bush on. In an interview with Woodward, the president said Howard shared his “zeal” for the “liberation” of Iraq (along with Britain’s Tony Blair and Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar). Bush said they “all share the same zeal for freedom. It probably looks paternalistic to some elites, but it certainly is not paternalistic for those we free. Those who become free appreciate the zeal. And appreciate the passion.”

When the Bush and Howard met in in the White House on 10 February 2003, a month before the invasion, Woodward quotes Bush telling Howard that “thanks to your strong resolve we’re finally getting clarity.”

In his memoir Howard reflects that he committed Australian troops without bipartisan support and against public opinion: “Although the cabinet, most particularly my senior National Security Committee colleagues, unconditionally supported our stance, I had been the driving force behind the firm support we had given to the Americans. Both the party and the public saw this as something to which I had given a deep personal commitment.”

That “driving force” herded and harnessed Canberra.

The cabinet submission that never was

The public service silence on Iraq quickly entered Canberra lore. A year after the war, in a book on Howard, Bush and the alliance, journalist Robert Garran wrote:

Howard acknowledges there was no cabinet submission on the costs and benefits of going to war in Iraq. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was not asked for, and did not offer, any advice on the pros and cons of supporting American intervention. This reinforces the view that Howard’s decisions on Iraq were political, not based on a dispassionate appraisal of the threats it posed.

Garran’s footnote for that statement reads: “In an interview with the author on 12 March 2004, asked to comment on reports there had been no overarching cabinet submission on Iraq, Howard did not dispute the point, and answered that the issue was dealt with by cabinet’s National Security Committee.”

The journalist Paul Kelly observed that one of Australia’s most contentious conflicts “saw an astonishing and complete unity of opinion in Canberra.” He called this an insight into both strategy and governance: “Ministers made clear they did not want contesting advice and the public service offered no advice on the merits of the war or Australia’s commitment.”

Here is the modern version of the Canberra system. Frank and fearless advice is not an automatic requirement. If the prime minister has decided to go to war then don’t give him contrary advice. Certainly, don’t give him advice he hasn’t sought. And beware any senior bureaucrat who produces paperwork that could be leaked to attack or discredit the commitment to war.

The public service would attend to details; Howard and the NSC would do the rest. The secretary of foreign affairs and trade, Ashton Calvert, said his department’s task was to prepare for Australia’s Iraq role and make it work: “DFAT did not argue against that war role. In my view there was a strong and shared sense of policy direction on Iraq from Howard and Downer… In my view they didn’t need advice on what they should do because they had, in effect, made up their minds.”

When Ric Smith became defence secretary in November 2002, the message he got from ministers was that “they did not want strategic advice” from his department. “This reflected a conviction that ministers knew the issues and would take the decisions for or against the war.”

Making up your mind is one thing. Having a closed mind is a recipe for policy disaster. Australia would help to invade, conquer and occupy — then leave immediately. Iraq’s future? The consequences for the Middle East? Not our problem, thanks. All issues for the United States.

Consider what the Howard government could have known and asked in 2002 and early 2003 before committing to the blunder that became the Iraq war. No perfect hindsight is required; merely what cabinet could have focused on as it prepared to be part of an invading coalition.

If the big cabinet submission that never was had been ordered, what would have been discussed? Beyond military planning, such a submission would have covered intelligence, the nature and future of Iraq, the geopolitical balance in the Middle East, and Australia’s legal responsibilities as an occupying power. Then the submission would have drawn all the strands together to discuss the core driver of commitment — the alliance.

Intelligence

The WMD intelligence was thin, as Canberra’s two post-invasion inquiries found. Suffice to say that a government considering options would have wanted the intelligence stress-tested and argued over.

In a retrospective on the war in 2013, Howard argued that the “belief that Saddam had WMDs was near universal” while quoting the ONA’s view that the evidence “paints a circumstantial picture that is conclusive overall rather than resting on a single piece of irrefutable evidence.”

The strength of the intelligence was questioned by the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, when he met Howard in New York five weeks before the war began. At the meeting, Blix wrote later, “far from saying to Mr Howard that there were WMDs in Iraq I conveyed to him that we were not impressed by the ‘evidence’ presented to this effect. Regrettably, there were few at that time who cared to examine evidence about Iraq with a critical mind.”

As Blix later commented in a review for Inside Story of the memoirs of Howard, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the three leaders relied on Iraq’s alleged WMD to justify invasion but “the evidence was nowhere to be found.”

The three leaders used intelligence as the basis for a preventive war, not just a political debate. If the intelligence was circumstantial rather than definitive, other factors should have weighed heavily, such as a discussion of what would happen in a conquered Iraq.

The nature and future of Iraq

As war loomed, many expert voices denounced the dream that a US-led war would transform Iraq into a peaceful democracy.

Ten years after the invasion, John Howard gave this version of what went wrong:

The post-invasion conflict, especially between Sunnis and Shiites, which caused widespread bloodshed, did more damage, in my judgement, to the credibility of the coalition operation in Iraq than the failure to find stockpiles of WMDs. Persecution by the pro-Saddam Sunnis of the Shia majority had been a feature of Iraq for the previous twenty years. It was inevitable that after Saddam had been toppled a degree of revenge would be exacted, but a stronger security presence would have constrained this.

Ponder how those thoughts would figure in the crucial cabinet submission that was never written. Take as the text for that submission an article published in the Australian six weeks before the war by Rory Steele, Australia’s ambassador to Iraq from 1986 to 1988. Offering a brisk survey of Iraq’s artificial nature as a country and the Sunni–Shia split, Steele judged that invasion would be the easy part. After that would come “the mother of all messes” as Iraq’s “abundant internal contradictions” turned to chaos:

New questions will arise daily, of legitimacy, of policing, in a situation of revenge killings, armed resistance and terrorism. With Iraq risking fracture, the coalition of the willing that entered may find it is in for a much longer and murkier haul than expected. Its hope will be to exit quickly, leaving Iraq in good order. The peacekeepers’ role could be thankless, dangerous and open-ended.

This was no 20/20 hindsight, but advice offered before the invasion. Having pondered that dark vision, the cabinet submission that should have been written would then turn to the impact on the Middle East of the mother of all messes.

Middle East geopolitics

Howard always presented himself as a tough international realist rather than a mushy multilateralist. Yet he had little regard for the realist views he accurately summarised a decade after the war:

The realists were probably untroubled by the UN issue, likely believed Saddam had WMDs, and regarded him as a loathsome dictator. Despite this they saw merit in continuing a policy of containing him and eschewing resort to military action. To them the world was too dangerous a place to become involved in such action except in the most compelling circumstances, which they did not think existed in Iraq in 2003.

The war’s disastrous impact on the geopolitics of the Middle East was predicted by many — not least a generation of US policy-makers who could not make George W. Bush listen.

After throwing Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, president George H.W. Bush (the senior and wiser Bush) stopped short of toppling Saddam from power. The argument he made to Australia and others had a public and private dimension. The public line was that freeing Kuwait was the extent of the UN mandate. The private version was that deposing Saddam would destroy the regional power balance and that remaking Iraq would be a vast endeavour.

The US secretary of state in 1991, James Baker, wrote in his 1995 memoir that if the US had marched on to Baghdad after taking Kuwait, “Iraq might fragment in unpredictable ways that would play into the hands of the mullahs in Iran, who could export their brand of Islamic fundamentalism with the help of Iraq’s Shiites and quickly transform themselves into the dominant regional power.”

In the power realignment, the big winner would have been Iran, no longer balanced by Saddam’s Iraq. The United States would deliver regional victory to Tehran, aiding the regime it hated most. It was a strong realist argument in 1991 and it needed to be considered in 2002–03. It also turned out to be true.

Australia as an occupying power

An invading power is responsible for the country it conquers. Arguing with his president, US secretary of state Colin Powell compressed this international responsibility into a single image — Bush would “own” Iraq — that evoked the pottery shop rule, “You break it, you own it.”

The imagined cabinet submission would have needed to consider Australia’s obligations to the state it had broken. After Australian forces helped overthrow Saddam, Howard was asked on 17 April 2003 if Australia was “an occupying power.” The prime minister replied: “We have the obligation of an occupying power under the Geneva Convention. We, along with the Americans and the British have responsibilities, certainly, and we won’t neglect those responsibilities.” Howard said Australia had an obligation to the people of Iraq to help establish a new democracy, and expressed the view that “the predictions of a civil war are unduly pessimistic.”

Howard’s embrace of occupying-power responsibility was another fib: the fleeting words of a radio interview, not a government commitment. Australia invaded, then fled, declining a role in governing postwar Iraq. Canberra refused to sign on for that legal responsibility at the United Nations, leaving it to the other members of the military coalition.

UN Security Council resolution 1483 in May 2003 attributed only to the United States and Britain the status of occupying powers. It noted that on 8 May the two countries had written to the Security Council claiming “the specific authorities, responsibilities, and obligations under applicable international law of these states as occupying powers under unified command.”

The US alliance and Howard’s view of his masterful blunder

Having dealt with those four dimensions of the looming war in the submission that never was, cabinet would have turned to the central concern: what Iraq might mean for Australia’s alliance with the US.

A single sentence in the penultimate paragraph of the Iraq chapter in Howard’s autobiography expresses the foundational view that took Australia to Iraq: “I found it inconceivable, given our shared history and values, that we would not stand beside the Americans.” Howard was confident the United States would win, and that Australia would do its duty. Much history underpins that “inconceivable” conviction.

In the years since the United States came to Australia’s rescue during the second world war, Australia has trooped to America’s wars — Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. A singular purpose runs through Australia’s role in these wars: the US alliance. Canberra invites itself so it can pay its alliance dues. Paying the insurance premium explains much about Australia’s longest war in Afghanistan and our role in Iraq.

The self-invitation process can be swift and built on high emotion, as it was when communist forces invaded South Korea in 1950 (Australia’s quick response helped clinch the ANZUS alliance) and in Afghanistan after the 11 September 2001 attacks on America.

The 1991 Gulf war sits close to this category but doesn’t quite fit the “America’s wars” typology. In the first exuberant moments of the post–cold war era, Australia went to the Gulf to support the United Nations and international law by overturning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The multilateral interest might have been of equal importance to the US alliance. The balance of interests meant that Australia’s contribution was primarily naval; no boots on the sand in 1991 and no Australians in combat.

At other times, as in Vietnam and Iraq, a step-by-step journey builds until it culminates in an Australian commitment. This is not sleep-walking to war. Many debates and decisions are involved. But a sense of narrowing options, even inevitability, can grip Canberra, building a sense of alliance necessity. The premium must be paid.

Australia did a better job of military preparation for Iraq than it did for Vietnam. Australian officers were embedded in the US system and took part in a prolonged period of military planning. In Vietnam, by contrast, the location of Australia’s first deployment was decided by the US military and advised through diplomatic channels. Australia went into Iraq far more cautiously than it did in Vietnam and got out as the dust of invasion cleared. We were slowly drawn back into Iraq by alliance demands in later years but, again, the military commitment was limited and confined. That is why the price paid in Australian blood was low, with two Australia military personnel killed between 2003 and 2009.

Examining the Vietnam–Iraq echoes, former Australian diplomat Garry Woodard found an “astounding durability” in Canberra’s alliance mindset, marked by “the dominance of the prime minister, decisions made in secret by a small group of ministers obedient to him, minds closed against area expertise, preference for party political advantage over bipartisanship, and willing subservience to and some credulity about an ally, the United States.” Woodard listed fifty Vietnam–Iraq parallels, including:

• Advice that ministers don’t want to hear won’t be heeded.

• The focus of Australian decision-makers is the US alliance.

• Australia will be part of a coalition of two or three if necessary.

• Australia’s assessment of the US is personalised and presidential qualities weigh heavily in that assessment.

• Australia relies heavily on US intelligence.

• There was no exit strategy for either war.

• In both cases, Australia put its standing in Asia at risk.

As Woodard judged, these are “enduring features” of Canberra’s decision-making. Howard exemplifies those features in his alliance commitment and the way he drove the government.

In December last year I questioned Howard on those issues during a media briefing at the annual release of cabinet records held by the National Archives.

One of my questions was based on the history offered from Washington in the books by George W. Bush and Bob Woodward. Both accounts, I said, painted Howard as an advocate of the war, not a caution. The Bush memoir described him as a “staunch advocate.” But the word that caught Howard’s attention was Woodward quoting Bush’s view about Howard’s “zeal” for the Iraq cause.

“My what?” Howard responded.

“Your zeal to go after Saddam,” I said.

“His word, not mine,” Howard said.

“Indeed, his word,” I said, “but were you an advocate rather than a caution in terms of the war?”

Howard replied that “zeal” would be a label more appropriate for Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, and his “huge commitment” of 45,000 British troops to the war.

“He believed in it very strongly,” said Howard. “Now, was I zealous? I think ‘zeal’ is slightly overstating it. You imply my role was to act as a cautionary friend. Well, you’re entitled to that view. I thought my role was to assess the Australian national interest, and that’s above all what I was sworn to uphold. I thought I pursued that because I thought it was in our national interest to put a curb on the capacity of terrorists to get hold of weapons of mass destruction from Saddam. I believed at that time that he not only had programs but he had stockpiles. I thought it was in Australia’s national interest to listen carefully to assessments of international reality and situations by our close friend and ally, the Americans.”

I’d prefaced my questions about the government process with a quote from Howard’s memoir, where he stated his aim to run “a fully functioning and orderly system of government.” My questions were: “Why in the decision to go to Iraq did you not use the system that you’d set up? Why were there no submissions from the public service on the intelligence? Submissions from the public service on the Middle East process? On what would happen in Iraq? Instead, the documents we do have — and there aren’t many — are basically letters to you from ministers and oral briefings. So why did you follow that, if I might say, rather unusual process, running it through the NSC?”

“What you’ve got to understand about the NSC,” Howard responded, “is that’s where all of detailed discussions about Iraq took place. There wasn’t one, single cabinet submission that you could isolate. But over a period of months we discussed in detail what was happening in Iraq, what was the current state of the intelligence and all of that. It was just a rolling process. Now you’re entitled to make the point, ‘Why was there at least one omnibus submission that covered everything?’ Well, it was pretty hard during that time to cover everything, because different events unfold.”

He went on: “When the Americans finally decided to push the button, they had to come to us to tell us, then they had to come back to get the result of a cabinet decision. And it was, from a legal standpoint, perfectly open to Australia to decide even at that late point, for one reason or another, that we wouldn’t go ahead. However, I never had that in mind. Certainly not. I think that would have been verging on the deceptive to a close ally to have behaved in that way. But it was, nonetheless, a legal decision.”

A decade after the war, Howard had offered this key sentence: “Australia’s decision to join the Coalition in Iraq was a product both of our belief at the time that Iraq had WMDs, and the nature of our relationship and alliance with the United States.”

Don’t be misled by the order Howard gives. Notice the weighting of the words: the issue of the moment feeds into the permanent interests of relationship and alliance. Given the strength of the two issues in the Howard universe, my estimate of relative importance is US alliance 75 per cent, Iraq WMD 25 per cent. And even that probably underestimates the alliance premium.

The Australian Army’s unofficial history of the war, produced by the Directorate of Army Research and Analysis, concluded that Howard went to war solely to strengthen the alliance. It dismisses as “mandatory rhetoric” Canberra’s other claims about enforcing UN resolutions, stopping the spread of WMD and global terrorism, and remaking Iraq.

Only the alliance was a strong enough reason for Australia to join the United States in launching war. At huge cost to the United States and many others — but relatively little cost to Australia — the purpose was met. Washington made one of its greatest strategic blunders; Canberra served the alliance. On this reading, Australia shouldn’t care whether the United States wins or loses as long as the alliance is burnished.

But does Australia bolster its alliance credentials by cheering on Washington as it plunges into folly and quagmire? Disasters that sap America’s treasure and national psyche hurt its ability to meet the alliance promises Australia so values. A principal concern for Canberra ought to be the harm the United States does to itself, diminishing its ability to shape the world to its (and our) advantage. This is the great blunder in Howard’s political mastery.

In writing about Iraq, Howard demonstrates that the necessary act of political will — the choice — at the heart of the alliance can take on an automatic tinge. That’s what happens when the pact is elevated from vital to sacred.

Australia had never before launched a war. In Iraq we did. Consider our catalogue of conflict: Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Vietnam, Malaysia’s confrontation with Indonesia, Korea, the second world war, the first world war, the Boer war. In no case, apart from Iraq, was Australia the aggressor. We mobilised and joined alliances in response to attack, playing defence, not offence. (The Boers and Vietnamese might argue, but the regime-protection, defence-not-offence model can encompass those conflicts.)

A cabinet that truly debated its options in 2003 would have had to contemplate “doing a Canada” and refusing to join the invasion. We would have avoided a war of choice that was really a war of aggression. Howard’s tight hold avoided a dangerous discussion of the possibility that the closest of allies can say “no.” Refusal would have crashed against the prime minister’s personal pledge and deepest beliefs. Australia would have stepped back from a campaign it helped plan.

Surveying the Iraq disaster, one of Australia’s great foreign policy realists, Owen Harries, judged that “uncritical, loyal support for a bad, failed American policy” would hurt Australia’s standing as an ally in the long run. His dry but devastating denouement: “A reputation for being dumb but loyal and eager is not one to be sought.”

The lack of any Iraq WMD meant the reason for the “dumb but loyal” choice soon stood alone as the sole justification: Australia would go all the way with the USA. Iraq was the means. The alliance was the purpose. Squibbing a role in the conquered nation, Howard was deeply committed but not responsible. The US hubris was massive, and we drank of it. •

The post John Howard’s masterful blunder appeared first on Inside Story.

Given that April 1945 was one of the most consequential months in modern history, now — as global governance faces its greatest test since the second world war — is an opportune occasion to review the stupidity and wisdom of the time that spawned the world we have all grown up in. Cue 1945: The Reckoning.

Eight years after the war, and a month before her coronation, Queen Elizabeth II was “pleased” to appoint a new representative to her loyal (and other) subjects in Australia. William Slim was an ideal appointment for those times when Churchill and Menzies were in their pomp.

The head of the “forgotten army” in the Burma campaign, Slim — whose illustrious military career had included service with the West India Regiment and not one but two Gurkha Rifles units — held the highest rank attainable in the profession of professional killers: field marshal.

Well before the British Commonwealth evolved into a multicultural forum of equally sovereign states under Elizabeth’s tutelage — before most of its members had even achieved statehood — it took a military form, with all its members wearing the uniform of the British Fourteenth Army, led by then Lieutenant General Slim.

Likewise India, two generations before it would become an economic superpower, was the workshop of that embryonic Commonwealth. Author Phil Craig spells it out literally and alliteratively: “The empire needed clothes, chemicals and cement, parachutes and paint, machine guns, mortars and medicines, and by 1945 India was producing as much of all this as South Africa, New Zealand and Australia combined.”

While India, and those of her most active military leaders who aligned themselves with one or another of the Great Powers, are the main actors in this unflagging drama, Craig’s vision is as global as was the war they had joined. His kaleidoscopic approach combines viewpoints from various theatres of war: for a few pages we are immersed in Burma, then we are teleported to Borneo, Singapore and, as the conflict spreads, Tokyo, London, Yalta and Formosa.

But the roving eye is always drawn back to India, the inspired setting for Craig’s account of the clash between the globe’s mightiest nations from the viewpoint of the colonised. We see with clarity how the pawns in their Great Game of geopolitical chess become the agents of a postcolonial, postwar future as nations in their own right.

Gandhi’s lifelong pursuit of non-violence grabbed the world’s imagination, but on the subcontinent itself, as Craig points out, Subhas Chandra Bose, a fellow nationalist who took the path of armed engagement, remains equally famous eighty years later.

Bose, aka the warrior-prophet Netaji (“most respected leader”) to Gandhi’s Mahatma (“Great Spirit”), is commonly regarded at home and throughout the diaspora as a “freedom fighter” in contrast to Gandhi’s image of deep spirituality. British novelist Gerald Seymour has been credited with coining the phrase “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” and Craig shows how that principle works in the real world.

Bose, who like Gandhi had studied at Cambridge, took the path of active rather than passive resistance. The British, perceiving both men as endangering colonial rule, placed them under house arrest early in the war. Whereas Gandhi had appealed to Englanders’ declared attachment to “fair play,” Bose regarded John Bull as the immovable enemy of his people.

Both lived up to their images: passively resistant Gandhi wasted away, protesting injustice via hunger strikes; actively resistant Bose hastened away, escaping from his house in Calcutta before trekking 2300 kilometres to Kabul and seeking out the German Ambassador, who arranged his flight to Berlin.

To adapt an Arab truism, he took the enemy of his enemy for his friend. A false friend, as it turned out. In May 1942 “Bose met Adolf Hitler for the first and only time.” Hitler advised him that the situation wasn’t timely for an uprising in India because “German forces were not in a position to support it.”

As the kaleidoscope slowly turns, allowing the reader to concentrate on one facet at a time, Craig synthesises the lessons to be drawn from each theatre of war and each episode recounted.

Grand themes whose significance would extend far into the postwar future are identified and discussed. Perceptions of racial arrogance, of course, proved incendiary fuel for the anti-colonialists; but Craig also explains how the swift end of 350 years of English governance just two years after the war owed much to the ambivalence of the English themselves, and of their political parties, faced with the cost of maintaining an empire. The greatest gift that Craig, a British journalist whose famous television platforms included World in Action and Panorama, brings to this volume is the ability to see the view from opposing sides of the imperial divide.

At one point he notes, “Many British people are so in love with the ‘underdog’ version of the Second World War — Dunkirk, rationing, the Blitz and ‘the Few’ — that they fail to understand that much of the planet never once looked at their country in that way, and for good reason. Britain was more often seen as the over-dog…”

He sees that Japan’s rapid conquest of Southeast Asia proved how “Asian societies no longer needed outside or control to run a sophisticated state, build a modern military or create a world-class economy.” But his clear-sightedness is not one-eyed: never once does he understate the acute pitch of brutality inflicted by Japanese soldiers on prisoners of war from Changi to Sandakan.

Nor does he let the reader pretend that, when it comes to the capacity for evil, all the light in that most Manichean of conflicts was on one side while its foes were steeped in moral darkness. If racism today is classified as a question of acceptable and unacceptable speech, infinitely more eloquent is the test of actions.

The Bengal Famine of 1943 — one of the century’s great disasters yet overshadowed by the global power struggle — killed three million people (equivalent to nearly half the Australian population at that time). “However hard the authorities tried to help,” Craig observes, “and try many of them did, they would surely, inevitably, have done more had the food run short in Surrey, Manitoba, the Western Cape, New South Wales or North Island.” You can’t argue with that.

Marring this overwhelmingly absorbing read is a smattering of errors, the blame for which belongs in part to Craig’s editors. Most persistent is the misnaming of soldiers from the Malay Peninsula as Malaysians rather than Malayans: the Federation of Malaysia didn’t come into being until 1963.

Dehra Dun, India’s military and educational hub, appears as Deera Dun; and one of the lesser-known characters Craig introduces, English wartime nurse Angela Noblet, stationed on the Lopchu Tea Estate in Assam, simply could not have had “views of the magnificent, unconquered Everest in the distance.” Everest is more than 250 kilometres away; the peak you can see from there is the world’s third loftiest, Kanchenjunga, seventy kilometres due north.

More amusing, though failing to elicit the emotional response the author must have intended with the graphic term “pus-filled boots,” was how it turned up on the printed page as “puss-filled boots.”

Even if Craig’s book doesn’t dwell on the duality of his vision, it is baked into the text on nearly every page. West/East; democratic powers/autocracies; passive/active resisters. But even within the force field of active resisters there were two diodes, as it were: Bose, head of the Indian National Army, “the largest all-volunteer military force in history.” Opposing him, Kodandera Subayya “Timmy” Thimayya, who led the forces under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten, supreme commander of allied forces in Southeast Asia. Tellingly, when Timmy met Louis (yes, I know), it was at the British naval supremo’s invitation.

Apart from Craig’s ability to trace historical patterns by threading individual stories into a coherent and satisfying narrative, he brings one other great gift to his task, a gift honed in his TV incarnation — a highly developed visual sensibility. It is easy to imagine this book being turned into a box-office triumph.

Post-independence, “Timmy” became commander of the entire Indian Army, “the pinnacle of his life’s work.” As a parting gift to curious readers, the closing pages reveal the personal connection that explains why Craig was prompted to tell this epic story, with all its subplots. But no spoilers here… buy the book! •

1945: The Reckoning — War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World
By Phil Craig | Hodder & Stoughton | $34.99 | 380 pages 

The post Empire’s end appeared first on Inside Story.

The twenty-five-year-old Nolan was an unlikely soldier. There’s a grainy photograph of him taken just a couple of years earlier, in 1940, that perfectly captures his nonconformist nature. He’s sitting on a pier in St Kilda with his first wife, fellow artist Elizabeth Paterson, squinting suspiciously at the viewer, his unruly hair held back by a thick head band. Decades before the invention of rock and roll, he looks for all the world like guitarist Keith Richards. You have to wonder what staid Melbourne or the Australian army — or Paterson’s parents for that matter — thought of this unrepentant bohemian.

Nolan’s Wimmera interlude must have felt to the young artist like an unjust exile into a pit of irrelevance, but in some ways it was the making of him. Wherever he was stationed — Dimboola, Horsham, Nhill — he would set up a rudimentary studio and get to work. During this khaki sojourn he also had a lifeline to the outside world: his lover Sunday Reed.

Nolan had left Paterson and his young daughter Amelda in 1941 to take up with Reed — and her husband John Reed, to form probably Australia’s most famous ménage à trois. He eventually moved to the Reed’s property Heide, a small farm on Melbourne’s northeastern outskirts, where an informal artists’ colony flourished under their patronage. After the war, Nolan would paint his famous Kelly series on the dining table at Heide, often with Sunday by his side. By the late 1940s, however, the love triangle would fall to pieces. Nolan left and never returned.

But that was all in the future. During the war Nolan and Sunday were very much in love. She would post him sheets of Masonite and muslin-laid boards to paint on, and tins of Dulux lacquer and Ripolin enamel to paint with. Nolan, an autodidact with a love of public libraries, read voraciously, so Sunday also sent him books: Rimbaud, Kafka, Kierkegaard. On leave he would return to Heide; sometimes Sunday would visit him.

She also encouraged Nolan to paint the landscape around him. In the Wimmera, Nolan and his fellow conscripts laboured under a vast dome of blue sky, surrounded by flat fields of yellow wheat interlaced with interminable roads and railway lines. In the distance they could see ancient rocky outcrops worn down from what were once mountains. Nolan captured all this, and more, and developed rapidly as an artist.

And then he did something out of character: he applied to become an official war artist. In the archives of the Australian War Memorial you’ll find the letter of application he wrote to the man in charge of Australia’s war artists, a lieutenant-colonel named John Treloar. Pinned to it is a note that describes Nolan “as an extremist of the modern school.” He didn’t get the gig.

Treloar was a veteran of Gallipoli, where he had almost died of typhoid. Later in the war he worked closely with Charles Bean, the progenitor of the Anzac legend, in the Australian War Records Section, collecting documents and artefacts and commissioning artists for the memorial Bean had decided must be built. After the war, he became the second director of the AWM. The paintings Treloar wanted to adorn the walls of the memorial had to be factual, consoling and inspiring.

But imagine if Treloar had taken a punt on the young artist. Imagine if Nolan had been sent off to New Guinea with a haversack full of Ripolin and a melancholy kiss on the mouth from Sunday Reed. Imagine what Nolan may have taught us about Australia’s war in the Pacific.

In 1944, fearing he might be sent overseas to fight, Nolan went absent without leave. It seems he was willing to paint for Australia; but not to fight for it. On the run, he took up the pseudonym Robin Murray and, with the help of the Reeds, managed to avoid the authorities until 1948, when an amnesty allowed him to become Sidney Nolan again. While he was mythologising Ned Kelly in paint, Nolan himself had been an outlaw.

There is little in Nolan’s work during the war that is overtly about the war. The best-known are Latrine Sitters and Dream of the Latrine Sitter. The titles speak for themselves: they are the paintings of a young man resentful at having to suffer the depredations of army life. Neither painting is in the spirit of Anzac as Colonel Treloar would have understood it.

But one work stands out, mainly because Nolan would later return to the image again and again. Painted in 1942, Head of a Soldier shows a digger in a slouch hat with the staring eyes of a soul in the grip of post-traumatic stress disorder. Not surprisingly, it was used on the cover of a book called Psychiatric Aspects of Modern Warfare.

More than a decade later, in the late 1950s, Nolan would revisit the subject of war in a major series inspired by the story of Australia’s disastrous Gallipoli campaign. He worked on the project off-and-on for the next two decades and produced hundreds of images. It might be the best least-known work of Nolan’s fecund and celebrated career.

Nolan’s Soldiers (1959). Australian War Memorial

Unlike Colonel Treloar, Nolan wasn’t interested in historical accuracy; he wanted to get at something truthful and universal. Nolan’s Gallipoli series is full of arresting images. Diggers are sent twisting and turning by shell bursts. Shadowy figures fight to the death with their bare hands. Doomed men frolic in the Aegean. Drowned corpses bob and roll in the surf. The mad stare from Head of a Soldier is repeated many times on many faces. Though they are twentieth-century Australians, the subjects of these paintings could have been fighting side-by-side with Achilles at Troy.

In 1978 Nolan no doubt outraged the ghost of Colonel Treloar when he donated 252 pieces from the series to the Australian War Memorial. The extreme modernist deserter had made it inside the building. Today the collection — probably worth millions — lies safely in the AWM’s secure storerooms.

The story behind this donation, and the creation of the series itself, is a little-known chapter in Australia’s cultural history. At its heart is Nolan’s friendship with three other accomplished Australians: George Johnston, author of the Australian classic My Brother Jack; Johnston’s partner Charmian Clift, a writer and newspaper columnist; and Alan Moorehead, a war correspondent and non-fiction writer.

The quartet were all members of Australia’s Double War Generation. Born during, or just after, the first world war, their childhoods were dominated by the Great War and its aftermath, while their twenties and thirties were shaped by the Great Depression and the second world war.

Nolan might never have pursued his Gallipoli series without the influence of the other three. Or if he had, it may have been very different. What do you call it when painters and writers exchange ideas, and meet and talk and drink together? You call it the history of art.

Back in the 1920s an iconoclastic member of the student body at Scotch College endured his school’s annual Anzac Day ceremony with well-hidden ennui. Many years later, Alan Moorehead would write: “I think that we school children, in our secret hearts, became bored with all this as we got older… bored with the singing of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’… bored with the retired generals’ speeches, the crossed swords and the little glass box of medals hanging in the school hall, and the war paintings in the art galleries.”

This was blasphemy, and the young Moorehead knew it. Anything less than veneration for Australia’s “civic religion” — as the historian Ken Inglis dubbed Anzac — was deeply frowned upon at Scotch College. “Even now,” Moorehead would write as an adult, “I have the feeling that I am dragging a shameful secret out into the open.”

On this point, Moorehead was not exaggerating. As for so many other Australian families, Gallipoli had been a catastrophe for the Mooreheads. Alan’s uncle Frank had been killed in action during the famous landing; another uncle, Harold, had survived a Turkish shell blast but lost his right leg and right arm.

While Moorehead was keeping his renegade views on Anzac Day to himself, elsewhere in Melbourne two other young Australian boys were also growing up in the shadow of the Anzac legend. In Elsternwick George Johnston spent the war waiting for the return of his father John, who served in Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Johnson’s mother Minnie worked as a nurse, caring for maimed veterans.

Many of these damaged men stayed with the Johnston family during the war. One of them, Bert Thornton, who had lost a leg in France, eventually married George’s sister Jean. As they wore out, Bert’s obsolete prosthetic legs were discarded in a pile behind the hallway door. Johnston’s childhood home was a sort of living memorial to the horrors of the war.

In nearby St Kilda, Nolan’s childhood was also suffused in the Anzac legend. His father Sid enlisted in 1916 and became a military policeman. As a young boy Nolan remembers reading The Anzac Book, a collection of poems and drawings written and illustrated by the “Men of Anzac.” Its famous cover picture, drawn by the soldier artist David Crothers Barker, succinctly conveys the Anzac story that most Australians in 1916 would happily accept; it was all about heroic Australian Britons fighting for the British Empire under the Union Jack.

Inside the book, the young Nolan would also read the following jingoistic doggerel, “The Trojan War, 1915”:

Homeric wars are fought again.
By men who, like old Greeks can die,
Australian back-block heroes slain,
With Hector and Achilles lie.

For these three young boys, the place names of Gallipoli — Suvla Bay, Achi Baba, Chunuk Bair — were as familiar as the tram stops of Melbourne. As Nolan once explained: “You grew up with Anzac, not so much a fact of life: it was part of one’s existence.”

In 1926 Moorehead began a law degree at Melbourne University. In the middle of his final exam he was gripped by an epiphany that must have bewildered his parents: he didn’t want to be a lawyer after all. He put down his pen, got up from his desk, and left the exam room; then he caught a tram straight into town, went to the Herald and Weekly Times building, and asked for a job.

After a few years as a journalist, this impulsive young man became restless again. The world was heading towards disaster, and he wanted to report on it. Moorehead left Melbourne in 1936 to try his luck on Fleet Street. His mind was on the war to come, not on the dusty rituals that commemorated the past war. “I must admit,” he wrote later, “that soon after I left Australia… the whole elaborate Anzac legend vanished utterly from my mind.”

The second world war made Moorehead famous. Writing for the Daily Express, Britain’s largest-selling newspaper, he became one of the world’s most celebrated war reporters. He covered the Desert War in North Africa, the invasion of Italy, and the final defeat of Germany from the Normandy landings to the fall of Berlin. Clive James considered him “a far better reporter on combat than his friend Ernest Hemingway.”

An untitled Nolan painting of Gallipoli figures in battle amid shellfire (c. 1962). Australian War Memorial

After the war Moorehead became a regular contributor to New Yorker, as well as writing general histories and travel books that became international bestsellers. By the 1950s he was the most widely known Australian writer on earth.

Moorehead began work on a general history of the Gallipoli campaign in 1954. At first glance it seems a quixotic choice of subject. Weren’t there plenty of interesting stories to tell about the war that had just recently ended? Why would a story that so bored him as a child make for a good yarn now? But the more he researched the story, the more haunted he became by it.

Moorehead realised his research would be incomplete until he visited the scene of the disaster. In the northern winter of 1954, he travelled to the Imperial War Cemeteries at Gallipoli. As he was ferried across the Dardanelles by motorboat to the land of the dead on the other side, he became aware that the short trip was redolent in history and myth. It’s the stretch of water Leander is said to have swum to visit his lover Hero. It’s where Xerxes, the King of Persia, built a bridge of boats to enable his invasion of Greece in 480 BC. And not far away is the site of Troy, the battlefield of Greek legend recounted in Homer’s Iliad.

When he finally set foot on Gallipoli itself, Moorehead encountered emotions he’d not expected.

There is a sense of timelessness about the Gallipoli Peninsula. Nothing very much has happened there since 1915. After the last battles were fought, silence descended on the place, and although there have been occasional earthquakes, it remains pretty much as it has always been — a simple farming countryside dotted with a few poor villages and fishing communities… [E]verything evokes the past, even the local shepherds; as they stand in the fields, swathed in tentlike goatskin capes, they look like figures in a classical landscape.

As his guide, a Turkish officer, lectured the defenceless Australian about the intricacies of the campaign, the boyhood cynic now grown to manhood found himself swept up in a reverie.

While I was waiting for the interpreter to translate, I would look at the lizards scuttling… and, beyond them, at the silver cloud of the olive trees, the heather on the cliffs and the sea. There seemed to be some stereoscopic lucidity in the air that brought all these things into one plane, so that the fisherman’s caique with red sails drifting by in the bay appeared no further away than the lizard on the wall; one felt one could reach out and touch either of them.

The veteran war correspondent admits that his feelings towards Anzac had shifted decisively.

Not unnaturally, in this atmosphere I found that my interest in the campaign had advanced through one more stage, that it had developed from legend, through history, to the point where it almost seemed to have become a personal experience of my own, and the sense of boredom it had produced in me as a child was quite gone.

Moorehead is inspired to make one final stop on his tour. “We found the grave easily,” he writes, “a plaque in the ground no different from the others, but still moving to me, since it had my surname on it.” It is, of course, the gravestone of Frank McCrae Moorehead, his long-dead uncle.

Moorehead wrote about his Anzac pilgrimage in a piece for the New Yorker called “Return to a Legend” in April 1955. Note: that’s not “of” but “to.” Throughout most of 1955, he hunkered down on the Greek island of Spetses, south of Athens, to write his book.

As you might expect from a war reporter who filed copy from the frontline, Moorehead was a speedy writer. His Gallipoli, published in 1956, was a commercial and critical success. Moorehead didn’t know it at the time, but his writings on the failed campaign — particularly his New Yorker article — would plant a seed in the imaginations of three other Australians.

In November 1955 Nolan left grey-skied London for the sunlight and stimulation of the Greek island of Hydra. Much had happened to him since his days at Heide. He’d moved to Britain, where his career was floating ever upward on a rising tide of artistic and commercial success. Most importantly, though, he had married John Reed’s sister Cynthia, a former dancer who had become a travel writer. The marriage, seen as a betrayal at Heide, was the final blow that toppled Nolan’s relationship with the Reeds irretrievably into a ditch.

Living on the island were his friends and fellow expatriates, the novelist and journalist George Johnston and his partner Charmian Clift. Clift was the youngest of the quartet. Born in 1923, she joined the Australian Women’s Army Service during the war and became an anti-aircraft  gunner. Like many other women, the war offered her opportunities that might have been denied her in peacetime. She became an officer, a journalist, and began to fulfil her greatest ambition: to become a writer.

Clift and Johnston are perhaps the best-known of Australia’s literary couples. They had scandalised postwar Melbourne when Johnston, a respected journalist and, like Moorehead, a famous war reporter, left his wife and daughter for the much younger Clift. Both were romantics who pursued the writing life with little regard for the poverty and strains it inflicted on them.

After several years in London, where Johnston worked for Australian newspapers, the couple grew frustrated with their easeful, metropolitan lives. They wanted to write books and needed somewhere cheap to live. Nolan played a small part in their plans. In London he had introduced them to a friend of his who extolled the virtue of Hydra as an ideal retreat for writers. They arrived in 1954 with their two children, Shane and Martin, and two new typewriters. A third child, Jason, would be born on the island.

With only a handful of English-speakers on the island, the two Australian couples are soon seeing a lot of each other. All through that winter and spring, after a day of writing and painting, they would meet in the backroom of the Katsikas general store or their other favourite haunt, the Douskas Taverna. As Johnston later wrote, “When the retzina circled and wild winter buffeted at the shutters of the waterfront taverns, we would talk far into the small hours.”

Inspired by his reading of The Iliad and Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, which had been published to great acclaim in 1955, Nolan had started a series of works based on Greek mythology. But the project was frustrating him. “In a rare outburst of emotional passion,” Johnston recalled, he “flung his sketches down and cried, ‘You can’t paint it! You need metal and a forge; it’s got to clang!’”

By the end of his sojourn on Hydra, the hardworking Nolan had nevertheless created a significant body of work. In her book Peel Me a Lotus, Charmian Clift has a character based on Nolan — a painter she calls Henry Trevena — display his artistic haul from a season spent on the island:

In the studio Henry had spread out his winter’s work for inspection: five hundred small sketches in oil paint on the stiff white sheets of heavy art paper that he buys in bundles of a thousand at a time. The islands are there, the rocks, the goats, the spikes, the thorns — Greece actual. But most of the studies are concerned with Greek myth, browbeaten into tractability… The sketches are terribly impressive. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Henry might well turn out to be one of the really important artists.

At some point during Nolan’s stay on Hydra, Johnston showed the painter Moorehead’s New Yorker essay. Nolan was particularly intrigued by the connections Moorehead made between Greek myths and the Anzac story. On his trip to the Anzac peninsula, Moorehead had also visited the site of Troy, which is not far south of Gallipoli, on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles:

Just at first, it is difficult to evoke a picture of the past from the meandering diggings in the brown soil, and the vision of Helen of the lovely hair is lost somewhere in the rocks. But the Scamander still flows, the earth is the same earth that was kicked up by the chariots of Hector and Menelaus, and Mount Ida, looking detached and serene under its snow, cannot have altered at all.

For Nolan, Johnston later wrote, “It was like unlocking a door.” According to Nadia Wheatley, author of The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, “It would take Nolan another few years to get the ideas onto canvas, but this was the genesis of his Gallipoli series.”

All his career Nolan relied on travel to stimulate his imagination. He rarely painted en plein air but he never painted a landscape he hadn’t visited. To produce the final work, he made sketches or relied on his eidetic memory. In his later, financially comfortable years, he owned a Manor House on the Welsh border called The Rodd. “I’m very fond of it, except I don’t paint it,” he explained in a 1984 interview, “I sit down and look at the snow and paint Ayers Rock.”

As the Anzac story began to percolate in his mind, Nolan realised that he would have to make a pilgrimage to Gallipoli, just as Moorehead had done.

In late September 1957, visiting Clift and Johnston in Hydra, he noted in his diary: “Delighted to see George & Charm. In evening talk about Anzac Gallipoli and Alan Moorehead’s book. Confirms my decision to do Anzac paintings & go to the Dardanelles.” The next day he wrote: “Hydra. Swimming. Decide paint large picture of Australian soldiers swimming at Anzac Cove.”

Within a month Nolan is in Gallipoli. As he later recalled:

I stood in the place where the first Anzacs stood, looked across the straits to the site of ancient Troy, and felt that her history had stood still. Here and there I picked up a soldier’s water bottle or some other piece of discarded equipment… I found the place on top of the hill where the Anzac and Turkish trenches had been only yards apart and the whole expedition balanced between success and failure. I visualised the young, fresh faces of boys from the bush, knowing nothing of war or of faraway places, all individuals, and suddenly all the same — united and uniform in the dignity of a common destiny.

Before he left Turkey, Nolan sent a postcard of Troy to Clift and Johnson back on Hydra: “Here it is that famed spot. We took a taxi there. Got to Anzac today so the record is complete. Thought of you both. Love Sid.”

The paintings and drawings Nolan created in reaction to this intense period of conversation, research, contemplation and pilgrimage would be unlike any other art produced in response to the Anzac Legend.

Beaten down by money troubles and ill health, Johnston and Clift retreated to England in 1961. It was to be a sanctuary from their worries; instead, it was a disaster. They missed the Greek sun. They failed to find well-paid work. Their children weren’t happy in school. But there was one bright spot: Johnston got to visit Nolan at his house in the London suburb of Henley and for the first time saw some of the outcomes of those drunken late-night talks on Hydra. Then their old friend came through with some tangible help. He encouraged them to return to Hydra, and sent them an art book with £5 notes interleaved between the pages.

Once back in Hydra, Johnston began work on the book that would solve his family’s money problems and make his reputation. Nolan’s biggest gift to Johnston, it turned out, were those same late-night retzina soaked talks back in 1955–56. Just as Johnston inspired Nolan, the painter also inspired the writer. As Nadia Wheatley explains, “If Nolan saw a way to fuse two potent myths [Anzac and Troy] and present the old story in a new and Australian light, a door had also been nudged open for George Johnston.”

The discussions about Gallipoli on Hydra encouraged Johnston to write a semi-autobiographical novel that would become My Brother Jack. It tells the story of Johnston’s avatar, a character called David Meredith, from his childhood during the first world war to his adult life as a journalist. The novel is about many things — ambition, masculinity, betrayal — but at its heart is a theme that was new to Australian literature at the time: the disastrous impact of “shellshock” — or what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder — on returned servicemen and their families. When My Brother Jack was finally published in 1964, it struck a resonant chord with Australia’s Double War Generation.

As Nolan pursued his vision of Gallipoli, he finally met the man whose ideas kicked the project into motion. In January 1960 Nolan contacted Moorehead in London; a few months later they met for dinner. As the historians Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell note: “Nolan and Moorehead may not have met in the Aegean in 1955, but they were destined to become close friends.”

According to Nolan’s biographer Nancy Underhill, the friendship between Nolan and Moorehead led to an important “intellectual interchange” between the two men. Moorehead was prompted to write about the Burke and Wills expedition by Nolan’s series of paintings on the doomed explorers. He published Cooper’s Creek in 1963. Later, Nolan’s second attempt at painting a series about the duo was influenced in turn by Moorehead’s book.

In January 1964 the two men travelled together to Antarctica for eight days. While Moorehead worked on an article for the New Yorker, Nolan made sketches for what would become his Antarctica series.

Nolan’s Gallipoli series got its first dedicated showing in 1965, when 145 paintings and sketches were exhibited at the Qantas Gallery in Sydney to coincide with Anzac Day. As Nolan explained in an interview, the works had been bubbling around in his head for some time:

And that is how I came to paint the series. Not then and there, and not all at once. But after I had thought about it in places like Hydra, in the Greek Islands, and Egypt, and Kenya and Ethiopia, and Australia and Antarctica, and London. I let the paintings come along as they wanted to.

As Nolan once said about his artistic output: “five minutes in the making, five years in thinking.”

Nolan visited Clift and Johnston on Hydra for the last time in 1963 to discuss the cover art he was designing for My Brother Jack. Just as he once gave them money to return to the island, Nolan now encouraged them to return to Australia.

Life on Hydra was becoming increasingly difficult for the couple: Johnston’s health was deteriorating due to tuberculosis; both were drinking heavily; Clift had become involved in extramarital affairs. With the imminent success of Johnston’s new novel, it might have been their best — and last — chance to return home. Nolan sealed his argument by burning some eucalyptus in an impromptu smoking ceremony: “He put a match to them and burned them and held them under our noses,” Clift later wrote, “and I was ready to cry with longing for the spiky wild strange grey bush, tunnelled with harshness and silence.”

Johnston and Clift returned to Australia with their children in 1964. To Johnston’s delight and relief, My Brother Jack was quickly and widely lauded as a classic of Australian literature, winning that year’s Miles Franklin Award. Two years later it was made into an ABC TV drama with a script by Clift. Johnston went on to write two more books in a trilogy about his alter ego, David Meredith: Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), which also won the Miles Franklin Award and then, posthumously, the unfinished A Cartload of Clay (1971).

In a diary entry written in September 1987, Nolan jotted down the following: “Remember that Alan Moorehead was going to write a book on the sacred lotus. Also, on the Sahara. Also, on the whalers who went from Nantucket to Tahiti, Antarctic, Australia, Peking: returning three years later to their wives.” If you know the context, it is a poignant memory of his old friend.

Moorehead had suffered a stroke in December 1966 that left him unable to write or speak with any skill for the rest of his life. For the seventeen years until his death in September 1983 — four years to the month before Nolan’s diary entry — he was pretty much incapable of working.

What Nolan was remembering, of course, was all the work Moorehead might have produced if he’d still been able to bang out a sentence on a typewriter. In July 1979, to compound the tragedy, Moorehead survived a car accident that killed his wife and primary carer, the journalist Lucy Milner.  The purgatory of this energetic and vital man’s last years is hard to imagine.

In 1967 the Art Gallery of NSW held a major retrospective of Nolan’s work. He and Cynthia returned to Australia to attend the exhibition, and Nolan began work on a biographical documentary for the ABC called This Dreaming, Spinning Thing. The ABC filmed Nolan as he travelled around the country, revisiting places he’d lived and worked. As an old friend, Johnston was commissioned to accompany Nolan to conduct interviews and write the narration. Ill-health meant that Clift stepped in and conducted some of the interviews with Nolan.

The film’s director, Storry Walton, who also produced the 1964 TV dramatisation of My Brother Jack, tells me that the three old friends worked happily together on the project. “George’s script,” he says, “was respectful, reverent of [Nolan’s] talent and, I think, infused with his affection for the man, and the wonder for the kind of creative spirit in Nolan that George could never ever quite understand.”

When Charmian interviewed Sid for the film — out in the red centre, atop one of Kata Tjuta’s domed rocks — the two chatted like old mates who understood each other very well. “I never saw a hint of any bitterness or strain between them,” says Walton. “But it’s not to say that it didn’t exist. I saw the three of them for a sliver of time, when they were all bound together on a project.”

Under the surface, however, there is evidence that all was not well. As Nadia Wheatley explains: “Unfortunately, in all the planning, no one had realised that Sid’s affection for George — and to some extent Charmian — had considerably waned since the Hydra winter of 1955–56. With this film… would come the ending of the old relationship — at least from Nolan’s side.”

Also working on the project was a young Sue Milliken. A successful producer of TV and films, including the recent documentary Charmian Clift: Life Burns High, Milliken was back then a twenty-five-year-old production secretary at the ABC. She got to know the three quite well. “They all loved to talk,” she tells me, “and they were all charming.”

But Milliken also remembers that Cynthia Nolan, who she also got to know at this time, might have been the reason for the waning friendship. One night when Nolan was away filming, the two women had dinner together, and Cynthia confided to Milliken that she didn’t much like how Clift had portrayed a character based on her in Peel Me a Lotus. Ursula Trevena, the wife of the painter Henry Trevena, is described, for example, as “worn out” with a “ravaged” face, who “yawns and yawns as she hunches down in her coat and broods.”

Whatever the reasons, the relationship between Clift and Johnstone and the Nolans seems to have cooled somewhat by 1967.

Clift and Johnston’s relationship was also fraying and becoming more volatile. In July 1969, just before Johnston published Clean Straw for Nothing, Clift took a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Friends would reveal afterwards that Clift’s depression was partly generated by the book’s fictional depiction of her extramarital affairs during the Hydra years. After her death, Sue Milliken remembered something Clift once said to her: “Everyone says ‘poor old George’. No one ever says, ‘poor old Charm’.”

A year later, in July 1970, George Johnston died from the tuberculosis that had plagued him since living in Greece for many years on the borderline of poverty.

Nolan was not spared by tragedy either. In November 1976, Cynthia, his wife of twenty-eight years, was found dead in a room at London’s Regent Place Hotel — also from an overdose of sleeping pills. Nolan was deeply shocked. He professed to have had no idea about her mental state. Nor would he find any explanation in a farewell telegram she sent to him shortly before taking her own life. It declared cryptically: “Off to the Orkneys in small stages.”

So that’s the story of the series’ creation, but why did Nolan donate his Gallipoli paintings and sketches to the AWM?

In the confusion of the Anzac landing, many diggers died without ever reaching the shore. As they leapt over the gunwales of their steel lifeboats, weighed down by heavy boots and packs, they sunk into the depths, and never rose again.

Nolan’s Gallipoli Series contains many images of soldiers drowned in Anzac Cove. Nolan’s obsession with death by drowning goes back at least to his time on Hydra. The ever-observant Clift noticed that he was fixated by the story of Icarus, the boy who flies too close to the sun, and falls into the sea and drowns.

“Icarus occurs again and again,” Clift wrote, “The same haunting naked figure soars above fanged rocks and wide dark seas, sometimes just rising from the ground, sometimes a speck floating high against a burning ball of the sun, frail as a dragonfly.”

The myth of the drowned boy was always a key point of connection between Clift and Nolan. She owned a small Nolan painting of Icarus that for many years hung on the wall in her house on Hydra. On the island she also invented a parlour game based on the myth. She would divide people into Daedalus types (the careful engineer) and Icarus types (high-flyers and risktakers). George and Cynthia Nolan were Daedalus types; Charmian and Sid were born of Icarus. Nolan even turned the Icarus story into a sort of artists’ battle cry, urging his friends, in the face of rejection slips and the fear of failure, to “Fly then! Bloody well soar, why don’t you?”

Nolan was obviously engrossed by the Icarus story, but why did he transfer a version of this image from Greek myth into his Gallipoli series? He would have known that many Australians were drowned at Anzac — so the image is based on historical fact. But as we know, trifling facts were of limited interest to Nolan.

Back in 1944 when Nolan went AWOL, his patriotic parents must have been horrified and embarrassed by their son’s behaviour. Nolan claimed later that his father — the former military policeman — even threatened to tie his legs to a chair and jump on him; a punishment meted out to deserters during the first world war.

Like George Johnston, Nolan had a brother. Raymond Nolan, known in the family as Boy, was seven years his junior. He had been born in 1924, just a few months after the Australian champion swimmer Andrew “Boy” Charlton won gold at the Paris Olympics. To the pride of his parents, the younger Nolan turned eighteen in 1942 and promptly enlisted, becoming a sapper in the 15th Small Ship Company, and serving in the South Pacific.

On 20 July 1945, with the war almost over, Raymond was drowned when he slipped and fell from a boat into the harbour at Cooktown. A few weeks later, on 6 August, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the war was effectively over.

Nolan believed that Raymond’s death shortened his father’s life. It must have also exacerbated the distress both his parents felt about their eldest son’s dereliction of duty.

Nolan’s Gallipoli, panel 1 (1963). Australian War Memorial

The largest of Nolan’s works held by the AWM is a diptych simply called Gallipoli that features several ghostly figures struggling in water. It’s been described as “an aquatic vision of hell” and directly references Raymond Nolan and his father Sid. On the left-hand side of the first panel (above) is a portrait of the father and his son. Is the older man trying to save Boy? Or is Boy trying to protect his father?

When Nolan donated the Gallipoli series to the AWM back in 1978, he did so in the name of his brother Raymond. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Anzac Iliad appeared first on Inside Story.

But, as with the retreat from Gallipoli at the end of  1915, ignominious defeat would soon be dressed in the new livery of patriotic pride. The Australians had fought with distinction as the Japanese swept down the Malay Peninsula, their gallantry evident in a series of tenacious engagements that had briefly slowed the inexorable advance. And, as with the Dardanelles campaign, it soon became lore that weak British leadership and inadequate military support was to blame for failure.

The suffering over the following years as more than 18,000 Australian prisoners of war were subjected to the horrors of Changi, the Thai–Burma Railway, Sandakan and countless other slave labour camps — more than 8000 of them dying in captivity — would further reinforce the comforting national belief in the ill-fated but untarnished valour of our troops in Southeast Asia.

That reverently curated mythology was rudely challenged with the release three decades ago of previously secret British wartime records damning the behaviour of Australian troops in the final days before and after the surrender in Singapore. It has now been punctured with the publication of a new book that not only reinforces the British allegations but concludes that the official Australian history of the war, by design or omission, failed to include a truthful accounting of those events.

In June 1942, General Archibald Wavell, the allied commander-in-chief for the Southwest Pacific, sent an incendiary report from his headquarters in Delhi to British prime minister Winston Churchill and the war cabinet. The Australian troops had “gone to pieces,” it claimed: “For the fall of Singapore itself, the Australians are held responsible.”

Based on interviews with about fifty servicemen, officials and civilians, the report alleged there were mass desertions by Australian troops well before the official surrender was declared and that lawless Australian troops had fought with civilians to gain access to boats to flee the island in defiance of final orders to lay down their arms to the Japanese.

The report was released in 1993 by the British government. Two years later, British historian Peter Elphick went further, claiming that more than 8000 Australian troops had deserted — close to half the entire Australian force — and that some of them had been involved in looting, rape and murder. In his book Singapore: The Pregnable Fortress, Elphick claimed the mass desertion of the Australians, as well as by many British and Indian troops, represented “the highest incidence of desertion from any army, anywhere at any time.”

The initial release of the Wavell report drew an indignant response from then Australian prime minister Paul Keating, who said attempts to blame young Australian soldiers for “the British Empire’s most humiliating debacle” were “beyond the bounds of decency and credibility.”

While conceding that the allegations, if true, would bring discredit on the men and their country, and that it was important not to hide from uncomfortable historical truths, Wavell’s report focused on the fact that Singapore’s defences were inadequate and the British government knew it.

“It was certainly not Australian troops, or British troops, but British policy which led to the fall of Singapore,” Keating said. “It is unlikely that the other allegations will ever be satisfactorily tested. But blaming young soldiers for the failures of politicians and generals will not find much support in this or any other country.”

He went on: “Whatever the alleged behaviour of individual soldiers in the last days of Singapore, the fact remains that Australian, British and other Commonwealth troops were placed in an impossible position. Overwhelmingly they served with courage and distinction in appalling circumstances not of their making.”

Peter Elphick conceded that the Allied troops had suffered from poor morale from the start of the campaign that grew steadily worse after the Japanese landed on the northeast coast of Malaya and rapidly advanced down the peninsula towards Singapore. “The lack of air cover, the absence of tanks and the shortage of anti-tank guns meant that by the time Northern Jahore was reached the situation was probably irretrievable unless we could have sent a fleet and more aircraft.”

But Elphick supported Wavell’s claims that the mass Australian desertions made it impossible to avert surrender and force the Japanese into retreat. “Wavell felt that if the island could have held out for six weeks he could have brought in air reinforcements,” he argued. “If the desertions hadn’t been on such a large scale, I believe the garrison would not only have resisted longer but would have been capable, even as late as the final day, of launching a counter attack.”

A controversy that has since subsided into the corridors  of academic debate is set to be reignited with the publication of the first biography of the general editor of Australia’s official history of the Second World War — Gavin Long, the highly regarded successor and protege of Australia’s fabled Great War official historian, Charles Bean.

In Great at Heart, published this month, Garry Hills offers a generous and admiring account of the life and work of Long, who achieved distinction as a war correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald in Europe, North Africa and New Guinea before being selected by the Curtin government, on Bean’s recommendation, to oversee the vast official history project. But he is sharply at odds with the hero of his narrative on the matter of the conduct of Australian soldiers during the fall of Singapore.

Hills writes that many documents that informed Peter Elphick’s conclusions about the magnitude of the desertions and the misconduct of Australian troops were available to but ignored by both the British and Australian official historians in the early 1950s — not to mention the many witnesses to the events who might have been interviewed but were not.

“The question at hand is whether a full and accurate depiction of the shameful episode is evident in the official history,” says Hills. “Clearly it is not.”

When the volume of the history dealing with the fighting in Southeast Asia was first published in 1957, it gave barely a hint of impropriety in the conduct of Australian troops in the dying days of Singapore. “The Japanese Thrust” carried the byline of Lionel Wigmore, a British-born Sydney journalist who had served as a media officer with the Australian forces in Singapore before being evacuated to Java a few days before the island’s capture.

Wigmore’s volume alludes briefly to misconduct before setting off on an elaborate defence of the motives of the men faced with imminent capture by the Japanese and arguing that a fine line distinguished escapers and deserters: “The behaviour of the escapers varied greatly. Some, generally regarded as being among the deserters, including Australians, blackened the reputation of their fellow countrymen and prejudiced the chances of those who followed.”

But the only detail of such reputation-blackening conduct is a single sentence in a footnote that refers to an unnamed Dutch police inspector who had hosted a party of twelve Australian soldiers and “found upon returning from absence on duty that his house had been ransacked and food, bedding and parts of his dress uniform taken.”

Wigmore argues strongly — perhaps in anticipation of future controversy — that the dividing line between desertions and escapes was in some instances indefinite. He points out, not unreasonably, that a report that a ceasefire was to take effect from 4.30pm on 15 February 1942 had gained wide circulation: “Many acted on it in good faith. Some, as the plight of the city worsened, consciously deserted. Once the fighting had ceased, others felt free to get away if they could.”

Garry Hills is scathing about what he describes as Wigmore’s attempts to mitigate the culpability by briefly referring to “odious actions and then immediately offering a psychological rationale” for them: “The reader is presented with a glimpse of the stark facts about the shambles that the Australian soldiers lived through that day, but… remains unenlightened about the extent of the unconscionable behaviour.”

While “The Japanese Thrust” was Wigmore’s work, Garry Hills is unsparing about its implications for Gavin Long’s reputation as general editor of the full history: “Long had such a close and active involvement in the project that he is clearly implicated in any editorial failures.”

Hills notes that in 1956 the Australian chief of staff in Malaya, Colonel Jim Thyer, wrote to Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, the allied commander in Singapore who stayed to embody the humiliation of surrender and spent three and a half years as a Japanese POW (unlike the most famous Australian escaper/deserter, Major General Gordon Bennett, who defied Percival, abandoned his troops and made it home to Australia). Thyer declared that any watering down of the official history did not worry him because “a discerning person” would be able to read between the lines.

“Wavell claimed his report to Churchill was ‘fair and accurate’,” Hills writes. “Is the Australian history fair and accurate?” •

The post The fall of the myth of Singapore appeared first on Inside Story.

Covering an area the size of South Korea, these five annexed Ukrainian provinces — victims of the world’s biggest land grab since the Second World War — have been subjected to a brutal occupation. Rather than maintaining a temporary wartime occupation, Russia is attempting to absorb them in perpetuity and wipe out any evidence of Ukrainian identity.

While perhaps a dozen books have been published on the invasion, English political scientist David Lewis’s Occupation: Russian Rule in South-Eastern Ukraine is the first to focus solely on the takeover. He does so with great thoroughness and in chilling detail, explaining the systematic yet chaotic, thuggish and corrupt nature of the occupation. The resulting picture mixes together Hitler’s Reichskommissariat Ukraine, Orwell’s 1984, Puzo’s The Godfather and Russian satirists like Gogol and Voinovich. Ukrainian activists have justly labelled the regime a “silent terror,” akin to living in an open-air gulag.

The occupied territories became the main target of the invasion after Ukrainian forces repelled the early assault on Kyiv. Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson form a crucial land bridge between Russia and Vladimir Putin’s prized possession, Crimea, captured and annexed in 2014. Given its solid minority of ethnic Russians — perhaps one in four residents — this region was more vulnerable to Russian occupation than other parts of Ukraine, although Lewis underlines the extent to which the population had hybrid identities: by 2017, polls showed that only one in twenty residents considered themselves “only Russian” as opposed to both Russian and Ukrainian.

The nature and scale of the Russian occupation has barely been covered by mainstream media. No respectable international news organisations have been allowed to work there, and nor have UN or other international agencies and NGOs. The number of Ukrainian civilian dead, mostly in the early months of the war, could be twice as high as in Gaza, but is impossible to verify. In a world of “if it bleeds, it leads,” footage of intrepid journalists in frontline trenches or the wreckage of bombed buildings is much more likely to be screened than interviews with people who have been tortured or had their businesses expropriated.

Analyses of the Russian-occupied territories often rely on surreptitious phone interviews, messages from residents remaining in these heavily censored zones or testimony from Ukrainians who have fled the area. By necessity, they also draw on Kremlin-friendly Russian news and social media sites and Russian government agencies, as well as outstanding work by independent Ukrainian and Russian journalists and investigators. The UN has issued major reports through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and its rapporteur on torture (Australian Alice Edwards), as have Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other non-government agencies.

Lewis himself has gathered a mountain of meticulously documented evidence from Russian and Ukrainian sources, including interviews with Ukrainians, that reinforces the broader conclusions of such reports. He focuses on four main tools the occupation regime uses to make Russian control permanent: the legal-administrative framework; violence; propaganda and indoctrination; and economic levers, expropriation and theft.

Despite the meticulous crafting, the carapace of legality the Kremlin created around the annexations and occupation was patently thin. Although it occupies none of them entirely, Russia formally incorporated the four provinces of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk in September 2022 (much of the latter two had been under de facto Russian control since 2014). This was no simple declaration of annexation but an elaborately concocted process of sham referendums in each region, followed by requests from these newly “independent” entities to join the Russian Federation. The Russian parliament then graciously considered and approved their accession.

All this was executed over a matter of days, with “yes” votes as high as the Donetsk region’s 99.9 per cent (on a 97.5 per cent turnout), surpassing even Soviet election figures at their most implausible. Despite the rigging, the authorities felt obliged to send polling officials, accompanied by soldiers, to people’s homes to encourage the appearance of a solid turnout. Ignored was the fact that up to half the prewar population — up to four million people — had fled in the wake of the invasion and couldn’t or wouldn’t return to vote. Surveys prior to 2022 had shown an overwhelming majority of people in southeastern Ukraine — around 70 per cent — rejected any unification with Russia.

After the “accession” of the annexed territories, Russia introduced the full gamut of legislative and administrative machinery: laws, ministries, agencies, local government, currency, banking, police, social services and passports. Ukrainians in the occupied zones can’t access healthcare, pensions or other benefits and services without accepting Russian passports and citizenship, which entails an oath of loyalty. Access to government services more broadly is weaponised to ensure political and social control.

All these measures, it should be stressed, are a grotesque violation of international law on belligerent occupation. The Fourth Geneva Convention and customary international law oblige an occupying power not to interfere in local laws, customs and governance unless there is a pressing security need. Russia hasn’t made the slightest pretence of compliance.

The whole occupation and assimilation enterprise was overseen by Russian security forces, notably the FSB internal security police, and ultimately supervised by Putin’s all-powerful presidential administration. The new regional and local administrations drafted in or recruited many officials from Russia proper, though the regime also relies on locals to staff many positions.

Some of those locals took roles in the new bureaucracy because they were ethnically Russian or pro-Russian, but the main drivers of collaboration were new career prospects, ambition, higher salaries and resentment at the Ukrainian political class that had ousted or thwarted them. Others took jobs because they had few alternatives, saw them as politically neutral, or were coerced.

The occupation unfolded somewhat chaotically because parts of the Russian system knew nothing of the tightly held plans for invasion. Its overall effectiveness drew on experience and methods developed in other occupations: the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe after the Second World War and, more recently, the occupations of Afghanistan, Chechnya, Crimea and parts of Syria. Those conflicts, as well as the Stalinist system, were also laboratories for developing a military-security culture that emphasises extreme violence and a disregard for legal rules.

More publicised than most aspects of occupation has been Russia’s use of violence to enforce control. But its extent is still widely unappreciated. Investigators identified well over one hundred centres where Russian security forces have tortured Ukrainians who might oppose the new regime, including politicians, officials, civic activists, journalists, police, military veterans, and priests or members of churches not aligned with Moscow (notably the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and various Protestant groups). One investigation found that more than eight in every ten survivors of Russian captivity reported having been subjected to severe torture.

Common among the various techniques used were electric shocks (reported by nearly two-thirds of survivors), often using old field telephones with a manual crank to generate a shock. Victims relate the use of variants nicknamed “the phone call to Zelensky” (applied to the genitalia) and “the call to Biden” (attached to the anus).

Beatings and mock executions, rape and other sexual violence, extra-judicial killings, abductions and disappearances have all been widespread, along with forced migration and the deportation of children taken from orphanages and state boarding schools or because they had simply become separated from parents. Ukraine has listed more than 61,000 people as missing from the region since 2022, many suspected to have been imprisoned in Russia or murdered.

Precise numbers are still unclear in most categories. Ukrainian investigators recorded more than 108,000 war crimes by Russian forces by September 2023 alone. The International Criminal Court indicted Putin for war crimes over the deportations of children. The ICC or a Nuremberg-like tribunal would be kept busy for decades if every credible allegation was prosecuted and evidence was available.

Russia also embarked on what Lewis calls a “cognitive occupation” aimed at transforming the consciousness of people living under Russian rule and obliterating the Ukrainian past. Media, internet and phone communications are tightly managed, and access to anything but Russian networks and channels is blocked as far as possible.

Russification of the education system includes abolishing tuition in Ukrainian language (which had been standard) and using history lessons as a form of indoctrination. The latter extol Russian greatness while eschewing any delving into darker aspects of the Soviet and Tsarist past, and inculcate the Kremlin’s line that Ukraine isn’t a real country. Teachers have been sent on retraining courses where are told the main global enemies are the “Anglo-Saxons.” Lists of books banned from libraries include any literature “propagandising European gender values,” an ironic echo of contentious decisions being made in some American towns and states.

Aside from new history textbooks, new courses, and campaigns using film, television and theatre, Russia deployed multimedia exhibitions in museums and “history parks.” Opening one exhibition, the head of the history parks organisation declared: “We are defending historical truth and returning the good name to Peter’s, Catherine’s, Alexander’s, and Nicholas’s victories on this primordially Russian land.”

Russian nationalists do indeed reimagine southeastern Ukraine as the province of Novorossiya (New Russia) forged by Catherine the Great and her successors. But while much of the region was newly settled and developed agriculturally and industrially by the Russians, and while it had a very mixed population, Novorossiya was nonetheless largely Ukrainian in ethnic composition.

Wiping out traces of Ukrainian identity includes destroying monuments, erasing symbols and restoring former Soviet names to places and streets that had been renamed for Ukrainians in the 1990s post-Soviet “decommunisation” campaign. A plethora of Karl Marx Squares and Lenin Streets has reappeared, despite the fact that Marx would turn in his grave at being linked to Putin’s crony capitalist regime. The renaming is made even more absurd by the fact that Putin himself has blamed Lenin and the Bolsheviks for creating an artificial Ukrainian republic in the USSR. But why worry about details when the aim is simply to wipe out traces of Ukraine?

Ukrainian artworks and cultural items are being removed wholesale from museums and galleries (10,000 from Kherson alone). And Moscow has also set about “recoding” Ukrainian youth to be loyal young Russians. The insidiousness ideological control is exemplified by the sophisticated surveillance of teenagers’ mobile phones and use of the internet by organisations with catchy Orwellian titles like the Centre for the Study and Network Monitoring of the Youth Environment, or TsISM.

Lewis elucidates the extraordinary extent to which occupation authorities, security agencies and their cronies have deployed expropriation, dubious legal mechanisms and straight coercion to steal a vast number of Ukrainian businesses, properties and dwelling. Economic levers — pensions, bank accounts, salaries, contracts — are also being used to reward loyalty and punish rebellion.

A favourite trick has been to give a short deadline, a matter of days, for owners who have fled the fighting to claim a business or an apartment announced as “abandoned.” If they can’t meet that absurd deadline their property is expropriated. Owners rarely comply in time, or are even aware of the need to comply. The spoils are often given to cronies of local politicians or officials, no doubt accompanied by kickbacks. By the end of 2022 alone, some 30,000 Ukrainian legal entities had been re-registered in the Russian corporate register. Nearly all these forms of expropriation are, again, clear violations of the Geneva Conventions.

In the early stages of the occupation, large amounts of property were plundered by Russian soldiers with virtual impunity. Other looting was clearly organised by the military and security agencies: Ukrainian company Metinvest, for instance, claims that Russian groups stole as much as US$600 million worth of steel and other products from its metallurgical plants. At lower levels, traditional mafia tactics — kidnap for ransom, shakedowns and protection rackets — were rife, but in this case perpetrated by agents of the Russian state.

The disposal of stolen mines, metal plants, grain exporters and other big businesses came under Moscow’s purview. The hierarchy of entitlement flows from dons in the Kremlin to local lieutenants (or Gauleiters as Ukrainians have dubbed them) on to capos and enforcers in the FSB. Occupation teases out in detail the crony-capitalist networks prevalent in the newly captured territory.

Russia’s construction ministry oversees a large program of rebuilding and renewal works in cities like Mariupol, which was largely destroyed or damaged in the first months of the invasion. The rapid rebuilding has been very effective, if not efficient, in building new housing and infrastructure, notwithstanding all the skimming, milking and underhand dealing. But many residents who lost their apartments in the bombing and fighting are unable either to access or afford new ones, which are often creamed off by wheeler-dealers and sold to investors or to Russian buyers attracted by the idea of an apartment by the Azov Sea ($100,000 for a two-bedder, just fifteen minutes’ walk from the water, anyone?).

As well as exploring those dimensions of occupation, Lewis succinctly explains the background to the invasion and why, beyond geographic proximity and the land bridge to Crimea, southeastern Ukraine became the frontline. Its roots are a complex nexus of geopolitics, Russian imperialism, the Kremlin’s fear of democratic “colour revolutions” in neighbouring states, and legacies of Russian colonialisation and Soviet development.

A key geopolitical element was Russian leaders’ resentment at losing global status and empire, compounded by perceived slights over issues like Kosovo, Iraq and Libya. Less important was the oft-touted threat posed by NATO expansion (which Russia had already rendered moot by 2022 thanks to its occupation of Crimea and the Donbas). The imperialist and ethnocidal nature of the annexations and forced assimilation into Russia certainly makes a mockery of claims that Putin invaded primarily because of the NATO threat.

Ukraine seems to have little prospect of pushing back Russian lines significantly in the short term. Sabotage and assassinations have inflicted some damage on the occupation and its personnel: using social media postings, one scholar calculated that seventy-three Russian soldiers, police officers and officials were killed by partisan movements in just one two-month period. But resistance doesn’t appear to have caused insuperable problems for the Russians.

Lewis highlights the challenges of unscrambling the omelette the longer the occupation continues. In the unlikely event of reclaiming control over these territories, what would the future be for those who have collaborated with the occupying power? Many of the millions of potential returnees who fled war and Russian occupation would feel aggrieved by those who remained and how they behaved. If the land isn’t recaptured, will Ukrainians have a right of return? What kind of anger and violence will be stored up for the future towards Russia?

Recognising Russia’s annexations in any peace talks would sabotage the international consensus that territorial aggression and conquest is inadmissible, a view that has prevailed, almost uniformly, since the Second World War. But Donald Trump and his camp seem determined to pressure Ukraine into territorial concessions of some kind. They are less clear about whether this means ceding sovereignty over some or all captured land, or freezing the conflict without recognising Russian sovereignty and leaving their fate to be decided sometime in the future.

Parallels with Cold War Germany and Korea, sometimes mooted as models for postponing an ultimate resolution, are grievously misguided. Divided along ideological and military lines, these countries and nations nevertheless remained German or Korean on both sides. In Ukraine this would mean consolidating the absorption of one large part of Ukraine into Russia — not just its land, but its people and nationhood.

Some experts argue that the invasion and occupation meets the definition of genocide. It can certainly be described as an ethnocide. Are US or other leaders signing up to consecrate that? It is hard to see how even a freezing of the conflict, with a final resolution left in abeyance, could be credible unless (a) the annexations are legally revoked by Russia and (b) international organisations and observers are allowed in to encourage a modicum of compliance with international law.

Lewis deftly explores the nuances of identity, motivation and loyalty for people in the occupied zone and the challenges they face. Occupation’s themes are expounded not with a polemical sledgehammer but through meticulous attention to detail and analytical rigour. Nor does it play down the flaws in Ukraine’s policies and actions.

Occupation is a vital source document and framework for understanding what has occurred in Ukraine, although it may only represent the start of the process of unearthing the full story. As Lewis concludes, his and similar accounts may one day contribute to a process of rebuilding and reconciliation within Ukraine and between Ukraine and Russia. “But that will only happen,” he writes, “if the recording of historical facts, the painstaking work by war crimes investigators and the accounts by witnesses of these traumatic events eventually produce some form of justice and a reckoning.” •

Occupation: Russian Rule in South-Eastern Ukraine
By David Lewis | Hurst | £25 | 248 pages

The post Silent terror appeared first on Inside Story.

Having created the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, our own overseas spy service, the good chaps set about serving the nation while breaking the laws of other nations. The dichotomy was crammed into a single sharp sentence by one of the architects of Australia’s intelligence community, Justice Robert Hope: “In all cases, espionage is illegal and the clandestine service’s job is to break those laws without being caught.” The tensions in the task have seen three ASIS leaders sacked since operations began in 1952.

The spy service’s troubled early life meant it risked being strangled before maturity. Several Australian Britons did good-chap duty cementing its existence, especially the external affairs minister, Dick Casey, and the third ASIS director-general from 1960 to 1968, Walter “Bill” Cawthorn.

Cawthorn had an extraordinary life as an Australian Briton. A digger at Gallipoli, he joined the British army and reached the rank of major-general, ran intelligence for four countries (Britain, India, Pakistan and Australia) and served as an Australian ambassador. Cawthorn’s life as an “intelligencer” — bringer of news, secret agent, spy — is the lens used by journalist, writer and ex-diplomat Alan Fewster in his account of the life, Intelligencer: The Secret World of Walter Cawthorn, Australian Spymaster.

Born in Melbourne in 1896, Cawthorn was a junior cadet instructor, training as a teacher, when war broke out in 1914. After he joined the Australian Imperial Force he was quickly promoted to sergeant, sailing for Egypt in May 1915 and then embarking in September for Anzac Cove. Cawthorn’s diary describes his introduction to Gallipoli:

Long before we saw any sight of land, we could see searchlights flashing & the occasional flash of a gun. As we got close in we could see the hospital ships — all lit with green lights, with a big red cross and also a big warship in the distance. It was about 12 midnight when we dropped anchor and we could hear the bullets going. We transferred to a big barge lashed to a tug at about 2 a.m. and did not get on to land till about 4 a.m. A more awful 2 hours I never spent — weighed down with equipment — about 500 men where there was only room for 200, made the discomfort simply terrible. The barge rocked forward very much so that it was only by the exercise of great determination that I was not sick.

Fewster’s chapter on Gallipoli is a vivid account of the birth of an Australian military legend through the eyes of one soldier. After an afternoon swim on his first day, Cawthorn walked the beach to see for himself all the work done since the first Australians had landed five months before: “Whole hills had been terraced and cleared of shrub. And roads made spiral-wise up the slopes. No wonder those that are left are just about tired to death.”

Cawthorn’s battlefield home was a ready-made dugout caused by a Turkish shell: “It has a sheet of tin roofing over the top and it’s quite roomy.” He dreaded having to lead a burial party into no-man’s land between the trenches at Lone Pine: “You have to crawl out on your hands and knees and try to locate the dead, then secure their disks or pocketbook, scrape a hole and bury them — all in perfect silence.”

Death came without warning. A man was shot through the head while looking over the parapet of the trench one afternoon. “A shell burst and he looked over to see the dust fly, when a sniper got him,” wrote Cawthorn. “Made us all feel rather gloomy for a while, but the occurrence was soon forgotten. It is awful to see a man killed in this way, but we are all used to it now, and the compassion soon dies away.” Despite some superiors’ worries about his youth, the nineteen-year-old earned a battlefield commission as a lieutenant.

After the evacuation from Anzac Cove, Cawthorn’s battalion deployed to the Western Front. In June 1916, a fortnight after his twentieth birthday, the young soldier was invalided to London after suffering a gunshot wound to his abdomen. Cawthorn missed his battalion’s first major action at Pozieres, during which twenty-seven officers and 656 other ranks were killed or wounded.

Army life suited Cawthorn and he made it his career. Having decided the opportunities would be more plentiful in the British army, the Australian Briton resigned his commission as an Australian captain to become a lieutenant in the British Indian Army. The decision “changed the course of Bill’s life,” writes Fewster, “setting him on a path he would follow for the next fifty years: the shadow world of intelligence and espionage” — at first for Britain and then in India, Pakistan and Australia.

Cawthorn was one of India’s delegation to the 1946 conference that established the United Nations. Such was his knowledge of the North-West Frontier that the new government of Pakistan “trusted him to negotiate what ultimately became the de facto border with India, which remains in place today. As Deputy Chief of Staff of the Pakistani Army, Cawthorn created the Inter-Services Intelligence bureau, which grew from an empty room with packing cases for desks into one of the world’s most powerful and feared intelligence organisations.”

However glittering the career, an Australian Briton was still branded on the tongue, as shown by this observation from a British diplomat in 1947: “I was able to speak very frankly to Cawthorn because, although he is an Australian, he is well known to be a particular friend of the United Kingdom, and a man of great discretion and tact.”

Cawthorn and his wife returned to Melbourne in 1951, buying a house near Kallista in the Dandenong Ranges, an area “popular with retired members of the Indian army and civil service, who liked the cool temperate climate, which reminded them of Raj hill stations.”

The Australian Briton stamp put him in good stead at the Melbourne Club and with other good chaps such as Menzies and Casey. Cawthorn was a child of “the crown and empire generation,” Fewster observes. “[A]lthough he was not born into the officer class, he had the bearing of a pukka sahib,” with the moustache to suit.

A fellow good chap, Walter Crocker, described Cawthorn’s ambivalence about returning to Melbourne: “He finds Australians ignorant and provincial but also arrogant and self-confident. There is hardly anyone any more who understands his interests, India, the officer sahib’s ways of life, the empire and so on.”

Crocker is an important witness who testifies frequently through the Intelligencer via his diary, a journal that is the gold biographers pray for as they sift to find the life. He was another eminent Australian Briton, had left Adelaide for Oxford and served in the British colonial service and the British army, had become the first professor of international relations at the Australian National University, and from 1952 spent eighteen years as an Australian ambassador, serving in eleven countries.

Cawthorn’s life as an intelligencer resumed when he joined the Melbourne-based Joint Intelligence Bureau, which tried to coordinate intelligence from Australia’s three armed services. But in a “series of meetings and lunches at the Melbourne Club” from mid 1953 into early 1954, “Casey sought to gauge Cawthorn’s suitability for a posting to his old stamping ground” as ambassador to Pakistan. And so, in 1954, Cawthorn returned to Karachi, back to the world he knew, as Australia’s high commissioner. Fewster headlines this chapter, “More a Pakistani than an Australian.”

No longer a senior officer at the centre of the headquarters action, Cawthorn waged long-distance fights for attention from External Affairs, which saw him as an outsider, and for resources from a public service board he found ignorant and dilatory.

Crocker, who was serving as high commissioner in New Delhi, recorded Cawthorn’s anger at the “supreme ineptitude” of Australia’s diplomatic service, and the frustrations of being a diplomatic bag-carrier for visiting Australians. Our man in Karachi complained about “the plague of visitors” and the “outrageous behaviour” of “ordinary Australians, especially politicians” who would telephone from the airport “at any hour of the day, seeking accommodation, or to be met.”­­­

Cawthorn served the system well enough to be knighted in 1958, and the following year he was posted as Australia’s high commissioner to Canada. The postings meant he observed “from a safe distance the turmoil that was the Australian intelligence community in the mid-to-late 1950s.” ASIS was “reviled by its two most important clients, External Affairs and Defence,” Fewster writes, “morale was at rock bottom” and the spy service was “in a fight for its survival.”

In 1957, Australia’s senior ministers and officials had decided to kill ASIS. British and American spy agencies pushed hard against the closure. MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, sent its deputy chief to do the rounds in Canberra and “managed to convince Casey that Australia ought to stay in the business of secret-intelligence and counter-subversion.” Casey didn’t need much convincing. Unlike those of his senior diplomats who distrusted the spies, Casey was always interested in what he called “the dirt boy stuff,” the espionage he defined as “bribery, deception, whispering and underground methods generally.”

After only a year as high commissioner to Canada, Cawthorn returned to Melbourne in 1960 to take over at ASIS headquarters in Victoria Barracks. The public reason for his short Ottawa stint was poor health, a cover story that had some truth — he’d had a heart attack, suffered from phlebitis, and took three different drugs every day.

Crocker’s diary records his view of the good-chap qualities that suited his friend to run the spies, judging that Cawthorn had “the honesty to be entrusted with a secret service but has he the safe intellect?” If Australia must do espionage, Crocker mused, the job could be entrusted to Cawthorn because “his old fashioned Christianity and Anglicanism, and his utter decency and his never-give-up plodding more than compensate for his slowness and over-simple judgement of men and situations.”

The question of “who will watch the watchmen?” was one the two friends returned to near the end of Cawthorn’s eight years running ASIS. Crocker recalled expressing a dislike of the “espionage approach” and doubts about the value of the “peep-hole view in international relations” during an after-dinner conversation in 1968; Cawthorn responded by saying that ASIS should not report on current facts and appearances, as done by embassies, but discern the long-term trends:

When Crocker made clear his fears about “huge, powerful” secret services, “more or less above the law, as well as in the dark,” Cawthorn replied that Australia would not have such a service, and in any case “we must be able to count on integrity and balance in the operations.” Cawthorn thought that a profession in which “duplicity, concealing your true feelings and of leading people up the garden path” did not normally “warp the practitioners.” Croker said he found that proposition hard to accept.

When Cawthorn took control in 1960, ASIS had overseas stations in Jakarta, Tokyo and Dili, with a presence in the MI6 stations in Hong Kong and Singapore. In the two years after Harold Holt inherited the prime ministership from Menzies in early 1966, ASIS achieved its biggest expansion of posts, opening stations in Manila, Rangoon, Bangkok and Saigon.

Cawthorn gave his life to his work. Two years after leaving ASIS, he died of a heart attack while waiting for a massage at a health club around the corner from the Melbourne Club.

Fewster makes proper use of the definitive book on the early decades of the spy service, Brian Toohey and William Pinwill’s OYSTER: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. (“OYSTER” was a codeword stamped on ASIS material.) Fewster’s work shares with OYSTER the scars of legal battles with government. Where Toohey and Pinwill had to fight to defend what they’d written, Fewster’s struggle was to get the documents he needed from ASIS.

OYSTER was “subject to censorship by the government,” Toohey and Pinwill noted, because the Federal Court had ruled that any material about ASIS must be vetted by the government before its release. Their final text had to be negotiated with ASIS and Foreign Affairs officials. Toohey and Pinwill wrote that a “sensible and professional” negotiation meant only “one major deletion” from the text, a passage identifying an Australian public relations firm that provided cover for ASIS agents in Asia. (After the first edition OYSTER, another journalist, Robert Haupt, revealed that the firm that aided ASIS was Eric White and Associates, established by a former director of public relations for the Liberal Party.)

Fewster’s battle took place in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. When he started researching the book in 2018, virtually no ASIS records appeared in the National Archives catalogue. Fortunately, Fewster’s close reading of the 1977 royal commission report on the intelligence services revealed references to a document on the organisation’s internal history submitted by ASIS. Fewster targeted that history using the Archives Act, only to be opposed by ASIS at every step. As Fewster told me:

Senior and former officers from ASIO, DSD, Defence and DFAT, as well as the former director-general of ASIS, Major-General  Paul Symon, appeared before the tribunal to argue why I should be denied access to the history. On security grounds, neither my lawyer nor I were allowed to hear the arguments made by these officials to the AAT. I could not justify on grounds of cost, or the time involved, an appeal to the Federal Court. For its part, ASIS was itself beginning to open up its records. As the years progressed, I began to find on the Archives website files which were still the subject of action by me in the AAT. Eventually, in 2024, the Tribunal gave me access to the history, albeit heavily redacted. By then, it was online.

The secret world is oyster-like in clamping hold of its secrets, but some pearls escape.

Fewster’s book illustrates the evolution of intelligence bureaucracy in the twentieth century as lived by an unusual Australian. While spies operate beyond the law on behalf of government masters, their cloak-and-dagger machinations are ruled by the need to feed the files. As Cawthorn warned an army officer he was trying to recruit: “In ASIS you’ll spend most of your time behind a desk.”

Credit Alan Fewster for his writing mission, sense of history and archival persistence. Or as he puts it himself in the last sentence of his acknowledgements: “Finally, my thanks to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service for supplying the cover photograph [of Cawthorn] and, grudgingly, some redacted files dealing with ASIS history.” •

Intelligencer: The Secret World of Walter Cawthorn, Australian Spymaster
By Alan Fewster | Australian Scholarly Publishing | 276 pages | $49.95

The post Secret world appeared first on Inside Story.

A new edition of All in Line, published by New York Review Books with an introduction by the cartoonist Liana Finck and notes by the Saul Steinberg Foundation’s Sheila Schwartz, offers viewers the chance to catch Steinberg as he sets off on a mid-century journey that would be punctuated by delight, surprise, and many an unexpected jolt. This is my afterword to this new edition.

— Iain Topliss

Saul Steinberg’s All in Line was a triumph when it was first published in June 1945. The New York Times praised it, there was a positive notice in Art News, and LIFE magazine reproduced examples of the drawings with comments from the artist (making a drawing “is… like walking along an edge… if you lean in a little too far… you are lost”). In the first month of publication alone it sold around 6000 copies. There followed a second printing, selection by the Book of the Month club, and a Penguin Books (London) reprint on austerity paper for distribution in Great Britain. Within a year Steinberg reported sales of 20,000. In 1947, Penguin Books (New York) issued a much-modified paperback edition with a bastardised cover image for the American popular market. Already well-published in the United States, Steinberg stood on the brink of what would develop into a truly brilliant career.

All in Line emerged from a tumultuous phase in Steinberg’s life. In 1933, following the rise of nationalist and anti-Semitic politics in his native Romania, Steinberg moved to Italy to train as an architect at the Regio Politecnico, Milan. While there, he found his gift as a comic artist, publishing to acclaim in two humour newspapers. But the promulgation of racial laws by the Italian fascist state in 1938 made him an outcast, and by 1940 he was seeking refuge in another country.

Following a six-week internment in a camp on the Adriatic coast in spring 1941, he spent a year in the Dominican Republic awaiting a US visa. In February 1943, now in New York, he received a commission as an ensign in the US Naval Reserve (along with American citizenship), thanks to the machinations of New Yorker editor Harold Ross, already an admirer of Steinberg’s work. Then, after a six-week layoff in Calcutta, he served fifteen months in China, North Africa, and Italy assigned to the propaganda arm of the Office of Strategic Services. By early October 1944 he was back in the United States. Although he remained on active duty for more than a year, eventually being promoted to the rank of lieutenant, his war was effectively over.

Steinberg and Ross apart, three other people helped in the making of All in Line: Victor Civita, at the time acting as Steinberg’s agent; James Geraghty, art editor at the New Yorker; and Hedda Sterne. Sterne, a fellow Romanian expatriate who was making her way in the New York art scene, agreed to take care of Steinberg’s artistic interests during his absence overseas. She and Steinberg had already begun a tentative love affair.

Civita’s role was a vexed one. In an October 1943 meeting with Sterne in New York and later in letters to Steinberg in China, Civita gave the impression that he had come up with both the idea for the book and the publishers, Duell, Sloan & Pearce. Months later, Sterne found out it was the other way round — the publishers had thought of the collection and contacted Civita through Geraghty. This small deception was typical of Civita’s way of pushing himself forward. The publishers couldn’t bear him, Sterne disliked his “noisy vitality,” and Geraghty complained he didn’t think “the way we do.”

Steinberg had more serious reservations. He told Sterne that Civita had insisted “the only way of being able to publish something in New York is just lowering the standard… make a vulgar ‘popular’… kind of drawing.” “Civita,” Steinberg wrote later, “doesn’t know but business for himself… interested only in money.” (Like Sterne, Steinberg’s English at this time was far from perfect.) Nonetheless, it was Civita who, one way or another, drove the project along, making preliminary selections, securing the cooperation — often qualified — of the others, dispatching proofs, and helping fend off a rival publishing offer from Alfred Knopf, one favoured by Geraghty. Negotiations with Knopf continued after the Duell, Sloan & Pearce contract had been sent to Steinberg, but although that contract was dated 17 January 1944 it was probably not signed until later, by which time Knopf was out of the picture.

As first proposed, the book would collect the best and most popular of Steinberg’s work of the previous four years, from satirical, anti-fascist war cartoons in PM and Liberty, which he had begun to publish while still in the Dominican Republic, to humorous “idea drawings” in the New Yorker. Steinberg disliked the hint of retrospectivity in such a selection. He wanted more recent work­­ and opposed the inclusion of anything suggestive of an earlier “European” lack of sophistication, such as characterised, he believed, his work in Italy in the 1930s and even some later drawings.

One instance was the picture of the optometrist asking a client if he could read a floor-to-ceiling-height letter A. Both Civita and the publishers thought it should be included, and Sterne, on pragmatic grounds, agreed. Steinberg did not. “It’s an old old drawing,” he complained, “made maybe two years ago or more, when I made transition from my european style to The New Yorker’s and it sure is a very stupid drawing… drawings like [this] don’t do me any favor.” But as Sterne pointed out, it had attracted much fan mail, and despite Steinberg’s misgivings, was a fair example of his work.

Steinberg relented. The drawing stayed, but he redrew it to make the people look more “American.” For most viewers the difference between the “European” figures in the New Yorker version (30 October 1943), and the “American” ones in All in Line will be easily missed — modifications to pose, body shape, and facial features — but for Steinberg the shift was critical.

During the book’s gestation, Steinberg was on the move — from China to Algiers, from Algiers to Naples, then back to Algiers, and finally to Rome. Frustrated by the slowness of the mail, fretting that Civita “would make some silly combination,” he despaired of ever having a final layout to approve. After getting one roll of thirty-five-millimetre film with more than eighty drawings on it, as selected by Civita and apparently agreed to by Sterne, Steinberg was livid: “Now I’m sure… Civita influenced [you] on choosing the worst drawings… [but] the selection is very casual… I told clear that I don’t want old ones and political and more than half is made out of old and political.” Sterne defended the selection: “If there are cartoons which everybody thinks wonderful… you might put them in even if as a work of art you don’t like them much — People will buy the books and see the ones you like too.” Eventually, unconvinced, Steinberg told Sterne he was sick of the book and thought it best “just to wait.”

Steinberg’s frustration arose not just because he disagreed with Civita’s selection, but from a revelation of what his powers as an artist might amount to. Back in August 1943, after six weeks in a training camp in southwest-central China, Steinberg was posted to Kunming. In his spare time, he drew studies of life in the town. “I made about a dozen… Very special drawings… rather different from my usual. I act like a photographer and sketch what I see… I sit down and sketch with thousands of people around looking behind the shoulder. It works.”

In these drawings he avoided both the overt political character of the anti-fascist cartoons published earlier in PM and Liberty and the wild comic inventiveness of his other works, instead recording off-duty military life and encounters with the local populace. The Kunming drawings were reportage, mimetic but not straightforwardly so, freighted with the artist’s idiosyncratic touches. They were unlike anything he had done before.

By late October he had sent off “thirty to forty” of these drawings to The New Yorker, including the one below. Six weeks later, the drawings arrived, and Ross and Geraghty were overjoyed, promising to publish them in a two-page spread as soon as possible. Once the drawings appeared in print Ross declared them “the strongest pieces of art we have run in a long time… everybody is jubilant about them, including the readers.” Gratifyingly, they were noticed in Washington — “a lot of Air Force people… spoke of [them] proudly, including the Under Secretary of War for Air.”

Steinberg’s war drawings solved a problem for Ross. From its inception, the New Yorker had refused to publish photographs, but after nearly two years of fighting the magazine’s reporting still lacked a visual dimension. The contrast with the pictorial magazines — LIFE, for example, very much on Ross’s mind — was painful. Ross told Steinberg: “Our coverage… in drawings is largely by ear” — that is, pictures drawn by staff artists from descriptions provided by correspondents — “and therefore not as good as we would like to have it.” But with Steinberg’s drawings the magazine not only recovered ground but even gained an advantage over its rivals — “You may save the day for us, in a big way… the hell with LIFE and the other magazines,” as Ross put it. The first of three China portfolios was published on 15 January 1944.

By early February 1944, it occurred to Steinberg that he had material for two books: the book Civita, Sterne, and Geraghty were working on, and a separate book of war drawings. Ross had much the same idea but pointed out that the war drawings would have to be published before the war ended, which he thought could be within months. Steinberg digested this advice. Mindful of how unsatisfactory Civita’s selection had been, he was tempted to abandon the first book altogether, telling Sterne in April, by which time he had been in North Africa and Naples, “I think I better give up the idea of making a book of drawing — I’d rather make one of war drawings which can be ready in a couple of months, some 70 drawings would be allright.” As for the compilation of his humorous work, he continued, “the selection made by Civita is more than one half wrong on my opinion, and I’m sure he didn’t care much for your opinion… So I think war drawings will make a better union or unity.”

It seemed as if the book of witty drawings was doomed. But Steinberg then began to wonder if the war book might not be improved by the addition of a few carefully selected humorous drawings. In the same letter, he then said: “maybe a better idea would be to call the book ‘Soldiers & Civilians’ and include a second part of just a few, about 20… of caption-less… usual stuff.” This sounds like a preliminary version of All in Line. By June, he had changed his mind a third time, returning to the idea of two books. “I’ll take a decision tonight,” he wrote to Sterne, “probably for lack of a better idea I’ll say yes. The hell with it, let’s have books.” This seems definite — “books” not “book” — but from this point on the idea of two books vanishes, never to be heard of again.

Steinberg returned to the United States on 4 October 1944. He and Sterne married a week later (he had proposed back in January in a series of letters and illustrated “newsletters”). He could now manage the book himself, having in hand drawings from all the war theatres in which he had served. Details are not clear, but it is fair to assume that the final choice of drawings and the layout was Steinberg’s alone. His hand is certainly evident in the title. Late in the game, it was still Everybody in Line, as suggested by Duell, Sloan & Pearce over a year earlier. That remained the title in a sketch of the dustjacket Steinberg made in his appointment book on 17 February 1945. But in another such drawing on the 30 April page, it had become All in Line.

The 1945 edition of All in Line is arranged in two parts. First, a forty-eight-page untitled collection of Steinberg’s humorous drawings, many from the New Yorker. Second, a seventy-two-page section, “War,” divided into five sub-sections: some of Steinberg’s propaganda cartoons from PM and Liberty, followed by portfolios based on his double-page spreads in the New Yorker —“China” (15 January and 5 February 1944, and 24 March 1945), “North Africa” (15 and 29 April 1944), “Italy” (10 June, 8 July and 29 July 1944) and “India” (24 February and 28 April 1945).

To “War,” Steinberg added many unpublished drawings, contrasting, for instance, the splendid view of the servicemen in a transport plane flying over the Himalayan Hump with a similar view of the inside of a sampan on a river in China (above). He also used six pages of unpublished Italian sketches, notably a view of the border checkpoint between Rome and Vatican City, a panorama of an occupied Italian provincial town, and a view of Vesuvius erupting, a scene Steinberg had witnessed. In some of these war drawings, we can detect a private meaning.

One addition to the “Italy” portfolio, the drawing he chose to head the selection, alludes to an earlier moment in Steinberg’s life: the obelisk in a piazza with figures is a topographical fantasia, privately dated on the original drawing “Friday June 6, 1941,” that far-off day when Steinberg, then in an Italian internment camp, heard that he would be freed and permitted to leave Italy. Similarly, in gratitude to Harold Ross, Steinberg’s American begetter, he made sure that the book would close with a drawing Ross had singled out as his “favorite,” the convoy in the mountains:

Walter Bernstein’s review of the book in the New York Times pointed out that the best drawings were those “without captions, that do not fit the regular cartoon formula.” He singled out a clock eating itself as time passed, an idea that had “the terrifying quality of the best surrealist work.” This quality is discernible in drawing after drawing: the elaborate doodles of the end-papers; a painter sawing an extended landscape into sellable units (below); a smoker blowing smoke-squares; a man asleep with his shoes, gloves, watch, spectacles, and hat laid out, each in its anatomically correct place, on the floor beside his bed; the counter-intuitive tilt of the horizon in a picture of a GI’s sea voyage.

Steinberg later understood that this sort of effect — the discovery of the unexpected in the familiar, the redeployment of a received idea, an adjustment of scale or perspective, lay at the heart of his work. “I… have always thought that to express certain things I had to transform them into jokes, puns, or… strangeness: so-called humor.” That transformation is epitomised in this drawing of Steinberg drawing Steinberg drawing Steinberg, a motif that even finds its way into the scene inside the sampan.

The drawings in All in Line have a vivacity springing from Steinberg’s exceptional, often startling wit, but they provoke something greater than a passing comic delight. “Your humor is poetry,” Sterne wrote to Steinberg during the planning for All in Line, “because its mostly a tender smile upon things one never looks twice at — Instead of taking away the magic of things that have it — you add where there is none.” The special “poetry” of Steinberg’s humour, as singled out by Sterne, is but one sign of something more momentous, the arrival of a new late-modern sensibility, one that embraced the taking of liberties with habitual ways of seeing and the gleeful dissolution of old forms and fixities.

The range is extraordinary: from bizarre comic drawings (a mis-constructed centaur), to savage political satire (Hitler, a pistol to his own head, orders Mussolini, Hungary, and Romania at gunpoint into Russia, dragging along behind him a child-size Finland, above), to eye-opening visual reportage (a street scene in unwrecked Kunming, also below). It is hard to think of any other artist at the time who could put together such a collection. These drawings extend the viewer’s horizons — whether comical or conceptual, political or geographic — and presage the reach of Steinberg’s later work. •

The post Beyond words appeared first on Inside Story.

A century later, many of us, looking back, can barely see the point of it all. On Remembrance Day, we are sometimes told that it was a matter of resisting the triumph of “German militarism.” But whereas the necessity for combatting Nazism still convinces most of us of the case for the Second World War, justifications for the first slip ever further into a murky realm of uneasy ambivalence.

If you had asked soldiers on the western front in 1914 what they thought they were up to, some of the French poilus might have said they were defending the republic and seeking to redress the balance after the humiliating defeat by Prussia in 1871. But by 1917, after three years of carnage, such rationalisations no longer carried conviction: mutinies broke out all along the line. Tommy Atkins might have declared at the start of the war that he was fighting for “king and country.” Whether the “Diggers” from the Antipodes said the same after the nightmare of Gallipoli is doubtful. At any rate, after the event, patriotic rhetoric rang less true than the grim realism of Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for a Doomed Youth” and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.

All the more so in the case of the Russian muzhik compelled to fight for an empire that treated him as just one step up from an animal. Or the conscript in the Austro-Hungarian armies whose ribald cynicism in the face of wartime propaganda is brilliantly captured in Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweik. Why should a Pole or a Ukrainian in Habsburg uniform thrust his bayonet at a Pole or a Ukrainian in Russian uniform? The answer was far from clear.

On the eastern front, four empires, Russian, Habsburg, German and Ottoman, confronted one another in what each regarded (or came to regard) as a struggle for survival. That, at any rate, was how leaders and elites saw it. But this attitude did not always percolate down to troops in the front line. Upon acquaintance with the quotidian vexations and torments of modern warfare — uncertain food supply, inadequate medical attention, leaky boots, freezing cold as winter set in, dust and mosquitoes in the summer, mud, mud, mud in the spring and autumn, and the company of rats at all seasons, not to mention the ever-present threat of death or mutilation — common soldiers became not so much concerned with the survival of empires as with their own survival or that of their comrades in arms. In all the armies they grew increasingly resentful, ill-disciplined and, by the later stages of the war, prone to mental breakdown, tempted to desert and susceptible to calls for revolution.

Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front is the second volume of a trilogy on the history of the First World War. The first, The Western Front (2021), covered territory familiar to many English-speaking readers. Winston Churchill called his history of the eastern front, at any rate its American edition, published in 1931, The Unknown War. So it has largely remained, at any rate in the west (Churchill’s book, unlike his earlier The World Crisis, did not sell well).

This book lacks the hard-headed strategic commentary of Basil Liddell Hart’s classic history of the war (1930), no longer in print but still well worth reading. Lloyd’s is more narrowly focused on military operations than more recent one-volume works such as those of Gerd Hardach (1977), Niall Fergusson (1998) and David Stevenson (2004). But it is painstakingly researched and a cracking read.

Unlike the Western Front, which, from the autumn of 1914 until the end of the war, stretched in a continuous line from the English Channel to the Alps, there was not one eastern front but several. In East Prussia in 1914–15 the Germans defeated the Russians in epic battles at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes but failed to exploit those triumphs and push through to a decisive victory. In central Poland and Galicia, Habsburg armies, aided by the Germans, confronted the Russians in a war of movement that swung to and fro between 1914 and 1917. Further south, Russia and Austria-Hungary, with their respective subalterns, engaged in what has been called the “Third Balkan War” (though the first two, essential to an understanding of the third, are barely mentioned here). Greece and Rumania wavered in their allegiances, while Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary engaged in pitiless onslaughts on Serbia. Further west, Italy decided in 1915 to renounce her treaties of alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary and, hoping for postwar territorial aggrandisement, launched attacks against what Churchill later called Austria’s “soft underbelly.”

All that is not to take account of additional eastern fronts where Allied armies engaged the Ottomans in Gallipoli, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia and Palestine — but these are not covered in Lloyd’s book: presumably they have been held back for his final volume which, we are promised, will deal with “the wider war.” All systems of organisation, of course, have their advantages and disadvantages: Lloyd’s has the drawback that the Ottomans, at any rate in this volume, get short shrift — actually no shrift.

This is a solid, old-fashioned military history. Lloyd’s aim, he writes, is “to present the war as it appeared to those at the highest echelons of command and leadership; to show how they tried (and often failed) to achieve their goals; and to leave any judgement to the reader.” His task in this volume is more complex than in the previous one, as he has to keep many more balls in the air simultaneously. He performs this feat deftly, switching from one to another without losing control of his central narrative.

Lloyd does not help much with the conundrum of the purpose (or purposes) of the war. In fact, he barely addresses it. He opens with a perfunctory prologue recounting the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914; then, as in his first volume, he plunges headlong into a narrative of military events. Of course, we can refer to the vast literature on causes of the war, notably Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers (2012) and Perry Anderson’s just-appeared Disputing Disaster (2024). But still it would be helpful here to have some indication of where this author stands on how it all began.

Where Lloyd excels is in analysis of the strategic thinking of the war leaders and in set-piece descriptions of great battles. What emerges most strikingly is the resentment of nearly all commanders on the eastern fronts at the inadequacy of the means with which they were compelled to fight: too few men, guns, shells, rifles, ammunition and boots. Typical was the exchange in October 1914 between General Stepa Stepanović, commander of the Second Serbian Army, and his superior, General Radomir Putnik. Regretting his inability to supply more guns, Putnik sought to stiffen his subordinate’s resolve with fine words: “If we lack artillery, we have to resist with rifles alone,” adding “Courage, my friend, courage.” To which Stepanović responded bitterly, “I have never lacked courage but give me the means to fight.”

Those were sentiments that, in substance, were echoed by generals on both sides of the lines in this conflict over the next four years. In 1916, the Italian commander, Luigi Cadorna, reacting furiously to efforts by the King and the prime minister to dislodge him, burst out: “My arch-enemies are not the Austrians. But don’t think that I lose any sleep. I’m fine, thank God, and I shall shake the dust off my shoes, always ready, after all, to pack my bags and leave immediately for Rome.” He remained in command for another year, presiding over an endless sequence of futile bloodletting on the River Isonzo.

At critical points, some generals were so convinced of the rectitude of their positions that they defiantly disobeyed orders. For example, in June 1916, the Russian chief of staff, Mikhail Vasilyevich Alekseiev, ordered his subordinate, General Aleksei Brusilov, to delay a planned offensive. Alekseiev said that he spoke with the authority of the Tsar. Brusilov refused point-blank and demanded to speak to the Tsar himself. When told that the emperor had gone to bed and could not be woken, Brusilov snapped back: “The Commander-in-Chief’s slumbers are no business of mine and I have no intention of thinking anything over.” He launched his offensive a few hours later.

By far the most consequential of the wars among the generals were those between the Austrians and the Germans. The Austro-Hungarian chief of the general staff, Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, probably merits the title of most disastrous military leader on either side in this war. Time after time, he led his men into calamitous defeats, for which, as Lloyd comments, he “blamed everyone but himself.” Again and again, he had to turn to his German ally to save his bacon. On one occasion, when Conrad went to see his German counterpart, Erich Falkenhayn, to appeal for support, an accompanying officer wrote that the “boss doesn’t have it in him to speak forcibly with Falkenhayn, always like the naughty schoolboy towards the teacher upbraiding him.”

In September 1916, when Falkenhayn, suffering from severe toothache, was replaced by Paul von Hindenburg, the Austrians in effect surrendered their sovereignty: all the Central Powers’ forces were now subordinated to the supreme command of the German Kaiser and his duopoly of military dictators, Hindenburg and the “First Quartermaster General” (he invented the title for himself), Erich Ludendorff.

Overcoming his declared inclination to “leave any judgement to the reader,” Lloyd can hardly avoid indicating his own assessments. He shows some sympathy for Falkenhayn, whom Liddell Hart called “history’s latest example of the folly of half-measures; the ablest and most scientific General — ‘penny wise and pound foolish’ — who ever ruined his country by a refusal to take calculated risks.” Lloyd portrays him somewhat more generously as one of the few strategists who saw the big picture and tried to balance his forces accordingly. Alekseiev and Brusilov are awarded brownie points and Lloyd rightly presents a gold star to the German general August von Mackensen, “a soldier of remarkable talent.”

Military history these days is understood to encompass much more than fighting. It has broadened to take account of such matters as industrial mobilisation, war finance, public health, propaganda, intelligence and the experiences of civilians in the age of “total war.” As early as the 1920s the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace began publication of a pioneering series on the economic and social history of the Great War. Completed by 1937 in no fewer than 152 volumes, this remarkable enterprise tackled such topics as “The Land and the Peasant in Rumania,” “Food Control in Hungary” and “Effects of the War upon Russian Industries.” In this generation, historians such as Norman Stone, Avner Offer, and John Boyer have shown how attention to socio-economic underpinnings can strengthen understanding of military outcomes. Little of that is reflected in Lloyd’s book. In this respect, it compares unfavourably with Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (2014), which covers much of the same ground but with greater attention to those fundamentals.

As for the issue of war aims, we are given little more than passing references: to Italy’s demand in 1915 for territorial expansion at the expense of Austria, as her condition for entering the war at the side of the Allies; to Hindenburg’s ambition to create a German empire in the east; and to Russia’s insistence, as voiced by foreign minister Paul Miliukov after the February revolution in 1917, on securing the “transfer” of Constantinople and the Straits.

Like its first volume, Lloyd’s history is based on (mainly published) sources in many languages. Lloyd’s “command and control” of disparate materials is assured; his narrative is fluent, often gripping; and his historical judgement generally sound (though too much attention is accorded to Rasputin). The evolving viewpoints of the various capitals are summarised dispassionately. Greek, Bulgarian, and Rumanian perspectives are not ignored (the bizarre comedy of the hundreds of thousands of inactive French and British “gardeners” of Salonica is well described).

The book itself is produced to a high standard, with excellent, often unfamiliar, illustrations. But the seventeen maps are a disappointment: too few of the locations mentioned in the text are shown — a particular defect given that most English-speaking readers would be hard put to situate many of them. Moreover, the book lacks a list of alternate placenames: not every schoolboy knows, for example, that the city known to Austrians as Lemberg was the same place as Polish Lwów, and modern-day Ukrainian Lviv.

To judge from its first two volumes, Lloyd’s is shaping up to be the most accessible, lucid and coherent (but narrowly military) history of the First World War. Its most formidable competitor, Hew Strachan’s authoritative Oxford history, ranges more widely. But Strachan’s first volume, To Arms, takes some 1200 pages (no more than eighty dealing directly with the eastern front) to cover the early part of the war. That appeared in 2001: we still await its successor. By contrast, a mere three years separated the appearance of Lloyd’s first two volumes. So we may look forward with keen anticipation to the third.

The end of this volume, like its beginning, is precipitous: the narrative closes abruptly with the Austro–Italian armistice on 4 November 1918. The reader is left, like the viewer of the Bayeux tapestry, feeling that the last frame has been lost. What are we to conclude from this chronicle? A brief epilogue does not solve the problem. Let us hope that in his final volume Lloyd will vouchsafe some considered reflections on the meaning of all that went before. •

The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War
By Nick Lloyd | Viking | $65 | 642 pages

The post Forgotten war appeared first on Inside Story.

In early May, the 1st Australian Task Force deployed two battalions to an area twenty kilometres north of Bien Hoa city to intercept and disrupt the enemy forces withdrawing from Saigon. Several fire support bases, or FSBs, were established to provide artillery and mortar support for patrols from 1RAR and 3RAR deployed north from their base at Nui Dat. One would be immortalised as FSB Coral, the others FSB Balmoral and Coogee.

The Battle of Coral–Balmoral, launched early on 13 May with a concerted enemy attack before the FSB defences had been completed, would be the first time the Australians met North Vietnamese forces in regimental strength and became their biggest and most costly engagement of the war. Twenty-five Australians were killed and another ninety-nine wounded.

Late the following afternoon, 5 Platoon of B Company 1RAR was operating about a kilometre from Coral when the patrol was ambushed by a squad of enemy. As the official history of the war would later recount, the forward scout and the commander of the leading section were hit before heavy enemy fire isolated the two wounded men.

Private Richard Norden, a nineteen-year-old from Gundagai in New South Wales who had enlisted in the army two years earlier, requested covering fire and dashed forward under heaving enemy fire to reach the section commander, killing one enemy on the way.

“Having expended his own ammunition, he grabbed the automatic weapon of the dead Viet Cong soldier and fought off another enemy as he assisted the section commander back to the section,” the official history recorded. “Although wounded, Norden again went forward under enemy fire and reached the forward scout, killing the Viet Cong who had been using the scout as a shield. Seeing that the scout was dead, Norden returned to the section, collected grenades, and cleared the area, enabling the scout’s body to be recovered.

“His three attacks into the enemy position resulted in the position being secured. Norden was personally responsible for killing three of the enemy. For his outstanding example in saving the life of his section commander, recovering the body of the scout, and at the same time reversing the enemy’s advantage, Private Norden was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal.”

Norden survived the war to receive his DCM back in Sydney but died in 1972, at the age of twenty-four, killed in a motorcycle accident while serving with the ACT police.

“What do you have to do to get the VC?,” NSW governor Sir Roden Cutler is reported to have remarked rhetorically as he pinned the medal to Norden’s chest. Cutler was well qualified to ask, having lost a leg and won the Victoria Cross while fighting as a forward scout with the Australian 2/5th Field Regiment in Syria in 1941.

Former governor-general and Chief of the Defence Force, Sir Peter Cosgrove — who himself had won the Military Cross in Vietnam — was equally nonplussed. He had been “blown away” when he first read the citation describing Norden’s bravery. “I thought, when I read that, this bloke should have got a VC,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Cutler and Cosgrove were far from alone in their disbelief. From soon after the war, some of the men who fought alongside Norden in Vietnam and many others have been tenaciously battling an obdurate defence bureaucracy to see his exceptional bravery rightly recognised with the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry in the Commonwealth. It would take fifty-six years for their efforts to finally succeed.

Cynics might suggest there was more than simply an act of belated justice in the great fanfare surrounding yesterday’s Remembrance Day announcement by governor-general Sam Mostyn that Norden had become the fifth Australian to be awarded the VC for valour in Vietnam.  What better than an outpouring of patriotic pride amid a growing tide of disaffection with a government? What better indeed than a celebration of heroism to divert attention from a Defence establishment mired in a catalogue of atrocities by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, a royal commission’s unmasking of an epidemic of military abuse and suicides and a bureaucracy found to be routinely failing to meet the need of veterans.

While prime minister Anthony Albanese acknowledged at the announcement “everyone who has championed and advocated due recognition of Richard Norden,” he offered no clue as to why it had taken so long to recognise “the deeds that are more than worthy of the highest military honour our nation can bestow.”

The truth is there have been years of bureaucratic indifference and outright opposition to awarding a VC to Richard Norden. Earlier this year Chris Forde, who was Norden’s platoon commander in Vietnam, shared the frustration of his supporters. Many of his soldiers had displayed exceptional courage in Vietnam, he said, but Norden’s bravery was “above and beyond… the stuff from which legends are born.”

He told the Australian: “On that particular day, there wasn’t a one in a thousand chance of surviving the deeds that Dick performed. Each of his three sorties were death defying. In fact… if I hadn’t been cut off and was able to have had an influence, I wouldn’t have let him do what he did. It was suicide and there was every chance that I would have been fighting to extricate another body.”

In 2020 George Hulse, a lieutenant-colonel had who fought in the Battle of Coral-Balmoral as a twenty-one-year-old, wrote to the then chief of army, Rick Burr, arguing that Norden’s actions fulfilled the criteria of exceptional bravery under fire required for the awarding of the VC. He got short shrift. Burr declared that he was not satisfied that Norden had “performed acts of conspicuous gallantry, or a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty.” What’s more, he said, despite his undoubtedly brave and gallant actions Private Norden had been “doing what was expected of him as a rifleman, albeit in hazardous conditions.”

This response infuriated Norden’s supporters but was hardly surprising. The Defence hierarchy has long been vehemently opposed to retrospective gallantry awards, in part out of concern about diluting the status of recognised acts of gallantry and opening a potential floodgate of questionable claims. The posthumous VC awarded to able seaman Teddy Sheean in 2020 — for famously strapping himself to his gun and continuing to fire at Japanese aircraft as HMAS Armidale was sunk in the Timor Sea in 1942 — took seventy-eight years to arrive and decades of acrimonious debate. Ultimately, it required former prime minister Scott Morrison to overrule his defence minister Lynda Reynolds, who had rejected the tribunal’s recommendation in favour of Sheean.

But General Burr’s somewhat patronising obstinance didn’t deter Richard Norden’s backers and they succeeded in forcing a formal hearing into their claims. In June 2022 the tribunal recommended to defence minister Richard Marles that Burr’s ruling be rejected and Marles recommend to the governor-general (and the King) that Norden be awarded the VC.

The fact that is has taken a further two years to reach this week’s conclusion will only feed the view that the result has as much if not more to do with the government’s need for a good news story than righting a historical wrong. •

The post “What do you have to do to get the VC?” appeared first on Inside Story.

Dozens of those airmen and sailors would be showered with honours for their heroic, ill-fated efforts — two of them receiving the Victoria Cross, the highest honour of all. But time and again the ship Winston Churchill branded “The Beast” had evaded its hunters, sometimes seriously wounded but never vanquished.

On that November day a crew of young Australian airmen suddenly found themselves at the centre of an event that would trigger jubilation across the English- speaking world. They were the first to witness and record the sinking, and the ones who brought home the news.

Bruce Buckham, a twenty-six-year-old BHP clerk from Penshurst in Sydney, was captain of a Lancaster bomber crew, all of them Australians save for their Scottish flight engineer. They had been handpicked to carry the cinecamera men who recorded the final three raids against the Tirpitz, which was sheltering in the supposed safety of the Norwegian Artic at the limits of the operating range of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. On the final raid, they flew forward with more than thirty other bombers — half from the legendary 617 “Dambusters” Squadron RAF and the rest from 9 Squadron RAF.

Codenamed Catechism, the operation had been launched just after midnight on 12 November 1944 when a reconnaissance Mosquito aircraft returned to report that while weather conditions over Tromsø were poor, they were showing signs of improvement. Two hours later the waves of Lancasters, most of them two tons overweight with extra fuel and their special 12,000-pound “Tallboy” bomb loads, lumbered into the air from several RAF stations across the far north of Scotland. Six Australian pilots had joined the raid along with another ten Australian flight crew.

Buckham and his crew were delayed almost an hour by the icing of their aircraft in the sub-zero temperatures on the ground at Lossiemouth airfield, but quickly made up time. After turning out over Moray Firth, the main force Lancasters from Lossiemouth set course northeast for the Norwegian Sea flying at 1500 feet. After several hours they turned eastwards towards the Norwegian coast, maintaining their low altitude. After crossing the coast and climbing rapidly to clear the mountains, the bombers crossed into Sweden and then headed north, hugging the border to the rendezvous point at Akkajaure, a large reservoir 150 miles south-southwest of Tromsø.

James Brian “Willie” Tait, the highly decorated commanding officer of 617 Squadron and leader of the raid, would marvel at the spectacle as they approached Tromsø. “The sun was resting on the horizon, so the snow-covered mountains were turned pink in its light,” he later recounted. “The sky was cloudless, the air calm and the aircraft rode easily without a bump to disturb the bomb aimer’s sights. We sighted the Tirpitz from a range of at least 20 miles, lying squat and black among her torpedo nets, like a spider in a web; silhouetted against the glittering blue and green waters of the fjord and surrounded by the beautiful hills. Down below everything was quite still. The whole scene — water, mountains and sky — blazed in the cold brilliance of the Arctic dawn.”

Buckham flew close to Tait’s Lancaster as they moved in on the target. “There was Håkøya Island, a large snow-covered mound in the middle of Tromsø Fjord, and there, anchored in the tranquil waters, was the huge shape of the Tirpitz,” he recalled. “We still had about fifteen minutes to fly and vast explosions were occurring in the middle of and all around our loose gaggle of aircraft. Tirpitz was firing her fifteen-inch main guns at us with short-delay fuses. As we got closer, we came under fire from the ship’s secondary armaments, as well as fire from the shore batteries and two flak ships. Things were getting hot!”

Buckham flew in at 6000 feet as Tait and the others lined up to do their individual bombing runs, but he soon found this was “too unhealthy” and so descended to about 2000 feet and shot up the German shore batteries lining the fjord and one of the flak ships. “The bombers were right overhead now,” he later recalled, “doing a perfect run with bomb doors gaping wide open and the glistening wing of the huge 12,000-pound Tallboy bombs suspended. Now they were released.”

Tait was the first to release his Tallboy. Moments later, five other Lancasters released their bombs, including the crew of one of the other Australian pilots, William “Bunny” Lee, who would report at the later operational debriefings that Tirpitz was obscured by smoke just after his bomb was released. “Our bomb went straight down into the centre of the smoke,” he said. “All bombing we saw appeared very well concentrated and firing from the ship ceased after the first bombs went down.”

Another of the bombers in that wave was also piloted by an Australian, Arthur Kell: “We bombed along the length of the ship turning to starboard and running in on the bows. Our bomb, which registered a hit or a very near miss, fell in the centre of the smoke coming up from just in front of the superstructure.” Yet another Australian, John Sayers, was the last of the 617 Squadron pilots to bomb: “We followed our bomb down nearly to the ship when it was lost in smoke. It was either a hit on the bows or a very near miss.”

As the following aircraft from 9 Squadron flew closely in the wake of the 617 Squadron Lancasters, the fate of Tirpitz was sealed. The crews could not believe their good luck — the weather had held, the smokescreen pots protecting the battleship had not been activated and, most crucially, a feared German fighter squadron based nearby had failed to scramble in time to intercept the attackers before they had bombed.

On the water, Armageddon had arrived. In a later detailed account of what unfolded, the Tirpitz’s most senior crew member to survive the attack, Alfred Fassbender, recorded that “a stick of bombs” had fallen inside the battleship’s net enclosure.

There were two direct hits on the port side, one on the aircraft catapult and one abreast of B turret. Seconds later, Tirpitz began listing to port. As the first bombs hit, damage control parties were ordered to correct the trim by flooding. Soon the list increased to 30 to 40 degrees and Robert Weber, the former executive officer who had taken over command of the ship just eight days earlier, ordered the evacuation of the lower decks. Less than five minutes later, the list increased to 60 to 70 degrees, then the 700-ton Caesar gun turret exploded and arced upwards before plunging into the water. Soon after that, Tirpitz capsized, trapping hundreds of men beneath the upturned hull.

As the last of the bombers completed their runs and headed back out of the fjord to begin the long flight home, it was still not certain to the attackers that Tirpitz was finished. Buckham’s Lancaster, now alone, held back as they continued to watch and film while the first German fighters finally were scrambled.

“We descended to 200 feet and flew over it, around it, all about it, but still she sat there,” he recalled. “After about thirty minutes we decided to call it a day and headed back out to the end of the fjord. Just then my rear gunner, Eric Giersch, called out, ‘Skipper, I think she’s turning over.’ I turned to port to take a look and, sure enough, she was listing over at an angle of 70 to 80 degrees. So back we went.”

As Buckham swept in at about fifty feet above the water he could see German ratings jumping into the water. “Then we watched with bated breath as the ship heeled over onto her side, ever so slowly and gracefully, leaving her red hull gleaming in the morning sunshine. It was the third time we’d knocked the Tirpitz about, but this time we had finished her.”

An estimated 1700 crew were aboard Tirpitz that morning, about 700 others having been transferred to shore-based work. Within two hours, 596 men had made it ashore or been rescued from the water. A desperate struggle unfolded as teams tried to free those trapped in air pockets inside the wreck, a task hampered by the lack of acetylene torches to cut through the thick steel plates. Over the next two days, just eighty-seven men were recovered before it was estimated that the last oxygen had expired.

The final death toll was reckoned to be 971, including Captain Weber and almost all of his officers, many of whom were trapped inside the armoured control room where he had gathered them to direct the defence of the ship. Captain-Lieutenant Fassbender would be awarded the German Cross in Gold for his bravery during the desperate final moments of Tirpitz.

By the time they returned home, Buckham and his crew had been flying for fourteen hours and nineteen minutes – with Buckham the sole pilot at the controls the entire time. But there would be a further drama before they were safely down. As they began their return journey, the crew had felt and heard a tremendous crash. It was only as they prepared to land that they saw their starboard main wheel hanging down, the engine nacelle panels flapping loose and a gaping hole in the wing. A later investigation would reveal that a flak shell had passed through the undercarriage bay, travelled between the Number 1 and Number 2 fuel tanks and exited through the wing, miraculously without exploding. Buckham was forced to land on one wheel.

Buckham’s crew were the last of the raiders home, but because they had lingered over the target long after the other bombers had departed Norway, they carried the first confirmation that Tirpitz had indeed finally been sunk — and the spectacular film evidence to prove it.

The Bomber Command leadership decided to delay the announcement of the sinking to allow time to review the footage of the attack before conveying the dramatic news to Churchill who, in turn, briefed King George VI. They also wanted time to maximise the impact of their stunning strike against the Germans in the newspapers and on radio, in Britain and around the world.

Buckham and rear gunner Eric Giersch were woken early the morning after the attack and ordered to head into London for a press conference at the Ministry of Information and a round of interviews with the BBC. Back in Australia, Bruce’s wife Gwen received a phone call from an uncle who worked at an air force base in Sydney. Until then, Gwen had no idea what her husband was doing in England, apart from serving as a pilot with a Bomber Command squadron. They had not spoken since he left Australia two years earlier. They wrote regularly to each other, but Bruce would not and could not talk about his day job.

“My uncle had heard on the radio that the Lancasters had bombed the Tirpitz and some of the planes were missing,” Gwen Buckham recounted. “He rang to tell me to listen to the six o’clock news. He didn’t know what Bruce was doing but just knew that he flew Lancasters. I said, ‘What’s the Tirpitz?’ I didn’t even know that! He said, ‘It’s the battleship, you nong, the German battleship.’ Then I really began to get worried.”

The entire family tuned in to the BBC world service that evening. “They announced that it was London calling from the BBC and then told about the raid on the Tirpitz,” Gwen recalled. “They didn’t mention about anybody not getting back so that was good. After they talked about what had happened, the announcer said, ‘I am now interviewing one of the pilots who took part in the raid — Flight Lieutenant Bruce Buckham.’ I nearly fell off my seat! I couldn’t believe it… That was the first time I had heard his voice since he had left for Europe.”

There was another false alarm for Gwen Buckham a short time later, when a telegram arrived at the family home in Penshurst. Often a telegram would be the first news of the death of a loved one.

“The telegram boy came down the street and my father was in the garden at the time. The boy had a telegram for me, and I just froze. Dad said, ‘Give it to me, I’ll open it.’ He stood there and read it aloud, ‘Congratulations are extended to you by the Minister for Air and the Air Board on the award of the Distinguished Service Order to your husband Flight Lieutenant B.A. Buckham in further recognition of his gallant service.’ Then a great feeling of relief and rejoicing came over us. Most of all, it again meant that he was alive.”

When the news of the Tirpitz sinking finally broke, it made headlines around the world. The dramatic pictures adorned front pages of the Fleet Street press and the newspapers back in Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald of 15 November 1944 splashed with: “800 OF CREW LOST WITH TIRPITZ: Last Nazi Battleship Destroyed.” As well as providing still photographs, the 700 feet of spectacular film footage shot from Buckham’s aircraft would feature in newsreels screened in cinemas around the English-speaking world. •

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Since January, the Court has delivered orders and decisions in three Palestine-related cases. Together they give an insight into how international law sees the violence and how countries including Australia are obliged to respond.

The first of the cases was launched in December 2023 when South Africa alleged that Israel had violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention of 1948. South Africa argued that Israel’s acts and omissions are “genocidal in character” and had been committed with the intent “to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”

States that have signed the Genocide Convention (including Israel and Australia) have the obligation to prevent, and punish, genocide — even if it is being committed somewhere else. Committing or attempting to commit genocide is punishable, as is inciting genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide. Also punishable is complicity in genocide — namely, the provision of material, strategic, or political support for genocide. This last point is particularly important for governments that might have military and economic ties with a state allegedly committing genocide.

The ICJ’s final judgement on whether Israel’s actions amount to genocide seems likely to be years away. But South Africa also requested “provisional measures,” similar to an urgent injunction in domestic law. At this stage of proceedings, the court need not make a definitive ruling about whether a genocide is occurring — instead, it needed to determine whether the rights being asserted by South Africa were plausible. In late January 2024, the ICJ did make such an order, and essentially found that there is a plausible claim that genocide is occurring in Gaza.

By an overwhelming majority, the court ordered Israel to adhere to its obligations under the Genocide Convention and “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission” of all genocidal acts. In relation to Palestinians in Gaza, Israel must stop killing members of this group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to them; deliberately inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about” the destruction of members of this group; and “imposing measures intended to prevent births” within this group. The court also ordered Israel to take immediate and effective steps to enable humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza.

Only a few days later, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered further military action in the southern Gaza city of Rafah. South Africa again approached the ICJ, this time with an “urgent request for additional provisional measures.” In March, the court handed down a new order reiterating the earlier provisional measures and outlining additional measures. These included a unanimous order that Israel adhere to its obligations under the Genocide Convention by taking “all necessary and effective measures” to ensure the provision of “urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” including “food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation” and “medical supplies and medical care.” Israel must also ensure that its military doesn’t commit a genocidal act by preventing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

In May, South Africa returned to the ICJ to request further provisional measures. On 24 May, the court ordered a halt to Israel’s military offensive in Rafah and insisting that the Rafah crossing remain open for humanitarian assistance.

These orders make Israel’s obligations clear. But what do they mean for Australia and other countries? As a party to the Genocide Convention, Australia has the obligation not to commit or be complicit in genocide, and to prevent and punish genocide occurring elsewhere. In earlier cases, the ICJ found that the obligation to prevent genocide requires any governments that is aware (or should be aware) of the serious risk of genocide “to employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide so far as possible.”

What about states that provide military support to Israel? This question was raised in the second Palestine case at the ICJ this year. In March, Nicaragua sought an ICJ declaration that Germany had failed in its obligations under the Genocide Convention and “contributed to the commission of genocide” in violation of the convention. Nicaragua also claimed that Germany “has failed to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law” by providing assistance to Israel.

Nicaragua sought an provisional measures order that Germany immediately suspend military aid and exports of military equipment to Israel to the extent that it could be used in violation of the convention and other rules of international law. The court declined the request in terms that will be of interest to officials in Australia for a couple of reasons.

First, the ICJ relied heavily on the fact that German manufacturing, marketing and exporting of military equipment must be approved by an “inter-agency process” involving at least two ministries. Export licenses are granted only after a formal “assessment” of whether the item would be used in the commission of genocide or other crimes. The ICJ also found that the value of military export licences had fallen significantly since November 2023, and Germany had not yet acted on some pending requests from Israel. As a result, the ICJ concluded, provisional measures were not needed at this stage.

But the ICJ did make several clear points about the situation in Gaza and the responsibilities of states. It reiterated that signatories to the Geneva Conventions — regardless of whether they are a party to a specific conflict — are required “to respect and to ensure respect” of the conventions and comply with them. It also recalled that signatories must “employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent genocide.” Finally, the court considered it “particularly important to remind all States of their international obligations relating to the transfer of arms to parties to an armed conflict” to avoid the risk that these arms be used to violate the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. The message from is clear: signatories including Australia need to be very careful to comply with their legal obligations.

This year’s third ICJ decision concerning Palestine — an advisory opinion on the “Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” — was delivered on 19 July. The action dates from December 2022, when the UN General Assembly asked the ICJ to advise on “the legal consequences arising from the ongoing violation by Israel of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, from its prolonged occupation, settlement and annexation of the Palestinian territory.” Unlike the two other cases, this advisory opinion relates to Israel’s actions in the entirety of the occupied Palestinian territories, not only Gaza.

The ICJ concluded that Israel’s occupation of the occupied Palestinian territories is unlawful. It violates the right of Palestinian people to self-determination; imposes a comprehensive regime of restrictions on Palestinians that “constitutes systemic discrimination” on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity; violates the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid); and facilitates a systematic practice of unlawful settlement that is part of a broader policy of annexation.

Once again the ICJ pointed to the obligations of governments, including Australia’s, “to abstain from entering into economic or trade dealings with Israel” that may “entrench its unlawful presence” in the occupied territories; to “take steps to prevent trade or investment” that assists the illegal situation in the occupied territories; and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence there. All parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention — which include Australia — have the obligation “to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law.”

In light of these three cases, how can we summarise Australia’s obligations? Put simply, Australia has clear international obligations: to act to prevent the plausible genocide occurring in Gaza; to punish genocide if it is established; to ensure that it is not complicit or involved with any genocidal acts (by providing support to Israel); and to ensure Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law and human rights law throughout Palestine.

How compliant is Australia with these obligations? What are the economic and military ties between Australia and Israel? What defence industry partnerships are in place? What arms are being sent to Israel – perhaps via third countries? What military intelligence is being provided (including through the Pine Gap surveillance base near Mparntwe Alice Springs)?

Publicly available information is scarce but concerning, and suggests continued Australia support for Israel’s military activities in Gaza and the illegal occupation of Palestine. While Australian officials have denied that Australia is “supplying Israel with weapons which are being used in the conflict in Gaza,” the landscape of military technology and bilateral trade is complex.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, notes that “Australia continues to broaden bilateral cooperation with Israel” and that “in recent years, there has been significantly increased engagement across a range of sectors, including innovation, security and defence.” The bilateral economic relationship between Australia and Israel is strong and “continues to grow,” according to DFAT. Two-way trade between the two countries was worth $1.34 billion in 2021.

Particularly since 2017, “Australia and Israel have expanded cooperation on national security, defence and cyber security,” according to DFAT, and a memorandum of understanding “on defence industry cooperation” was signed in October 2017. Even into 2024, the military trade between Israel and Australia continued to expand: for example, in February 2024 a new joint venture agreement worth US$600 million was concluded between the Australian Army and Israeli military company Elbit Systems.

Permits are required under the Defence Trade Controls Act 2012 to export Australian military goods and technologies. Military and “dual-use” goods and technologies are listed on the Defence and Strategic Goods List and the permits are issued (and may later be revoked) by the Defence Minister. Without a permit, a supplier would face ten-year imprisonment or $825,000 fine.

For a permit to be issued, the minister must be “satisfied that the supply would not prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia.” To determine this, the minister “must have regard” to criteria set out in the Defence Trade Controls Regulations 2013, which gives domestic expression to Australia’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty. One criterion is the risk that the goods or technology may become available to a country where “it may be used in a way contrary to Australia’s international obligations or commitments.” Another is the risk that the goods or technology “may be used to commit or facilitate serious abuses of human rights.”

How does this system measure up in light of Nicaragua’s case against Israel? At the provisional measures stage the ICJ believed Germany’s inter-agency process was sufficient to avoid breaches of international humanitarian law. But Australia’s system is different in several ways from Germany’s, including the difference between an “assessment” and “having regard” to certain criteria, and the German requirement for more than one ministry to be involved. For these reasons, Australia’s system doesn’t appear to be as robust as Germany’s.

Defence minister Richard Marles has revealed that eight export permits have been granted for Australian shipments of defence goods to Israel since 7 October 2023. Of these, seven were for “items which have gone to Israel to be worked on and then returned to Australia.” This suggests that the export permits were not provided for goods destined solely for Israeli use — but also that a two-way trade in military technologies continues between the countries.

Marles’s figure doesn’t capture the number of export permits granted before 7 October 2023 that are still in place. In June, it was confirmed that around sixty-six such permits are still operational. Marles has stated that these permits are for “dual use” technology, but this is a murky area: while the goods might be suitable for civilian use, they may also be used in commission of a crime. This was recognised by a Dutch Court that in February 2024 ordered the Dutch government to stop the export of fighter jet parts to Israel because there is now an “undeniable” and “clear risk” that these parts would be used in violation of international law.

Of particular concern is Australia’s role in a broader supply chain of component parts that then go to another country for integration into a product to be supplied to Israel. One example is the component parts made in Australia for F-35 fighter jets. Lockheed Martin, the manufacturers of the F-35s, noted in a now-deleted website post that “every F-35 built contains some Australian parts and components.” In June 2024, Israel’s defence ministry signed a $3 billion agreement with the United States to acquire twenty more of these fighters. The Israeli military has confirmed that F-35 aircraft are being used in its attacks on Gaza.

A related concern is Australian export of military goods and technologies to another country, which then sends it to Israel. In August 2024 Australia “streamlined” its weapons trade to the United States and Britain as part of the AUKUS military partnership. From 1 September, around 900 export permits previously required under Australia’s system are no longer necessary, representing around $5 billion worth of military exports per year.

Goods can therefore leave Australia without a permit, bound for the United States or Britain, which both have significant miliary trade with Israel. Just days ago, Britain withdrew some of its export permits given the “clear risk” that military exports might be used in violation of international humanitarian law. This may seem reassuring: Britain has its own permit system, and a risk was identified the permit has been revoked. But this change suggests that goods may have previously left Britain while at risk of being used in violation of international humanitarian law.

Given all this, Australia’s military and economic ties to Israel appear to remain significant, and Australia is at risk of providing military and economic support to a state that is plausibly committing genocide and violating international law — thereby making Australia complicit in these crimes.

For these reasons, more than one hundred Australian international lawyers recently called for “a comprehensive arms and energy embargo on Israel that covers the export, import and transfer of weapons, including parts, components and other dual-use items as well as military jet fuel.” The lawyers (I was among them) also called for Australia to “urgently suspend all investment, trade and scientific, technical and technological cooperation in these areas and engage in a systematic evaluation of all economic ties with Israel.” These lawyers are not alone: Save the Children, Amnesty International, the Jewish Council of Australia and the Australian Centre for International Justice have all made similar calls. More than 5500 Australian citizens signed Petition EN6141 to “Impose Trade and Arm Sanctions on Israel.”

In its decision in the South Africa v Israel case, the ICJ took note of a statement by a United Nations official: “Gaza has become a place of death and despair… its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence — while the world watches on.” In the face of this plausible genocide, Australia must comply with its obligations: to prevent further genocidal acts, and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law. •

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The deaths of six hostages, five Israeli and one American, in what appears to have been a rescue operation that ended disastrously has crystalised opposition to Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war. Hostage families are at the forefront of protests against failure to negotiate an end to the conflict.

This revolt has been a long time coming in a country riven by disagreement over what is widely perceived to be Netanyahu’s self-serving efforts to prolong the conflict. Israelis are conflicted over their backing for a ruthless campaign to eliminate Hamas, on the one hand, and a desire to see an enormously destructive war brought to an end, on the other.

At a distance, it is easy to understate the involvement of Israelis in defence of their country at virtually every level. In war, their traditional default position is to put aside political differences. But such is the level of disquiet over Netanyahu’s motivations in continuing the conflict to buy himself time politically that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are saying enough.

The phrase “existential threat” is too frequently used for propaganda purposes to describe pressures that Israeli might be under. In the case of the Hamas pogrom against Jewish people on 7 October, however, and subsequent conflict on Israel’s northern border with an Iran-backed Hezbollah, the phrase is not out of place.

That said, Netanyahu’s brutal conduct of the war, his lack of flexibility around negotiations for a ceasefire, and indeed his arrogant disdain for efforts of Americans and others to bring about a halt to hostilities has vastly complicated efforts to cauterise an open wound.

Has he overplayed his hand? The answer to that question will depend on the next few days, as he faces the wrath of his own people, the open resistance of his defence minister and the disdain of Israel’s security establishment. Adding to public disquiet is the willingness of former heads of Israel’s security agencies, its military and political leaders to speak out against Netanyahu’s conduct of the war.

In the eyes of Israelis and the international community, whether Netanyahu likes it or not, this is his project and it is being pursued at tremendous cost for all concerned, and not least Israel’s for reputation.

A meeting of Israel’s war cabinet last week descended into a shouting match between Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant over negotiations towards a ceasefire and release of hostages. Netanyahu is refusing to budge on what is known as the Philadelphi corridor along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. Removing Israeli troops from the corridor is a sticking point: Gallant wants to yield on this issue to enable a ceasefire agreement.

In a tense exchange, Gallant, who was sacked by Netanyahu and reinstated last year over disagreements about the conduct of the war, reportedly called the Israeli prime minister’s attitude towards the hostages a “moral disgrace.”

What this exchange, along with the mass protests, reveals is that the Israeli consensus on the war is deeply fractured. Gallant’s belief in the need for flexibility almost certainly reflects views among senior military, who are opposed to an endless urban conflict at tremendous cost for all concerned. On Sunday he called for an immediate cabinet meeting to reverse Thursday’s decision to keep troops in the Philadelphi corridor.

Israel’s casualties from war, leaving aside economic costs, run into the hundreds. In a small country, this is a heavy burden. (The Palestinian death toll now exceeds 40,000, according to Gazan health authorities.) Among the concerns of the Israeli military is that Israel’s political leadership refuses to describe what might constitute a political solution to a conflict that shows little sign of ending militarily. Netanyahu’s refusal to address this question in pursuit of total victory is not the least of the impediments to a lasting ceasefire and the release of surviving hostages.

In all of this, a feckless American leadership has been exposed. President Joe Biden might express understandable outrage at the death of an American hostage in Hamas hands, but Washington has had ten months to bring this war to a negotiated conclusion that would enable the political and physical rebuilding of Gaza. Thus far, it has failed.

This will not be regarded as a high point in American diplomacy. •

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Suu Kyi has been moved from her jail to a house within the compound in the capital, Naypyidaw, where the top military leaders live. But they aren’t concerned for her well-being, it seems: with armed resistance groups getting into drone warfare, her presence is designed to deter sneak attacks. The generals are hiding behind Aung San Suu Kyi.

In this, the fourth year of military rule under the innocuously named State Administration Council, the military regime has moved from overwhelmingly dominating to struggling for survival. It is faced with a diverse array of opponents. Most effective are the armies of the ethnic minorities around the fringes of Myanmar — armies that have been battling for decades against the centralising powers of the Bamar majority, from which the national military, or Tatmadaw, is largely drawn. But a broader-based resistance, drawn from supporters of the ousted government and calling themselves the People’s Defence Force, is growing in military skill and experience.

Concerted attacks last October by three ethnic armies based in the north and northwest — the “Three Brotherhood Alliance,” or 3BA — ousted the Tatmadaw from border-crossing control points into China and nearby towns. Almost weekly since then have come reports of more towns and army bases falling into rebel hands, with heavy Tatmadaw casualties and many of its troops captured or surrendered. By February, the junta had announced a new conscription drive to field more soldiers. Then, a month ago, ethnic forces took over the city of Lashio, a major stop on the old Burma Road between Mandalay, the ancient capital and Myanmar’s second-largest city, and China’s Yunnan.

David Scott Mathieson, an Australian analyst who has reported on Myanmar from Thailand for two decades, says the resistance groups are inflicting “body blows” on the Tatmadaw, forcing it out of borderlands along the country’s north, southeast and in Rakhine (Arakan) state on the Bay of Bengal. The People’s Defence Force is also starting to deliver pin pricks. In recent weeks, fighting near Mandalay forced a Singapore-owned power plant to shut down for two weeks. It also grabbed three small oil and gas fields not far from Bagan, the tourist centre of ancient temples and stupas further down the Irrawaddy River.

Mathieson cautions that some of the claims are tenuous. “You have to look at the backlash,” he tells me by phone. “When the military lose control of a town or area they then subject it to really intensive aerial and artillery bombardment. The resistance might gain control of the town but over the following weeks half the town is flattened and the townspeople have to flee.”

An accommodation has been worked out in some commercially important centres. No bombing followed the capture of Lashio, for example, which receives significant investment from China and is home to the Wa ethnic group, long known for its working relationship with China, whose United Wa Army is keeping order. Nearer the Thai border, ethnic Karen forces earlier claimed to have taken Myawaddy, a big cross-border trade centre with many Thai investments, but agreed to retreat to its fringes rather than subject it to fighting or bombing.

What has doubled the pain for the junta is that China clearly supported last year’s 3BA action against the northern border points. Its authorities were fed up with the cyber-scam centres tolerated and taxed by the regime in the borderlands, where workers — effectively captive — mount phishing attacks on individuals in China and elsewhere. It allowed the 3BA to acquire attack drones with software that enables then to avoid the anti-drone weapons China supplies the Tatmadaw. In Rakhine state, the Chinese have an understanding with the rebel Arakan Army that their gas and oil pipelines into Yunnan will not be touched.

The ethnic leaders are thinking long term, says Mathieson. “It’s going to be the Chinese who will be their major investors. It’s the curse of geography. We don’t like them but this is the hand we’ve been dealt.” On China’s part, it’s realpolitik: the Tatmadaw were out of the picture in these regions, so China would deal with the ethnic forces. Chinese diplomat Wang Yi could simultaneously go to Naypyidaw, as he did recently, and pledge support for Min Aung Hlaing and his plans to hold elections next year, a fanciful window-dressing exercise if the proven most popular electoral force, Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy, is disbarred.

“The grand picture is that the Burmese military is losing a lot of territory in the hinterlands but they do have an incredibility strong central core with military factories, airfields, and lots of bases,” says Mathieson. “The question is whether they will be able to defend that central core where the dynamics of conflict will be quite different.”

Sean Turnell views the state of play from a different angle. He is the Australian economist who was resident adviser to Suu Kyi’s government; he too was imprisoned and tried on improbable espionage charges, and he was released in November 2022 after 650 days in miserable prisons. Now at Sydney’s Lowy Institute, he has just published Best Laid Plans, a somewhat rueful account of the economic reforms his team attempted.

For Turnell, the real threat to the military regime is the dire state of the economy, which has contracted sharply since the coup and left around 40 per cent of the fifty-five million population in poverty. Production of natural gas and exports via pipeline to Thailand have fallen sharply. Foreign exchange reserves have dwindled. The State Administration Council has resorted to desperate means to shake out more hard cash and stop capital flight.

Myanmar’s rulers have also tried to get the country’s many expatriate workers to send their remittances through the official banking system, where the exchange rate is Kyat 2100 to the US dollar — as against a market rate of more than Kyat 5000 to the dollar — which effectively means confiscating 60 per cent of their earnings. A somewhat less punitive exchange rate is enforced on commodity exporters. To cut off alternative ways of moving funds, security authorities have arrested leading bankers including the Yoma group’s Serge Pun, along with gold dealers and operators of the hundi system of counter-party payments that has run for centuries across India and the Middle East. (The regime uses hundi too, to evade sanctions.) Even the regime-appointed central bank governor has been hauled in.

“They [the State Administration Council] have given up any rhetoric on development or growth,” Turnell tells me. “All of their policy is about: How do we get resources to survive? And above all that means foreign exchange. Because the blending of the two, the economy and the military, comes at that point. They need the foreign exchange to buy the weaponry, from China or Russia. They’re desperately short of it.”

Foreign exchange reserves have fallen to “probably around a quarter” of pre-coup levels, said Turnell. “This is why they keep bringing in those measures — to capture the remittance business, go after the hundi dealers, the goldsmiths, the banks, the attack on Serge Pun and the bankers, all brought up to Naypyidaw and given lectures. It’s all about the same thing: commandeering foreign exchange… There’s no doubt they are on the back foot.”

This drift has Turnell and exiled figures in the self-styled National Unity Government starting to think about how they would resume the reforms so abruptly ended by the army. “We would do it all again, only faster and deeper,” Turnell writes in his book.

But economic reformers could no longer leave two previous constitutional givens in place. One is the military’s lock-hold on the defence and home ministries and its own budget. The other is the centralised state structure, with endless negotiations on devolution stretched into a future where it was hoped greater prosperity and cleaner governance would weaken ethnic demands for autonomy or independence.

Aside from military retreat, could a new central government really concede a dispersal of powers? The support Suu Kyi gave the Tatmadaw against charges of genocide against Rohingya in Rakhine comes to mind, along with the strident support for Bamar dominance among populist Buddhist monks and their wealthy abbots.

“That’s the $64 question,” said Turnell. “From the National Unity Government’s side, they’ve been incredibly careful to craft everything in some sort of federal framework, and to convince ethnic groups that there will be a sort of federal system. Certainly some of the armed organisations have at the very least paid lip-service to that. Where groups like the 3BA, the United Wa Army, fit into all that is where it becomes more difficult. Some of their activities would not bear close observation in terms of national building and all the rest of it.”

How would Suu Kyi herself now see these questions? Communications are now nearly non-existent, Turnell said. When he was appearing with her in their trials, they had some exchanges. “We would hear things, that she was highly favourable to what the National Unity Government was all about, things like federalism,” he said. “I don’t think she was in any sense dictating the pace of that, but certainly not objecting to it.”

If she had, she would have told him, Turnell thinks. “My leaving of her was a specific moment where a message could be got across, and the only message she was absolutely full on about getting across was how proud she was with the resistance, that people were standing up, that this was a new generation, things were different. There was no sense of her objecting to any particular piece of policy, even though that policy was in some ways quite different to what she was doing, in particular over the Rakhine, over federalism.”

In jail, Turnell and other key reformers talked about what they would do differently. “The assumption of these people, and it might be her assumption, was that the military had no place. Which meant that a lot of things that were unacceptable to them could go ahead, like a federal structure, like a very different approach to Rakhine.”

The military will resist all the way, of course. “Taking my economist hat off but putting my economic historian hat on, one of the things that always happens is when regimes get really desperate, in the crunch you don’t need money any more, you just take,” Turnell says.

“Money is always an ephemeral, inter-subjective reality, a philosophical thing, a belief we both trust,” he said. “Once that breaks down and money ceases to have a value, then you are in the world of nature, jungle and might, and real resources. A regime like Myanmar’s — they print money, the taxation system is not up to anything, the bond market is collapsed. They can go after the banks, the foreign exchange, because that retains value because it’s determined by somebody else.”

As monetary value collapses, regimes employ naked power, seizure and command. “To me, the regime is not yet into that last desperate stage, but it does seem they are getting into it, where the monetary system is beginning to not meet their needs.”

The decline could be slowed, perhaps, by an internal military coup. Turnell is surprised that none of the regime’s crony capitalist friends — figures like the notorious Tay Za and Aung Ko Win — seem to have remonstrated with the leadership. “But you might get rid of one despotic but incompetent general, and you get one that’s no less despotic but more competent.”

Where Mathieson and Turnell converge, however, is that after all the borderland reverses and the collapse of the formal economy, the regime might stretch out its survival in the central core, feeding off its exchange rate extortion, bartering resources, and paying for Russian and Chinese arms in gold.

“When you add up all these different data points: the currency, fuel prices, commodity prices, battlefield losses, it looks pretty grim for the State Administration Council,” Mathieson said. “The big question here is: They’ve stuck it out for nearly four years and how much longer can they hold on? I suspect that as long as they have access to their domestic arms manufacturers, enough bodies to put uniforms on and to fight, and air power, they can probably hold on. Ten years they could easily hold on. They can go down fighting, or they can hold on to be lords of the wasteland, like in Mad Max: Fury Road.” •

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Night after night, thousands of young men willingly flew off into the war’s heart of darkness knowing full well how short the odds of survival were, how any moment over enemy-controlled territory they might be shot down, blown apart or, having miraculously survived the jump from a crippled or burning aircraft, held for years in a German prisoner of war camp.

Much has been written celebrating the quiet heroism of these men, and rightly so, but much less has been heard about those who failed to meet the exacting standards demanded of them through their tours of duty — the unaccounted casualties of a relentless conflict.

“Each year there are about 3000 cases of nervous breakdown in air crew and about 300 cases of lack of confidence,” reported the RAF’s director-general of medical services, Sir Harold Whittingham, in April 1945. “A third of the neurosis cases occur in Bomber Command.” A large proportion of those cases were in training units where the men had yet to be exposed to the perils of combat operations but were being tested in extreme flying conditions. More than 8000 airmen were killed in training accidents or other non-operational flying during the war.

“Lack of Moral Fibre,” or LMF, was the punitive designation promoted by the RAF leadership throughout the war to stigmatise aircrew who refused to fly on operations, avoided operations or did a boomerang — flew home early from a sortie without a persuasive excuse.

By early 1940, senior officers had become concerned that medical staff were excusing too many men from flying duties. A memorandum issued by the air ministry to all commands in April sought to limit the definition of mental incapacity by promoting the alternative, if unspoken, diagnosis of cowardice. A revised version in September 1941 stipulated that airmen, “who though not medical cases, come to forfeit the confidence of their Commanding Officers without having been subjected to any exceptional strain of operational flying … must be proved to be lacking in moral fibre.”

The service records of those classified as LMF cases would be stamped with a large red “W” for “waverer.” All would be stripped of their flying badges, sometimes publicly in front of their peers. Officers would lose their commissions and be refused ground jobs in the RAF. Non-commissioned officers would be demoted to aircraftmen second class — the lowest rank in the service — and assigned menial tasks for at least three months.

From 1944, LMF cases could be sent to work in coal mines or drafted into the army. Many RAF psychiatrists, while accepting the policy’s deterrent effect, thought it was wrong not to take account of individual conditions and mitigating circumstances. Their disquiet was ignored. Senior commanders, including Bomber Command chief Sir Arthur Harris, regarded it as an essential measure to maintain discipline and aircrew numbers.

Christopher Kingdon of the University of Chicago would write in the Chicago Journal of History in 2013: “RAF Command had an obsessive predilection, based upon Freudian concepts, that rises in neurotic rates were attributable to the character deficiencies of its wartime recruits, and not to the combined effects of prolonged exposure to combat stress and high attrition rates.”

In a report to Air Command in July 1943, Edward Jewesbury, an RAF psychiatric specialist, articulated the force’s intolerance and lack of sympathy for those airmen who suffered severe combat stress: “The airman thereafter developed symptoms of an anxiety state and was treated in sick quarters for a month without improvement. In previous wars he would probably have been shot for cowardice. Today he is a ‘medical case’, albeit a medical nuisance.”

The rules were often ruthlessly applied. The authorities ignore the reality that the mental trauma causing some airmen to be unwilling or incapable of flying was often well beyond their control. Historian Richard Overy, in The Bombing War, describes the official embrace of the notion of LMF as “a stigma designed as an emasculating deterrent to any sign of weakness.” As with the victims of “shell shock” in the first world war, the label often became a cover for the reality of a mental condition yet to find a name, post-traumatic stress disorder.

While relatively few of the tens of thousands of men who flew with Bomber Command were sidelined or disabled by trauma, there is little doubt that many of them were deeply affected by the terrible things they were required to do and experience night after night, day after day in the skies over German-occupied Europe. Not to be afraid was not to be human — and not to be afraid could expose crews to even greater levels of danger than were part of their basic job description if it sapped the confidence and focus of men whose survival often depended on it.

Many aircrew would simply sublimate the stress or become fatalistic, according to Bruce Buckham, a highly decorated Australian pilot who flew on two tours of combat operations with Bomber Command and took part in the final raids to sink the German battleship Tirpitz in Norway in November 1944.

“There was no counselling,” Buckham recalled. “If the boys felt the need to talk to someone then sometimes they might go along to the padre and have a bit of a chat with him and a cup of tea. But I don’t think I saw too many people looking for relief that way. It’s an unfortunate thing that so many had reached the point where they said, ‘Ok. It will be up any time now.’ But others would say, ‘Bugger that. Let’s have another beer. We’ll forget about it and let it stay forgotten.’ But it was hard for some.”

Life at the Bomber Command stations was deliberately structured if not to condition airmen to the almost daily toll of death then to at least avoid as much as possible contemplation of that fact by those who might be next to fall. Early each morning the names of those crews that had failed to return from operations were quietly scrubbed from the blackboard where they had been listed for operations the night before.

Funerals and memorial services were never held for those known to have been killed over Europe. The slender hope that all or some of a missing crew might have survived crashing or bailing out of a stricken aircraft to be taken prisoner often was embraced to avoid having to confront the probability that they were dead. For those known to have perished, a glass raised quietly in the mess or at the pub would be their farewell.

When an airman failed to return, a group of officers known as a Standing Committee of Adjustment, would gather the missing man’s personal effects and forward them to a central RAF depository, eventually to be returned to the family. Frequently the empty bed would be filled by a new crew member within a day or two.

While these rituals could seem callous, many airmen already too aware of their own mortality appreciated not being required to dwell on the fate of those whose luck had run out. Bruce Buckham was one: “We honoured them silently in our own minds. We’d have a drink the next night and the equanimity of life was restored straight away. You wouldn’t dwell on it. You couldn’t, because you had to keep going.”

Part of the answer to why these men were able to stare death in the face and carry on lies in who they were and why they enlisted. All aircrew were volunteers, many from throughout the Commonwealth who signed on as patriots determined to fight an enemy that threatened the freedom of the mother country and therefore the freedom of their nations.

Training bonded them, not least the Australians, whose mateship that infused their national identity was strengthened by the sense of mutual responsibility that flourished in the Australian squadrons of the RAF. But that spirit would be severely tested at times when the airmen thought the commanders were indifferent to the losses of their comrades, according to Bruce Buckham.

“There was no evidence, any sign at all, of sympathy when things went wrong and a lot of crews were lost,” said Buckham, who died in 2011. “The attitude seemed to be, ‘Oh well, too bad, we won’t do that again,’ or it was, ‘Well, let’s try something else.’ The force was only a number of bodies who were sent out to do a job. That’s the way they looked at it. We had bigger and bigger forces going out. They built up a thousand-odd planes for Hamburg. They burnt that out. There were a couple of thousand-bomber raids on Cologne. There were many other raids of 800 and 900 aircraft. To the commanders it was just bodies and numbers of bodies that were involved.”

Early in his operational career, Buckham would keep a diary noting the losses of other aircraft after each mission. He soon concluded that this was not a constructive exercise.

“After about half a dozen trips I stopped. I realised this was crazy. All I was doing was taking a note of the ‘birds’ that were not coming back. And I tell you what, it was a bit heart rending when you have to go down to the flight next morning and wipe out half the names on the board where the crew were listed. The board had three lines for each crew and not many were able to fill those three lines — thirty trips. I didn’t like it. There was no time differential between life and death. I worked out that I was worrying about something that wasn’t manageable. And so I stopped keeping a count. I never thought about luck and I never thought about the lack of luck. I couldn’t. Every split second of life out there had to be dealt with at the time as you saw fit.”

***

Many airmen were convinced they had no hope of survival. Don Charlwood would write in his celebrated memoir No Moon Tonight: “We even became accustomed to the idea that to reach thirty ops was no longer possible, that home was a place for which we could afford no longings.” Phil Eyles, who was the navigator of later Pathfinder Force commander Don Bennett when they were shot down over Norway in early 1942, was another fatalist: “Everybody seemed to have the impression that they were going to cop it. That is why, right from the start when I joined up, I wanted twelve shillings and sixpence a day [as a sergeant] instead of being an AC2 [aircraftman second class] on a shilling a day, and that was all I wanted. There was going to be a pension for my wife and child.”

Many airmen relieved the intense stress of operations by drinking hard and playing hard in their free time. The Australians were notable for their excess on both counts. RAAF 463 Squadron commander Rollo Kingsford-Smith liked to drink and found that teetotallers who were often alone when not flying did not cope as well with the stress of operations as those who drank.

“Drinking (draught beer only — spirits were nearly unprocurable), the company at the bar and forgetting about the war was important therapy,” Kingsford-Smith would write in his memoir, I Wouldn’t Have Missed it for Quids. “Many misinformed English people did not really warm to Australian aircrews’ hijinks when not on duty. My enduring memory of most of my aircrew is of young men who, between fighting and dying, lived wildly, played exuberantly, and loved sometimes imprudently.”

The exhilaration of battle while dicing with death would drive a lot of airmen to perform the super-human feats they often carried out. But even the toughest and most stoic of airmen could be brought undone by dramatic events.

Jamaican Billy Strachan flew a tour as a wireless operator/air gunner before retraining as a pilot and joining 576 Squadron, based at RAF Fiskerton near Lincoln, in the final months of the war. His flying career came to an abrupt end one night, soon after his Lancaster took off carrying a 12,000 bomb.

“Our flight path was over Lincoln Cathedral,” Strachan would recount. “It was a foggy night, with visibility about 100 yards. I asked my engineer, who stood beside me, to make sure we were on course to get over the top of the cathedral tower. He replied: ‘We’ve just passed it.’ I looked out and suddenly realised that it was just beyond our wingtips, to the side. This was the last straw. It was sheer luck. I hadn’t seen it at all — and I was the pilot! There and then my nerve went. I knew I simply couldn’t go on — that this was the end of me as a pilot. I flew to a special ‘hole’ we had in the North Sea, which no allied shipping ever went near, and dropped my ‘big one.’ Then I flew back to the airfield.”

Strachan’s navigator that night was Len Dorricott, who had earlier won the Distinguished Flying Medal on operations with 460 Squadron RAAF aboard the fabled “G for George” Lancaster. In his flying logbook, Dorricott would note with great understatement, “Pilot ill.”

Following the incident, Strachan was sent to a large country house in Coventry where he stayed for forty-eight hours. A psychiatrist who interviewed him attributed his breakdown to “war weariness,” a gentler variation of LMF. Billy Strachan never flew again and was never awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross that undoubtedly was his due after such long and brave service with Bomber Command. After the war he became a famous communist and leader of the black rights movement in Britain. •

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Israel’s assassination of a Hezbollah military commander in Beirut and Hamas’s number two in Tehran invites retaliation. The question then turns to what form this retaliation might take, and whether it will risk a wider Middle East conflict. Is the region sliding towards a war that risks involving not simply Israel and its enemies but also the United States and its allies?

The answer lies in whether Iran and its proxies are willing to endure an all-out conflict that would devastate swathes of the Middle East and threaten region-wide stability. Here, the Iranian regime’s calculations about its ability to withstand such a conflict — and indeed retain its own hold on power — will be paramount.

We are not simply talking about an Israeli war with Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Yemen. The much wider question concerns which other Middle East players might become sucked into a regional conflict with devastating consequences. All-out war between Israel and Iran and its proxies would inevitably spill over into surrounding states and down into the Gulf.

Sometimes overlooked in the war-gaming that goes on at times like this is Iran’s capacity to shut down tanker traffic via the Strait of Hormuz, which handles up to 30 per cent of the world’s oil each day. Such Iranian adventurism would invite a crushing response from the United States, with enormous disruption to the global economy and the security of surrounding oil-rich states.

None of this is preordained, or perhaps even likely, but it would be unwise to discount the risks to region-wide stability if the conflict were to spiral out of control.

In Washington, worst-case scenarios will have been dusted off as a region awaits the aftershocks of two of the most provocative extrajudicial assassinations in a blood-soaked regional history. The killing in a Beirut suburb of Fuad Shukr, a Hezbollah commander, was followed a day later by the remote-controlled bomb that ended the life of Hamas’s Ismael Haniyeh in Tehran. The killings could hardly have been more provocative, nor more damaging to Iran’s proxies and its credibility more broadly.

If Tehran can’t guarantee the safety of someone like Haniyeh on what amounted to a state visit for the swearing of a new president what does this say about its ability to protect its own leaders?

Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei has vowed revenge. What form this might take is anyone’s guess, but a response there will be.

Leaving aside Haniyeh’s wider importance as a principal negotiator of a ceasefire with Israel in Gaza and the release of those hostages still alive, the bigger question is where all this leaves the desultory American efforts to stop a Middle East escalation. Israel’s twin assassinations have further complicated those efforts at a moment when negotiators were edging towards some sort of accommodation. All bets would seem to be off for the time being.

In all of this, the question arises again of whether Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is in any way motivated to bring the Gaza war to a conclusion in some sort of ceasefire arrangement. On the evidence of his government’s slow-walking response to various ceasefire and hostage-release initiatives advanced by American negotiators in partnership with Arab allies, the answer is no.

Since the beginning of the conflict American policy has been captive to Israeli domestic politics and Netanyahu’s own quest to hang on to power in the face of widespread domestic agitation. In remarkable contrast to other moments of crisis, when Israel tends to coalesce around its political leadership, the reverse has been the case during the Gaza war.

Israelis may be invested overwhelmingly in the removal of Hamas as a threat, but a large proportion also regard Netanyahu and his extremist allies as a significant part of the problem. They will not forgive him for the security lapses that contributed to Hamas’s breakout pogrom against Jewish people on 7 October, more than nine months and 40,000 Palestinian casualties ago.

Complicating the situation from the perspective of an international community looking askance at America’s fumbling peace efforts is the state of the White House itself. In the erratic history of American foreign policy there has scarcely been a more inept performance than the Biden administration’s attempts to push its Israeli ally towards a sustainable ceasefire.

From Biden’s initial rush to Israel to embrace Netanyahu to secretary of state Antony Blinken’s so-far futile efforts to stop the war, Washington’s inability to rein in its Middle East ally has been exposed. Last week’s address to a joint session of Congress by Netanyahu, during which he received sixty-one standing ovations, simply underscored American ruptures.

With the United States distracted by one of the most consequential presidential elections in its history, with a senescent lame duck president in the White House and with Donald Trump using the word “Palestinian” as a political weapon, American domestic politics finds itself on a knife-edge.

American political historians like to talk about “October surprises” in the context of presidential elections — those exogeneous events beyond reasonable calculations that threaten to overturn political predictions within weeks of an election. Earlier than might have been anticipated we have entered “August complications” territory, with a Democratic presidential nominee untested in the management of foreign crises and a Republican alternative whose unsteadiness would risk making a bad situation a whole lot worse. This leaves aside Biden’s own limitations.

In Tehran and Beirut these permutations will be weighing on calculations about what do next. At this stage, Ayatollah Khamenei and the Hezbollah religious leader Hassan Nasrallah seem unlikely to risk all-out conflict across Lebanon’s frontier, let alone further afield. Neither leader has a reputation for capriciousness.

Since the Gaza war began, Tehran has seemed intent on avoiding a wider regional conflict. Hezbollah has held back from unleashing the sort of rocket barrage against Israeli cities and towns of which it is capable.

Israel’s likely response to an escalation would be devastating on a scale unmatched by its various incursions into Lebanon, including its invasion of 1982 and its war of 2006. Neither ended well for Israel, and the 1982 invasion spawned Hezbollah.

As the world watches and waits for the next act of violence that will weigh further against prospects of an end to the Gaza war, other shoes will undoubtedly drop. Netanyahu seems determined to stretch limits, both militarily and politically, as he has from the beginning. Washington’s influence remains much diminished. •

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The work of poets like these, says Michael Korda, encapsulates much of what the public knows and understands of the first world war. In his new book, Muse of Fire, Korda offers the lives and work of six of the soldier poets — Brookes, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Graves, Owen, and the American poet Alan Seeger — as a way to understand that war anew.

Given the many shelves of work devoted to that calamitous struggle, this claim might seem overstated. And yet, as Korda points out, poetry has had a long association with war — think the Iliad and Odyssey — and at the time of the first world war it enjoyed a public currency that has become much devalued.

These were days when people routinely wrote verses for friends and family, when reams of poetry were memorised at school, when Rudyard Kipling was as famous as a modern sporting figure, and when newspapers and popular magazines ran poetry in abundance, much of it drawing on contemporaneous events. The poetry written during the war by Korda’s subjects was offered to a public much more receptive than our own.

Poetry was also unique among art forms, Korda points out, for its ability to escape censorship. Where the military censors routinely snipped indiscreet lines from soldiers’ letters, blacked out press reports potentially damaging to public morale, kept the official war artists at a distance and orchestrated staged scenes for photographers, they generally left poetry alone. An officer censoring Rosenberg’s mail, for example, waved the poems through with the comment that he “could not be bothered with going through such rubbish.”

Even if they had read it right through, I doubt officials would have been worried by the poetry of Rupert Brooke, the first of Korda’s subjects. The wave of patriotism and noble feeling that swept England when it entered the war is encapsulated in Brooke’s sonnet, “The Soldier.” Read aloud on Easter Sunday 1915 in St Paul’s Cathedral, it brought instant acclaim to its already celebrated poet author:

If I should die, think only this of me,
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

The acclaim was given bathetic poignancy when Brooke died three weeks later courtesy of a mosquito bite delivered while he was en-route to the imminent Gallipoli campaign. But the sentimentality of those lines soured after that campaign went awry; Gallipoli became the subject of bitter scorn once fighting began on the Western Front and every corner of every foreign field became sown with blood.

As Korda writes, and as many schoolchildren have doubtless been told, Wilfred Owen’s poetry appears to constitute a direct rejoinder to Brooke:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est.
Pro patria mori.

The journey from Brooke’s verses to those of Owen and his contemporaries constitutes the main arc of Muse of Fire. It is not, however, an uncomplicated trajectory. Korda’s inclusion of Alan Seeger, for example, allows him to draw attention to those whose patriotic feeling and enthusiasm for the war never waned. Seeger — uncle to Pete — was so desirous to fight that he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion, endured its famously arduous training, and was stationed on the Western Front until his death, in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme. He almost luxuriated in the war: the last person to see him alive recalled him “running forward, with his bayonet fixed” and “pride in his eye.”

Much like Brooke, Owen’s poetry can be read as a rejoinder to Seeger’s celebration of a noble death:

Yet sought they neither recompense nor praise…
Nay, rather, France, to you they rendered thanks
(Seeing they came for honour, not for gain),
Who, opening to them your glorious ranks,
Gave them that grand occasion to excel,
That chance to live the life most free from stain
And that rare privilege of dying well.

Perhaps the most affecting life related, however, is Isaac Rosenberg’s. A child of Jewish immigrants from Russia, he grew up in dire poverty in London but showed sufficient talent as a painter that community leaders paid for his study at the Slade Art School. He enlisted in 1915, likely out of a need for money, and was killed on the Western Front in 1918, aged twenty-eight. Some believed that Rosenberg’s work as a painter outstripped his poetry, but there is little denying the power of the close observation, attention to sound and refusal to smear away the sordid on display, for example, in “Dead Man’s Dump”:

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
Their shut mouths made no moan.
They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
Man born of man, and born of woman,
And shells go crying over them
From night till night and now.

Korda winces at this poem: “The sound of the crunching of the bones is Isaac at his unflinching best.” But as a former publisher at Simon & Schuster, he knows quality when he sees it. While he modestly declaims any expertise — “I am not a literary critic; nor is this a book about poetry as such” — his selections and his readings of those selections are compelling.

Korda also knows what will have a person turn the page. Over the past two decades he has become an industrious popular biographer, with Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee among his subjects. In many ways, Muse of Fire is a typical volume of popular history. Its argument accumulates weight via narrative verve. It is built almost entirely on secondary scholarship. It shies from overt analysis. It is streamlined by elegant prose that occasionally gleams with intriguing, somewhat beguiling, personal asides. Noting, for example, that the tiered English school system helped to produce different accents, Korda adds, “I am good at recognising class differences in the way people speak, even though, having been educated in part in the United States and Switzerland, my own accent is mid-Atlantic, and I am sometimes mistaken for a Canadian.”

For all the professional acumen of its maker, however, Muse of Fire is a curiously unbalanced and at times unambitious volume. Its first third is devoted to Brooke, whose poetry is defined by its ornate lyricism and preoccupied with an idyllic, bucolic and rather quaint England. Korda goes into considerable detail about Brooke’s melodramatic romances and prewar life, with frequent mentions of the poet’s good looks and speculation about whether he had sex (and what that might mean) with this woman or that.

Brooke emerges as a golden-tongued Dorian Gray: fluent with a pen, charming to talk to and beautiful to look at, sure — but also self-obsessed, manipulative, callous, vain and, behind closed doors, something of a sex pest. He shows Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf) his “trademark trick” of emerging from a river with an “instant erection”; he tells one-time lover Katherine “Ka” Cox that once she has “given” herself to him she is no longer her own mistress: “It means that you’re not as free to do anything as you were.”

Fascinating as Korda seems to find this — one senses he would like nothing better than to devote the whole book to Brooke — it is ultimately peripheral to his subject and has the effect of crowding out the other lives. Further limiting the book’s sweep is Korda’s decision to treat each of his subjects discretely. Instead of interweaving them, which would doubtless have been difficult, he generally leaves them to stand alone. This results in repetition (we have two accounts, 150 pages apart and pretty much the same, of a meeting between Brooke and Sassoon) and, more critically, in a much too superficial treatment of each poet’s development.

Korda’s keenness to use biography and poetry to depict the first world war makes him treat each poem as both autobiographical and, in its stylistic changes, driven wholly by the urge to depict the war in all its carnage. This approach dramatically underplays the role of his poets’ imagination, their reading, their engagement with debate about poetic direction and their responses to editing. The work of Edward Marsh, an aide to Churchill who was a benefactor, editor and confidant to most of Korda’s subjects — and who is given the best summation as an “indefatigable dowsing rod of talent’ — is particularly notable here, but Korda’s decision to isolate each of his subjects makes him a vague, arbitrary presence.

Then there is some odd sloppiness. Authorship of the Father Brown stories is given to Hilaire Belloc instead of G.K. Chesterton. Korda moves erratically between calling his subjects by their first names and then their surnames. On occasion, Wilfred Owen becomes Wilfred Owens.

“Seldom do poets play a significant role in history, or have a serious effect on politics or on public opinion,” Korda writes. The first world war is the exception. Both at the time and in subsequent years, poets like those commemorated at Westminster Cathedral have coloured how the war is understood and remembered. But even poetry has its limits. “Whatever else it did,” Korda concludes, “it did not end war — no war ever does.”

It does many other things, of course, and a strength of this book is that Korda quotes poetry evoking a wider vista of military life. There is Rosenberg’s self-explanatory “Marching”:

My eyes catch ruddy necks
Sturdily pressed back —
All a red-brick moving glint.
Like flaming pendulums, hands
Swing across the khaki —
Mustard coloured khaki —
To the automatic feet.

There’s Robert Graves’s comic mash of war and normalcy:

You’ll be dozing safe in your dug-out —
A great road, the trench shakes and falls about;
You’re choking, choking — then, hullo!
Marjorie’s walking gaily down the trench
Hanky to nose (that powder makes a stench!)
Getting her pinafore all over grime.
Funny, she died ten years ago.
Ah, this is a queer time.

And there’s Siegfried Sassoon’s cold mimicry of Kipling in “The Kiss,” written after a lecture on fighting with a bayonet:

To these I turn, in these I trust;
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal;
I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He spits and turns and loves the air,
And splits a skill to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss. •

Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets
By Michael Korda | Liveright | $63.99 | 382 pages

The post The poets’ war appeared first on Inside Story.

War between Israel and Lebanon need not be inevitable, but the two are edging closer to open conflict. A mistake, a miscalculation, a desire by one side or the other to inflict mass casualties could set off a chain reaction that results in war. We have seen this movie before.

In this latest period, the Middle East resembles a tinderbox, with Israel embroiled in conflict on three fronts: the Gaza Strip, its northern border with Lebanon, and pin-pricks from the Yemeni Houthis to the south. Standing behind the three is Iran, which supplies munitions, training and, in the case of Hezbollah, on-the-ground engagement via its Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Not since the Yom Kippur war of 1973 has Israel found itself grappling with a strategic challenge of this complexity. In some ways, the situation is more multifaceted because of threats to Israel’s heartland from a Hezbollah rocket arsenal.

The Gaza war is now the longest and in some ways the most debilitating in the country’s history. Israel’s international reputation is scarred on a daily basis by horrible scenes of carnage among civilians, including women and children subjected to merciless bombing.

Conflict with the Palestinians has exerted an enormous strain on Israel militarily, diplomatically and — given the political fractures it is causing within Israel itself — politically. The exhaustion factor cannot be discounted for a small country beset on different fronts.

While Hamas and the Houthis have a limited capacity to inflict damage on Israel proper, the Gaza war has been enormously costly in Israeli lives and ordnance. Benjamin Netanyahu’s sounding off this week over America’s withholding of a shipment of 2000-pound bombs is a sign of Israel’s concern over depleted stocks of munitions and the risks to resupply. There is a sense in the region that something will have to give.

Israeli military commanders are letting it be known they have dusted off war plans. Hezbollah militia leaders are preparing for open warfare. The two sides are mobilising along Israel’s northern frontier.

Washington is concerned, as well it might be. Being dragged into a wider Middle East conflict is the stuff of American nightmares. Understanding that open conflict between Israel and Lebanon may cause a wider regional war, US envoy Amos Hochstein has been in the region seeking to calm the situation.

Iran’s direct support of its Hezbollah proxy, on the ground or in the air, adds to the bad-case scenario. Alert to the risks early in the Gaza war, Joe Biden ordered two US carrier groups into the eastern Mediterranean to forestall such a possibility.

History is important for understanding the faultlines in the troubled Israel–Lebanon context. In 1982, following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and faced by the risk of the country falling apart, US president Ronald Reagan committed a stabilisation force to Beirut. American mediators had negotiated the Palestine Liberation Organisation leadership’s move from Beirut to distant Tunisia and its fighters’ dispersal to the far corners of the Middle East.

American involvement on the ground proved catastrophic. An April 1983 suicide bomb attack on the US embassy in Beirut killed thirty-two people. Later that year, in October, 241 American servicemen perished in another suicide bombing, this time in Beirut’s southern suburbs. For Washington, this was carnage on a mass scale.

Much chastened, Reagan withdrew US troops in 1984, vowing never again to commit American ground forces to the region. But the lesson hadn’t been learned by George W. Bush when he rushed to war in Iraq in 2003.

In Israel’s case, its involvement in Lebanon since the Israeli state was declared in 1948 has been militarily challenging, to say the least. Following the PLO’s bloody ouster from Jordan in 1970 — the event the Palestinians call Black September — the organisation’s leadership had moved to Beirut, from where it directed guerrilla attacks against Israel from southern Lebanon.

To push back the Palestinian threat to its northern towns and kibbutzim, Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. In the process it set up a buffer zone along its northern boundary in alliance with a Christian-led South Lebanese Army, which it supplied with arms and trained as a proxy force.

Four years later, following an attempt by Palestinian terrorists to assassinate its ambassador in London, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. The aim was to neutralise the Palestinian threat once and for all, but Israel paid a heavy price for its adventurism in the court of international opinion.

Between 16 and 18 September 1982, under the gaze of an occupying Israeli army, Christian Phalange militiamen massacred hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. Ariel Sharon, who was held accountable his sickening development, was obliged to resign as Israel’s defence minister.

The episode also prompted the resignation of Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister, who felt Sharon had misled him about the war’s scope. Sharon had sold the war on the basis that Israel’s army would limit itself to an invasion of southern Lebanon. Instead, under Sharon’s direction, it went all the way to Beirut, with disastrous consequences.

Out of all of this, there has been no more malign result, at least from Israel’s perspective, than the evolution of Hezbollah as a threatening Iranian Shiite proxy. Hezbollah — the “Party of God” inspired by the rhetoric of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini — dates its formation to 1982.

In its invasion of Lebanon and its occupation of southern Lebanon up until 2000, Israel inadvertently acted as midwife to Hezbollah. The organisation evolved from an embryonic resistance movement to its now-dominant role in Lebanon and the principal Iranian-backed threat to Israel’s security.

Tactically, strategically and politically, 1982 proved to be a jagged moment in Middle East history, a moment whose consequences are playing out in the contemporary environment. It’s a cliché, but the 1982 invasion proved to be an own-goal for Israel.

Another date is also important in considering the tensions between Israel and Lebanon. In 2006, Israel caused considerable damage to Lebanese infrastructure during a thirty-four-day war against Hezbollah in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. Its aim was to put Hezbollah on notice that it would pay a heavy price for actions that threatened Israeli security across its northern boundary.

That was the intent, but the best that can be said for Israel’s 2006 foray is that it met with limited success, and the more accurate way to characterise it is as a failure. Hezbollah is immeasurably stronger than it was eighteen years ago, both militarily and politically.

During those years, Lebanon has been a cauldron of ferment and instability, with Hezbollah gradually tightening its grip on the country and its institutions, to the point where it is now the dominant political player.

A construct of the French colonial era, Lebanon is barely recognisable from the country that Paris sought to foster in 1943 with a weighting towards Christian dominance. Eight decades later, the Christian, Sunni and Druze components of the population are more or less subservient to Hezbollah Shiite domination.

Beyond that, Hezbollah has become Iran’s most lethal proxy in the region, with something like 130,000 rockets in its arsenal that could be used to threaten Israel’s defences. Just this past week, it engaged in what can only be described as a blatant provocation by releasing a nine-minute video purporting to show Israeli military assets deep inside Israel.

The point it was making was that Hezbollah had the capacity to surveil Israel’s military facilities; the implied threat was that those facilities were within range of its own Iranian-supplied missiles, which are far more sophisticated, and thus lethal, than Hamas’s relatively rudimentary rockets.

Since Hamas’s 7 October pogrom and hostage-taking, it has been assumed that Iran wants to avoid a wider conflict. This is probably still true, but the heightened tensions along the Israel–Lebanon frontier risk fuelling a wider conflict. Drawing lessons from history, America and its allies need to find a way to persuade Israel and Hamas to agree to a permanent ceasefire with plans in place for a governing body in Gaza and its reconstruction.

Until and unless that happens, the prospect of de-escalation between Israel and Lebanon remains remote. It’s sometimes forgotten that 60,000 Israelis have been displaced in northern Israel by persistent Hezbollah rocket attacks. Experience tells us this situation is unsustainable. •

The post Middle Eastern tinderbox appeared first on Inside Story.

Casement, who was not far short of two metres in height, was handsome and athletic, spoke with a musical voice, and projected a powerful personality. But much of it was outward show: he was marked by contradictions and ambivalences. As Roland Philipps shows us in his new biography, Broken Archangel, he started out believing Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, but became a militant nationalist; served the British government abroad, and was twice decorated, yet defected to Germany during the first world war; was courteous, apparently honest and open, but also homosexually active (then totally taboo). He was also brought up Protestant but would convert to Catholicism when faced with death. His first Holy Communion was followed by receiving the Last Rites.

That a man with a Protestant background should become so involved in the Irish struggle for independence should not surprise us. It is often overlooked — since Ulster can be thought of as caging  Protestantism — that many of the leading figures advancing the cause of Irish independence were Protestant. These include Charles Stewart Parnell, the great advocate of Home Rule, and Wolfe Tone, the leader of the rebellion of 1798. More broadly, while James Joyce was brought up Catholic, W.B. Yeats was not. Nor was George Bernard Shaw, nor Oscar Wilde. (Indeed Wilde’s activist mother, a poet, was a fiery nationalist.) To the list we can add John Mitchel, a leading member of Young Ireland, whose Jail Journal contains wonderful descriptions of Tasmania.

Orphaned at an early age and poorly educated, Casement was eager to encounter the wider world. His first job, with a shipping company, took him to the Congo. When he arrived there in 1883 at the age of nineteen, he would encounter colonialism at its rawest.

Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was envious of the colonial empires of other nations (and relatives). He had looked into buying Fiji, and the Philippines, and now turned his attention to Africa. He convened a conference of explorers and geographers, steered them towards establishing the International African Association, and pointed to blank spaces on the map where “hospitable, scientific and pacification bases” could be set up. Forming a tighter organisation with himself as proprietor, Leopold employed H.M. Stanley (he who found Livingstone) to begin subduing the Congo. Stanley’s expedition advanced, offering local chiefs “rent” for their land in brass rods, cloth, knives and loincloths.

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck meanwhile convened a conference in Berlin to divide large parts of Africa among the European powers: lightweight Belgium was not invited. But the wily Leopold played on great-power rivalries. Lobbying intensely with promises of free trade and prosperity for all (including Africans, since slavery would be stamped out) Leopold was designated King-Sovereign of the Congo Free State.

The twenty-one-year-old Casement, already on site, got caught up in this enterprise, managing a base camp at the mouth of the Congo river. It was an episode he would later gloss over, for he was soon made aware of the brutality of Leopold’s project. One white man would pay his black soldiers five brass rods for every human head they brought in. The thousands of porters needed to carry the agents’ supplies were beaten mercilessly, to the point where, of the 300 conscripted for one expedition, not a single man survived.

Later it would become worse, as Leopold stepped up the extraction of rubber and ivory from what was in effect his private estate. For not meeting their quotas of rubber, people would have an arm or a hand chopped off. Worked to death or slaughtered outright, very many Congolese died: estimates ran as high as eight to ten million in a little more than twenty years. The king and his cohort calmly took their profits: between 1890 and 1904, Congo rubber earnings increased by a multiple of ninety-six.

Meanwhile, Casement had joined the British Foreign Office — with which he would remain until 1913 — serving as consul in a number of posts in Africa. He was still very much a believer in Empire, castigating the Boers in their war with Britain for setting up an Irish Brigade (which he would later emulate). Before taking up a consular post in Central Africa he visited Leopold in Brussels, and raised the harsh treatment of Africans with the king. Why not pay and then tax the Congolese, instead of imposing forced labour? It was “labour in lieu of tax,” the king replied bluntly.

By 1902 Casement was becoming more and more outspoken in his despatches to London: Leopold would have to be tackled head on. Given increased parliamentary pressure, the Conservative government was prompted to act, and instructed Casement to go on a fact-finding mission. Early on he was surprised to find the Congo “a desert — no natives left.” Wherever he went, there was desolation. Things were worsened by the Free State authorities’ insistence (through their dreaded African police) on district quotas being met, despite there being fewer able-bodied people on hand to meet them.

Aware that the Congolese were voiceless, and that he found himself cast as their spokesman, Casement described their piteous condition repeatedly. Some in the Foreign Office were disposed to regard him as tired and emotional, but the foreign secretary declared that even “making every allowance for the strength of his feelings, these papers are a terrible indictment.” Brought back to Britain to compile his special report, Casement produced the 50,000-word document in a week. The Foreign Office was surprised by its understated tone, which extended to Casement’s estimate that Leopold’s men had killed three million.

‘The public reaction was mixed at first, while Leopold was prompted to mount a counter-campaign, extending to whitewash pamphlets being placed in railway sleeping cars. But a Congo Reform Association was established, and even Leopold was compelled to set up an inquiry. Things accelerated once American opinion mobilised, helped along by Mark Twain publishing King Leopold’s Soliloquy. In 1908 the king would be obliged to transfer the Congo to the Belgian state — which meant supervision — while Casement would be decorated for his efforts. In the meantime he increasingly despaired of his employers. Suffering from recurrent health and financial problems, he took leave and turned to Ireland more and more.

He was rebuilding himself. An orphan since the age of twelve, Casement’s disjointed upbringing had left him, as Philipps puts it, “emotionally hollow and with a carapace of withdrawn self-sufficiency.” Increasingly he found that Ireland itself was in need of rebuilding. The language was so far gone that even his headmaster, who had published translations into Irish, presided over a school where the very word “Ireland” was never mentioned.

Casement now began to support the Irish-language movement, revive an Antrim bardic festival, and join the independence activists Sinn Féin. There was some similarity, he began to feel, between the oppression of the Congolese and the state of Ireland: colonial landlessness was at the heart of it. (As an Irishwoman once remarked, the English took everything except the scenery.)

Casement’s next three diplomatic postings were in Brazil. Increasingly he heard stories of the “universal subjection” of the Indians of the headwaters of the Amazon to secure greater rubber production. There a Peruvian had — Leopold-like — secured a concession when (not long before) slavery was still legal in Brazil, and ran the Putumayo accordingly. But the company concerned was registered in London, and relied on British investment.

Pressure built up for a commission, with Casement once again to the fore: the brutalities they discovered make grim reading. Progress was slow; Britain could exercise little direct influence in Latin America. But with the publication of the commission’s report, Casement became a household name. A papal encyclical enjoined greater humanity in dealing with the Indians. Casement — now Sir Roger — was recognised as the greatest humanitarian of the day.

But the Irish question was nearest his heart: “A people lost in the Middle Ages,” he wrote, should be “found and returned to Europe.” Having retired from the Foreign Office on a generous pension, he devoted himself to the cause. Conservative opposition to Home Rule for Ireland — a limited devolution of power — had intensified after a bill approving it was introduced to the British parliament in 1912. The Ulster Protestants began to drill, then arm, with the connivance of leading Conservatives.

For his part, Casement was involved in setting up the counter Irish Volunteers, extending to gun-running. Increasingly he stumped the country — and later America — making fiery speeches. With the outbreak of the first world war, the Home Rule act was passed but immediately suspended. Seeing Germany as a possible ally for the nationalist cause, Casement became intent on going there.

Proceeding from New York via Oslo, Casement arrived in Berlin with a scheme he put to raise a volunteer Irish Brigade from prisoners of war. Immediately the German authorities began to plan on segregating Irish POWs  to facilitate recruitment, and issued a statement saying they had no intention of bringing Ireland under German domination. But Casement found few recruits: having lost comrades in battle, the men were more anti-German than anti-English. (The provision in Casement’s agreement with the Germans that they might come to be deployed in Egypt instead of Ireland did not appeal either.)

Casement became dismissive, even contemptuous of these Irish. Meanwhile he was increasingly isolated. German officials were preoccupied with the war, and he was totally unaware that his Norwegian manservant, Adler Christensen, was acting as a double agent. His mental condition deteriorated and, lapsing into paranoia, he entered a sanitorium.

News reached Germany of the planned Easter Rising. Casement sprang out of bed and did what he could to warn the plotters that they had better call it off — the arms supplied would be far below expectations, the Irish Brigade ditto. But plans went ahead: the Germans wanted this sideshow to distract the British. Casement would be taken by submarine to the Kerry coast, where he would rendezvous with a disguised German ship bringing ammunition. The plan was botched. The ship, intercepted by the Royal Navy, was scuttled by the crew. The submariners got to shore, but were unmet. Prone with exhaustion, Casement was arrested shortly after.

He was soon taken to London, and since this was a case involving high treason, imprisoned in the Tower. It was as bad as it sounds: watching him in the windowless cell were two policemen, plus a third outside. The few permitted to visit found him exhausted and tattered, still in the same clothes he had landed in. A number of notables rallied round: George Bernard Shaw thought Casement should present his own defence in court, then proceeded to write one. Fearful of damaging his own reputation as a celebrity, though, Shaw withheld vital financial support. Indeed the only well-known public figures who contributed were the Quaker George Cadbury and the radical journalist W.H. Nevinson.

Meanwhile, to soften them up, a high government official summoned six journalists to his office. He showed them photographs of extracts from Casement’s diaries. Interspersed among other matters were references to homosexual encounters, all the more shocking for their perfunctory style. “Arr[ive] Newcastle. Huge! In Bath Splendid. Millar into me.”  The day after the trial, the Daily Express would headline them as “The Diaries of a Degenerate.” A keen supporter who was a teacher was dismissed from her  school.

Casement scrubbed up well for the trial, and was elegant and urbane. His counsel virtually broke down, but the defendant made a passionate statement from the dock. Casement stressed throughout that Ireland was a separate, unrecognised realm — as his trial before an English court rather than an Irish one made plain. “I saw no reason why Ireland should shed her blood in any cause but her own,” he declared, “and if that be treason, I am not ashamed to avow it or to answer for it here with my life.” He was sentenced to hang.

Shaw was again among those who pleaded for commutation, correctly arguing that Casement imprisoned was harmless; hanged, he would cause “endless mischief.” But the diaries, the government felt, would undercut any martyrdom. In the short run they were right. They effectively disgraced him, cancelling any credit points from his humanitarian career.

Duly executed, Casement was buried in prison, in quicklime. Attempts by the Irish government to repatriate his remains were unsuccessful: when it finally happened, in 1965, the elderly taoiseach Éamon de Valera rose from his sickbed to make a speech and join the crowded Dublin streets to welcome him home.

But Shaw was right: Casement’s execution dramatised his life. He is a haunting presence still. Many celebrated writers have written about him, from Yeats to Mario Vargas Llosa, whose Dream of the Celt took a Casement poem as its title. Most remarkable of all, Lawrence of Arabia (who shared some of Casement’s ambivalences) thought of writing a book about him; a phrase of Lawrence’s was taken to become the title of this one.

For a long time the diaries — as part of the martyrdom — were believed by many to be a forgery, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. But there remains a puzzle: how could a man so sexually active have kept this from his colleagues? Their complete reticence is a mystery. These matters must have been partly obscured by the homosociality of the British ruling class. It also demonstrates how effective the division between public and private life used to be.

Roland Philipps sees Casement as unanchored and unfulfilled. He points out that his only intimate relationship was with the treacherous Norwegian sailor Christensen, who also betrayed him at the end by submitting testimony from America. The high idealism was in part compensatory. Also fatal: in Philipps’s words, Casement was  “entirely without the intellectual underpinning, cynicism and instinct to compromise.”

The book adds much to Brian Inglis’s solid biography of 1973 — such as the link between Casement and Joseph Conrad. The craftsmanship is also impressive, saving details of Casement’s early life until the point where he reconnects with it, on going back to Ireland in 1904. Similarly, the use of the so-called Black Diaries is sparing — echoing the minimal recording of the sexual episodes. Philipps also gives us lively snatches describing most of the participants, and tells the story at a cracking pace. •

Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement
By Roland Philipps | Bodley Head | $37.99 | 400 pages

The post Oh, Sir Roger! appeared first on Inside Story.

The title of his previous book, 2014’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, is another. There, he recounted his experiences as a television producer in Russia between 2006 and 2016, the formative period of the “post-truth” era. In Russia, a president was “turning politics into a reality show, remaking authoritarianism with the logic of twenty-first-century entertainment.” In America, a reality TV star was on his way to the presidency.

Pomerantsev was born in Kyiv in 1977. His parents had fled Russia to escape a KGB crackdown after they were discovered to be reading the wrong things. A few years later the family was in London, where he went to school. His return to Russia in 2001 was prompted partly by a wish to explore an identity he had left behind, but he took with him an instinct for the political dangers of messing with reality.

This is Not Propaganda is addressed to a world in which mass persuasion has run rampant, “where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied.” His latest book, How to Win an Information War, released this month, completes what may be seen as a trilogy, but shifts the focus from those who create and promote the war against truth to the public who are its conscripts.

His central concern is that there seem to be no effective strategies for countering disinformation. Media outlets that identify with democratic principles and offer detailed factual coverage of events fail to reach audiences that have become wedded to sensationalised narratives and conspiracy theories.

On an urgent quest for antidotes that might actually work, Pomerantsev lights upon the story of Sefton Delmer, who spearheaded a bizarre and alarmingly effective British counter-propaganda operation during the second world war. Alarming because it was morally anarchic, flouting every ethical principle of public broadcasting. But weren’t the Nazis already doing just that?

That was the point. Delmer grasped the essential principle at the heart of all propaganda, which is mirroring and reversal. His capacity “to reimagine himself as others, become the enemy, climb inside their minds” arose from formative experiences not unlike Pomerantsev’s own.

Delmer’s parents were Australian. His father Frederick, an English literature scholar, had taken a professorial position in Germany by the time Sefton was born in 1904. As a ten-year-old schoolboy in Berlin at the outbreak of the first world war, he found himself torn between conflicting identities: the English-speaking outsider viewed with suspicion by his peers; the child stirred by collective exhilaration at national anthems and marches.

Things came to a head when Frederick was interned as an enemy alien. Following his release, the family fled to England, where Sefton found that, having stepped through the mirror, he was now a “German” outsider at school. In 1928, as an Oxford graduate, he decided to exploit his dual identity by returning to Berlin as a correspondent for the Daily Express.

With a novelist’s flair for scene-setting, Pomerantsev evokes the milieu of the Weimar republic, with its heightened and conflicting energies. Violent skirmishes broke out in city streets between communists and far-right nationalists. Storm troopers mixed with gender-crossing cabaret artists at all-night parties. Newspapers with extremist headlines poured off the presses. Hysterical posters depicted the ravening monster of inflation. In Delmer’s own words, the place had everything a tabloid foreign correspondent could wish for: “sex, murder, political intrigue, money, mystery and bloodshed.”

In this melting pot of identities, extreme and performative personae could be adopted and exchanged to suit the shifting cultural tides. Delmer engaged in the shape-shifting himself by mingling with experimental cabaret artists, some of whom were to become future collaborators.

In his role as correspondent, he cultivated the emerging leaders of the Nazi movement, winning the confidence of Erich Rohl, commander of the Storm Troopers, who allowed him to attend an inspection posing as his aide de camp. Delmer was enough of an insider to be included in Hitler’s national campaign tour following the Nazis’ loss in the 1932 election, and reported first-hand on the surging tide of mass hysteria.

Delmer was not just reporting, Pomerantsev stresses, he was also subverting. But he played the insider role so convincingly that British intelligence officers, suspicious of where his allegiances lay, opposed his requests to join. It was not until September 1940, when the British were clearly losing the war of the airwaves, that he was approached to return to England and attempt what he had been trying to convince them he could do.

Radio propaganda was proving one of the most effective weapons in the German arsenal, and like the blitzkrieg bombs it was aimed directly at civilians. William Joyce, a member of Oswald Mosely’s British fascist movement who achieved notoriety under the nickname Lord Haw Haw, had gone to work for Goebbels’s propaganda ministry in Germany.

Joyce had come up with the idea of a program to be broadcast into Britain in which actors impersonated English working men. Their talk of how “the bosses” were deliberately delaying their response to air-raid sirens to get more hours of productivity was designed to provoke social division and erode support for the war effort among the working class. British ratings for the program had grown to alarming levels.

Put in charge of a small team of writers, researchers, technicians and performers at a country estate in Bedford, Delmer set about outplaying the enemy at their own game. Pomerantsev does a fine job of exploiting the spy-thriller aspects of the story, and it comes as no surprise when we learn that one of Delmer’s collaborators in the new enterprise was James Bond creator Ian Fleming. They shared a flair for personae that Delmer saw as a kind of secret weapon.

Watching the German crowds stirred to fanatical enthusiasm (“fanatical” was a term of approbation in the Nazi vocabulary) he realised they were involved in a kind of role-play. Intense as it was, role-play was an engagement with limits. At some point, you would drop it, and perhaps exchange the role for another one. If he was right, Hitler’s supporters were not rusted on and, given sufficiently convincing provocations, could be turned.

Having diagnosed the Nazi appeal from within, Delmer’s team copied its key elements: the obscene insults, sado-masochist energies, paranoia and insatiable need for vengeance. And pornography. It was here that Delmer crossed the line, but where the strategy really gained traction. Officers in London began to balk at the graphic images and salacious, cruelty-laced narratives purporting to document the activities of decadent Nazi commanders.

Ratings, though, were Delmer’s unassailable defence. By the end of the war, audience numbers for the BBC’s German-language broadcasts were estimated at between ten and fifteen million a day, up from a million when Delmer joined the service in 1941.

If dramatisation could work to create hysterical euphoria, Delmer believed, it could also be deployed to introduce the seeping toxin of demoralisation. He had an enduring fascination with the psychology of Hitler’s followers and his focus was always on the person on the receiving end of diatribes that outdid the rhetorical extremism of the Nazis themselves.

As the geopolitical propaganda wars heat up, threatening to derail American democracy and end the sovereignty of eastern European nations, what does this history have to teach us now? That is Pomerantsev’s question, and it burns with his own involvement in the Ukraine resistance.

On a mission with journalist colleagues to document war crimes in 2022, he visits Bucha, the site of some of the worst atrocities of the invasion. During thirty-three days of Russian occupation, one in ten of the residents who had failed to evacuate in time had been killed. Many who survived had been raped and tortured. He goes on to Kharkiv, where his grandmother lived through the Stalin-engineered Holodomor (famine) in the early 1930s; now the genocidal onslaught is happening again, this time with bombs and tanks and propaganda.

Russians immediately denied the attacks or accused Ukraine of committing them, or sometimes both. “It never happened, and it was their fault,” is typical of the messaging. They have adopted techniques of scrambling and inversion cut and pasted from the Nazi playbook, says Pomerantsev.

Kremlin-promoted narratives have gained currency not just in Russia but also within the American right and the British left, and in many European countries where political cohorts are opposed to their governments’ support for Ukraine. If we don’t get smarter about the nature of the propaganda war, Pomerantsev warns, we’re going to lose. What he means is that we are faced with the loss of shared ground in truth and reality.

This is where Delmer’s story has currency. Aside from some extreme tactics that should not be replicated, he offered insights that have enduring relevance. Principal among these was an awareness that political alignments of the most intense kind are performative: people are attracted to a role in a drama, especially one that gives them a sense of belonging.

But the roles we adopt are not who we are, which is why so many fanatical supporters of Hitler peeled quietly way after a few years. The same thing is happening with Trump followers, if not in sufficient numbers to dispel the prospect of another Trump presidency.

The more we become aware of political role-play as such, the greater the chance we will resist being conscripted blindly as part of “a mass coordinated show.” Awareness creates critical distance, and critical distance is where propaganda goes to die. •

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler
By Peter Pomerantsev | Faber | $49.99 | 304 pages

The post The propagandist appeared first on Inside Story.

The territory of Guam — known as Guåhan to the indigenous CHamoru people — has been administered by the United States since the late nineteenth century. Today, as strategic competition with China intensifies across the region, the Pentagon has announced a new Guam-based military taskforce to coordinate defence operations in the northern Pacific.

Beyond Guam, the United States has extensive security programs in most Micronesian countries and territories. Last year, when Washington renegotiated its Compacts of Free Association with the Marshall Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia, or FSM, it extended unprecedented power over defence, security and foreign policy on top of existing development funding and migration access for Micronesians to the United States. As chief US negotiator Joseph Yun put it, “The most important thing we get out of them is, of course, access to their land, their air, and their water. It’s crucially important.”

Washington’s aim is to maintain a policy of “strategic denial” against China across Guam, the three Compact states and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, or CNMI. But its influence is being undermined by a dysfunctional US Congress and renewed regional engagement by China, Australia, Japan and other countries.

Micronesian leaders fear that strategic competition with China is driving Washington’s priorities, diverting much-needed resources to the military rather than social infrastructure, ocean management and climate change. Recently, for example, US congressional approval of vital Compact funding promised by the Biden administration was delayed for six months. “At some point,” said Marshall Islands president Hilda Heine, “our nation to needs seriously consider other options available to us if the US is unable or unwilling to keep its commitments to us. Our nation has been a steadfast ally of the United States, but that should not be taken for granted.”

Underwood, who sat in Congress in Washington but had no vote, also sees the Chinese threat as “the main motivator for changing the nature of the negotiations. How the Pacific fits into this discussion is what drives Washington. It certainly isn’t a basic concern over the Pacific islands. Prior to Chinese activities, the US interest in the Pacific was lukewarm at best and disinterested at worse.”

As the Pacific Islands Forum’s 2018 Boe Declaration on Regional Security says, “climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific.” But the people of Guam must now also live with the threat of state-to-state conflict, says Kenneth Gofigan Kuper, a political scientist at the University of Guam.

“Because of our relationship with United States and our geographic location,” Kuper tells me, “we cannot say that the potential of kinetic military conflict is overstated. It’s easier for other parts of Oceania to say the geopolitics issues are overplayed, but I don’t think we have that luxury.”

To broaden the security debate and highlight the perspectives of affected island communities, Kuper joined Underwood and researcher Leland Bettis to establish the Pacific Center on Island Security. The Guam-based think tank aims to ensure that islanders themselves have a voice “amongst the cacophony that is geopolitical posturing.”

“Island security is very different from using islands for your security,” says Kuper. “We are trying to open up debate about what is considered islands security and believe much of the security conversation should be coming from islanders themselves, without having the terms dictated by Washington DC, by Beijing, by Australia.”

In the stream of material about Indo-Pacific security published by think tanks in the United States and Australia, the voices of Micronesian islanders are rarely highlighted. Kuper argues that the militarisation of Guam and the neighbouring Compact states should be at the centre of analysis.

“Guam can often be seen as a microcosm of the way that US–China relations are going,” he says. “The moves that the United States are making on Guam and how China sees those changes have a lot to say about the trajectory of future conflict. We think that Micronesia will be a centre for geopolitical manoeuvring in this region.”

This geopolitical contest is playing out as China extends diplomatic ties in the region. While Palau and Marshall Islands have ties to Taiwan, FSM maintains diplomatic relations with Beijing. During a delegation to China led by FSM president Wesley Simina last month, Chinese president Xi Jinping announced RMB100 million (A$21 million) for Belt and Road infrastructure in FSM. But Simina has also welcomed US plans to build new military facilities in FSM: “The Federated States of Micronesia is open for US consideration for any kind of defence-related activities, including use of our lands and oceans.”

Across the northern Pacific, the Biden administration is taking up that offer, showering the US military with billions of dollars to use in Hawai’i, Guam and across the Micronesian islands. The Hawai’i-based US Indo-Pacific Command is upgrading naval shipyards, building new airstrips and storage for fuel, munitions and equipment, and deploying B-52 bombers, nuclear submarines and more US Marines to the islands.

As host to key American military installations in the western Pacific, Guam has been dubbed “the tip of the spear” and “the forward edge of the Indo-Pacific.” The US Department of Defence owns a quarter of the island’s land mass; its major facilities there include Andersen Airforce Base at Yigo and Naval Base Guam at Apra Harbour, Santa Rita. Although Guam has a population of just 154,000, it hosts nearly 21,700 US military personnel and their families.

“People view Guam as an isolated place because it’s an island, but that’s an outdated, stereotypical image,” says Kenneth Kuper. “A lot of the tremors from global waves reach Guam’s shores.”

The Pentagon openly acknowledges that US bases on Guam are a target if war erupts over Taiwan or on the Korean peninsula. China has developed medium-range missiles that can reach the island — one of its weapons has even been dubbed the “Guam Killer” by the US military. In 2022, North Korea test fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of reaching Guam.

This month, the US Missile Defence Authority announced a US$450 million contract for Boeing to manage construction of a 360-degree “Guam Defence System” at twenty sites around Guam. But the proposed missile system is being delayed by financial, logistic and environmental complications, even as the Indo-Pacific Command warns China may invade Taiwan by 2027.

During public hearings on the plan held by the US Department of Defense in Hagåtña in July last year, local protesters held placards saying “We are not the tip of the spear” and “Stop making us a target for war.” Former Congressman Underwood told the hearings that “Guam is being shaped into a laboratory for a conflict eco-system in the Indo-Pacific and we have no real choice on the matter. Defence planners are trying to say they’re focused on defending Guam. In reality, they’re equally focused on what they do after Guam is hit. So we’re kind of being offered as a first-strike community.”

While the Pentagon hopes to protect the major US bases on Guam, former Pacific Air Forces commander Kenneth Wisbach has said that he is “not a big fan” of plans to protect new airstrips and ports against missile strikes in the Marshall Islands, FSM and Palau. It seems the Micronesian islands and the people who live on them are expendable in a time of geopolitical conflict.

As they deploy military forces in the twenty-first century, US politicians repeatedly highlight how much American blood was shed as the allied forces fought the Japanese on Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Saipan and other islands during the second world war. Eighty years on, however, these battles have left many hazardous legacies. Islanders still face death or injury from unexploded ordnance; sunken warships rest on the bottom of atoll lagoons in FSM and Palau. Tourism authorities despair that the United States and Japan have failed to remove the bunker oil and toxic chemicals that are leaking from the rusting hulks in Chuuk lagoon, threatening the marine environment and tourist beaches.

The United States expanded its colonial administration of Micronesia from the late nineteenth century onwards. US Naval Station Guam was established in August 1899 after the island was seized at the end of the Spanish–American war. Germany yielded its Micronesian colonies after the first world war. Apart from the Japanese occupation of Guam in 1941–44 (when one in ten islanders were killed), US Marines have been based there for 125 years. Today, with two-thirds of its active-duty combat forces, the Pacific force is the Marine Corps’ largest operational command.

Campaigning for self-determination, many indigenous CHamoru have long protested at the alienation of land for military housing, live-fire ranges and other support services for the US Marines. They also recall how Covid-19 spread on Guam after sailors infected with coronavirus were brought onshore from the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2020, overwhelming local health services.

Further north, the presence of large US Marine contingents in Japan and Okinawa has provoked widespread protests in recent decades, as citizens mobilise against the noise and pollution of aircraft and helicopters, cases of rape and sexual assault by US Marines, and adverse effects on housing, the cost of living and security. More than a decade ago, growing community anger in Okinawa forced the Marine Corps to announce plans to relocate 8000 Marines to Guam. In a project partially funded by the Japanese government, around 5000 Marines and their families are relocating to Camp Blaz, a new base opened in January last year at Dededo village in Guam.

The relocation of US Marines also extends to Australia. A 2022 Australia–US ministerial meeting highlighted the need to identify further “priority locations in Australia to support enhanced US force posture and exploring enabling logistics such as prepositioning of stores, munitions and fuel.” Many other Marines from Okinawa are being rotated through the Northern Territory: in March this year, another 2500 troops arrived to join Marine Rotational Force Darwin, the 13th deployment to the Northern Territory since 2012.

Despite protests in Guam, CHamoru have a long tradition of serving in the US military. Assessing community sentiment about militarisation is correspondingly difficult.

“Indigenous CHamoru are not united on how we feel about this — there are many layers to it,” says Kuper. “On the one hand, Guam has a history of bearing the brunt of conflict between great powers. The lessons that we learnt from the conflict in World War Two, however, are different. Some people say that the United States liberated the island and will always protect the island. Others say that we know we’ve been caught in the middle before, so we need to avoid this at all costs in the future.”

The fundamental issue is money, he says. “In Guam, the two primary pillars of our economy are tourism and federal spending related to the military. But people also view negatives, particularly the environmental impacts of further militarisation of the island. We know that Guam has had a history of toxic contamination and in the past, there were proposals and plans to dredge reefs and disrupt limestone and forest habitat. It’s very complicated, very layered, and people can hold two truths at the same time.”

At the start of any twenty-first-century conflict between the United States, China or North Korea, the military bases in Guam are a likely target for attack. In response, the US military is preparing to disperse vulnerable forces to other sites across Micronesia.

Under a program known as Agile Combat Employment, or ACE, the Biden administration has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to refurbishing second world war–era airbases in CNMI, FSM and Palau. The US Pacific Air Forces have surveyed “every piece of concrete” in the region, looking for old landing strips that can be upgraded to take modern jet fighters and transport aircraft. “A lot of our strategy there is taking some World War Two airfields that frankly are overgrown by the jungle, and there’s still concrete or asphalt underneath that jungle,” said PACAF’s General Wisbach in 2020. “We scrape the jungle away and now we have an airfield.”

In 2020, US engineers rebuilt an airstrip on Angaur Island in Palau, then deployed US Army soldiers by transport planes to test it. The US military is planning a series of military installations in Palau, including an elaborate radar system. Last December, the Senate of the Olbiil Era Kelulau (Palau National Congress) passed a resolution opposing a proposed missile installation in the islands.

In March 2023, the ACE doctrine was tested in the annual Cope North military wargames, involving US, Japanese, French and Australian forces. Fighters, bombers, refuelling aircraft and airborne early-warning and control planes used ten air bases spread across thousands of kilometres of ocean, moving from Iwo Jima to Saipan, Rota, Guam and Palau.

During another exercise, Cope Thunder, high-tech Raptor F-22 fighters landed for the first time on Tinian Island in CNMI. In April, the US air force announced a US$409 million contract for Texan construction firm Fluor to refurbish and extend the airfield on Tinian, and US engineers have already begun to clear hundreds of hectares of bush.

The US military also wants to upgrade an airstrip on Yap, one of FSM’s four states. Budgeting US$96 million for next year, the air force will allocate US$400 million over time to expand facilities on Yap, even though its four islands have less than 100 square kilometres of land.

Guam also hosts the largest US munitions and fuel storage facilities in the western Pacific. The Pentagon is developing a plan for “emergency movement of munitions in Joint Region Marianas, Guam” to assist “distributed and dispersed” military operations.

Australian security analyst David Kilcullen argues that China is seeking influence in Pacific island states to create “a pre-developed pattern of ‘lily pads’ — a network of regional sites set up to receive missiles and launchers when needed.” In reality, the US military have already been implementing a lily-pad strategy by dispersing forces across the region. In March 2022, the US government established a Marine Littoral Regiment in Hawai’i, with another planned for Okinawa by 2025. Within five years, the US Marines will create a battalion armed with land-based Tomahawk cruise missiles to be relocated to small islands and attack passing enemy vessels.

These preparations are intensifying as Joe Biden and Donald Trump gear up for the presidential election in November. But Guam and CNMI have no members in the electoral college that will choose the new president. As a US territory, Guam does not even have a voting representative in the US Congress, and Kenneth Kuper notes that “as an unincorporated territory, we don’t have the political agency to make our own decisions.”

“We don’t dictate our own international relations, so there’s a justice issue here,” Kuper said. “We are being heavily militarised, but are not able to influence or control our foreign policy. We are bearing the brunt of the United States foreign policy towards the region.” •

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Peak Anzac was reached, in my recollection at least, between November 2014 and April 2015. The bracketing events commemorated the departure of the first convoy of Australian troops from Albany in Western Australia in November 1914, and the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. An estimated eight thousand Australians and two thousand New Zealanders travelled to Gallipoli that April for services there, while in Canberra 120,000 people attended the national dawn service at the Australian War Memorial.

Things then simmered down considerably, and by November 2018 much of the Anzac energy had drained away — though not before an extraordinary amount of money had been spent. The following year, when historian Carolyn Holbrook attempted to make sense of what had just happened, she offered some figures drawn from work done in mid 2015 by Anzac commentator David Stephens. Germany’s projected commemorative spend for each soldier and civilian killed in the war was $2. France was committed to spending $52, the United Kingdom $109. Australia? A projected spend of $8889 per soldier and civilian killed. My lord.

The first couple of years of the centenary saw an exhausting round of ceremonies, events, exhibitions, art commissions, television documentaries and websites; everyone trying to out-Anzac everyone else. Some of these were clearly devised to offer people a chance to experience and share heightened emotions in a safe way. The Anzac Days that many of us have grown up with have always done that, of course, but this was next level.

The most obvious example was a cluster of events in Australia and New Zealand called “Camp Gallipoli,” whereby people paid to join others for an evening under the stars to remember the Gallipoli landings. Attendees at the Tasmanian event on 24 April 2015 were promised an “emotional roller coaster” where they could sing, eat, drink, laugh (and cry) but most importantly… be together.”

There were some epic embarrassments. The commemorative television features sometimes rated poorly, and the Camp Gallipoli Foundation found itself accused of failing in its promise to pass on profits to veterans’ charities (claims it rejected). Anything that smacks of commercial exploitation of Anzac has always attracted suspicion, and the limits of tolerance were breached by supermarket chain Woolworths just before Anzac Day 2015, when a public outcry forced the cancellation of a digital ad campaign inviting users to upload an image of an Anzac to a picture generator. The generator added the green Woolies logo and the words “Fresh in our Memories.”

Among the sugar-rush projects, however, many initiatives were of enduring value, especially from libraries, archives and museums keen to use the opportunity to exhibit and digitise objects and records from their collections. I was involved in one or two, or three — no, four — of these, and they certainly did reveal hitherto unseen material and nuanced stories at a time when the public appetite was extraordinarily high. But I too became overwhelmed by so many stories, so many young men’s (and occasionally women’s) faces, and so many sad artefacts reminding us of all that loss of life and potential.

From a distance, they all look the same. You need to get up close to discern the differences; but by 2018 my vision was blurred and my capacity for surprise was gone. It had also been such a noisy time. Anzac and Remembrance Days always end with a minute’s silence (it used to be two minutes) but there was not much silence during the four years of the Anzac centenary.

Only gradually did my ears stop ringing long enough for me to lean into the post-centenary silence. By then hardly anyone was bothering any more. I was like American poet Mary Oliver sitting on her old stone bench in a forest, listening to the silence. “What’s magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason,” says the poet. I doubt she was thinking of historical research when she wrote that but there are some stories that take you deeper than reason, and they can still be found if you sit quietly long enough.

I found one of these in the small town of Uralla, twenty-three kilometres southwest of Armidale on the NSW tablelands. Upstairs in McCrossin’s Mill Museum (the local museum so named because it is housed in a former flour mill) is a display about Cecil Stoker, a local man who enlisted for the first world war in July 1915 and was killed in France less than a year later, after barely two weeks at the front, in June 1916. The story is best told backwards.

In 1982, according to their own account, two members of the museum committee, then much younger, were inspecting the interior of Uralla’s oldest existing building when they noticed a boarded-up fireplace. The building in Bridge Street was a former general store known as Stoker’s Store, empty and earmarked for demolition. They knew that technically they were trespassing, but “boys being boys,” and it being a Sunday afternoon when there was “nothing else to do,” they tore the timber away.

Inside, covered in soot and rubbish, was a rusty tin trunk, and inside that was another trunk in pristine condition. Inside that second trunk — which they opened without hesitation — they discovered Stoker family memorabilia from 1860 to 1951, including many artefacts, photographs and letters related to the military service and death of Cecil Stoker.

Their surmise was that Stoker’s mother, Elizabeth Stoker, had sealed up all the things in 1951 and had them hidden away. She died in 1954 aged eighty. Back home in front of my computer in Canberra I established that Elizabeth had made her will in 1951, so it does indeed seem she made final decisions about what to do with her possessions in that year. After her death her estate was duly dealt with by her two surviving sons, but the trunk mustn’t have been mentioned in her will. Her sons presumably didn’t know or had forgotten about it, and there it remained until the two Indiana Joneses broke into it in 1982.

Cecil Stoker was a junior railway porter in 1915, aged just seventeen, when he put his age up to eighteen so he could enlist. His father had died in 1910, leaving his mother to run the business and raise three sons on her own. He was obviously hell-bent on going to the war; he and nearly all the other men in the Uralla Football Club enlisted together.

From a distance, this is the type of story upon which the Anzac legend is built. If we wonder why that legend is so powerful, we need look no further than this. A beautiful young man leaves his family and his rural hometown to fling his life away in a global conflict not of his making. His family is shattered by grief but his community honours him for upholding values of courage and sacrifice, and later cherishes his story in the local museum. The Stoker display at the McCrossin’s Mill Museum in Uralla is a micro-version of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, shrunk to fit. There is even a spray of preserved flowers brought back from Stoker’s grave after someone from Uralla visited in 1992.

The most remarkable thing about the Stoker story is completeness of the family archive Elizabeth kept. The memorabilia goes back to the family’s earliest days in Uralla, and includes a photograph of their shop when it was a tinsmith operated by Cecil’s grandfather. There is a family photograph of Elizabeth and William Stoker and their three young boys, and a memorial card printed after William died in 1910 when Cecil was twelve. There is a snap of the dozen or so young men from Uralla who enlisted together, proudly posed around a motor car, still in their civvies, and a portrait photograph of Cecil in uniform taken at a studio in Armidale. There’s a birthday card from his “special friend” Vida Williamson, a local Uralla girl, wishing him bon voyage. There’s a postcard to his mother from overseas, sent from his troopship HMAT Warildra, and a photograph taken of him on a camel in Egypt. There are souvenir handkerchiefs Cecil bought in Cairo for his brothers, and a silk embroidered postcard and cushion cover for Elizabeth, all still in beautiful condition.

The power of the display lies in the artefacts associated with Cecil’s death, beginning with the telegram announcing that he had been killed. This was sent to the local Anglican minister in Uralla, Reverend E.H. Stammer, so he could break the news to Elizabeth. Very few of these telegrams have survived but obviously Reverend Stammer left it with her, and she kept it. Cecil’s campaign medals are there, along with a photograph of his grave at the Brewery Orchard Cemetery at Bois-Grenier, near Armentières, in France. Elizabeth’s last letters to Cecil were returned to her stamped “deceased” because he’d died before he could receive them.

Then there are the personal effects sent by military authorities to Elizabeth after Cecil’s death. Every deceased soldier’s service file records the effects, if any, returned to the family, and always, as on Cecil’s file, they are listed with brutal simplicity: photo, metal brooch, knife, letter, papers, disc, belt, badge, notebooks, “devotional” books, and so on. I have often brooded over these lists but I have never seen the actual things laid out like this, almost complete. They were usually disbursed among the family as keepsakes, but here Elizabeth kept nearly all of them herself.

I stood looking at Cecil Stoker’s last possessions. New Testament, prayer book and notebook. A belt covered in a school-boyish collection of buttons and badges. A tin of curios. Two saucy postcards he’d obviously picked up while on leave somewhere, never thinking his mother would see them. A photograph of a young girl in a white dress and wide-brimmed white hat (not Vida, as it turned out, but a girl called Amy). The knife and identity disc are not there, so perhaps Cecil’s brothers managed to grab a souvenir each.

Elizabeth kept all Cecil’s letters, and her letters to him have also survived. Museum volunteers have faithfully transcribed them for visitors to read. It is quite unusual to have the complete exchange; generally a soldier’s letters from the front are the ones offered to archives and libraries, while the family’s letters to him either don’t survive or aren’t considered historically important enough for posterity.

Elizabeth wrote to “Ces” every week and was always anxious for letters from him. She chats about local comings and goings, although Uralla is very quiet with so many men away. Mrs Besley is knitting Ces some socks. A man from Newcastle named Solomon wants to buy her business and she is thinking about it (ultimately she doesn’t sell). She will be closing the shop for a few hours on 25 April 1916 “in commemoration of Anzac Day.” It is also six years since “poor dad died” and she is feeling very miserable. She sends Ces parcel after parcel: socks, biscuits, tins of cheese, sheep’s tongues and salmon, preserved fruit, lollies, soap, coffee, milk. What else could she do? “I hope you will enjoy them,” she writes.

At the funeral address for Elizabeth Stoker in June 1954, the local minister declared she had been a loving and devoted mother and a faithful daughter within the church, had done much good in the community, and had earned the esteem of a wide circle of friends. No doubt she had. By then the double-boxed family archive had already been hidden away for three years, but to me it feels like Elizabeth had long sealed off her deepest feelings about Cecil’s loss. The boxing was her act of emotional independence, a declaration that she had never wanted anyone’s sympathy, and when she began preparing for her own death she hated the thought of anyone, even her family, going through her things and feeling sorry for her all over again.

What if, instead of passively weeping and writing nice little thank you notes to people who sent condolences after Ces died, Elizabeth Stoker took herself out on winter nights through the frosty paddocks around Uralla where no one could hear her, lifted her head and screamed and howled at a non-existent god for taking her husband and son? By herself, with only a few startled sheep to witness a rage so vast it couldn’t be absorbed by conventional gestures and memorials, only by an open sky and distant, icy stars. •

The post From a distance appeared first on Inside Story.

First came a period of strategic deception, during which his Hamas movement appeared to moderate its armed confrontation with Israel, notably by cutting rocket attacks, in return for large-scale economic aid from Qatar. That aid deal was tacitly approved by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw it as a way of helping tame Hamas while deepening the split in the Palestinian leadership between the Islamists of Hamas and the secular Fatah elements running the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Then came the attack, delivered so surprisingly and with such indiscriminate violence that a harsh military response was inevitable. Sinwar then withdrew his surviving fighters, accompanied by as many Israeli hostages as they could capture. Having himself been part of a swap of 1000 Palestinian prisoners for just one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, he knew their value as bargaining chips.

Stinging at the deception, Netanyahu marshalled 50,000 soldiers and launched an air, land and sea campaign into Gaza with the aim of eliminating Hamas for good and freeing the hostages. So far, some eighty-five of the original 230 hostages have been released in a swap for Palestinian detainees. About one hundred are thought to remain alive, captive to Hamas or other militant groups.

After six months of military operations, the Israel Defence Force says it has killed about 13,000 of the estimated 30,000 fighters in Hamas’s military arm, including several senior unit commanders, for 260 soldiers of its own killed in Gaza operations. But Sinwar and other top leaders remain hidden and active.

For their part, Hamas health officials say 33,000 (among them 9000 women and 12,300 children) have died from Israeli attacks, with about 75,000 wounded and a further 7000 missing, believed buried in rubble. The figures, which seem widely accepted by international agencies and observers, don’t distinguish between militants and civilians.

The Israeli onslaught is the response Hamas expected. “We know very well the consequences of our operation on October 7,” said Khaled Mashal, a Qatar-based Hamas political leader, soon after the attack. “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”

If any Gazan citizens don’t agree with being put up as sacrifices like this, we don’t hear from them. In the daily stream of smartphone videos of bereaved survivors pulling their dead children from the rubble we haven’t seen Hamas being blamed for the bloodshed. And perhaps Gazan journalists working for Reuters, Associated Press, Al Jazeera and other media would hesitate to ask.

It took Israeli authorities some time realise that the death tallies and horrific video images made up the narrative mostly being seen by the outside world. Israel’s own media, with a few exceptions like the liberal newspaper Haaretz, concentrated on the violence against Israelis in the October attack, showing little of the carnage inside Gaza. After some weeks, Israeli embassies and lobby groups abroad began showing video and other evidence, emphasising child murder and sexual assault, to counter sympathy for the Gazans.

The high death toll and the destruction of more than two-thirds of dwellings in Gaza was meanwhile achieving the objectives stated explicitly by Mashal and other Hamas figures. They had seen the Palestinian cause slipping away, the West Bank being steadily annexed by Jewish settlements with little effective protest by Western powers pledged since 1993 to a two-state solution.

Under Donald Trump, the US embassy had been moved from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem: he was not holding out for a two-state settlement. Trump had also brokered the Abraham accords, which brought Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states closer to Israel: support for Palestinians seemed to be weakening among these Sunni powers.

Hamas set out to shatter this trend. “We knew there was going to be a violent reaction… But we didn’t choose this road while having other options,” said one Hamas official, Basem Naim. “We have no options.” It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told the New York Times in Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

Without going into the “context” sometimes used to explain or even excuse the 7 October attack, it’s useful to consider what Israel could have done instead of its all-out military response. What alternatives does it have now to pursuing it?

Cautioning voices in the early weeks made comparisons with America’s “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks. Could a more measured response, holding back the military while carefully assembling police evidence of the atrocious crimes committed by Hamas and other attackers on 7 October, have turned the moral tables? Bodies were quickly buried, and other forensic evidence lost, in the wave of anger and grief that swept Israelis.

And even then, what to do? Military experts say there is no way to eliminate an enemy hiding in cellars and tunnels in a dense urban setting without many civilian casualties. The battle of Fallujah, in 2004 during the Iraq war, and the Mosul siege against Islamic State in 2017 are comparable, except that in both cases most of the civilian population was able to flee beforehand. Even so, the Americans and Iraqis killed many of the remaining civilians and lost many soldiers, while the insurgents were not decisively eliminated.

Given the narrowness of Gaza and Egypt’s refusal to accept refugees (assuming Palestinians agreed to leave, knowing they might end up permanently expelled), the strip has hardly any space for safe refuge, and Hamas fighters would in any case move with civilians. Further slaughter of civilians would be unavoidable.

Netanyahu says Israel’s military is regrouping to push into Rafah in the south of the strip, against the Egyptian border, where 1.2 million displaced Gazans are camped and where the Israeli Defense Force claims the bulk of surviving Hamas fighters are hiding. Israeli spokesmen have suggested the IDF’s first move will be to seal the border and offer Hamas militants safe passage out to exile. If few accept, which seems likely, what then?

The operations in the north and centre of the Gaza strip have not been a clean sweep. Hamas elements remain, causing Israeli casualties, and a recent return to the large al-Shifa Hospital to ferret out hidden insurgents has resulted in more Gazan casualties. A Rafah attack and even more civilian deaths and injuries will only add weight to Sinwar’s grim calculus.

Israel’s main Western allies, meanwhile, are declaring it is time to stop — calls that intensified after a drone attack killed seven aid workers including Zomi Frankcom, an Australian. They are also preparing to deliver humanitarian aid themselves: the United States is building a new jetty and Britain will send a Royal Navy ship to land supplies.

Netanyahu is also facing mounting pressure inside Israel: for not giving priority to freeing the hostages; for failing to take responsibility, by resigning, for the security lapses that allowed the 7 October attack to happen; and for his earlier attempts to undermine judicial independence and wriggle out of corruption charges.

“If we enter into Rafah it will be a human disaster,” Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, told London’s New Statesman last week. “I don’t know how many Palestinians will die. I know that many Israelis [soldiers] will die. We have to assume rationally that Egypt will have to react. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will climb on the [border] fences.” Egypt, Jordan and other regional states will reassess relations with Israel.

Pressure of a different kind comes from within the Israeli cabinet, where extreme Zionists like national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir say they will topple Netanyahu if he baulks at attacking Rafah. Politically, he has every motive to keep up the military offensive.

At whatever point the Israeli government declares “mission accomplished” it will be left in control of 2.2 million destitute people and a Gaza in ruins, among them many Hamas sympathisers and a new generation seething for vengeance. Like the insurgent leaders in Fallujah, Sinwar might well have slipped away.

But at that point, too, Netanyahu knows that his days in power could end. The war has protected him against calls for elections or a reshuffle in the Knesset. But if it is over, and hasn’t been extended to new fronts — against Iran, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, or by settler attacks in the West Bank — Israel could then have a new leadership, probably still right-wing but perhaps less invested in Netanyahu’s policies.

That would bring an opening for Arab powers, the West, and the United Nations to assume responsibility for rebuilding and securing Gaza.

The US secretary of state Anthony Blinken has been working on a plan that would see a Gaza truce extended into a creation of a Palestinian state. The Washington Post reported in February that the ideas under discussion include the withdrawal of many, if not all, settler communities on the West Bank; a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; the reconstruction of Gaza; and security and governance arrangements for a combined West Bank and Gaza. Israel would be offered specific security guarantees and normalised relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Britain and the European Union are said to be supportive.

And Australia? Speaking at ANU this week, foreign minister Penny Wong indicated that Canberra was party to this thinking. Instead of putting Palestinian statehood at the end of negotiations, she said, “the international community is now considering the question of Palestinian statehood as a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution.” Echoing ex–Shin Bet chief Ayalom, she argued that statehood would undermine Hamas, Iran and other extremists.

A reformed Palestinian Authority would be needed to run the state, with no role for Hamas. “Hamas is a terrorist organisation which has the explicit intent of the destruction of the state of Israel and the Jewish people,” Wong said.

(In a revised charter in 2017, Hamas said it would accept a Palestinian state within the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war only as a step towards complete settlement of the original pre-Israel territory. It was not opposed to Jews, it said, just Zionists. Netanyahu publicly ripped up a print-out of this less-than-reassuring charter.)

In Australia, the Coalition has quickly characterised Wong’s proposals as “rewarding terrorism,” as have various Israel-aligned lobby groups. Indeed, it will be hard to avoid Hamas getting credit. Among Palestinians, including those in the West Bank, opinion polls have shown support for Hamas and its attack has risen to 80 per cent.

In a plan circulated at the end of February, Netanyahu declared that Israel must maintain security control, including a 300-metre no-go zone at the Gaza borders and a wide corridor across the middle of the strip, and by tightly controlling the Egyptian border. He wants the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, kicked out. He proposes replacing the Hamas administration with local representatives “who are not affiliated with terrorist countries or groups and are not financially supported by them.” He continues to ridicule the idea of Palestinian statehood and says a date has been set for invading Rafah.

In other words, a Palestinian state would probably emerge only over Netanyahu’s political corpse. With the US presidential election getting nearer, Blinken’s time may also be running out.

Many Palestinians would also have to be convinced that the United States and other Western powers are sincere and determined. More than thirty years have passed since the Camp David accords set two states as the goal. Tareq Baconi, president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, is one who argues that the moment for a two-state solution has long passed, and that the idea of partition, which ignores the 1947 expulsion of Arabs from what became Israel, is inherently unjust and impracticable. Israeli journalist Dimi Reider has long urged that creative thinking be used to turn Israel’s “apartheid” system into a single entity that gives equal rights and security to Israelis and Palestinians.

Rebuilding Gaza will take decades and tens of billions of dollars, says senior UN economist Rami Alazzeh. Not only have many homes been destroyed, but water, sewerage, electricity, schools, administrative records and financial systems have also been devastated. The population is suffering dire physical and psychological distress.

Just possibly, though, the vista for a longer-term building of peace could be opening. Whether it’s a two-state solution, a single state or one that leads to the other is a field of literature in itself. Either requires a vast effort of trust and reconciliation in the embittered Holy Land. •

The post Hamas’s dark calculus appeared first on Inside Story.

Important history keeps arriving: Russia’s initial arrogance and military blunder in thinking it could invade and occupy in weeks; Ukraine’s extraordinary resistance as a nation found its steel and its soul; the world confronted by threats of nuclear war for the first time in decades; the strategic fanaticism of Vladimir Putin; the galvanised response of Europe and the United States, now overtaken by questions about Washington’s will to support Ukraine.

Such international drama is the stuff of “instant” history. And an exemplary example is War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, published just last week by Johns Hopkins University Press and available as a free download here.

This is big history with a big canvas:

The war in Ukraine has altered the course of global history. When Vladimir Putin’s forces sought to conquer Ukraine in February 2022, they did more than threaten the survival of a vulnerable democracy. The invasion unleashed a crisis that has changed the course of world affairs. This conflict has reshaped alliances, deepened global cleavages, and caused economic disruptions that continue to reverberate around the globe. It has initiated the first great-power nuclear crisis in decades and raised fundamental questions about the sources of national power and military might in the modern age. The outcome of the conflict will profoundly influence the international balance of power, the relationship between democracies and autocracies, and the rules that govern global affairs.

Edited by Hal Brands, the history offers seventeen chapters by different authors, grouped in three sections: Origins and Overview; The Conflict; Global Dimensions and Implications. The aim is to map causes and essential elements and “explain how this war is reshaping the world.”

Brands, professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins, says the volume “is an effort to write history in real time.” The quality of the writing and the sharpness of the analysis mean the book does a fine job of hitting many moving targets.

Brands argues the war is part of a broad historical pattern which means that Ukraine, sitting at the hinge of Eurasia, has been at the centre of every major global clash, hot or cold, of the modern era. “Any European empire seeking glory to the east must go through Ukraine,” he writes. “Any Eurasian power expanding into Europe must do the same. So the fate of Ukraine was a vital issue in every great Eurasian struggle of the twentieth century: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. It is no less central to the clash between Russia and the West today.”

He offers six preliminary understandings on the meaning of the war, linked to looming questions about:

The norms and conventions of the international order: Russia’s attempt at conquest could “usher in an era in which neo-imperial powers engage in the most naked forms of predation.” Will the post 1945 norm against territorial conquest be strengthened or shattered?

A double failure, years in the making: “Putin’s failure to ensure a weak, pliant Ukraine by means short of all-out conflict, and the West’s failure to deter just such an all-out attack.”

The uncertainty of war: The invasion’s outcome was highly contingent and the opening phase was full of surprises. “When the invasion began, most observers expected Ukraine to be defeated in short order. The Ukrainian military was outnumbered and overmatched; foreign governments were urging President Volodymyr Zelensky to flee. The collapse of Ukraine’s government and the success of Putin’s war plan were entirely possible.”

A fractured world: The war deepened and accelerated global division, pitting “two coalescing, rival coalitions more sharply against one another, even as other countries resisted this polarisation of world politics — or profited from playing both sides.” Will advanced democracies that have supported Ukraine, or the Eurasian autocracies that have been complicit in its suffering, have the strength and persistence needed to thrive in this age of global competition? Will the conflict fortify or fragment international order?

The return of great-power nuclear crises: “Before 2022, it had been decades since two great powers squared off in a crisis in the shadow of nuclear escalation. That changed when this war began. From the outset, Putin and his minions made threats, veiled and not-so-veiled, that Russia might use nuclear weapons if the West directly intervened in the conflict.” Will nuclear blackmail be seen to bring strategic benefits or self-imposed costs?

The war’s global legacy is yet to be fully written: “For if this conflict illustrates the contingency of major war, it also illustrates the contingency of global order.”

Looking at military operations and battlefield dynamics, contributor Michael Kofman tells a tale of two wars — the initial period versus the long war. The first period decided whether Ukraine would retain its sovereign status and identity as an independent nation, writes this Russia specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, while the long war is a traditional conflict to determine Ukraine’s geographic boundaries and its economic viability:

After the first month of intense combat, the course of the war began to align with historic patterns of large-scale conventional wars, featuring prolonged periods of positional fighting, offensives and counteroffensives, sieges in urban terrain, phases dominated by high levels of attrition, and operations to break through a prepared defence.

As the war becomes more a marathon and less a race, says Kofman, the factors of “manpower, materiel, money, and mobilisation capacity cast a long shadow over the arc of a conflict.” And now, in 2024, Russia has “a growing advantage in manpower, equipment, and ammunition.”

Russia’s military resilience and adaption is described by Dara Massicot from the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Despite severe casualties, poor field conditions, and commanders of varying quality,” she writes, “Russian soldiers mostly continue to endure their circumstances inside occupied Ukraine.”

During the disastrous opening months of the war in 2022, Massicot notes, some units abandoned equipment and positions while on the offensive, yet these units were later reconstituted and redeployed to the front. “Desertions as of early 2024 have been growing, but they still constitute only a small percentage of overall combat strength inside Ukraine,” she writes. “There have been no mass refusals of orders or cascading refusals along the front lines, even during the collapse of the Kharkiv front in 2022.”

On the whole, Massicot finds, Russian positions have “not capsized due to poor morale or lack of resilience, even as units are likely underperforming as a result of prolonged exposure and stress and lack of rotations.” She suggests that Russia may conclude that it has the resilience to outlast Ukraine and the West:

A strategy for Ukraine centred on attrition or punishment has thus far proved insufficient against an adversary willing to absorb upwards of 350,000 casualties of varying severity and losses of 13,000 pieces of equipment over the past two years. Russian leaders remain willing to pay high costs in personnel and equipment for modest gains and do not appear all that concerned about challenges to domestic stability.

The initial Russian invasion failed to deliver a quick, decisive victory, and the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive suffered the same fate. The two sides are now in war of attrition.

Describing the changing war strategies, Thomas G. Mahnken and Joshua Baker write that Russia’s transition to a “deep defence” signals Moscow’s preparation for a long war. Mahnken is a professor at the Johns Hopkins and head of Washington’s Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, while Baker is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

In this long war, they note, “Russia’s frontline troops seem to be well resourced and more willing to defend their positions.” Ukraine and its Western backers face a war that “closely resembles the great wars of the twentieth century,” conflicts rooted in “ideology and fuelled by nationalist desires.” The determinants of success in long wars are different from those in short wars:

Whereas surprise, new ways of war, and operational virtuosity loom large in short conflicts, victory in protracted conflicts often hinges on other factors. Sound strategy and operational art are always at a premium, but success or failure in protracted wars often hinges on one side’s ability to out-produce the other, maintain its societal cohesion while undermining that of its adversary, and gather and nurture a coalition while disrupting that of the enemy.

The ability of the United States to influence the war was vividly shown when Washington denied Moscow any chance at shocking Ukraine into submission. The “unprecedented warning” issued by US intelligence agencies, outlining Russia’s plans and preparation before the invasion, is described by Alexander Bick, who served in the Biden administration as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council and as a member of the policy planning staff at the State Department. Bick argues that timely US intelligence and military support deprived Russia of any element of surprise, and was critical in the defence of Kyiv.

Bick set up a Washington team of government experts, a “tiger team,” in December 2021 to consider the consequences of the threatened Russian invasion and produce a “playbook” of US responses. The starting point was a list of objectives developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and given to the president in October 2021:

1. Avoid a kinetic conflict between the US military and NATO with Russia
2. Contain the war inside the geographic boundaries of Ukraine
3. Strengthen and maintain NATO unity
4. Empower Ukraine and give it the means to fight

Two weeks before the first Russian tank crossed the Ukraine’s border the tiger team playbook approved by the Biden in the second week of February laid out a “comprehensive picture” of the US response plan and roles. Bick says the experience offers a caution about any ability to predict future events:

In devising our planning scenario, the Tiger team got the scale, geography, and timing of Russia’s military operations almost exactly right. But we were wrong on almost everything else. We overestimated the Russian military, underestimated Ukraine’s capabilities and resolve, and failed to anticipate the extent to which fear and public revulsion would reshape European politics in favour of tougher response options, some of which seemed out of reach only days before.

During the first year of the war in 2022, the Biden administration proclaimed that Russia had suffered a major strategic failure. The optimism declined in 2023 as Russia blunted Ukraine’s offensive.

Discussing US strategy in Ukraine, Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute says Biden’s aim was “to provide extensive but limited support to Ukraine for as long as it takes.” US policy had five main elements: disclosing intelligence information, rallying international support, imposing economic sanctions, isolating Russia diplomatically, and providing military assistance to Ukraine. But Biden, she charges, was principally concerned about limiting American risk rather than maximising Ukraine’s power.

Schake was one of 130 former Republican national security officials who signed a 2020 statement endorsing Biden and claiming President Trump was unfit to serve another term. She offers what can be read as a measured Republican critique of Biden’s Ukraine policy. Her sharpest charge is that the US didn’t “adjust its strategy over time to tighten the noose around Russia until Putin lost on the battlefield.” The refusal of Trump-inspired (or fearful) Republicans in Congress to vote for more military aid to Ukraine seems to indicate that Trump’s policy is to loosen the noose completely.

Delay in delivering weapons and ammunition, Schake writes, was “most tragically and visually evident in Russian construction of defences in late 2022 and early 2023.” Biden’s strategy had the enormous benefit of incurring no American casualties while showcasing American leadership in upholding international order, Schake judges:

Unquestionably without the crescendo of effort undertaken by the Biden administration, Ukraine would have lost its war and been extinguished as a nation. Nonetheless, by early 2024 the Biden administration found itself in a similar position strategically to the Bush administration in 2005: having committed enormous resources to a war effort that was not succeeding and probably could not attain success on the current trajectory, the government remained intellectually unwilling to adopt approaches that might produce a better outcome. And as in George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Joe Biden’s presidential administration was now inseparably tied to the war in Ukraine: should the effort fail, it would look of a piece with the disastrous denouement of American involvement in Afghanistan.

The largest conventional armed conflict in Europe since the second world war has changed Russia as much as Ukraine. The mind of Vladimir Putin conjured up the war and his determination drives the conflict. His dream is to reconstruct the Russian empire that dissolved with the ending of the cold war.

Moscow will challenge Europe and US so long as Putin is in power, and most likely well beyond his departure, argues Andrea Kendall-Taylor of the Centre for a New American Security:

Putin is reorienting Russia around the cause of confrontation, first with Ukraine but also with the United States and NATO. He is reshaping society, has put the economy on a wartime footing, and [has] doubled down on partnerships with like-minded partners, especially in China, Iran, and North Korea. These changes will not easily be undone. Confrontation with the West has become the organising principle of Russia’s domestic and foreign policies, and Putin points to Russia’s “existential struggle” with the West as the primary justification for his regime and its actions. Even if the fighting in Ukraine subsides or ends, Putin will require confrontation to keep his regime in power.

Putin’s “strategic fanaticism” is the focus of the chapter by Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. He starts with philosopher George Santayana’s famous observation: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

Strategic fanaticism stems from obsession and a readiness to go to extraordinary lengths to satisfy that obsession, says Freedman. “Since 1991 Russians have been reluctant to accept Ukraine as an independent state. This turned, under Putin, into a conviction that Ukraine could only be allowed sovereignty so long as it was deferential to Russia’s wishes, accepted a degree of economic integration, and stayed clear of Western institutions. When that could not be guaranteed, it should be dismembered and punished.”

Putin has ensured that that Russia will be hated and distrusted by Ukrainians for generations, Freedman judges, and Putin’s aim of a compliant government in Kyiv is now beyond his reach.

Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic magazine attacks the myth that the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault. She says that Americans, accustomed to seeing themselves at the centre of every story, imagine that Western foreign policy choices and decisions “are central to the centuries-long power struggle between Russia and Ukraine.” Joined to that myth, she argues, too many in the West give tacit assent to the “Russian argument that Ukraine is not a real country and does not have a right to sovereignty.”

Looking instead at what Putin and his cronies proclaim, Applebaum says, reveals “a Russian elite that believes smashing Ukraine and smashing treaties will alter forever a world that they perceive to be dominated by the wealthy democracies, especially the United States. This nihilism is reflected directly in the systematic brutality of Russian troops on the ground.” The Russian occupiers have “repeatedly demonstrated their intention to eliminate not only the Ukrainian state but also Ukrainian identity and culture.”

Any instant history of a war in progress must confront the ultimate question: how will this end? Applebaum’s answer is that only Russian defeat will deliver a decisive conclusion:

A military loss could create a real opening for national self-examination or a major change, as it so often has done in Russia’s past. Only failure can persuade the Russians themselves to question the sense and purpose of a colonial ideology that has repeatedly impoverished and ruined their own economy and society, as well as those of their neighbours, for decades. Yet another frozen conflict, yet another temporary holding pattern, yet another face-saving compromise will not end the pattern of Russian aggression or bring permanent peace.

The war means that the European Union has shifted from a “peace project to a war project,” according to Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Where “most European countries could not imagine a war breaking out between European states,” he writes, the war changed the way that core nations in the EU think about their identity. A “truly geopolitical Europe” is emerging, Leonard argues, that will “fundamentally reshape the European security order and the idea of Europe along with it.” A Europe that sought to escape history must confront bloody history on its doorstep.

Leonard’s prediction is that the European Union will keep expanding to eliminate “the problematic buffer zone between Europe and Russia,” producing a “sharp definition of Europe’s borders.” A bigger, stronger European Union with a geopolitical role shaped by the war would be “a union able to defend itself against military threats, wield its economic power more effectively, renew itself politically while maintaining its legitimacy, and emerge as an equal partner to the United States.”

In Ukraine today, winter has turned to spring and Russia prepares to mount a major offensive, as it did last year. Last month, Moscow finally abandoned the fiction that it is mounting a “special military operation,” instead expressing the truth that it’s at “war.”

The language shift is aimed at Russians as much as the rest of the world. Russia may have the upper hand militarily — it occupies almost a fifth of Ukraine — but Moscow’s nod to reality is about the huge casualties Russia has suffered and an economy forced on to a war footing.

Ukraine has pushed back Russia’s Black Sea fleet and uses drones to hit targets in Russia. But in the ground war, the Economist reports, Russia is firing at least five shells for every Ukrainian one: “There is an alarming possibility that a big new Russian push in the next few months could punch through Ukraine’s defences and deep into the country.”

The blockage of the Biden administration’s US$61 billion military-support package by Trump-leaning Republicans in Congress means Ukraine may not have the weapons to match its will to fight. Even in a war of attrition, something eventually shifts.

The war has been all about the fighting, with no negotiation. The how-this-ends equation means the conflict must reach a moment when the talking starts. The desired end point for Kyiv is a permanent resolution with Russia, based on a recovery of Ukraine’s territory. That vision sees Ukraine turning away from Russia to consolidate its democracy, to join the European Union and eventually NATO, and begin the decades-long work to rebuild a shattered country.

A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stephen Kotkin, writes that a country can win the war and lose the peace: “Ukraine winning the peace is an armistice and an end to the fighting as soon as possible, an obtainable security guarantee, and European Union accession. In other words, a Ukraine, safe and secure, which has joined the West.”

A less-optimistic (but highly likely) version of what negotiation will deliver is an armistice along a line of control, with much of Ukraine’s land and people in Russian hands. That is the recipe for a semi-stable but uneasy armed stand-off, with Ukraine winning neither the war nor the peace.

Much of history’s reckoning for Russia’s has already arrived, however the war plays out on the battlefield. Putin failed to achieve the objectives he proclaimed in 2022. His nation has paid a huge cost in lives and treasure. The would-be tsar has united Ukraine in its hatred for Russia. And Putin’s lust for empire means Europe won’t trust Russia long after Putin is gone.

The war demonstrates the limits of US support but has energised Europe in ways that seemed impossible before the invasion. A Russian leader who sought to crush Ukraine and frighten off NATO forever has instead given the alliance new life and purpose and brought NATO closer to Russia. Appalled at Putin’s savage ambition, Finland joined NATO in April 2023 and Sweden joined in March 2024. NATO says the next three nations in line to join are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine.

In setting up this admirable attempt at instant history, editor Hal Brands imagines two possible futures.

One sees a properly supported Ukraine that blunts Russian attacks, retakes the offensive and eventually wins a tolerable peace. In the other, Russia grinds its enemy down, even if it never takes Kyiv or conquers most of Ukraine.

How the war ends, Brands says, “will determine the degree to which Putin’s Russia — already a vengeful, embittered revisionist — emerges from this conflict empowered or enfeebled.”

Some of the history, though, is already in clear view, as Brands concludes: “Nothing that happens next is likely to fundamentally change the global fragmentation the war has caused. But how the conflict is resolved will have vast consequences for Ukraine and the world.” •

War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World
Edited by Hal Brands | Johns Hopkins University Press | US$32.95 or free download | 328 page

The post Long war appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps the least ambiguous of the works discussed is A Survivor from Warsaw; it is also the least like a memorial, being powerfully dramatic and barely eight minutes long. The Austrian-born Schoenberg had seen Hitler for what he was as early as 1924, and left Europe for the United States in the year Hitler came to power. By 1947 he was a long-time resident of Los Angeles, and his terse, twelve-tone cantata is a vivid retelling of an incident remembered from a concentration camp by a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. The text (by the composer himself) is spoken in English and in the first person, except for the commands of a sergeant, which are shouted in German. At the work’s climax, a men’s chorus defiantly sings a unison setting of the “Shema Yisrael.” (Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is One!)

From the beginning, the work was controversial. The dramatic immediacy of Schoenberg’s music and text was so confronting that some early performances were cancelled and the work bowdlerised. In the first German performance, for instance, mention of a “gas chamber” was deleted.

Shostakovich’s symphony, the first movement of which sets to music Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar,” ran into similar difficulties with Soviet authorities. The ravine at Babyn Yar — to give it its Ukrainian name — was the scene of the massacre of more than 33,000 of Kyiv’s Jews in just two days in September 1941. Later massacres there included not only Jews but also Romani, Soviet prisoners of war and communists. Efforts to conceal the atrocities began before the war ended, as the ravine was gradually filled in and levelled. Now it has gone. After the war, the Soviet authorities were keen that the site be remembered for Nazi atrocities but discouraged specific mention of Jews, so Yevtushenko’s poem, which began “Over Babi Yar there are no memorials,” proved contentious.

The poet was not himself Jewish, but in his poem he identified with the victims of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic genocide, naming Alfred Dreyfus and Anne Frank and stating, “Today I am as old as the Jewish race.” Most radical, as Eichler points out, was the poem’s criticism of Soviet anti-Semitism. Even during the Khrushchev thaw, this was brave of Yevtushenko, and it was braver still of Shostakovich to put it to music. Conductors found they were too busy to take on the premiere and the bass soloist was suddenly indisposed on the day (something that had been foreseen, so a substitute was standing by). It wasn’t long before Yevtushenko was prevailed upon to water down his poem, but when Shostakovich refused to change the words in his symphony the piece was banned.

Eichler quotes the critic Lionel Trilling, who remarked that “if we ever want to remind ourselves of the nature and power of art, we have only to think of how accurate reactionary governments are in their awareness of that nature and that power.”

The most famous musical war memorial is probably Britten’s War Requiem, commissioned for the inauguration in 1962 of new Coventry Cathedral, its medieval predecessor having been destroyed in the bombing raid on that city in November 1940. And yet Britten’s piece makes no mention of the Holocaust, and neither does it refer, directly, to the second world war. The poems Britten put to music, alongside the Latin words of the Requiem Mass, were by first world war poet Wilfred Owen. Perhaps it was this distancing from his subject — the universalising of his theme to be “war and the pity of war,” as Owen put it — that allowed Britten’s piece to gain immediate international acceptance.

Of the four works discussed by Eichler, only Strauss’s Metamorphosen for twenty-three solo strings has no words. The piece began to germinate before the war ended, when the elderly Strauss learnt of the razing in bombing raids of the opera houses in Munich, Berlin, Dresden and Vienna. He had conducted in these houses, some of which had staged premieres of his operas, and felt their destruction keenly. But Strauss was not only in mourning for his own past; the opera houses were emblematic of German culture, and that had been endangered by more than Allied bombing.

Strauss had been nearly seventy when Hitler came to power. His librettist, Stefan Zweig, was a Jew and so was Strauss’s daughter-in-law, and therefore his grandchildren. But Strauss himself was Germany’s most famous living composer, so his instinct was to keep his head down, accept honours that came his way and ingratiate himself with the Third Reich. It couldn’t last. When his opera with Zweig, Die schweigsame Frau, was premiered in 1935 and Strauss saw that the Jewish librettist’s name was left off the poster, he objected. Performances were cancelled and Strauss, now persona non grata, took himself off to Garmisch in the Alps.

Strauss’s Metamorphosen is evidently music of deep regret, but what was the composer regretting? His own behaviour? His naivety? At the end of the score, Strauss wrote, “IN MEMORIAM.” But to whose memory is the music dedicated? To that of his Jewish neighbours in Garmisch who disappeared and never returned? To German culture? If it’s the latter, then there is a semblance of hope in the form of a quotation, just before the end of the piece, from the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. It’s as though Strauss is saying: at least Beethoven survived.

I wrote above that, unlike the other composers, Strauss set no words in his Metamorphosen but, as Eichler reminds us, to begin with there were words. The piece for twenty-three solo strings grew out of the composer’s attempt to put to music a short poem by Goethe, “Niemand wird sich selber kennen” (No One Will Ever Know Himself). This is the complete text:

No one will ever know himself,
Separate himself from his inner being.
But still he senses every day
What at last becomes outwardly clear:
What he is and what he was,
What he can do and what he may.

So, a poem about the struggle for self-knowledge. Is that what memorials are for?

In the prelude to Time’s Echo, Eichler writes of two non-musical memorials. One is a small sculpture made from “Goethe’s oak,” a tree in the forest of the Ettersberg that became associated with the great German poet in the nineteenth century. A little over a hundred years after his death, the forest was cleared by prisoners to make way for their own concentration camp: Buchenwald. The oak was preserved, but during the war it died and, when the camp was bombed, the trunk was charred. The camp guards had it chopped down, though the stump still survives. In an act of bravery, a lump of the wood was saved by a prisoner, Bruno Apitz, and turned into a bas-relief death mask, which he called “The Last Face.”

The other memorial, which is nowhere to be seen, is to the Jews of Saarbrücken. In front of the municipal building that once housed the Gestapo headquarters is a cobblestoned square. One night in 1991 the artist Jochen Gerz led a group of students into the square to dig up some of the cobblestones and replace them with temporary stones. The originals were then inscribed with the names of more than two thousand Jewish cemeteries destroyed by the Reich. Again under cover of darkness, the stones were replaced, but with the names face down.

Word spread in Saarbrücken about the removal and replacement of the cobblestones. But when the locals arrived to see what had happened, they saw nothing. Only each other.

Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo is a towering achievement. Do read it. And listen to the music. •

Andrew Ford talks to Jeremy Eichler about Time’s Echo on The Music Show.

The post Music of remembrance appeared first on Inside Story.

An opening montage blends images of an atomic fireball, tanks in the streets, burning villages, crowds tearing down statues and leaders being saluted by military parades. Historian Timothy Naftali speaks through it all: at its peak, he says, the cold war touched every continent, shaping the decolonisation of empires and transforming domestic politics in the great cities of Europe, North America and Asia.

As Knappenberger acknowledges, the series is “insanely audacious.” It features original footage of critical moments, interviews with people who lived through worst of them, and commentary from around a hundred historians and political insiders, many of whom were directly involved in the crises. Lessons have been learned from documentary-maker Ken Burns, with talking heads presented as dramatis personae. It’s all about managing tone and pacing so that reflections from the present create depths of field for visually evoked scenes from the past.

Knappenberger achieves something of the Burns effect in bringing out an at-times unbearable sense of how these events were experienced by those caught up in them. Rapid montages conveying the scale and density of the upheavals are counterposed with sustained evocations of the experiences of those caught up in them.

Hiroshima, considered a purely military target by the US government, had a civilian population of 350,000. Prewar photographs show carts and bicycles in narrow streets spanned by arching lamps, a place of small traders and modest resources. People who were living in the city as small children deliver their testimonies steadily, quietly — though, as one of them says, visibly working to sustain his composure, “I hate to remember those days.”

Howard Kakita, aged seven, was on his way to school with his five-year-old brother when the warnings started. The explosion came as they returned to their grandparents’ house, which was obliterated. They dug themselves out of the rubble and fled the city through the ruins and carnage. Keiko Ogura’s brother told her he had seen something drop from one of the planes flying over, a tiny thing, which did not fall directly, but was caught for a while in the slipstream of the aircraft before arching down. Then came the flash, the loss of consciousness and the awakening to a world in which “everything was broken.”

The effect of the blast on human bodies creates scars in the memory. Corpses turned to ash on contact. The river was full of them. It’s hard to watch, and to listen to these accounts, as it should be. They are a necessary corrective to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, with its brief, stylised evocation of the horrors, firmly subordinated to the main story of an American hero and his tribulations.

Is it even possible to see such a disastrous train of events from “both sides?” That, surely, is the question we were left with by the cold war that followed. For the first time in history, two global superpowers were frozen in a deadlock of mutually assured destruction. The rush to catastrophe was paralysed by symmetry.

That, at least, was one version of the narrative. But mutually assured paranoia, the more complex and confusing side of things, was anything but paralysing. The belief in an enemy working in secret on unimaginably evil weaponry provokes an overriding conviction that your own side must secretly work on something equivalent or preferably more lethal. This is the “hot” equation behind the cold war.

With technological escalation seemingly taking on a life of its own, no one could comprehend the scale of what was being created. The American government’s messaging was all about survivability — backyard fallout shelters, “duck and dive” drill for schoolchildren — as if a small wooden desk might be an effective shield.

The language used at the time betrays a pitiful divorce from reality. A military officer flippantly describes a planned thermonuclear test as something that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers. The monstrous Bikini Atoll explosion, with 7,000 times the power of the Hiroshima blast, give its name to a new provocative style of swimwear.

“Institutional Insanity” is the title of the episode that deals with all this. It is as if the human brain simply isn’t coping with the consequences of its own activities. No one really knew what they were doing, comments nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, and testing became a kind of game for hyperactive experimentalists.

In interviews recorded before his death last year, Daniel Ellsberg recalls joining “the smartest group of people I ever did associate with” at Rand Corporation, men seen in contemporary photographs relaxing with their feet up on their desks, sleeves rolled up, smoking. But it is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, grimacing in close-up as he advises on enemy psychology, who gets the last word in this particular sequence. “That was a documentary,” says Ellsberg.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev took a leaf out of the Strangelove manual. With an arsenal that couldn’t catch up with massive overreach of his opponents, he sought to weaponise American fears by making exaggerated claims, mounting the covert Active Measures program, which spread misinformation through news media and other forms of public communication.

Against this backdrop, the achievement of Khrushchev’s ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, in defusing the collective psychosis was extraordinary, whatever his political failings from the Russian perspective. Polarised views of Gorbachev’s legacy remain one of the deepest challenges to the West’s comprehension of post-Soviet Russia. Putin’s pronouncement that the break-up of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the modern era has driven the new wave of military aggression that now confronts us.

One of Turning Point’s great strengths is its engagement with the complexities of moral arbitration, which are explored in the extensive commentary offered those in a position to offer genuine insights. Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, now a professor of international affairs in New York, gives an account of the secret speech of 1956, in which Khrushchev made public the scale of the purges of the Stalin era and condemned the cult of personality that had poisoned Soviet politics.

Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and other books on American cold war policy, delivers an excoriating analysis of the thinking behind interventions in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Covert operations like these were one of the defining elements of the cold war; we get insider views of the activities of the CIA and its Soviet counterpart from dissidents now free to tell the tale and bring into focus some of the minor players who shaped events.

The cult of personality accounts for much of the evil in the modern political world, but an excessive focus on these figures is a problem in itself, as we are learning with the media response to Trump in America now. A personality-driven view of history glosses over the influence of those in the supporting cast — the secret service directors, spies, foreign policy advisers, diplomats, propagandists, journalists — and, it must be stressed, the voting public, who allow themselves to be swayed by flagrant manipulation.

Are we returning to the cold war? That question runs through Turning Point, culminating in the final episode on Ukraine. “History is not history,” says journalist Lesley Blume, “but we are in an ongoing tide.” •

The post Roaring back appeared first on Inside Story.

In the latter case, probably not. Yet it is in so many ways both the most intriguing first choice — who, after all, would expect the creator of James Bond to allude to the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Charles Secretan? — and the most portentous revision. The decision to eschew the clumsy homage and instead appropriate the dull name of an American ornithologist underscores Fleming’s ruthless pruning of anything that might unnecessarily adorn the instrument he created in 1952.

That creation, and the long story of its making, is at the heart of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an immense biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Building on earlier efforts by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995), the book was prompted by the Fleming estate’s willingness to give Shakespeare access to unreleased archival material that illuminates the real-life source material embedded in the Bond novels. That openness may also have been the estate attempt to adjust the dominant view of Fleming as a man who, where he is not defined by Bond, is derided as a misogynistic, alcoholic wastrel with a penchant for whipping who showboated during the second world war and spent postwar summers in Jamaica fantasising about British grit, foreign villains and sexual conquest in exotic locales.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man has plenty of whipping and wantonness, but it adds nuance to a life whose early years seem to have been spent in guileless and unknowing preparation for important wartime work — work for which he turns out to have been unusually gifted. In fact, it is the observation of one journalist — that Fleming, in this moment, with all his gifts and talents finally in use, was a “complete man” — that gave Shakespeare his title.

But what freight it brings to the book: an intimation of comprehensiveness underscored by its bulk and the vivid cultural history woven through it; an implied claim to being definitive bedevilled by the persistent haze of uncertainty around Fleming’s war record. Then there is the dramatic portent — that Fleming, even as he created the character that secured his fame, was somehow lesser or incomplete in those postwar years.

But perhaps that was merely a reversion to form. Fleming’s early life was monied but grim. His miserly Scottish grandfather was a banker who had survived considerable bereavement (three siblings had been buried before he was born, and three more, plus his mother, would follow by the time he turned fifteen) to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Robert Fleming’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was to be a constituent of a young Winston Churchill, who called on him for donations and provided in his friendship a glow of respectability for Robert’s sons, Val and Philip, whom Churchill nicknamed the “Fleming-oes.”

Val, elected a Conservative MP in 1910, fathered four sons — Peter (1907), Ian (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913) — with socialite Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose, whom he had married in 1906. But his influence as a father was defined by his absence. After war broke out, he joined Churchill’s regiment, trained alongside the future prime minister, and was killed while serving on the Somme in 1917.

Robert Fleming is said to have bellowed in grief at the news, Evelyn painted every room in the house black, and Churchill wrote an obituary for the Times, a copy of which, framed and hung above Ian’s bed, gave the eight-year-old a nightly reminder of the greatness that he could never hope to match.

Val’s estate, meanwhile, gave Evelyn enormous wealth, but in terms that invited her to endure a lifetime of dutiful widowhood: should she ever remarry, the money would be immediately transferred to her children. She responded by elevating her dead husband “from an absent, pipe-smoking, deer-stalker to an iconic figure in the clouds with whom she alone enjoyed privileged communication,” writes Shakespeare, in one of many deft summations.

Controlling, insecure and extravagant, she played her boys off against one another, guilt-tripping them and blackmailing them with threats of disinheritance, pulling out all the stops to ensure they might never suffer the consequences of taking responsibility for their actions.

For Ian, this manifested most acutely in endless reprieves from failure and ignominy, and repeated diversions from paths that might well have led him away from Evelyn. He was pulled out of Eton ahead of trouble over a relationship with a girl and sent to Sandhurst with hopes of joining the Black Watch infantry battalion. Out less than a year later after contracting gonorrhoea in a London brothel, he was dispatched to the Tennerhof, a private school in the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, with freshly adjusted plans that he would pursue a diplomatic career.

Distance from Evelyn allowed promise to flower: linguistic versatility, some artistic ambitions, an engagement to a Swiss woman. But on his return his mother stomped on all these green shoots. After his failure to find a position in the Foreign Office she intervened to get him a job at Reuters, where he made a decent fist of covering a famous Soviet show trial of six engineers employed by a British machinery manufacturer. Then he was off again, moving at Evelyn’s insistence to join a firm of merchant bankers in the City.

Fleming had little to no interest in commerce and even less in maths: “I could never work out what a sixty-fourth of a point was,” he wrote. Yet he flourished to the point of becoming a partner at another firm only eighteen months later. The succession of environments into which he had been dropped had given him a charming veneer that allowed him to adapt and conform while keeping people at a safe distance. Even the jaded journalists he tried to scoop in Moscow had been disarmed to the point that they were willing to help him with his boss: one vouched that Fleming was “a pukha chap.”

The elite education and time spent among the privileged had also knitted Fleming into every club and network that was worth knowing about, giving him vast contacts and points of reference that he wielded readily. The “stockbroker” Fleming would talk to clients about investment strategy, wine and dine them at an appropriate club or hotel, and then turn them over to the pointy heads and bean counters in the office who could make the money flow. On the surface (and, to some, that was all there was), all this made Fleming a Wodehouse character: paid too much to do too little, all charm and glamour and self-obsession.

And yet, Shakespeare suggests, Fleming had by this time planted “miscellaneous seeds.” He could speak several languages, had solid journalistic experience, and was friendly with several notably crotchety press barons. He had contacts and networks across the financial, commercial and intelligence worlds. He even had literary credentials, via the reflected glow of elder brother Peter, who had become a successful travel writer, and his own efforts as a collector of first editions of books that had “signalised a right-angle in the thought on that particular subject.”

The book collecting might not have seemed helpful when war broke out in 1939, but the miscellaneous seeds sprouted once Fleming was recruited to the Department of Naval Intelligence as a personal assistant to its director, rear-admiral John Godfrey. His ability to deal with the press and with people — not least his irascible boss — made him indispensable. His myriad contacts became invaluable. His knowledge of distant worlds and their connections made him insightful. But perhaps most surprising of all was his creativity.

In this vein he was much like Churchill, whom Fleming grew to resemble with his polka-dot bowties and “daily prayer” memos (“Pray, could you find out…”). Under Godfrey, Fleming brainstormed all sorts of schemes, many impractical and far-fetched, to gain an advantage over the enemy. For every hare-brained idea — to have a fake U-boat captain send messages in glass bottles railing against the Third Reich, to create a fake treasure ship packed with crack commandoes (which sounds suspiciously like the Trojan horse) — there was something promising. Perhaps most notable was what Fleming took from a little-known novel, The Milliner Hat Mystery: the germ of what became Operation Mincemeat, a successful tactical deception of the Axis powers.

Placed at the near-centre of British intelligence efforts, Fleming had a wide ambit of activity that Shakespeare believes to have extended to a role in the creation of America’s foreign intelligence service. He was hardly the “chocolate sailor” some contemporaries called him. Godfrey certainly thought highly of his assistant. He called Fleming a war “winner” who was owed a debt that could never be repaid, and Shakespeare adds to this the findings of other historians: “It has taken time to realise how central Ian Fleming is,” says one. “What he was doing touched on so much of the war,” says another.

But ascertaining exactly what Fleming touched, and how lightly or heavily, is difficult. Even the claim to Operation Mincemeat is made via inference, analysis of stylistic tics and coincident timetabling. Secrecy is the issue. With friends and colleagues, Fleming was generally reticent about his wartime service; bar the blurred fantasies of the Bond books, he left few hints of his activities. Shakespeare adds to this the need for confidentiality during the war and, later, during the cold war, when archives were both weeded and closed to access. Then there is the material simply lost to time — damaged, forgotten, burned — and the records that are exaggerated or simply mistaken.

None of this is unusual, yet at other times Shakespeare strains to explain Fleming’s absences from records, or even to gainsay what exists and inveigle Fleming’s way in. “Simply because Ian is not listed in the minutes of a high-level meeting,” he writes at one point, “does not mean he was not there in the room.”

Enough well-documented rooms exist to make arguments like this unnecessary. The array of material Shakespeare proffers is enough to convince this reader, at any rate, that Fleming was an active, engaged, important and unconventional wartime player. While Shakespeare labours the point, it also serves to establish a key fact about Fleming’s literary efforts: while James Bond was depicted in a cold war world, with its dubious moralities and shifting principles, he was fundamentally a creature of the second world war and its starker divides between allies and enemies, good and bad.

The oft-made comparison with John le Carré has never been to Fleming’s advantage, but Shakespeare draws out so many connections, echoes and resemblances between Bond and the second world war that any comparison between Bond and George Smiley or between Fleming and le Carré seems like a category error. In fact, given Shakespeare’s attention to literary antecedents, the better comparison is between Bond and characters such as Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Richard Hannay and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes — Britons who, with vigour, smarts and a willingness to do violence, save the world.

Shakespeare is a restless writer. As though to jolt the reader awake, lengthy passages of third-person past-tense narration suddenly crystallise into the first-person present as he tracks down a long-lost colleague of Fleming’s or a vague acquaintance or — in more self-indulgent moments — the descendent of some vague acquaintance. These moments fold into the story of Fleming’s life the story of the stories — of the Pearson and Lycett biographies of Fleming, and of Shakespeare’s biography.

Shakespeare quotes people crowing about their efforts to mislead his predecessors or their determination to shut up shop: “Poor Pearson,” Godfrey writes, of Fleming’s first biographer, “is like a famished man gazing, his mouth watering, into the butcher’s and confectionary shop windows and having to be content with a stale turnip (or swede) from the greengrocer.”

Shakespeare doesn’t conceal his similarities with Pearson, noting his own eager anticipation of new discoveries. But he adds in the dynamics of his interviews, poignant notes about the contingency of historical research, and observations about the dark material at the heart of the Bond novels.

In one scene he arrives in the rain outside a bungalow at Milton Keynes to interview the last surviving member of 30AU, a wartime intelligence gathering unit set up under Fleming’s influence and operating, effectively, under his command. Bill Marshall is ninety-four years old and feels a decade older. He tells Shakespeare he is a week early but beckons him inside anyway. “Later, I am glad I got the date wrong,” Shakespeare adds. “Bill Marshall will be hospitalised five days after our conversation. Had I come at the right time, I would never have heard what he tells me.”

Inside, Shakespeare listens as Marshall — who only days before has received the Légion d’Honneur and a letter from Emanual Macron praising him as a hero — confesses to murder:

On 26 June, Bill watched as German snipers fired through the windows of a hotel, killing one medical orderly and shooting another through the knee as they attended wounded American soldiers in the street. It was raining when the German riflemen surrendered. Another witness told Nicholas Rankin how not long afterwards he had seen their blood flowing in the rainwater.

Bill grows quiet, withdrawn. “I shot four Germans in cold blood.”

“What did you feel?’

“Nothing. How do you feel seeing two men trying to attend being shot?”

What happened next, whether he was reprimanded or Returned to Unit, he does not say. He has said enough. I think of another character who inherited Bill’s licence to kill. This was the compost out of which James Bond emerged.

Much as he had come into his own, Fleming was in an invidious position by the end of the war. Bound by secrecy, he could not dispel or rebut jibes about him being the “Sailor of the Strand.” He was carrying considerable emotional turmoil: his brother Michael had died in 1940 as a prisoner of the Germans; a serious romantic relationship with Muriel Wright, begun in 1935 in Austria, had come to an end with her death in a German bombing raid in 1944. He could too easily see a future in which the skills and talents he had wielded so well went to waste. He was hardly alone in this plight: in the United States, Allen Dulles described his return to the legal profession as an “appalling thing” after heading a spy network. “Most of my time,” he wrote, “is spent reliving those exciting days.”

Where Dulles went to the CIA, Fleming returned to journalism. In 1945, he took a position in the Kemsley newspaper group, handling a network of foreign correspondents. A journalist Shakespeare interviews recounts how Fleming sat in front of a canary yellow map of the world equipped with tiny flashing light bulbs — one for each man.

Shakespeare cautiously ventures that this might have been cover for continuing intelligence work, but the whole portrait has the tragic comedy of a Graham Greene novel: Fleming’s use of naval intelligence lingo with his journalists, his retention of a code and cipher book in his office, the derisive whispers of younger colleagues that his vaunted contacts were nothing but old duffers. Then, of course, there are the corporate machinations: Fleming took the position with Kemsley, which also owned the Sunday Times, on the intimation that he might become the paper’s editor and the hope that he might even get a seat on the company’s board. He also fantasised that the foreign news service he was managing might one day become a rival to Reuters — at which point Fleming would be a press proprietor in his own right.

If true, it was only ever to be a sideline, for alongside a salary of £225,000 in today’s pounds Fleming negotiated an iron-clad policy of two months of paid holiday each year. He would spend those months in Jamaica, at the rather uncomfortable bungalow he had built and initially named “Shamelady Hall” before choosing a name that harked back to a wartime operation — Goldeneye. Here, in daily bursts of 2000 words, he wrote Bond.

In Shakespeare’s telling, the novels came shortly after a burst of disappointments and disillusionments. Fleming’s hopes of advancement at Kemsley had vanished; his long-term paramour, Anne Charteris, had been divorced from her husband and fallen pregnant (again) to Fleming, necessitating a hasty marriage that neither of them much wanted. With fatherhood imminent, wedlock complete, he was looking back to a life he once had and could still have had — in intelligence, on one hand, but also in literature.

Signs of Fleming’s desire for this life recur in the book, especially during Fleming’s time attending the Tennerhof. There, according to Shakespeare, the youthful Fleming was steeped in European history and literature and imbued with ambitions to write a serious novel in the vein of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. He made attempts to act on those ambitions, planning but then aborting a co-authored translation of Paracelsus and, in 1928, self-publishing a volume of poetry titled The Black Daffodil only to become deeply embarrassed by it. “He took every copy that had been printed and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames,” wrote one of Fleming’s friends.

A factor in Fleming’s constant withdrawals, Shakespeare argues, was his elder brother’s success at writing. “Of course, my brother Peter’s rather brilliant as a writer,” Fleming would say, “but I wouldn’t know how you set about writing a book myself.” In the postwar years, however, his attitude changed. One prompt was his belief that he could better his brother’s effort at an adventure novel; another was his sense that he would not be trespassing on his brother’s turf if he did so. Then there was a sense of resentment, aggravated by his failed hopes at Kemsley, as friends, acquaintances and other writers churned out thrillers and spy novels that, in many cases, claimed experiences and actions Fleming saw as his own to write about — the gag of secrecy notwithstanding.

Perhaps too there was a sense of how he might slip that gag: Shakespeare posits that Graham Greene’s difficulties with the intelligence services — it was felt he drew too closely on his first-hand knowledge — may have influenced Fleming to increase the fantastical elements of the Bond stories even as he drew on the real-life material of his wartime experiences and insights. “I think he wrote the books primarily because he had a great deal of knowledge of things like this within him, and he had to get it out,” says one acquaintance.

It is a conflux of influences that Shakespeare presents with considerable verve. He plays with the book’s internal clock, changes style and tone, moves into scenes and back out of them, and in doing so creates vivid juxtapositions and drama. The chapter on Bond’s first appearance on the page follows immediately on Fleming’s decision to marry to create the convincing argument that Bond was an escape for Fleming as much as for an exhausted postwar Britain:

Suddenly, as he floated over the reef [at Goldeneye], above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess–Maclean defection, and re-establish SIS as “the most dangerous” Secret Service in Russian eyes. And he would be a bachelor. “If he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.”

A chapter later, Shakespeare is looking ahead again, foreshadowing how Bond would consume Fleming. It was not only that Bond’s fame quickly came to define his author’s public persona; it was also that Fleming became reliant on Bond. Advised that it was no good to write just one book, that he had to “hit the nail again and again with the same hammer until it’s driven into the head of your potential public,” Fleming became a factory working on a one-year schedule, the brunt of the work to be done during a spell at Goldeneye.

Fleming went into this routine clear-eyed, seeing it as wholly compatible with his working life as well as a path out of financial difficulties caused by a spendthrift Anne. As he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape during negotiations over Casino Royale, “I am only actuated by the motives of a) making as much money for myself and my publishers as possible out of the book, and b) getting as much fun as I personally can out of the project.”

But the fun, in Shakespeare’s telling, dwindled as the money poured in. Lawsuits over film and television rights, accusations of plagiarism, negative reviews and laughter from friends all corroded this late-life literary success. Then there was Fleming’s knowledge that, at some point, he would run out of material. Philip Larkin famously detected in the posthumously published Octopussy (1966) an allegory for how Fleming had used his war experiences as treasure off which to secure his heart’s desires — Bentleys, caviar, Henry Cotton golf clubs. It was acute insight that Shakespeare agrees with. “This was the draining exchange,” he writes. “Once Ian gave birth to Bond, he relied heavily on the hard-earned secret capital of the war. Each book was a different slice of stolen gold until the material ran out.”

The poor quality of Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), also published after Fleming’s death, suggests Shakespeare’s assessment is right. But at play in the preceding Bond books too is a sense of Fleming butting up against the limits imposed on a writer tilling in a single genre. For Your Eyes Only (1960) abandons the novel form in favour of the short story, one of which — the horribly titled “Quantum of Solace” — eschews gunfights and villains in favour of a parable about marital compassion delivered after a disappointing dinner party in a manner reminiscent of Somerset Maugham. The response to this deviation was lukewarm at best.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), meanwhile, is unique among the Bond novels for being framed by a meta-fictive introduction from Fleming, for adopting the first-person perspective of a woman, and for its brutally sleazy and violent story. The book contains the most rounded and complex of Fleming’s female characters, but its reception was so virulently hostile that Fleming, taken aback, suppressed a paperback edition, refused to allow anything but the title to be used in the film adaptations, and went back to his safe patch with the Bond that followed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

One might wonder whether Fleming still yearned to write something that his younger, more highbrow self would have been proud of, and whether he had come to believe that, thanks to Bond, he could not. If so, it is all the more tragic for being a knowing compromise signalled by the early change he had made to the draft of Casino Royale.

A homage to a nineteenth-century philosopher was never going to fit into that work, into that world, and Fleming saw it quickly. He slashed a blue line through Secretan and above it wrote a new name. His protagonist would introduce himself bluntly, almost monosyllabically: “Bond. James Bond.” •

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
By Nicholas Shakespeare | Harvill Secker | $42.99 | 830 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor had long endorsed AUKUS, but now a Labor PM was standing beside US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce how it would be implemented. The political symbolism was sharp; what had previously been endorsed by Labor was now being wholeheartedly embraced.

Soon after, former prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club to drop a rhetorical depth charge. He called the Albanese government’s embrace of AUKUS Labor’s “worst international decision” since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Suddenly the debate opened up, and since then doubts and criticisms of AUKUS — among them my book The Echidna Strategy — have barely let up. As former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese put it during Adelaide Writer’s Week in February, the anti-AUKUS argument is now reasonably complex and sophisticated while the pro-AUKUS position rarely rises above platitudes.

In the two-and-a-half years since the deal was announced, we have not once heard — either from the Morrison government or its successor — what the order for eight nuclear-powered submarines is actually designed to achieve. With neither a prime minister nor a senior minister providing any kind of strategic rationale for the deal, the case for AUKUS has not advanced beyond clichés and truisms about “deterrence.” Apart from pacifists, everyone is in favour of deterrence; the debate is solely about how we deter, and on this point the pro-AUKUS side has barely engaged.

Still, for all the strength of AUKUS scepticism, it seems unlikely to have any perceptible impact on government policy. Foremost among the reasons is the fact that major-party support for AUKUS remains steadfast: neither Labor nor the Coalition is likely to move away from AUKUS because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

AUKUS was conceived by a Liberal-led government, and the Liberal Party typically feels that national security is its electoral strong suit. So, barring a major reversal in the practical implementation of AUKUS (more on that in a moment), it is difficult to see what they could gain by revising what they regard as a signature policy initiative. Former prime minister Scott Morrison recently said that history would record AUKUS as the best decision his government made.

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for subsequent leaders to walk away from policy stances championed by their predecessor. But Peter Dutton was defence minister when AUKUS was conceived so he is closely associated with the policy and will stand by it.

Is Labor support for AUKUS more fragile? A heated debate took place at the party’s national conference in September last year, but ultimately a resolution backing the initiative passed with a comfortable majority. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley was moved to describe AUKUS as a “core Labor value,” evoking a sense of grassroots support and deep historical resonance. Beazley called the conference vote “the most significant move in the party since the 1963 Labor Federal Conference,” which dealt with the establishment of the North West Cape naval communications station.

But there is reason to doubt the sincerity of Labor’s conversion. Before AUKUS, no senior Labor figure had ever campaigned for nuclear-powered submarines. Indeed, support for such subs was a fringe position even in the Australian strategic debate. Then, in September 2021, the Morrison government gave the Labor opposition less than a day’s notice before announcing AUKUS. Labor, fearing a khaki election, instantly threw its support behind the initiative.

By any measure, it was a lightning-fast conversion on a huge policy question. And it seemed to be based largely on political calculation rather than deep principle or historical affiliation. Beazley’s “core Labor value” declaration looked like an attempt at what American political strategists call “astroturfing” — political elites creating an artificial semblance of grassroot activity.

But even assuming support for AUKUS inside the Labor caucus is a mile wide and an inch deep, does that matter for the future of the project? Perhaps less than we might think. Major political questions are never decided purely on principle or on the careful weighing of policy alternatives divorced from party-political considerations. Politicians can change their minds, but they change them faster if arguments align with incentives. At present, that’s simply not the case.

Prime Minister Albanese has spoken openly about his plans to entrench Labor in office for several terms to guarantee its reforms can’t be undone (as was the carbon price) by the Liberals. To win successive elections, he and his senior ministers appear to believe that Labor should never give Australian voters reason to doubt its national security credentials. And the cost of providing that reassurance is, for the moment, manageable.

AUKUS spending is not expected to peak for some years. Of a total project cost of between A$268 billion and A$368 billion, the government expects to spend A$58 billion over the next decade, but with less than a quarter of that sum due in the first five years. In budgetary terms, therefore, the decision is easy. Why offer the opposition a stick with which to beat the government at the next election when avoiding that fate costs the government so little?

Labor doesn’t even have an incentive to encourage debate about the deal by having the prime minister or defence minister give a major address. Policy wonks want such a debate, but who gains? What powerful political force would be quieted by a prime ministerial statement? Critics of AUKUS are unlikely to be satisfied; supporters just want to see the project go ahead.

This reflects two things about the structure of Australian politics: first, the number of people who care about defence policy is tiny, and so government doesn’t feel an urgent need to be accountable; second, the number of key decision-makers in defence and foreign policy can be counted on one hand. Unlike in the United States, no alternative base of power exists in the legislature to encourage accountability.

But political incentives change, and this project will rise or fall on its practicalities. Once a steady drip of news reports about cost overruns and program delays begins, internal critics will emerge. (The latest worry concerns the capacity of US shipyards to fill Australia’s order while keeping the US navy itself supplied with new subs.) There are AUKUS sceptics in the parliamentary Labor Party, but scepticism will need to turn to disaffection and resentment. When ministers and parliamentary secretaries see their budgets sliced while AUKUS is fed, internal grumbling may begin.

What else could crack Labor’s AUKUS consensus? The most immediate threat, if he takes office next year, will be Donald Trump. It’s unlikely Trump even knows what AUKUS is right now, but if he’s confronted with its existence he may reel. Australians remember his blistering response when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described to him a refugee resettlement agreement that his administration had inherited from Barack Obama. It was a testament to Turnbull’s deft handling of the call that the president didn’t renege on what he described as “the worst deal ever.” Goodness knows what he will make of an agreement that makes the US navy smaller so a foreign navy can grow larger.

Presently, Australia is responding to the prospect of a second Trump term in much the same way as America’s other allies — lots of fretting and crossed fingers but precious little policy change. The assumption appears to be that if Trump wins, allies are in for another rough four years before the situation returns to “normal,” much as it did when Biden replaced Trump.

That interpretation requires a good deal of optimism and a peculiar reading of recent history, yet it remains the prevailing view. It is remarkable to recall that Australia proposed AUKUS to the Biden administration just a few months after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Our government was evidently so convinced that this outrage, and the president who had provoked it, were aberrant rather than an expression of enduring change that they almost immediately proposed to his successor the most dramatic upgrade to the ANZUS alliance since it was signed in 1951.

While media and political attention is focused on whether AUKUS can be delivered, in the background lurks a strategic question: even if we can get AUKUS done, is it even a good idea? That’s the issue The Echidna Strategy focused on. Australia’s biggest strategic asset is distance — Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney — yet the AUKUS submarine project is effectively an attempt to compress that distance when we should be exploiting it. If China ever wants to project military force against Australia, let it traverse the vast oceans that separate us. There is no pressing reason for Australia to project military power to China’s near seas and onto its landmass.

Such arguments have no purchase on either major party right now, but the real job of books like mine is to open the “Overton window” — to make the unthinkable thinkable. When AUKUS begins to sink under the weight of its misdirected ambition, political leaders will look for new ideas. An alternative defence strategy exists that is prudent and affordable, not weighted with ideological baggage from either extreme, and based on realistic assumptions about the future of Chinese and American power in our region. •

The post Spiky questions remain for AUKUS proponents appeared first on Inside Story.

The Allies’ trial of Japanese wartime political and military leaders was intended to lay the foundations of a new, peaceful and democratic Japan by punishing the militarists who had led the country into a disastrous conflict. The notion that victors could judge the vanquished evoked controversy, both within Japan and internationally; yet in the late 1940s the pioneering Japanese feminist Kato Shizue could confidently write that “intelligent Japanese long ago decided that the punishment of the war criminals was inevitable, and they think the verdicts were just.”

Today, feelings are very different. Japanese conservative politicians (including prominent members of the present government) rail against what they label the “Tokyo Trial View of History,” which they blame for instilling a darkly masochistic view of the nation’s history in the minds of the Japanese population. The late prime minister Shinzo Abe was particularly emphatic in denying that the men convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East should be regarded as criminals. The seven who were executed for war crimes following the Tokyo trial — as well as others convicted and given lesser sentences — are among those commemorated in the Yasukuni Shrine, where right-wing politicians and some senior military officers go to honour the spirits of the dead. As political scientist Gary J. Bass argues in his monumental new book Judgement at Tokyo, “the Tokyo trial misfired and fizzled,” revealing “some of the reasons why a liberal international order has not emerged in Asia, despite the wishes of some American strategists.”

The paradoxes at the heart of the Tokyo trial began to be visible well before the International Tribunal opened its hearings on 3 May 1946. Bass’s book starts by guiding readers through the concluding stages of the Pacific war and the impassioned debates among allied leaders about the treatment that should be meted out to the vanquished. (US secretary of state Cordell Hull was among those who initially favoured summary executions of Hitler and Japan’s wartime prime minister, Tojo Hideki.) A central figure in the early part of Bass’s narrative is Henry Stimson, US secretary of war at the time of the defeat of Germany and Japan, who played a key part in creating the conceptual framework that underlay both the German Nuremberg war crimes trials and the Tokyo trial.

In Nuremberg and Tokyo, the wartime leaders of the defeated nations faced three classes of criminal charge. Class A was the crime of waging (or conspiring to wage) aggressive war; Class B covered the war crimes set out in the existing Geneva Conventions, including mistreatment of prisoners of war; and Class C encompassed crimes against humanity. The difficulties lay in Classes A and C. There were no legal precedents for prosecuting people for waging aggressive war, nor for crimes against humanity, and even within the victorious allied nations some leading legal commentators were concerned that the trials were imposing newly invented laws retrospectively on the defeated.

The horrors revealed at Nuremberg helped to embed the notion of crimes against humanity both in public consciousness and in international law. But in Tokyo the key charge (though not the only one) was the crime of waging aggressive war — an offence for which no one had ever been prosecuted before the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and for which no one has been prosecuted since.

As Bass vividly shows, unease and disagreement about the moral and judicial basis of the International Tribunal’s proceedings haunted the Tokyo trial. Even Sir William Webb, the acerbic Australian judge who presided over the International Military Tribunal, privately questioned whether waging aggressive war could be treated as a crime, though he managed to suppress these doubts sufficiently to concur in, and hand down, the tribunal’s guilty sentences on all the twenty-five defendants who survived the trial. (Two died during the proceedings, and another was found mentally unfit to be tried.)

A further obvious paradox of the Tokyo trial was the fact that Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the war had been fought and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers had gone to their deaths, never appeared in court. By the time Japan surrendered, the US government had decided that it would be politically expedient to retain the emperor as symbolic leader of the new Japan. Despite protests from Australia, he remained immune from prosecution.

Judgment at Tokyo, though, is not a dry analysis of judicial principles and legal arguments. It is a vivid blow-by-blow account of the trial, filled with colourful characters and moments of farce as well as tragedy. The Tokyo tribunal, though dominated by the colonial powers, was more international than its Nuremberg counterpart. Its eleven judges represented the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, China, India and the Philippines, and each judge brought with him (they were all men) his own experiences, professional training and personal prejudices. They spent their time in war-devastated Tokyo living an isolated existence in the Imperial Hotel, and relations between them were often tense. Chinese judge Mei Ruao took a deep dislike to Indian judge Radhabinod Pal; the British judge, Lord William Patrick, was derisively dismissive of his Filipino counterpart, Delfin Jaranilla. They were united, it seems, only in their shared aversion to the court’s president, William Webb.

Yet this is not a simple litany of fractiousness and failure. What the Tokyo trial achieved, in very difficult circumstances, was the collection of a mass of vivid and often searing evidence of the horrors of war, including of many conventional war crimes: among them, the massacres and mass rapes of civilians in the Philippines and China, the mistreatment and killing of prisoners of war, and the brutal forced labour inflicted on tens of thousands of Southeast Asians and of allied prisoners of war on the Thai–Burma Railway and elsewhere.

While taking readers through this evidence, Judgement at Tokyo also points out the silences: most notably, the absence from the trial of any serious discussion of Japan’s use of biological warfare in China. The US and Soviet authorities were well aware of this dark story but made sure that it was kept out of the trials because they were busy trying to obtain knowledge of Japan’s biological techniques for their own purposes.

Bass explores not only the events of the trial itself but also the subsequent destinies of the judges — particularly the very different fates of Mei Ruao and Radhabinod Pal. Mei, who had been appointed to the court by the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, decided hesitantly to return to mainland China in 1949 and throw in his lot with the new People’s Republic of China. Ironically, he fell foul of the communist authorities because of his fierce criticism of Japanese war crimes at a time when China’s government was trying to improve the country’s political relationship with Japan. He was publicly condemned during the Cultural Revolution and died soon after — only to be elevated to the status of national hero under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose nationalist rhetoric echoes Mei’s own insistence that China should never forget the wartime horrors inflicted on its people by Japan.

The Indian judge Pal, on the contrary, famously wrote a dissenting judgment that sweepingly rejected the right of the International Tribunal to judge the defendants. (Later, he also questioned the Nuremberg judgements and the reality of the Holocaust.) Pal’s lengthy statement of dissent made him the hero of the Japanese right, who feted him on his later visits to Japan and have cited his judgement ever since as justification for their own revisionist views of the war.

Judgement at Tokyo is based on a mountain of court records, government archives and interviews with the descendants of the judges and defendants, and Bass skilfully weaves all this together into a fascinating narrative. Despite the scale and scope of the book, though, there is one odd lacuna. It barely mentions a crucial counterpoint to the Tokyo trials: the story of the 4000-odd Japanese soldiers and military auxiliaries who were found guilty of Class B and C war crimes in trials held throughout East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, of whom almost 1000 received the death sentence.

As Utsumi Aiko and other Japanese scholars have pointed out, these were the most tragic of the war crimes proceedings, for many of those who received the harshest sentences were low-ranking auxiliaries — some of them drafted from Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea into the violent world of the Japanese wartime military only to be abandoned to their fate by the collapsing military machine that had recruited them.

As Gary Bass shows, the Tokyo trial had far-reaching implications for Japan and its Asian neighbours. Its fundamental flaw was its shakily based attempt to define the waging of aggressive war as a crime. The spectre of double standards and retrospective justice raised by this concept has never been laid to rest. This in turn allows historical denialists today not only to dismiss the trial as “victors’ revenge” but also, by extension, to whitewash the history of the war and depict the Tokyo defendants as innocent martyrs to a just cause. And the growing influence of that denialism, as Bass trenchantly observes, risks shackling Japan to a narrative of the war that is both “morally odious and historically dubious.” •

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
By Gary J. Bass | Picador | $39.99 | 912 pages

The post Victors’ justice? appeared first on Inside Story.

He’d been born in Mississippi in 1968 and lived there in his formative years, so obviously he was a racist. He’d been raised in New Jersey, where he played centre on his high school football team, and then went on to play rugby in college, so of course he was brutish and crude. He had spent twenty-eight years in the US Army and had been in combat, so surely he had killed people.

Obviously, of course and surely, Brent Cummings eludes these reductive inferences. In An American Dreamer, Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Washington Post, unfurls Brent’s inner complexities and outer contradictions.

Brent appeared fifteen years earlier as an army major in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, an embedded account of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, and Finkel’s long connection to him has built the foundation for a work of gripping intimacy. An American Dreamer gets inside Brent’s skull, and those of his wife Laura and neighbour Mike, to capture the emotional landscape of contemporary American life from three diverging vantage points.

Brent is now working stateside at a college with his retirement from the army looming. His soul is troubled. He feels his country has lost its way in the last couple of decades, as if he’s come “out of one war and into another” against enemies on the home front. In a revealing slip, he remarks that the earlier time “felt… clean. No that’s not the right word… It’s slipping.”

What the pollutant might be is not clear to him. Trumpism is part of it. Despite being “probably more Republican than Democrat, probably more conservative than liberal,” he loathes the man for his egotism, ill-discipline and bullying more than for his policies. But the problem runs deeper: Brent has lost confidence in his country’s goodness and shared purpose. “Everything was fraying. That’s what it felt like.”

Brent’s concerns have more to do with meaning than with material or political realities. His belief in American virtue and progress is shaken, and while that abstract dream is disintegrating a real one disturbs his sleep. Not the post-traumatic image of desert horrors we might expect but a chorus of mocking voices from a profound darkness.

His sense that the ground has shifted under him is reinforced by a series of bafflements. He is shocked by the lack of support he receives from colleagues when he challenges the use of a confederate flag on an insignia, upset by activist attacks on his beloved military, appalled by the unthinkable assault on the Capitol. He finds himself in a vanishing middle where the mental habits of a lifetime, grounded in ideas of honour and fair play, have lost their traction. “Am I the one who’s wrong? Am I the one who’s missing something?”

Laura and Mike play second and third fiddle to Brent, but Finkel gives voice to them with the same empathic immediacy. Laura’s main register is anxiety rather than disorientation. She fears violent crime, feels a rising sense of menace in her neighbourhood and worries about the fate of her intellectually disabled daughter when she is no longer around.

Mike, for his part, overlays fear with anger, going full-bore MAGA while railing against the “socialist and communist” treachery of the Democrats. Why Mike, a quadriplegic of modest means, would set aside his early doubts about Trump and come to see him as his infallible saviour is a mystery. His political conversion creates tension with his neighbours, a microcosm of the severing of connections that has played out across the country.

Finkel is a wonderful guide to the inner terrain of his characters. He shows rather than tells, keeping their dialogue and the private thoughts behind it direct and relatable. Brent in particular is brought to vivid life through confrontations with events that confound him. Very occasionally these episodes seem a little forced, notably in the parallels between an encounter with the security wall on a visit to Jerusalem and Trump’s border wall. Mike’s characterisation can also appear ever so slightly two-dimensional by comparison with Brent’s, but the book as a whole is a triumph of compassionate and sympathetic attention.

Finkel inhabits Brent in a rare way, better than a life-long friend could hope to do. More a finely tuned recording instrument than a buddy, he makes no attempt to elevate Brent, hide his flaws or turn him into a morally instructive Everyman. He is an ordinary guy, standing somewhere on the slippery hump of the political bell curve, but he is also a creature of a specific time, place and tradition, not just a symbol of averageness. Witnessing his puzzlement at how things have changed, we might wonder how much his sense of loss comes from occupying a political centre that cannot hold and how much it is a sign that he is getting older and his generation is being unseated.

We hear so much about the growing polarisation of American life. Books like this one help to humanise the conflict, not only by plucking individuals from their political tribes but also by exploring the quieter emotional dimensions of their experience. Beyond the primal fears and hatreds, Finkel suggests, there are people seeking solutions to big, existential questions about purpose, meaning, legacy and value. An American Dream shows us that behind all the yelling and distrust and there is vulnerability and hope. •

An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country
By David Finkel | Scribe | $36.99 | 256 pages

The post “Am I the one who’s missing something?” appeared first on Inside Story.

This state of affairs came to an abrupt end with Russia’s all-out invasion on 24 February 2022. Not only did the fighting reach deep into Ukraine’s heartland, but life far behind the frontline also became militarised. Russia frequently bombards civilian infrastructure as well as cities in a type of terror warfare intended to break the will of Ukraine’s defenders. There is no longer any hinterland.

How long will this slaughter last? In August last year I warned against overly optimistic expectations, writing that “supporters of Ukraine’s democracy should prepare themselves for long-term, costly support.” Another six months on it is even clearer that patience and endurance will be needed if we want to see Ukraine survive and strive. We have to stop thinking in terms of short and decisive campaigns. This war has become a war of attrition.

Like Vladimir Putin, we need to think in the geographical and historical categories of what historian Timothy Snyder has memorably called the “bloodlands” — the vast territories between Russia in the east and Germany in the west, with Ukraine in the middle. This viewpoint expands the time horizon dramatically. The last three wars fought in this region were far from short campaigns. The first world war’s “eastern front” lasted from August 1914 to March 1918. The wars of the Romanov succession began in Central Asia in 1916 and elsewhere in 1918, only ending, depending on the region, in 1920, 1921, 1922 or even 1923. The German Soviet war — constantly invoked by Putin both in the run-up to the war and during Russia’s continuing cultural mobilisation — extended from the (northern hemisphere) summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945.

Hence, the normal duration a full scale military conflict in this part of the world seems to be three to four years. Ukraine has survived two so far.

But it’s not just the region’s history that suggests a long haul. Once battle lines are fully entrenched, conventional war takes time. The first world war’s western front was bogged down in costly trench warfare, with massive casualties but little territorial gains, for four years.

By the time the second world war rolled around, military specialists in all armies had found the technical means to overcome trenches, barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements. And yet it took the Allies close to a year after the invasion of Normandy in 1944 to defeat Germany, a country under assault from the east by the steamroller of the Red Army, from the south by the United States, British Empire forces and the Free French, and from the air by indiscriminate attack by the combined power of the US and British air forces. Both Ukraine and Russia are in much stronger positions today.

Historical analogies are miserable predictors. But they matter when historical actors think in and through them. Putin is an avid reader of history, constantly pondering where he fits in. He thinks in categories and time-spans informed by Russia’s historical experience.

While he didn’t expect Ukraine to resist so effectively and survive the initial onslaught, he had long prepared his country for a drawn-out conflict with the outside world. One indicator is the effort his regime spent on making Russia’s food system relatively independent of outside supplies. At a time when everybody praised the virtues of globalisation and international networks of trade and mutual dependence, Putin insisted Russia should be able to feed itself.

As a recent study points out, this is the kind of food system you build when you expect a long-term confrontation that might throw your country back on its own resources. Putin embarked on it over decades, at a time when barely anybody in Europe could imagine a war of this magnitude on the continent.

Putin also entrenched his dictatorship, also an anticipation of war. First came the slide towards authoritarianism that began on the first day of his presidency. More recently came its acceleration. The death last week of opposition figure Alexei Navalny is just the latest escalation of a massive crackdown that began in 2021 and quickened with the start of the all-out war in 2022. Russia is now a full-blown dictatorship.

Thus entrenched in the Kremlin, Putin expects the democracies of Europe to have the shorter breath. The way Ukraine has become a political football in US domestic politics might well feed this expectation.

We need to appreciate that this is Putin’s theory of victory: to pound Ukraine with artillery and air attacks; to bleed the defenders white by sacrificing large numbers of his own citizens; and to wait until “the decadent West” loses interest and returns to business as usual, depriving Ukraine of the weapons and economic support it needs to defend itself.

As things stand, he might well be proven right. As I wrote a year ago about the then unlikely prospect of a Russian victory:

Winning the war would require Russia to ramp up its military production and mobilisation of manpower and increase the quality of its training and leadership. It could do that over the long run, just as the Soviet Union did during World War II… It could do so particularly if some of the countries which today are sitting on the fence decide to defy the United States, NATO and the European Union and circumvent or ignore sanctions; the United States reverts to isolationism; NATO disintegrates into squabbles between its members; and the European Union implodes among disagreements between old and new, and rich and less prosperous nations.

This pessimistic scenario has not yet come to pass. Yes, Russia currently has the whip hand. It has massively increased its armaments production, found ways around sanctions and continued to field large numbers of men while avoiding all-out mobilisation. Meanwhile, the United States has shaped up as the weakest link in the chain of democracies supporting Ukraine.

But Russia has not won yet. Ukraine still has “a viable theory of victory,” as two leading military analysts recently wrote. Its military has become expert at war by attrition, which it fights intelligently, minimising its own losses while maximising the enemy’s. Supplied adequately, it will become even better at this terrible art, denying Russia victory and eventually turning the tide.

For this to happen, though, Ukraine needs the continued support of the outside world: from NATO countries, from the Europeans and from friends further afield, such as Australia. But these friends need to appreciate that this war is now a war of attrition. And those wars are not won in a day or a season.

What about negotiations? A strong commitment to long-term support should unite all friends of Ukraine, no matter whether they think that ultimately the war will end in Kyiv’s forces retaking all occupied territories, if necessary by military means (the current official Ukrainian position), or in a negotiated settlement of some sort, with compromises on both sides.

There are indeed models for a negotiated peace which, while painful, might satisfy Ukraine and guarantee its safety rather than simply giving Russia breathing space to rearm for the next assault or the chance to insist on Ukraine’s unconditional capitulation. The much-discussed “West German” solution is one such proposal. It proposes that Ukraine be divided into a democratic west with some of its eastern territories occupied or even annexed by Russia. The west would be integrated into NATO and the European Union and developed with a massive aid program similar to the Marshall Plan. This is certainly not an acceptable solution for either side at the moment, but it might well become one once exhaustion eventually sets in.

The key term here is “eventually.” Negotiating now only aids Russia in its imperialist and anti-democratic goals. Forcing Ukraine to negotiate at a moment when, with delayed and insufficient support from its democratic friends, it is on the defensive amounts to asking a democratic nation to surrender to a dictatorship. Negotiations are best held from a position of strength. If not backed by the ability to resist and indeed to inflict damage, talks with a militarily stronger opponent quickly lead to a loss of territory and sovereignty.

The Ukrainians learned this lesson in 1918 when they signed the first treaty of Brest–Litovsk with the Germans and Austrians, who subsequently occupied the country and squeezed out food reserves to feed their own war effort. The Russian Bolsheviks learned the same lesson shortly thereafter, when, devoid of the fighting force they themselves helped dissolve, they had to sign a punishing peace with the Germans just to get out of a war they could no longer fight. And, in an instance of remarkable historical justice, the Germans learned the same lesson in 1919, when they could do nothing but sign the famously unfriendly Versailles treaty.

Ukraine needs to be helped to avoid such a situation and negotiate from the position of strength, if a negotiated settlement will indeed end this war. •

The post Russia’s war against Ukraine: a longer view appeared first on Inside Story.

When the International Refugee Organization sent him to faraway Australia in 1948, it probably sounded like an adventure. But the nineteen-year-old found himself doing back-breaking work in an isolated mine surrounded by dense Tasmanian forest. He would later tell government officials that it was “200 years behind European working conditions.”

After a year, Jakob decided he was finished with capitalist Australia and would return to the Soviet Union. Many of his peers were unimpressed by his decision — it even sparked a brawl during which he was stabbed. But his pro-Soviet migrant friends considered him a true patriot. Celebrating with them and a little drunk, the young refugee boasted that he would give the Soviets intelligence on Australia and go to Korea to fight the Western capitalists.

Unbeknown to Jakob, his audience of friends and acquaintances that night included two spies: a Soviet MVD colonel and an undercover agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Concerned by their informant’s report, Australian security officers began keeping an eye on Jakob. They followed him all the way to the docks when he sailed for the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the West and full of praise for his Soviet homeland, he was considered a threat to Western security.

This is not the familiar refugee story told in countries like Australia: a story of desperate, hard-working migrants who gratefully become loyal contributors to their new homeland. Jakob had certainly been desperate — he became a forced labourer at just fourteen — and, for the most part, he had worked hard in Australia. But the war and displacement produced complex, shifting identities that didn’t simply disappear when the shooting stopped. And life in the West didn’t always live up to its promises.

The second world war had left forty million or more people displaced in Europe. Some wanted nothing more than to return to their homes, but for others, particularly those from now Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, the home they had left no longer existed. As the International Refugee Organization worked to solve this “refugee problem,” thousands of Russians who had lived through the war in East Asia were being displaced by China’s communist revolution.

Most of these refugees, whether in Europe or China, were stridently anti-communist. Many had good reason to be, having lived as exiles after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution or through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The views of “White Russians” and Eastern Europeans who considered their homelands “captive nations” would fit neatly into the West as the fresh storm clouds of the cold war built on the horizon. Increasingly, each Soviet refugee was a propaganda victory for the West: these were individuals choosing freedom, expressing hatred of communism by voting with their feet.

Some, however, harboured more ambivalent views. A few could even be called “Red”: communists, socialists, trade unionists or, most commonly, pro-Soviet patriots who were proud of the victorious Red Army and their homeland’s achievements since the communist revolution. “Displaced persons,” known as DPs, were resettled primarily in countries that now defined themselves as the anti-communist West, with the largest contingents going to the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel.

The lives and experiences of anti-communist DPs — the refugees who became model migrants in the West — have been chronicled in the rich scholarship on postwar migration that has proliferated since the 1990s. Yet Soviet refugees with left-wing views, DPs like Jakob who did not fit the model, have remained essentially invisible.

Surveillance and the persistent shadow of espionage were central parts of their lives in the West. Former or current Soviet citizens who were Russian speakers and left-wing sympathisers threw up multiple red flags for Western intelligence organisations, which often struggled to understand their traumas, experiences and intra-community politics. Many had been socialised in the Soviet Union, their political views shaped by complex lives in Europe and China.

In the cold war West, their ideas took root in new ways. Ideological convictions — that the world could be better and fairer, or that the worker’s lot was difficult — mingled with personal ones, shaped by memories of lost homes, murdered family members or forced labour. These ideas made them potential threats, forcing them to negotiate the incursions of state security into their everyday lives.

In many ways, it is because these refugees loomed so large in the eyes of intelligence agencies that we struggle to catch sight of them. The lives of “ordinary” people are often difficult to locate in official records, but that marginalisation was compounded by cold war anti-communism and surveillance.

Left-wing Soviet DPs had particular cause to recede from view by lying about their politics and backgrounds or simply keeping their own counsel. They knew they were being watched; most were aware that both the state and other migrants regarded them with suspicion; very few recorded their experiences. History maintains a sense of irony, though: the very surveillance dossiers that marginalised these migrants can now provide the historian with a window into their worlds.

Intelligence agencies are notorious for their secrecy and reluctance to reveal the details of even decades-old operations. When they do reveal information, it is typically on their own terms and in the service of their public image — take, for example, the declassification of the CIA’s Canadian Caper operation, which formed the basis of the film Argo.

In some cases, researchers can appeal to legislation. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act provides a well-trodden path to accessing FBI and CIA files. A similar provision in Canada allows requests for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s files. But both have, to differing degrees, proven limited in recent years. Britain’s MI5 is subject to very few access measures, releasing files only as it chooses. Further, its release policy targets higher-profile individuals, leaving the files of more ordinary subjects unknown and unknowable for historians.

By comparison, access procedures in Australia are quite liberal. A dedicated application process via the National Archives of Australia provides greater access to security files if one is sufficiently patient. These dossiers are still redacted, equivocal and frustrating, but they provide unique glimpses of a left-wing presence among the DPs. Presumably, similar migrants ended up elsewhere in the West.

Though they had chosen life in the West rather than the East, and in some cases had experienced the worst that Soviet communism had to offer, these migrants continued to align themselves with the political left. For the most part, they were not activists. They tended not to join Australian political parties and their ideas did not often fit neatly under labels like “communist,” “Marxist” or “Trotskyite.”

Their views were idiosyncratic patchworks rather than refined political doctrines, reflecting lives lived across East and West in turbulent times. Their experiences of Soviet terror and state support, Nazi and Japanese occupation, concentration camps and forced labour often informed their understanding of the twentieth century’s prevailing political philosophies more than books or manifestos. Their politics played out at street-level: in living rooms, church halls, night clubs, theatre groups, factory floors and discussions over glasses of wine (or vodka) at parties.

Though some refugees chose Australia specifically for its distance — the furthest they thought they could get from the Soviets — the cold war arrived there, too. By 1948, as the revolution in China compounded still-heightened fears of invasion by neighbouring Asian countries, anti-communism gained a firm foothold in Australia.

As the historian David Lowe has written, the cold war was “Australianised” with settler-colonial anxieties about maintaining white racial homogeneity and preventing territory loss. Australia saw itself as part of the English-speaking world but was surrounded by a decolonising Asia-Pacific region with a growing socialist and communist presence, and so sought the security of close ties with Britain and the United States.

One result was the formation of ASIO in response to American concerns about Australia’s lax security and a Soviet spy ring in Canberra. Domestically, the cold war flared in 1950–51 as Australian troops were shipped to Korea and prime minister Robert Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party. A referendum on the ban saw the public drawn into an increasingly heated debate about communism, national security and civil liberties.

Similar tensions were sparked in 1954 by the defections of Soviet officials (and spies) Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov — an incident soon christened the Petrov affair. Vladimir Petrov had socialised extensively among Soviet migrants in Sydney and many of them waited with trepidation as ASIO investigated and a royal commission enquired.

Both moments were cold war watersheds for Australians, a time when debates about communism and espionage hit close to home. But they hit even closer for Soviet refugees as their homelands and the ideologies they had lived under and knew intimately were discussed in daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. Many of the refugees knew Petrov personally; the affair played out in their lives in distinctive ways, providing new, rich layers to our history of this event.

The Petrov affair’s most iconic and enduring moment — Evdokia Petrov, her husband having already defected alone, being escorted across Sydney’s airport tarmac by two Soviet couriers — was heightened by thousands of anti-communist Eastern European migrants. They turned out to protest what they saw as the forcible return of a terrified Russian woman to a dire fate in the Soviet Union. Many had themselves felt at risk of a similar fate, in Europe’s DP camps, and arrived with placards and raised voices to warn Australians and their government of the Soviet Union’s cruelty.

These anti-communist exile groups existed alongside and often in conflict with smaller communities of left-wing migrants. For some, joining a left-wing group related more to opposing diaspora norms — their vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric and strong attachment to the church — than cold war politics. Less conservative social mores and better entertainment often helped too, especially for young refugees. But whether they intended it or not, many were then cast into cold war conflicts.

Sydney’s left-leaning Russian Social Club brought DPs into the orbit of the broader Australian left and the Petrov affair. A corresponding Social Club was also set up in Melbourne, in 1952, though it seems to have been short-lived. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet embassy officials stationed in Australia, who were often working covertly as spies. A host of left-wing Jewish organisations were also established by, or drew in, postwar migrants, such as the Jewish Councils to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Sydney and Melbourne, the Volkscentre in Darlinghurst and Kadimah in Carlton.

Left-wing migrants often participated across multiple groups and sometimes became involved with Australian-run organisations as a result. The typical “communist front” groups which proliferated across the West — Australia–Russia societies (later renamed Australian–Soviet friendship societies) and peace councils — were also hubs for left-wing Soviet refugees. The Melbourne friendship society even had, for a time, a DP as chairman. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet officials but also attracted Australian surveillance, and thus, interactions with spies on both sides.

Most put down roots in Australia, establishing themselves in new communities and becoming neighbours, friends, fellow churchgoers and colleagues of both other migrants and those born in Australia. Some shifted between communities, burying their earlier years, and some became more conservative with age. Most were naturalised, giving up Soviet passports or statelessness in favour of Australian citizenship — though, again, they pursued this in order to access specific benefits, rights or stability just as often as a desire to become Australians.

With naturalisation, they became Australian voters. Soviet refugees’ voting patterns are near impossible to ascertain, but both Labor and Liberal parties tried to some extent to cultivate migrant votes. Few of the left-wing group (even if pro-communist) appear to have associated directly with the Communist Party of Australia, but some refugees joined or maintained connections to the Labor Party.

But not everyone settled down. Australia was not typically a refugee’s first choice, and some moved on to other countries, such as Canada or the United States. Some never made it past the two-year work contract, deported for absconding from their assigned employment. Others did their best to get themselves deported: one way to obtain a cheap ticket back to Europe.

The other way, for Soviets, was voluntary repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted its “stolen” DPs back and Soviet citizens who wanted to return could often do so at Soviet expense. Repatriation figures were only ever a tiny fraction of the tide of Westward migration during the early cold war — between 1947 and 1952, some twenty-eight Soviet DPs returned from Venezuela, twenty-two from Argentina, sixteen from Canada, nine from South Africa and only two from the United States. Nevertheless, they reflected the fact that life in the capitalist world could also be harsh, especially if you were a refugee.

In Australia, the two-year work contract was often a catalyst and some, like young Jakob, left soon after completing it, homesick and dissatisfied. Others remained longer, even decades, before making the decision to repatriate. China Russians could also return if they secured the appropriate paperwork, though the Soviets likely would not foot the bill. Nevertheless, some did repatriate.

But whether they chose to stay in Australia or not, many Soviet refugees lived through the early years of the cold war in the West. As these battle lines were drawn, they had to pick a stance: leave politics behind and remain quiet, become anti-communist “cold warriors,” or accept the surveillance and suspicion that came with life as a pro-Soviet “enemy alien.” •

This article is adapted from Ebony Nilsson’s new book Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

The post Red flags appeared first on Inside Story.

Among the various negative consequences of a vainglorious attempt to implant Western-style democracy on the banks of the Tigris is the empowerment of Iran as a regional force. Prior to 2003, Iran had barely recovered from a debilitating 1980–88 war with Iraq. Its efforts to spread power and influence across the region were constrained by war wounds and a weak economy. After 2003, however, Iran found itself the principal beneficiary in a Middle East power game gone badly wrong.

Overnight, it acquired an oil-rich client state, Iraq, on its western flank and a virtually unimpeded gateway for spreading Shiite influence across the region via surrogates including Hezbollah, its client in Lebanon, and an embryonic and ultimately lethal relationship with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Not all the fallout from the disastrous American intervention in Iraq was negative. The Arab Spring of 2010–12 raised hopes, all too briefly, that autocratic regimes like those in Syria would succumb to popular uprisings, partly driven by social media.

Over time, though, autocrats reasserted themselves. In the process, Iran’s influence continued to spread. In Syria, for instance, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bolsters Bashar al-Assad’s regime against ongoing civil conflict.

The upheavals following the Iraq war also helped to facilitate Russia’s re-engagement in the Middle East. Moscow has become a significant player across the region with relationships that extend from Syria, where a Russian intervention helped to save Assad’s regime, down into the Gulf.

Russia’s renewed influence includes what is effectively a security pact with Iran and a push to sell arms into a region already awash with armaments. Acknowledging the weakened and weakening US position in the region, Gulf states like Saudi Arabia have improved their ties with Moscow.

Sometimes overlooked is the fact that Russia, China and Iran have mutual security ties. They have conducted joint naval exercises in the Arabian Sea. China is heavily dependent on Middle East crude oil. It’s a far cry from 1972, when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat sent Soviet advisers packing and tilted his country towards the West, and America in particular. That year marked a nadir of Soviet influence in a region broadly regarded by Moscow as its sphere of interest — a nadir from which Vladimir Putin’s regime has sought to recover.

If the historian Barbara Tuchman had been alive to update her magisterial critique of American foreign policy, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, she would surely have included the Iraq invasion in her summation of misguided policies with far-reaching consequences.

This brings us to 7 October 2023, the day Hamas militants broke of a Gaza security cordon in which Israel had assumed, wrongly, they were contained. The massacre of combatant and non-combatant Israelis has had, and is having, metastasising effects across the region. In many cases, though not all, Iran is a common denominator.

This is not to say that Tehran doesn’t have legitimate security interests in a hostile Middle East environment. But its support for disparate players ranged against America’s client, Israel, is a principal cause of the current mayhem.

Without Tehran’s backing, it is doubtful Hamas would have been in a position to carry out its brazen 7 October incursion. Absent Iran’s military training, arms and diplomatic support, Hezbollah in Lebanon is unlikely to have become the force it is.

In Yemen, Iran’s nurturing of the Shiite Houthis enabled its client to withstand brutal efforts by Saudi Arabia to bomb its forces out of existence. In recent weeks, Tehran’s supply of cruise and anti-ship missiles and drones has given the Houthis the capacity to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea, through which 15 per cent of the world’s seaborne trade usually passes.

Iran’s regional power play brands itself as an “arc of resistance” aligned with its Shiite co-religionists in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria (whose heterodox Alawite rulers represent a branch of Shiism), and with Sunni fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza. This is resistance primarily to Israel, but also more broadly to efforts by the United States to assert itself in a region where its credibility has been eroded by mistakes like the Iraq war and virtually unconditional support for an Israel whose treatment of the Palestinians fuels resentment.

Long gone are the days when Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state at the time, could broker a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Now Kissinger’s latest successor, Antony Blinken, shuttles forlornly between Israel and Arab capitals constrained by his own weak president and the prerogatives of American domestic politics in an election year.

The Biden administration has been shown incapable of restraining Israel’s merciless attacks on Gaza, which have left more than 25,000 Gazans killed, according to the Hamas health ministry, and vast swathes of the enclave uninhabitable. American cover, direct or tacit, for Israel’s brutal tactics against Hamas has further stretched Washington’s credibility in the region.

On the other hand, support for Hamas among Arab regimes is tepid, if not hostile. This attitude has been conditioned by concerns that Hamas’s version of radical Islam, incubated in Egypt in the 1920s, will spread and thus create an internal threat for those regimes.

Self-preservation is the prime concern of the hereditary rulers of oil-rich Gulf states, but at the same time they can’t ignore the horror among their populace at what they are witnessing on their television screens. The Biden administration’s resistance to calls for a ceasefire has strained relations with traditional allies, like Jordan, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin.

The continuing spillover from the generations-old conflict between Israel and Palestine has also intensified a shadow war far beyond the Gaza Strip. Evidence of this can be seen, on the one hand, in Israel’s assassination of Hamas leaders in Syria and Lebanon and its elimination of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon, and, on the other, an upsurge in attacks on American bases in the region.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see a realistic conclusion to the Israel–Palestine conflict as long as Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister. For virtually his entire political career Netanyahu has sought to frustrate reasonable efforts towards a resolution of the issue. At every turn, whether in office or in opposition, he has contrived to stymie a process that might lead to a reasonable compromise.

Since his earliest days in politics he has been a sponsor of Israeli settlers in the territory occupied in the 1967 war. The number of settlers has reached a point where it will be virtually impossible to unscramble the settlement egg without risk of civil conflict in Israel itself. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank and another 200,000 in Arab East Jerusalem; many are militant Zionists who believe they are occupying the biblical home of the Jews.

Netanyahu has been a godfather of this process both from the perspective of his own ideological attachment to a Greater “annexationist” Israel and out of political expediency. In his continued efforts to hold on to power and avoid possible jailing for corruption he has aligned himself with some of the most extreme elements in Israeli politics.

His reluctance to countenance a “two-state solution” if and when the guns fall silent is consistent with his opposition over many years to an accommodation with the Palestinians except when it has been politically expedient for him to show some flexibility.

He is a prime minister on borrowed time. It is highly likely, even inevitable, that once the Gaza war subsides Netanyahu will be obliged to step aside. An inquiry into events leading up to 7 October, including intelligence failures, will almost certainly hold him accountable.

None of this is to suggest the Palestinians are blameless. A weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has contributed to a vacuum being filled by more radical elements. It might be an inconvenient detail, but if elections were held in the Palestinian territories today Hamas would almost certainly prevail, credited with its resort to armed struggle.

What then are the prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians under the two-state formula discussed over many years? This is the holy grail of Middle East peacemaking and, like the holy grail, it is likely to remain mythical.

That is unless America and its allies in Europe and the Middle East are willing to impose a formula on Israel and the Palestinians. The only way that will happen is if Washington puts Israel on notice that financial aid, military assistance and diplomatic cover will be jeopardised if it doesn’t engage in realistic steps towards formalising a Palestinian state.

Since this is highly unlikely under any reasonable political scenario, the Israel–Palestine conflict will remain an open Middle East sore with the likelihood, even the certainty, that terrible events will erupt from time to time. As we’ve seen in recent months, these events — and the ever-present risk of a much wider conflagration — will test not only America’s resolve but also that of the international community.

The risks are manifest. In an American election year, with the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, a volatile situation in the Middle East may well become even more incendiary. While it is not in either America’s or Iran’s interest for the conflict to escalate out of control, that possibility can’t be excluded given both the circumstances and personalities involved.

We can but speculate as to America’s response to the events of 7 October if Trump had been in the White House, but it is most unlikely that he would have had a calming influence. Biden may have been ineffectual in constraining Israel, but Trump could well have made a bad situation a whole lot worse.

Then there are Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Both sides of American politics have said Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear capability would constitute a red line. In the event of his winning the presidency, would Trump resist pressure to conduct pre-emptive strikes against Iran’s facilities as it creeps ever closer to acquiring the ability to manufacture and weaponise a nuclear device?

It was Trump who abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. The single most irresponsible foreign policy decision of Trump’s administration, it undid an agreement aimed at persuading Iran that its interests would be better served by desisting from enriching weapons-grade uranium.

All this means that even when the Gaza war is over, a proxy war between Iran and the United States and its ally Israel will persist, made worse by an erosion in America’s ability to influence events or stop its principal ally from pursuing policies detrimental to Western interests more generally.

With the Middle East in turmoil, history tells us that once a thread is tugged from a regional tapestry things can unravel, and unravel fast. These are perilous times. •

The post March of folly appeared first on Inside Story.

In the absence of traditional naval warfare, the rationale for maintaining large naval forces has rested largely on the idea that trade routes must be maintained. Most of the time this argument has relied on an analogue of Lisa Simpson’s tiger-repelling rock — the claim that the very existence of large navies is the reason trade flows so smoothly.

Now, however, the catastrophe in Gaza has spilled over into a conflict in the Red Sea. The Houthi rebel movement in Yemen, backed by Iran and opposed to the United States and Israel, has begun attacking ships in the Red Sea, deterring many from travelling through the Suez Canal. One estimate puts the fall in traffic at 30 per cent.

Despite the claims of naval advocates, the Houthis were not deterred by the presence of the large naval force set up to counter them. Combined Task Force-153 was established in 2022 by the Combined Maritime Forces in the Middle East to “specifically address maritime threats in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.” News reports speculated that the goal of the task force was to counter the Houthi threat.

Evidently, this goal was not achieved. After unsuccessfully attacking Israel itself (in response to the invasion of Gaza, which in turn responded to the Hamas terror attacks, which in turn…), the Houthis began attacking Israeli-owned ships in November, and have since steadily increased their range of targets to include most commercial shipping.

The United States and Britain have responded with an impressive expansion of their naval forces, including a carrier strike group, Typhoon fighter jets and submarine-launched cruise missiles. Houthi drones have been downed and Houthi bases and military launch sites targeted with air strikes.

The effectiveness of this response remains to be seen. In the absence of ground forces, air strikes have rarely compelled an adversary to surrender. And the last attempt to keep the Suez Canal open by force, undertaken by Britain, France and Israel in 1956, ended in a humiliating fiasco which produced the opposite of its intended outcome.

But let’s suppose that the continued presence of this naval force is sufficient to deter or destroy Houthi attackers and allow normal shipping to be maintained. Is this benefit sufficient to justify the required expenditure on naval forces?

If the United States decided not to maintain the forces necessary for an operation of this kind, it could save the cost of one of its eleven carrier battle groups. With a naval budget of US$220 billion a year, that would be a saving of US$20 billion a year.

But what if the canal remained closed? When a land or air route is interrupted by armed conflict, the usual response is to take a longer way around. (The tragic consequences of not doing so were illustrated by the destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.)

In the case of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, the long way around is via the Cape of Good Hope, an extra distance of around 2000 nautical miles (or about 15 per cent) in the distance from Europe to Asia. About 12 per cent of world trade normally uses the canal, so the average shipping time for all goods would rise by around 2 per cent if the canal were closed. Even for traded goods, shipping costs are only about 7 per cent of the final price, so any impact on global inflation would be imperceptible.

We can look more directly at the costs by considering estimates that the cost of a round trip from Europe to Asia would increase by “up to” US$1 million. With about 8500 round trips per year, that’s a cost of at most US$8.5 billion. On that figure, even if the threat posed by the Houthis remains indefinitely and the current force manages to keep shipping flowing, the costs to the United States would far outweigh the benefit to global shipping.

But is protecting the shortest routes for global shipping so crucial an objective that it can’t be compromised, regardless of costs? It’s worth considering some alternatives.

Protecting global shipping is a form of foreign aid. For the cost of a carrier battle group the United States could nearly double its entire overseas development aid budget, saving many millions of lives. Alternatively, the money could be spent at home, for example on repairs to America’s crumbling transport infrastructure system or on making its schools safe for children to attend.

At least the United States is big enough and rich enough to afford an annual US$20 billion subsidy to the shipping industry. The same can’t be said for Britain, a smaller and poorer country experiencing a public sector crisis. Role-playing as a global maritime power is an exercise in imperial nostalgia Britain can scarcely afford.

Similar points apply to Australia, where we have spent around $500 billion this century on our navy, largely justified by the supposed need to protect vital shipping routes. We would be better off spending much of this money on improving our domestic transport system or meeting vital social needs in health and education.

More generally, the only use of military and naval force that should be treated as unquestionably necessary is self-defence against invasion. All the other supposed benefits — creating jobs, projecting power and protecting trade routes — should be subject to the same cost–benefit test as other expenditure. Many, perhaps most, military expenditures would fail that test. •

The post Maritime mathematics appeared first on Inside Story.

Even now, as Israeli forces push deeper into southern Gaza, the exact purpose of Israel’s approach is far from clear. Although Israeli leaders claim to be targeting Hamas alone, the evident lack of discrimination raises real questions about what the government is actually up to.

Is Israel’s eagerness to shatter Gaza a product of the same incompetence that led to the massive failure of the Israeli military to counter Hamas’s attack on 7 October, the plans for which ended up in the hands of Israeli military and intelligence officials more than a year earlier? Is wrecking northern Gaza and now southern Gaza a prelude to sending the territory’s entire population to Egypt, as proposed in a “concept paper” produced by the Israeli Intelligence Ministry?

Whatever the ultimate goal, Israel’s collective devastation of Gaza raises deep moral problems. But even judged purely in strategic terms, Israel’s approach is doomed to failure — and indeed, it is already failing. Mass civilian punishment has not convinced Gaza’s residents to stop supporting Hamas. To the contrary, it has only heightened resentment among Palestinians. Nor has the campaign succeeded in dismantling the group ostensibly being targeted. Fifty-plus days of war show that while Israel can demolish Gaza, it cannot destroy Hamas. In fact, the group may be stronger now than it was before.

Israel is hardly the first country to err by placing excessive faith in the coercive magic of airpower. History shows that the large-scale bombing of civilian areas almost never achieves its objectives. Israel would have been better off had it heeded these lessons and responded to the 7 October attack with surgical strikes against Hamas’s leaders and fighters in lieu of the indiscriminate bombing campaign it has chosen.

But it is not too late to shift course and adopt a viable alternative strategy for achieving lasting security, an approach that would drive a political wedge between Hamas and the Palestinians rather than bringing them closer together: take meaningful, unilateral steps towards a two-state solution.

Since the dawn of airpower, countries have sought to bomb enemies into submission and shatter civilian morale. Pushed to their breaking point, the theory goes, populations will rise up against their own governments and switch sides. This strategy of coercive punishment reached its apogee in the second world war. History remembers the indiscriminate bombing of cities in that war simply by the place names of the targets: Hamburg (40,000 dead), Darmstadt (12,000) and Dresden (25,000).

Now Gaza can be added to this infamous list. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has himself likened the current campaign to the Allies’ fight in the second world war. While denying that Israel was engaging in collective punishment, he pointed out that a Royal Air Force strike targeting Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen killed scores of schoolchildren.

What Netanyahu left unmentioned was that none of the Allies’ efforts to punish civilians en masse actually succeeded. In Germany, the Allied bombing campaign, which began in 1942, wreaked havoc on civilians, destroying one urban area after another and ultimately a total of fifty-eight German cities and towns by the end of the war. But it never sapped civilian morale or prompted an uprising against Adolf Hitler, despite the confident predictions of Allied officials. Indeed, the campaign only encouraged Germans to fight harder for fear of a draconian postwar peace.

That failure should not have been so surprising given what happened when the Nazis tried the same tactic. The Blitz, their bombing of London and other British cities in 1940–41, killed more than 40,000 people and yet British prime minister Winston Churchill refused to capitulate. Instead, he invoked the civilian casualties in rallying society to make the sacrifices necessary for victory. Rather than shattering morale, the Blitz motivated the British to organise a years-long effort — with their US and Soviet allies — to counterattack and ultimately conquer the country that had bombed them.

In fact, never in history has a bombing campaign caused the targeted population to revolt against its own government. The United States has tried the tactic numerous times, to no avail. During the Korean war, it destroyed 90 per cent of electricity generation in North Korea. In the Vietnam war, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam. And in the Gulf war, US air attacks disrupted 90 per cent of electricity generation in Iraq. In none of these cases did the population rise up.

The war in Ukraine is the most recent case in point. For nearly two years Russia has sought to coerce Ukraine through wave after wave of devasting air assaults on cities across the country, killing more than 10,000 civilians, destroying more than 1.5 million homes and displacing some eight million Ukrainians. Russia is clearly shattering Ukraine. But far from crushing Ukraine’s fighting spirit, this massive civilian punishment has only convinced Ukrainians to fight Russia more intensely than ever.

This historical pattern is repeating itself in Gaza. Despite nearly two months of heavy military operations — virtually unrestrained by the United States and the rest of the world — Israel has achieved only marginal results. By any meaningful metric, the campaign has not led to Hamas’s even partial defeat.

Israel’s air and ground operations have killed as many as 5000 Hamas fighters (according to Israeli officials) out of a total of about 30,000. But these losses will not significantly reduce the threat to Israeli civilians, since, as the 7 October attacks proved, it takes only a few hundred Hamas fighters to wreak havoc on Israeli communities. Worse, Israeli officials also admit that the military campaign is killing twice as many civilians as Hamas fighters. In other words, Israel is almost certainly producing more terrorists than it is killing, since each dead civilian will have family and friends eager to join Hamas to exact revenge.

Hamas’s military infrastructure, such as it is, has not been meaningfully dismantled, even after the much-vaunted operations against the al-Shifa hospital, which the Israeli military alleged Hamas used as an operational base. As videos released by the Israel Defense Forces show, Israel has captured and destroyed the entrances to many of Hamas’s tunnels, but these can eventually be repaired, just as they were built in the first place.

More important, Hamas’s leaders and fighters appear to have abandoned the tunnels before Israeli forces entered them, meaning that the group’s most important infrastructure — its fighters — survived. Hamas has an advantage over Israeli forces: it can easily abandon a fight, blend into the civilian population, and live to fight again on more favourable terms. That is why a large-scale Israeli ground operation is also doomed to failure.

More broadly, Israel’s military campaign has not deeply weakened Hamas’s control over Gaza. Israel has rescued only one of the 240 or so hostages taken in the 7 October attack; the other hostages freed have been released by Hamas, showing that the group remains in control of its fighters.

Despite large-scale power shortages and extensive destruction throughout Gaza, Hamas continues to churn out propaganda videos showing civilian atrocities committed by Israeli forces and intense battles between Hamas fighters and Israeli troops. The group’s propaganda is distributed widely on the messaging app Telegram, where its channel has more than 620,000 subscribers. By the count of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats (which I direct), Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, has disseminated nearly 200 videos and posters every week from 11 October to 22 November through that channel.

The only way to deal a lasting defeat to Hamas is to attack its leaders and fighters while separating them from the surrounding population. That is easier said than done, however, especially since Hamas draws its ranks directly from the local population rather than from abroad.

Indeed, survey evidence shows the extent to which Israel’s military operations are now producing more terrorists than they are killing. In a 14 November poll of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank conducted by Arab World for Research and Development, 76 per cent of respondents said they viewed Hamas positively. Compare that with the 27 per cent of respondents in both territories who told different pollsters in September that Hamas was “the most deserving of representing the Palestinian people.” The implication is sobering: a vast portion of the more than 500,000 Palestinian men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are now ripe recruits for Hamas or other Palestinian groups seeking to target Israel and its civilians.

This result also reinforces the lessons of history. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most terrorists do not choose their vocation owing to religion or ideology, although some certainly do. Rather, most people who become terrorists do so because their land is being taken away.

For decades, I’ve studied the most extreme terrorists — suicide terrorists — and my study of 462 people who killed themselves on missions to kill others in acts of terrorism from 1982 to 2003 remains the largest demographic study of these attackers. I found that there are hundreds of secular suicide terrorists. Indeed, the world’s leader in suicide terrorism during that period was the Tamil Tigers, an openly anti-religious, Marxist group in Sri Lanka that carried out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad — the two deadliest Palestinian terrorist groups — combined. What 95 per cent of the suicide terrorists in my database had in common was that they were fighting back against a military occupation that was controlling territory they considered their homeland.

From 1994 to 2005, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups carried out more than 150 suicide attacks, killing about 1000 Israelis. Only when Israel withdrew military forces from Gaza did these groups abandon the tactic almost entirely. Since then, the number of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has grown by 50 per cent, making it even harder for Israel to control the territories in the long run. There is every reason to think that Israel’s renewed military occupation of Gaza — “for an indefinite period,” according to Netanyahu — will lead to a new, perhaps larger wave of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.

Although the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has many dimensions, one fact helps clarify the complex picture. Virtually every year since the early 1980s, the Jewish population in the Palestinian territories has grown, even during the years of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s. The growth of settlements has meant the loss of land for the Palestinians and increasing concerns that Israel will confiscate more land to resettle more Jews in the Palestinian territories. Indeed, Yossi Dagan, a prominent settler and member of Netanyahu’s party, has urged the creation of settlements in Gaza, where the last settlements were removed in 2005.

The growth of the Jewish population in Palestinian territories is a central factor in fomenting conflict. In the years immediately after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, the total number of Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza numbered only a few thousand. Israeli–Palestinian relations were mostly harmonious. No Palestinian suicide attacks and few attacks of any kind occurred during this period.

But things changed after the right-wing government led by the Likud Party came to power in 1977, promising a major expansion of settlements. The number of settlers increased — from about 4000 in 1977 to 24,000 in 1983 and to 116,000 in 1993. By 2022, about 500,000 Jewish Israeli settlers lived in the Palestinian territories, excluding East Jerusalem, where an additional 230,000 Jews resided. As the settlements grew, the relative harmony between the Israelis and the Palestinians dissipated. First came the creation of Hamas in 1987, and then the first intifada of 1987–93, the second intifada of 2000–2005, and continuing rounds of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis ever since.

The near-continuous growth of the Jewish settlements is a core reason why the idea of a two-state solution has lost credibility since the 1990s. If there is to be a serious pathway to a Palestinian state in the future, that growth must come to an end. After all, why should Palestinians reject Hamas and support a supposed peace process if doing so means only more loss of their land?

Only a two-state solution will lead to lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike. That is the only viable approach that will truly undermine Hamas, and Israel can and should unilaterally press forward with a plan, taking steps on its own before negotiating with the Palestinians. The goal should be to revive a process that has been dormant since the last negotiations failed in 2008, fifteen years ago.

To be clear, Israel should couple this political approach with a military one, engaging in limited, sustained operations against the Hamas leaders and fighters responsible for the atrocities of 7 October. But the country must adopt the political element of the strategy now, not later. Israel cannot wait until after some mythical time when Hamas is defeated by military might alone.

Those who doubt that a two-state solution can ever be reached are right that immediately resuming negotiations with the Palestinians would not reduce Hamas’s will to fight. For one thing, the group is an avowed proponent of eliminating Israel. For another, it would be one of the biggest losers in a two-state solution, since a peace deal would almost certainly involve the prohibition of armed Palestinian groups aside from Hamas’s main internal rival, the Palestinian Authority, which would likely enjoy renewed support and legitimacy if it secured an agreement that the majority of Palestinians supported. And even if a two-state solution is achieved, Israel will still need a strong defence capability, since no political solution can completely eliminate the threat of terrorism for years to come.

But that is why the goal now should not be to immediately put forward a final plan for a two-state solution — something that is simply not in the realm of political possibility at the moment. Instead, the immediate objective should be to create a pathway for an eventual Palestinian state. Although sceptics claim that such a pathway is impossible because Israel has no suitable Palestinian partners, Israel can in fact take crucial steps on its own.

The Israeli government could publicly announce that it intends to achieve a state of affairs where the Palestinians live in a state chosen by Palestinians side by side with a Jewish state of Israel. It could announce that it intends to develop a process to achieve that goal by, say, 2030, and will lay out milestones for getting there in the coming months. It could announce that it will immediately freeze Jewish settlements in the West Bank and forgo such settlements in Gaza through to 2030 as a down payment that demonstrated its commitment to a genuine two-state solution. And it could announce that it is willing and ready to work with all parties — all countries in the region and beyond, all international organisations, and all Palestinian parties — that are willing to accept these objectives.

Far from being irrelevant to Israel’s military efforts against Hamas, these political steps would augment a sustained, highly targeted campaign to reduce the near-term threat of attacks from the group. Effective counterterrorism benefits from intelligence from the local population, which is far more likely to be forthcoming if that population has hope of a genuine political alternative to the terrorist group.

Indeed, in the long run, the only way to defeat Hamas is to drive a political wedge between it and the Palestinian people. Unilateral Israeli steps signalling a serious commitment to a new future would decidedly change the framework of and dynamics in the Israeli–Palestinian relationship and give Palestinians a genuine alternative to simply supporting Hamas and violence. Israelis, for their part, would be more secure, and the two parties would at long last be on a path towards peace.

Of course, the current Israeli government shows no signs of pursuing this plan. That could change, however, especially if the United States decided to use its influence. For instance, the White House could apply more private pressure to Netanyahu’s government to curtail indiscriminate attacks in the air campaign.

But perhaps the most important step that Washington could take now would be to jump-start a major public debate about Israel’s conduct in Gaza, one that allowed alternative strategies to be considered in depth and that brought forth rich public information for Americans, Israelis and people around the world to evaluate the consequences for themselves. The White House could release US government assessments of the effect that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is having on Hamas and Palestinian civilians. Congress could hold hearings centred on a simple question: is the campaign producing more terrorists than it is killing?

The failure of Israel’s current approach is becoming clearer by the day. Sustained public discussion of that reality, combined with serious consideration of smart alternatives, offers the best chance for convincing Israel to do what is, after all, in its own national interest. •

The post Israel’s failed bombing campaign in Gaza appeared first on Inside Story.

But Kissinger’s pleasure was surely mixed with bitterness at the outpouring of vitriol from the anti-imperialist left, who have long condemned him as a war criminal who deserves prison rather than praise. Marking the centenary birthday, Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC said he wanted to talk about “the many, many people around the world” who didn’t get to live even to the age of sixty because of Kissinger. He should be “ashamed to be seen in public,” Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters wrote in the Guardian.

They and many others trotted out the usual charges from his days as top foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: brutally and unnecessarily prolonging the Vietnam war, bombing neutral Cambodia, trying to help overthrow a democratically elected leader in Chile, greenlighting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, abetting genocide in East Pakistan, winking at state torture and killings in Argentina, and more.

The former secretary of state has heard this line of criticism for half a century, and the evidence suggests that it stings. Deeply protective of his honour, he has typically reacted angrily to challenges to his integrity and intelligence. In early 1970, for example, at Johns Hopkins University, a student asked whether he considered himself a war criminal — presumably referring to heavy civilian casualties in the Vietnam war. Kissinger walked out and refused to speak there again for the next twenty years.

In later years, his reaction to such questions changed very little. What did change was his willingness to be put in situations where he could be asked such questions. Being grilled about “crimes” was something that happened only when Kissinger was taken by surprise.

In 1979, for example, British journalist David Frost shocked Kissinger by posing hard-hitting questions about the bombing and invasion of Cambodia. Frost suggested that the policies Kissinger promoted had created conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge takeover and the genocide that left up to two million Cambodians dead. After the first taping, an irate Kissinger complained long and hard to the top brass at NBC, who leaned on Frost to go softer on the famed diplomat in the next taping.

There is little evidence that his skin has thickened since then. In 1999, when Kissinger was plugging the third and final volume of his memoirs, British journalist Jeremy Paxman challenged him about Cambodia and Chile. Kissinger answered, testily, and then walked out. At a State Department event in 2010, historian Nick Turse asked him about the number of Cambodians who were killed in the US bombings. “Oh, come on,” Kissinger said angrily. When Turse followed up later, Kissinger became sarcastic — “I’m not smart enough for you,” he said — and stalked off.

Last month, when Kissinger sat down to talk about his hundredth birthday with his long-time friend Ted Koppel, former host of the popular television show Nightline, he probably expected a softball interview like the ones the American media usually serve him. But Koppel felt obliged to point out that some people consider him a war criminal. He brought up the bombing of Cambodia, intending to suggest that Kissinger had valid strategic reasons for supporting it. “You did it in order to interdict…,” Koppel said, heading to the explanation Kissinger has always given: it was not so much Cambodia that was being bombed, and certainly not Cambodians, but North Vietnamese supply lines.

Kissinger heard only criticism. “Come on,” he interjected in an irritated tone. When Koppel tried to press him on the price Cambodia paid, Kissinger again interrupted with “Come on now.” For Kissinger, the topic is not worthy of discussion.

As this exchange indicates, Kissinger’s belief in his own righteousness is unbudgeable. In his view, then and now, the bombing of Cambodia was a strategic necessity. He long claimed, falsely, that bombs hit areas “either minimally populated or totally unpopulated by civilians.” In fact, American bombs killed and wounded tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians who were simply trying to live their lives in their own villages.

It’s not that Kissinger wants to argue that the costs of his (and Nixon’s) policies were worthwhile. He prefers to ignore the costs altogether. To him, counting the lives lost, in Cambodia and elsewhere, is a distraction. What matters is that the policies he advocated, in his perception, prevented American deaths and led to a more peaceful world order that saved millions of lives — indeed, potentially saved humanity from nuclear conflagration.

Detractors obsessed with the costs are, in his view, disingenuous and even deranged. In the 1970s he sneered at anti-war protesters as driven by “self-hatred.” Dismissing their arguments as irrational, he has said that leftists just want to “feel sorry for themselves.” Those who talk about his alleged criminality, in his view, merely show their “ignorance.” If you question the bombing of Cambodia, he told Koppel, you simply don’t want “to think.”

Hurt and resentful at being denounced, Kissinger has as little empathy for his critics and their perspectives as he had for the Cambodians and others who bore the brunt of his choices. If he had shown anything other than smug indifference to the price paid for his diplomacy, he might have diminished some of the zeal of his tormentors. But he remains locked in a maximalist position: unwilling to express any remorse, he ensures that his antagonists see only his guilt. •

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Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

The post The Lebers, a family of ratbags appeared first on Inside Story.

Kurkov is right. Reading books about this war can have a soothing effect. Only once we look up from the pages that have captured our imagination are we propelled back to the awful knowledge that Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Blood keeps flowing. People keep getting injured and killed. A country is being destroyed. There seems no end in sight.

Looking at the pages in front of them, historians have another experience as well. Trained to read for argument and to classify books into schools of thought, they begin to think about the books dealing with this war as part of its “historiography” — a corpus of texts engaged in a discussion with each other attempting to understand the past and its meaning for the present.

To see a historiography forming while the event it describes is still unfolding is unusual. Normally decades, even centuries, pass before historical schools solidify around a particular event. In this respect, the literature on Russia’s war against Ukraine resembles the historiography of Stalinism in its formative stages, but its historiographical schools are developing much faster in our present, pressurised environment.

Somewhat schematically, we can distinguish five schools of thought about the origins of this war. One group of writers sees the West at fault, and particularly NATO. Another blames Russia and the Russians, opponents of peace and democracy. A third group sees Russia’s imperialist past at the core of a war that expresses the legacy of a lost empire and the failure to overcome its culture. A fourth group, the intentionalists, focus on Vladimir Putin and his perhaps irrational, or at least idiosyncratic, motivation for waging war. A final group sees the war as a struggle between dictatorship and democracy reflected in Putin’s attempt to quash any potential challenge to his rule, at home or abroad. The war, on this reading, is part of Putin’s “preventive counter-revolution.”

There are, of course, combinations of these viewpoints. Blaming NATO can go together with a notion of Russia’s ongoing imperialism: given the latter, the argument goes, NATO should have abstained even more emphatically from expanding into Russia’s supposed backyard. Russia’s imperialism and continued quest for a great power status can be linked, in turn, to its hostility to Ukraine’s quest for democracy. Intentionalists, too, can see Putin as drawing on a wider Russian culture of imperialism, which can go hand in glove with a quest for dictatorship and therefore preventive counter-revolution.

Perhaps the most well-defined position in the debate on the war’s origins is the first: blaming NATO for provoking the conflict by expanding into Russia’s “sphere of influence.” This path has been taken most prominently by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. As critics of this view have pointed out, it has its history backwards. It was not when NATO enlarged into Eastern Europe that Russia became aggressive but when it showed weakness — by failing to agree on a response to the accession hopes of Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, for example. Moreover, it is difficult to see Putin’s aggression, “riddled” as it is with “irrationalities,” as some kind of logical response to a putative Western threat.

NATO-blaming has recently lost some of its dominance over public discourse. But it continues to be popular on the far left, sometimes amended to an opposition to both Russian and NATO imperialism. Beyond the extremes lingers the view that, whatever bad things happen in the world, “the West” must be to blame.

Historian Philipp Ther is clearly affected by such sensibilities. He feels “comfortable” in the company of “leftists,” he writes in the introduction to his latest book, and he feels that “the West” (whatever that might be) has lost its way. The multiple crises we encounter today, including the war against Ukraine, are part of a “wrong turn” in economic policy after 1989–91. “The West lost the peace” after the end of the cold war, he says, because it became self-satisfied and embraced unfettered capitalism (or “neoliberalism,” defined as the conglomerate of “liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, the reduction of state influence on the economy, and global financial capitalism”).

NATO expansion, then, is not at the centre of Ther’s argument in How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War. A social historian, Ther is much more interested in political economy than international relations. He flags in his introduction that he feels uneasy about NATO expansion, and at one point suggests Russia should have joined the alliance. But he hastens to add that his critique is “absolutely not meant to relativise Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” The latter “deserves the full support of the West and the entire world — otherwise Russia’s pursuit of a multipolar world order with a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe will instead lead to maximum global disorder.”

Elsewhere in his book, Ther declares Russia’s enduring “imperial legacy” to be the core cause of the war. The early 1990s might have been a moment to cast off the legacy, but it passed, first because of Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of a recalcitrant (and imperialist) parliament in 1993 and then because of the rouble crisis in 1998, “when most of the Russian middle class sank into poverty again.” The latter is something of an overstatement, as a middle class continued to exist thereafter, but Ther’s overall point is well taken: “Neither of these traumatic moments had anything to do with the expansion of NATO or the EU; they were domestic problems first and foremost.”

Rather than an outcome of international relations, Russia’s trials and tribulations were part of the global malaise Ther is exploring. His great bugbear is the failed prophet of the “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, whom he sees as the chief ideologist of Western triumphalism; his intellectual hero is the sociologist Karl Polanyi, analyst of the “great transformation” of the long nineteenth century.

Like Polanyi in the interwar years, Ther argues, we find ourselves at the tail end of another transformative period: the one that ran from 1989 to 2022. This transformation had two aspects — post-Soviet transformation in the former Soviet empire and “late-capitalist transformation in the West” — and they were held together by a shared framework of “neoliberal globalisation.”

Far from being the end of history, this period was one of profound economic, social and political upheaval, with winners and losers dotted around the globe, both between countries and within them. The claim that unfettered capitalism would somehow lift all the boats, making us all more prosperous, happy and democratic, turned out to be a pipedream at best and ideological obfuscation at worst.

Instead came the global financial crisis, followed by the annus horribilis of 2016, with Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the Brexiteers’ in Britain. Then the “one-two punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945… brought to an end the era for which historians have not yet found a name.” In line with Polanyi, Ther proposes calling the period from 1989 to 2022 “the age of transformation.”

Transformation to what? We don’t yet know, but it might not be good. Overall, Ther is quite pessimistic, but he does hope that his exploration of the history of our present will help open up “new opportunities for a progressive politics and society,” a political thrust that fits in well with other recent attempts to reconstruct the social democratic project for the twenty-first century.

To Ther, this is an existential quest. Like the unfettered capitalism of the nineteenth century, he fears that the new age of transformation might lead to some kind of fascism. The pendulum, to use his metaphor, having swung all the way towards a neoliberal abandonment of state protection, is now swinging back the other way. But Ther’s pendulum, in a hard-to-visualise twist, can swing in two ways: “left towards democratic socialism, or right towards fascism.”

Does any of this explain the war against Ukraine? Not really. Ther struggles to make Russia and Ukraine fit his explanatory scheme. True, the economic crisis triggered by Gorbachev’s reforms and deepened by the breakdown of the Soviet Union “plunged much of Russia’s population into destitution and misery,” which is never a good foundation for a democratic polity. But the same was true for Ukraine, which became democratic. And while Ukraine’s economy remained sluggish, Russia’s has grown by leaps and bounds since Putin came to power.

Neoliberalism, then, is of little use as a scapegoat for Russia’s aggression. Instead, Ther evokes a combination of the preventive counter-revolution argument and the anti-imperialist paradigm. Putin’s goal, he argues, is “to rewrite the end of history — with the creation of a new Russian empire.” The “larger dimensions of the conflict” also include the confrontation between “an authoritarian system” (Russia) that has evolved into a “hard dictatorship since Putin’s second term,” on the one side, and a country (Ukraine) that “has continually moved in the direction of liberal democracy ever since the Orange Revolution, and especially since 2014.”

Ukraine is far more democratic than Hungary, an EU member. Its governments have repeatedly transitioned smoothly and peacefully after elections, “something that unfortunately cannot be said for the USA since the storming of the Capitol.” Putin’s war on Ukraine is “also a war on democracy,” Ther writes, a “declaration of war against the EU and a free Europe.”

By evoking imperialism, a global transformation of capitalism, and a systemic confrontation between dictatorship and democracy, Ther avoids the position of authors who find the origins of this war in Russia’s national character, its history or its culture. I have argued elsewhere against such views as ahistoric and simplistic. Mikhail Zygar’s recent magnum opus War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance, can serve as evidence of some of their shortcomings: it is the book of a Russian democrat, a Russian anti-imperialist and a Russian enemy of this war. Were the arguments about Russia’s national character as militaristic, imperialist and anti-democratic correct, he should not exist. And yet he wrote a book — a long and eloquent one at that.

Zygar is a Russian intellectual, and he knows it. And he’s an anti-imperialist. His book is framed as a long letter to his Ukrainian friend Nadia, at whose house in Bucha — the scene of one of this war’s massacres — he wrote much of his earlier book, All the Kremlin’s Men. “Nadia no longer speaks to me,” he writes in distress. “Because I am Russian, she considers me an ‘imperialist.’” He hopes his book will change her mind, and the minds of his compatriots: “Nadia, I am not an imperialist, and I am writing this book so that others will not be either.”

War and Punishment is made up of two, very different, parts. In fact, it is two books pressed into one volume. The first is a series of historical essays on major moments in Ukrainian–Russian relations that have been turned into myths in both Russian and Ukrainian historiography. They include Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s ill-fated alliance with Muscovy against Poland in 1654, which Russian historians have used to claim that Ukraine voluntarily subjugated itself under Moscow’s tsars; Ivan Mazepa’s alliance with Sweden against Peter the Great in 1708, which was declared a “betrayal” by Russian imperialists; Catherine the Great’s destruction of the remnants of Cossack Freedom; the life and work of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet of the nineteenth century; the Ukrainian revolution and Ukraine’s independent state at the end of the first world war; the Great Famine, or Holodomor, of the early 1930s; and nationalist resistance against German and Soviet occupation during the second world war.

Zygar provides a fresh and readable account of the historical background of each of these episodes and how they persist as anti-Ukrainian myths in Russian historiography.

Like anti-Russian authors, then, Zygar is well aware of the imperialist mainstream of Russian culture. His book is an attempt both to condemn it and to reconstruct, or strengthen, its anti-imperialist counter-current. Like anti-fascist German intellectuals after 1933, and for similar reasons, he is scathing about the culture in which he grew up:

Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was… We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.

But his reaction is not to treat Russia as some kind of historical anomaly but to change what it means to be a Russian. “Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war,” he writes. What remains, however, is imperialism, a mindset, an emotional state, that needs to change, not just because of what it does to others, but also because of how it deforms Russia and the Russians:

Imperial history is our disease; it’s inherently addictive. And the withdrawal symptoms will hurt. But this is inevitable. We have to return to reality and realise what we’ve done.

We have to learn this lesson. To stop believing in our own uniqueness. To stop being proud of our vast territory. To stop thinking we’re special. To stop imagining ourselves as the centre of the world, its conscience, its source of spirituality. It’s all bunk.

Decolonising the Russian mind means democratising the country. Or, put the other way, democratisation can only succeed with the defeat of the imperialist mindset, which legitimises the subjugation of citizens as subjects:

We must strip the state of the right to impose its own view of the past on us. We have to roll up our sleeves and completely reinterpret our history, or rather the history of the peoples who fell victim to the empire…

Looking back, we see a horrific sight; our ancestors, indoctrinated to believe they were victors, were themselves victims. They were forced to kill, to rejoice in the killing, to take pride in the killing. And they were good at it. They were proud; they got high; they wrote beautiful poems, songs, and books glorifying blood and violence, the crunching of bones. And they forgot it was their own blood, their own bones.

This position is a radical departure from Russian liberal thought, both past and present, which often remained deeply imperialist (and racist), while espousing individual autonomy and democratic governance for Russians. At the same time it builds on anti-imperial Russian thinkers and the work of critical historians working, for example, in the now illegal organisation Memorial.

The second part of Zygar’s book is very different. It tells an integrated story, with a huge number of characters, reminiscent of the big Russian novels the title alludes to. This story begins in 1991 and ends in the present. While readers with little background in Russian and Ukrainian history will benefit greatly from the punchy and often inspired historical vignettes of the first part, they will likely get lost in the details of the second. It provides political history in its purest form: a tangled web of personalities and the relations between them; a history of power, corruption, loyalty and betrayal; and a history of powerful men and women: politicians and powerbrokers, oligarchs and gangsters, businesspeople and soldiers. In between, we learn about the unlikely rise of the comedian-turned-politician-turned-wartime-leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This focus on personalities, their relations and the complex history of events over three decades — the same decades covered by Ther’s great transformation — sits somewhat uneasily with the framing of the book as an exploration of Russian imperialism. Given that many actors in Ukraine also pursued their own interests, connected to Russia as much as to Ukraine, the emergent story of oligarchic politics is much more messy than the subtitle of the book suggests: this is not just a story of Russian oppression and Ukrainian resistance.

When it comes to explaining the outbreak of the all-out war in 2022, Zygar is an intentionalist: the fourth emergent school of the history of this war. Intentionalists focus on the decision-makers and their motives. My own recent book, informed in many ways by Zygar’s earlier work, was intentionalist in this regard: while I saw, again like Zygar, Russian imperialism as one of the underlying structural causes, I also argued that the timing of the invasion becomes intelligible only when we understand that Putin, his seventieth birthday approaching, was looking for a legacy. He had spent the Covid years in splendid isolation, stewing in his own juices and reading Russian imperialist history. He wanted to get into the history books as an empire builder alongside Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin.

Zygar tells a similar story, but he sees Putin driven less by his own historical ambition than by domestic politics. Spooked by the failed Belarusian revolution of 2020–21, the Russian president decided to remove the most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Putin’s agents poisoned Navalny on 20 August 2020 but the attempt on his life failed. Evacuated to Germany, Navalny launched a counterattack: a YouTube video with the results of his team’s investigation into the poisoning, which was watched by some twenty million people at the time.

Navalny returned to Russia on 17 January 2021, triggering anti-regime protests and his own arrest. Two days later his team released a video about a private palace owned by Putin on the Black Sea coast. “This revelation,” writes Zygar, “strikes perhaps the most powerful blow to Putin during his entire reign. The video is watched by 120 million people, that is, almost the entire adult population of Russia.” Demonstrations have to be clubbed out of existence “Belarus-style.” The “damage to Putin’s credibility is colossal,” and he fears losing control. It is in this context, Zygar argues, that Putin’s administration is beginning to hatch new war plans: Ukraine can serve as the successful little war that saves Putin’s rule.

This is why Putin returns to history and, with the help of his former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, writes his notorious July 2021 essay on the alleged historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians — the historical treatise that part one of Zygar’s book is trying to counter. It is a historical justification for the coming war, but not its origin. The origin is the attempt to forestall revolution at home.

Here, then, Zygar partakes of the final emerging school of thought on the origins of this war: that it is an attempt at preventive counter-revolution. As the Australian political scientist Robert Horvath has argued, Putin has long attempted to immunise his regime against the “colour revolutions” that seemed to be breaking out periodically both in Russia’s immediate vicinity and further afield.

One way to link this anti-revolutionary quest to aggression against Ukraine is to see Ukraine as a vibrant democracy at Russia’s doorstep and hence an example of what could be for the domestic opposition. The problem with this interpretation is that there was no renewed democratic revolution in Kyiv in 2022, and hence no reason to quash it.

Zygar’s interpretation is closer to Horvath’s original reading: Putin went to war not because Ukraine posed a democratic threat to his rule but because he faced a democratic threat at home. The war was a distraction: an attempt to reignite the imperialist jingoism of the Crimea annexation of 2014 that propelled Putin’s approval ratings upwards.

Two interpretive problems remain. For one, Putin didn’t order the invasion when he needed the distraction but well after the domestic crisis had passed. The 2021 protests were well and truly over by the time he published his Ukraine manifesto in the middle of that year. By early 2022, when he sent in his troops, there was no challenge to his regime.

Second, as Zygar documents himself, the war plans were hatched in secret. If the regime as a whole was under threat and the war was part of an attempt to prevent revolution, it is hardly credible that even Putin’s closest advisers were not aware of the war plans even at the eve of the invasion.

Be that as it may: Putin’s invasion on 24 February 2022 started a new historical epoch. As Ther points out, that might well be true for the globe as a whole but it is certainly true for Russia and Ukraine. At the centre of this new epoch is the war, its history being written as events unfold.

We already have military history in the more narrow sense of the term: an appreciation of unfolding events at the frontline; analyses of the technical aspects of the fighting, the evolution of tactics and weaponry; and a focus on what lessons professional soldiers can learn from this fighting. More readable for non-specialists are initial narrative accounts of this war. Among the steady stream of these, some are penned by historians but more by journalists. The latest addition is Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine, an account of the battle of Voznesensk in March 2022.

Harding’s slim volume is a gem. A masterpiece of journalistic storytelling, it has the qualities of a good novella. It may be the most readable book about this war published to date. Based on interviews with some dozen survivors of the battle — soldiers and civilians, men and women, Russians and Ukrainians — the book tells a tale of survival and resistance on Ukraine’s side as well as aggression and frustration on Russia’s. It also explores the sometimes unclear loyalties, and indeed identities, of both Russians and Ukrainians, and doesn’t shy away from unsentimental depictions of war crimes.

Harding’s book thus explores some of the complexities of the real history of this war without falling into relativism: it is clear that Harding’s sympathies are with the defenders rather than the aggressors and that he doesn’t find it difficult to distinguish between the two. He leaves us with the despondent nightmares of his interviewees. They are haunted, he writes, “by the notion that this conflict may never end, and by the fear that Russia’s capacity to absorb suffering and its unflinching willingness to continue inflicting it will eventually enable it to grind out some kind of victory.”

As Ther warns, such an outcome would be catastrophic. It can be avoided if Ukraine’s friends in what is left of the democratic world stay the course. The biggest threat to Ukraine’s independence today derives from phantasies that this war might be stopped if Russia were to be accommodated by reasonable diplomacy. As Zygar notes, Russia in its current configuration cannot be accommodated. Defeat, not victory, might set Russia on the path Zygar proclaims with grim optimism: “Future generations of Russians will remember with horror and shame the war that Putin unleashed. They will marvel at how archaic hubris came to dominate the minds of twenty-first-century people. And they will not tread the same path if we, their ancestors, bear the punishment today.” •

How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War
By Philipp Ther | Translated by Jessica Spengler | Polity Press | $36.95 | 304 pages

War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance
By Mikhail Zygar | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $34.95 | 424 pages

A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine
By Andrew Harding | Bonnier | $32.99 | 160 pages

The post Writing the history of the present appeared first on Inside Story.

Remarkably, that report was written not in February 2022, on the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion predicted by Western intelligence, but a century earlier, on 7 February 1922. The coincidence underlines both the scope and one of the themes — continuity across time — of Calder Walton’s ambitious and thought-provoking new book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West.

Stretching from 1917 to the present day, Spies covers the intelligence contest between Russia, Great Britain and the United States that extends over more than a century. Perhaps surprisingly, Walton argues that Russia has invariably been one step ahead of the West. Especially before 1945 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian intelligence services were an underestimated threat. Dating back to the conspiratorial traditions of the Cheka, the secret police created by Lenin, they were simply better spies and used deception more effectively.

The greatest, perhaps even “epic,” achievements of Soviet foreign intelligence occurred in the 1930s and during the second world war. Soviet agents penetrated the highest levels of government and the security services in Britain and the United States.

Walton, a distinguished British historian currently at Harvard, covers well-trodden ground but his analysis is sharp. Soviet agents like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Laurence Duggan and Ted Hall (in the United States), and the Cambridge Five, Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and George Blake (in Britain) are all familiar to scholars in the field, but Walton’s discussion is enriched by his engaging prose, his access to fresh archival records (some only declassified in 2022), and his sketching in of the military, political and cultural tapestry into which espionage was woven.

Although the intelligence provided by MI5 defector Kim Philby cost the lives of dozens of Allied agents, among other things, its immense potential value to the Soviets (and incalculable damage to the Allies) was undercut by Stalin’s paranoia or hubris. For the Soviet leader it was a case of “too good to be true.”

Stalin’s suspicion of disinformation was also evident when his spies warned of Germany’s imminent invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. He dismissed the warning from the celebrated spy Richard Sorge, whom he called a “lying shit,” and his pencilled response on the report of a German agent inside the Nazi regime (which I still recall seeing in the British National Archives) was “Fuck him.”

Stalin’s failure to believe the warnings about Hitler’s attack didn’t apply to material Moscow was receiving from spies who had penetrated the Manhattan Project in the United States. Stalin knew well before Harry Truman did that America was developing the atom bomb and, as is well known, expressed no surprise when the American president informed him of a new super weapon at the 1945 Potsdam conference. He also knew of the Venona operation, to which I’ll return, six years before Truman or the CIA.

For the United States, the cold war began in 1947. Three pivotal documents — the Truman Doctrine, the National Security Act (which created the CIA) and the text of Cominform’s “two camp” thesis — all appeared in that year. For Walton, however, it began with the Bolshevik revolution. In the 1920s, the Cheka had a division of officers coordinating foreign operations (and more than 100,000 agents inside Russia); at the time, MI5’s counterespionage unit had just five officers. In 1929 the US secretary of state shut down the government’s code-breaking agency because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” In 1936, a decision to open an MI6 station in the British embassy in Moscow was thwarted because it was “liable to cause embarrassment.”

By the beginning of the second world war, Walton wryly notes, Soviet intelligence “had more graduates of British universities than Britain’s own intelligence services.” Despite the wartime alliance against Germany after 1941, the Soviets intensified their espionage; Western intelligence operations, especially from Bletchley Park, were meanwhile preoccupied with the Nazi threat and dutifully ignored the Soviet Union.

The one exception was the Venona project. This ultra-secret operation was launched in 1943 to decode cables sent from Moscow to its embassies and went on to expose networks of Soviet spies operating in the West. (These included Walter Clayton’s KLOD network in Australia, which Walton doesn’t mention.) Although MI5 and MI6 had fewer than 200 officers between them in 1947 while the KGB was soon employing about 200,000, the process of redressing the imbalance had begun.

But the Russians were unrelenting. Despite the Venona crackdown, they set about interfering in Western elections. In one of the more startling revelations in Spies, obtained from Russian archival records, Walton contends that Stalin colluded with the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 US presidential elections, Henry Wallace, formerly Roosevelt’s Soviet-friendly wartime vice-president. Wallace appears to have secretly liaised with Stalin, who aligned himself closely with Wallace and vetted some of his campaign material. This, according to Walton, turned Wallace “into an asset for Stalin, if not a recruited Soviet agent.”

That may be an overstatement, but it at least confirms that the far more extensive election interference conducted by Russia in favour of Trump in 2016 (and before then in support of Gerald Ford in 1975) was not unprecedented. It was part of the arsenal of “active measures” against Britain and the United States that included bribery, forgery, misinformation, assassinations and the planting of deep-cover “illegals.”

Walton also probes the Soviet Union’s main adversary, the United States. American covert operations, termed “back-alley actions” by secretary of state Dean Rusk, became the weapon of choice in postwar Washington. They stretched from the CIA’s intervention in the 1948 Italian elections to the CIA-backed coups against democratically elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Dominican Republic (1961), British Guiana (1962), Iraq (1963), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1975) and many more, to the proxy war in support of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan (from 1980). One fact of which I was unaware is that a secret annex of the Marshall Plan channelled reconstruction funds to the CIA for clandestine political-warfare activities in postwar Europe.

Walton’s most chilling, and disturbing, account of covert action concerns the American destabilisation of Congo and its complicity in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s popular, left-leaning president, in 1960. Walton cites Eisenhower telling his national security adviser, Gordon Gray, that he was “very eager indeed that Lumumba be got rid of.” Lumumba was got rid of and the brutal, corrupt and despotic — but US-friendly — Joseph Mobutu ruled Congo (later Zaire) for the next thirty years. (In a wonderful vignette, Walton describes MI6’s head of station in Congo, Daphne Park, who helped coordinate Lumumba’s murder but who “looked, and acted, like Miss Marple from Agatha Christie’s novels.”) By taking in Africa, the Middle East, Latin and South America, Walton emphasises the global dimension of this long intelligence war.

The roles of high-ranking Soviet defectors to the West and moles working within the Russian intelligence services were crucial in the great cold war struggle, and their stories are compellingly told. Once again, most are familiar and well documented: Walter Krivitsky, a foreign intelligence officer who was eventually assassinated by Soviet intelligence (1941); Igor Gouzenko, who first exposed Moscow’s atomic espionage (1945); Oleg Penkovsky, perhaps the most prized agent, who played a pivotal role in the Cuban missile crisis (1962); Oleg Gordievsky, whose intelligence helped avert a nuclear first strike codenamed Able Archer (1983); Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected with a tranche of Moscow’s innermost intelligence secrets (1992); and Alexander Poteyev, who escaped an assassination attempt on US soil (2020).

A surprising omission is Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, who defected from the Soviet embassy in Canberra in 1954 and provided immensely valuable intelligence over the next five years. It was Vladimir who revealed the whereabouts of the “missing diplomats,” Burgess and Maclean, a revelation absent from Walton’s extensive discussion of the Cambridge Five. ASIO is also absent from the text (and index), though listed in the glossary, and Australia, despite its membership of the unprecedented Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, is similarly overlooked.

What are treated in some detail are the continuities. Boris Yeltsin dismembered the KGB, but the security services reconstituted under former KGB officer Vladimir Putin have retained and expanded their power. As Walton writes, the FSB and SVR (the domestic and foreign agencies) “inherited the KGB’s infrastructure, archives, agents, skill set, ideology and operational approach.” Only the acronyms changed.

Similarly, the cold war didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Diverting its attention to counterterrorism after 9/11, the West failed to appreciate that the Russian security apparatus was becoming even more aggressive or that a revanchist Putin would use asymmetric espionage — hijacking the internet to disseminate disinformation, for example — to Russia’s advantage.

Once again, the West had to play catch-up. By 2019, 77 per cent of Kremlin staff had a background in the security services. Intelligence in Russia was intensely politicised, as it always has been, which helps explain why the planned swift invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on prewar intelligence analysis and briefings that could not contradict Putin, was a failure.

Christopher Andrew — that doyen of intelligence historians with whom Walton collaborated on his history of MI5 — calls Spies “a masterpiece,” but it does contain errors. Russian tanks never “rolled in” to Prague to enable the Czechoslovak coup d’état in 1948, and nor was it a “military takeover” (unlike 1968); it was engineered by the NKVD — the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs — and the local Communist Party. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg never “confessed to spying,” and nor was Julius “a Soviet agent in Los Alamos”; he coordinated a New York–based spy ring and engaged in industrial rather than atomic espionage. Stalin’s death in March 1953 did not “bring the Korean War to an end”; the reasons for the armistice signed three months later lay elsewhere. During Gordievsky’s exfiltration from Moscow, crisps, not soiled nappies, were thrown from the car window at the Finnish border to deter sniffer dogs; the nappies did exist, but were changed on top of the car boot directly over the hidden Gordievsky to successfully foil Soviet guards and Alsatians — an improvisation perhaps unique in espionage history.

Notwithstanding these quibbles and Walton’s questionable conclusion that “the age of the secret service is over,” Spies brims with insights and fascinating details, encompassing a full century in a global setting, and should attract an audience otherwise unacquainted (beyond film and TV) with the murky world of espionage. •

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West
By Calder Walton | Simon & Schuster | $34.99 | 625 pages

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Deterrence’s conceptual framework developed around nuclear weapons. This is deterrence of a special kind, because of the absolute nature of the weapons and how hard it is to use them to win a war given the threat of retaliation in kind. We can see the caution this induces at work in the Russo-Ukraine War. NATO has not engaged directly on Ukraine’s behalf; Russia has not attacked NATO countries.

Israel also practises nuclear deterrence. It has its own arsenal, which it prefers not to talk about. It is geared to deterring Arab governments, and now Iran, from starting wars intended to destroy the Jewish state. As with all nuclear deterrence, it does not require demonstrations of what the weapons can do or a readiness to use them. All that is required is for potentially hostile governments to be aware of what could happen if an inter-state war escalates too far.

For lesser contingencies, including the threats posed by Hamas operating out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon, deterrence looks quite different. It is not based on absolute weapons and nor does it offer constant relief from danger. There is no guarantee of success and so when it fails, if only slightly, it must be restored. It is more like a fence that easily breaks but can then be mended than a solid brick wall. Unlike nuclear deterrence, there can be no sole reliance on threats but instead a readiness to respond forcefully to any challenge to bring home to adversaries the folly of attacking Israel.

It is this deterrence that failed on 7 October 2023 and may never be restored. An enemy so irredeemably hostile that it will always be looking for ways to attack, whatever the severity of the likely response, appears beyond deterrence. Instead of deterring Hamas, Israel now wants to eliminate it as a political and military force, but any relief achieved by this approach might also be only temporary.

WHY DETERRENCE?

Before it became so dependent on deterrence, Israel sought to control threats directly by maintaining a substantial presence in Gaza and Lebanon. The costs of maintaining that presence proved too high.

In the case of Lebanon, Israel became fully engaged in the 1970s after the Palestine Liberation Organisation, having been kicked out of Jordan, took up residence there in 1970. Because Lebanon was being used to mount raids, Israel occasionally entered its territory to push the guerilla bases further away from its northern border. Then, in 1982, it entered in force, moving north until it laid siege to Beirut. The aim was to push the PLO out (with some success) and also to install a government willing to make peace with Israel (in which it failed completely). Hezbollah in its current form is a lasting consequence of those events.

The Israeli Defence Forces, or IDF, eventually withdrew to a strip of southern Lebanon, which they policed with a Christian militia. In 2000, after Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak decided the presence there was doing more harm than good, they withdrew unilaterally. Hezbollah concluded that this was a great victory and a result of its constant harassment.

Five years later Israel left Gaza, again unilaterally. Ariel Sharon, a hardliner who had made his career by being tough on Arabs and was most responsible for the debacle in Lebanon, decided as prime minister that the effort to hold on to Gaza was futile because Israel’s position could only be sustained at an inordinate cost. He ordered withdrawal. In the face of protests from their residents, the IDF closed down the settlements. (Sharon suffered a stroke and went into a coma before he could reveal what he had in mind for the West Bank.)

The withdrawal was not negotiated with the Palestinians. No plans were made for what could follow. There were hopes that Gaza might turn a corner, replacing its seething resentment at occupation with economic development, but such hopes didn’t last long. Within two years Hamas was in control, first as a result of an election victory and then having won a short civil war with the Palestinian Authority.

With only rejectionist parties active in the territory, and no interest in coexistence with Israel, Hamas turned Gaza into its base, using all available resources, including those obtained from Iran, to manufacture rockets and build tunnels for smuggling supplies and getting fighters into Israel.

DETERRENCE BY DENIAL OR PUNISHMENT

With two implacably hostile neighbours in positions to attack Israel at any time, and having abandoned the idea that they could be occupied, deterrence became the centrepiece of Israeli strategy.

Deterrence is usually described as taking one of two forms. The first is deterrence by denial, which basically means that, whatever the target’s aggressive intent, it will be unable to act upon it because it will be thwarted if it tries. The other is deterrence by punishment. In this case the target can act on hostile intent, and even do some real harm, but the punishment will be severe, and whatever the gains the costs suffered will be far higher. When an adversary is not deterred, and decides to attack, the costs must be sufficient to ensure that it does not try again. In this way deterrence can be restored.

Israel follows both forms of deterrence. For denial it constructs large fences to prevent incursions into its territory. But the fences couldn’t stop rockets fired by Hamas or Hezbollah. So Israel also developed an elaborate and advanced air defence system — the Iron Dome – to prevent rocket attacks doing too much damage. The population can also use air raid shelters to protect them from rockets that get through.

The success rate of this system is impressive but not complete, and the attacks are cheaper to mount than to stop. So Israel normally seeks to add to the price for the perpetrators with air raids on the places from where they have been launched. There is always an element of punishment.

The punishment comes in three forms. First, it attempts to assassinate those responsible, whether political figures or military. Israel’s many “targeted killings” may have disrupted the enemy’s command structures and operations in the short term, but their long-term effects are at most marginal. Other commanders step up to take the place of those killed, and there is no guarantee they will be less capable or effective.

Second, the IDF targets the military assets that make the attacks possible. Again, this can make a difference in the short term but in the long term more rockets can be built, more tunnels dug and more fighters recruited.

Third, because these assets are to be found in the middle of urban areas, often deliberately near schools and hospitals, civilians will suffer. Israel denies that it engages in collective punishment and the deliberate targeting of civilians. In the name of self-defence and military necessity, it is not a war crime to attack areas where civilians may be present if armed units are also there. Hamas can be blamed for fighting out of such populated areas and Israel urges civilians to move away from areas where fighting is likely to be intense.

But intense strikes against military targets, especially involving tunnels believed to be below occupied buildings or individuals hiding in residential areas, are going to involve many civilian casualties and wider suffering. For onlookers the distinction between collateral and deliberate damage is often hard to discern.

Another feature of deterrence is that it appears as all stick and no carrot. There is no reason in principle why negative threats can’t be combined with positive inducements, but it is not a requirement of the strategy. And if the threats are working, there is less reason to find incentives to encourage a potential adversary to coexist peacefully.

DOES IT WORK? (I) HEZBOLLAH

In July 2006 Hezbollah conducted a raid into Israel, combining rockets fired into border towns and an attack on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers dead and two abducted to Lebanon. A failed rescue attempt led to three more deaths. Israel refused Hezbollah’s demand to swap Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails for the abducted soldiers. It responded instead with air and artillery strikes, against not only Hezbollah military targets but also Beirut airport and other civilian targets. It launched a land attack against well-prepared Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon that turned out to be costly and difficult.

Eventually the United Nations arranged a ceasefire. Much later the remains of the two soldiers were returned as part of a prisoner exchange. The operation was widely considered a failure in Israel, having exposed the country’s weaknesses to rocket attacks and a determined militia. Yet Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that the Israelis had killed up to twelve of his commanders and went on to make an interesting comment about the initial operation.

On the question of whether Hezbollah’s operation would have proceeded if it was felt there was “even a 1 per cent chance” it would lead to a war like the one that eventuated, he responded, “I would say no, absolutely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military, and political reasons.” Israel had been waiting for an excuse for a planned attack, he added — yet this admission, and the fact that there have been clashes since but nothing quite comparable, has been taken as evidence that deterrence can perhaps work.

But while Hezbollah is undoubtedly antagonistic towards Israel, it is less so than Hamas. One reason for this is that Hezbollah is now part of the Lebanese political system. While it is the most substantial force in that country, it still has to be responsive to factions and persuasions that are less interested in its feud with Israel, and to present itself as serving Lebanese interests. With the country in an economic mess, aggravated by the massive blast at the Beirut port in 2020, and still being run by a caretaker government, it is in no position to cope well with a war with Israel. Nor is Israel angling for a war with Lebanon.

This is not straightforward Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah’s agenda is as much set by Iranian considerations as Lebanese. It sent its fighters into Syria during the civil war there, for example, where they worked (not particularly effectively) with Iranian and Russian forces to prop up the Assad regime. (It is perhaps worth noting that the Sunni Hamas did not support Assad.) It depends on Iran for its military assets, including its large number of missiles, which are much more capable than those of Hamas. It has no particular incentive to go to war with Israel other than as part of a larger Iranian project.

DOES IT WORK? (II) GAZA

The Gaza experience has been different. Ever since Hamas took over the territory, the periods of calm on the border have been few. Clashes have varied in intensity and frequency, with big ones every few years. Each case involves rocket fire by Hamas (and its junior partner, Islamic Jihad) and air and artillery strikes by the Israelis; the casualties are starkly asymmetric, with those on the Palestinian side far greater than those on the Israeli, especially for civilians.

The suffering of Palestinians in these flare-ups leads international organisations, governments and campaigning groups to denounce Israel for acting disproportionately. Other than in 2021, when unrest spread to Arab communities in Israel, supporting protests have been held in the West Bank and elsewhere, but not much more. After weeks of fighting, a ceasefire of some sort has been struck and nothing much has changed once the fighting subsided.

The regularity of the clashes suggests that deterrence has worked poorly in Gaza. From the Israeli perspective the priority has mainly been to show that it is not rattled by provocations and will respond forcefully each time. These responses were described by some Israelis as “mowing the lawn,” a phrase capturing the idea of an indefinite conflict containable by occasional forceful action.

Part of the shock of 7 October was that the Israeli government had convinced itself that its approach was working, to the extent that it was starting to ease the restrictions on Gaza. Islamic Jihad was a problem, but Hamas didn’t seem too interested in any more violence. What happened then, in Israeli eyes, was a failure not only of intelligence but also of deterrence, and the extent of the failure meant restoring deterrence no longer seemed an option.

The response followed the same pattern as before, except with more intensity. Many individuals connected with Hamas and in particular the attacks of 7 October have been targeted and killed. Military infrastructure has been hit mercilessly, and the consequences of Hamas’s actions have been brought home to the suffering population far more ferociously than in past episodes and with far more civilian casualties and general distress. Despite Hamas’s original provocation, this has led to international anger and demands for a ceasefire.

We can question whether deterrence was ever operating effectively, but it certainly isn’t now. Israel has no interest in persuading Hamas not to attack again. It wants to make sure that it never has the capacity to do so.

But it does need to deter Hezbollah, and in practice Iran. The latter’s network, including the Houthis in Yemen, has been busy. So far, much of that has been largely posturing, with the aim of demonstrating what might happen if the war continues at its current pace. In this respect it might be argued that the deterrence offered by Iran/Hezbollah has failed because Israel has pressed on regardless with its ground war, though they might claim that they are tying down Israeli forces that might otherwise be used against Hamas.

If Hezbollah did want to get involved, it would have had more effect if it had done so early on. Israel is now geared up for a two-front war, including evacuating people from the border with Lebanon and restocking the Iron Dome. This doesn’t mean Hezbollah won’t get involved, especially if the accusations of letting Hamas down start to worry its leadership. But the key decisions will be taken in Teheran, which will have to consider whether this is the issue with which to take on the United States. A tweet from Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi — “Zionist regime’s crimes have crossed the red lines, which may force everyone to take action” — suggests that no decision has yet been made.

The pressure will also grow on other Arab countries to do more than issue statements, especially those like Saudi Arabia that have already “normalised” relations with Israel or were preparing to. It is hard to assess how they will act, but if they look ahead they should see a significant role for themselves in shaping the new order that might yet emerge.

NEXT STEPS

Israel’s land invasion of Gaza was undertaken despite US misgivings and Saudi objections — one a country on which Israel relies, the other that it has been courting. The foreign ministry has insulted the numerous countries supporting the ceasefire resolution in the General Assembly, and refused to talk to UN secretary-general António Guterres because he saw equivalence between the unprovoked attacks on Israel’s people and the ruthless response undertaken in the name of self-defence.

Israel can note that it is hardly the only state in the region that puts its security needs above humanitarian considerations. The past decade has seen extraordinary loss of life in the battles against Islamic State and in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen (the last two with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths). But the pressure on it to stop will only grow. Israel is used to treading a lonely path, and it may find its position gets lonelier. As with its previous wars, it will be resisting pressure for a ceasefire until its objectives have been achieved.

Can its objectives be achieved? That is not yet a given. Information on what is going on in the battles in northern Gaza and towards Gaza City are sketchy, so it is unwise to speculate. It is also unclear how much humanitarian assistance will be able to get into Gaza in these conditions, and whether countries like Qatar are still potential mediators, including in efforts to get hostages released. In all of this, the biggest uncertainty away from the battlefield and the potential widening of the war is the future governance of Gaza.

Israel has been forced to look beyond deterrence. It has concluded that it is dealing with an entity that has never truly been deterred and can’t be deterred in the future. Wilder elements in Israel may fantasise about pushing all the Gazans out of the territory, but that is not a serious option. This is where the other flaw in Israel’s deterrence strategy becomes painfully evident. It has not been accompanied by a more positive political strategy. The only long-term vision Israel offers is a Gaza without Hamas. The chaos and instability that would result if Gaza were turned into an ungovernable space without anyone in charge would serve nobody’s interests. A way will have to be found to fill the space.

Given how Israel has defined its objectives, success for Hamas simply requires surviving in a commanding position in Gaza. Even if it is forced to evacuate its positions, Hamas will not disappear. It represents a strong political tradition in the Arab world, and regardless of what happens to it over the coming weeks it will have the capacity to regenerate and to return to power if there is no alternative government in place.

There is no evidence of great love for Hamas among Gazans, and at some point they will reflect on the missed opportunities to develop the territory and the wisdom of its constantly provoking Israel into attacks that it is unable to mitigate. Nor is there much respect for the Palestinian Authority, which is generally considered to be inept, corrupt and unable to stand up at all to the Israelis. Though constitutionally the PA’s return to Gaza would seem the best option, this would be greeted suspiciously in the best of circumstances and even more so if it arrived behind Israeli tanks. Any government installed by Israel would lack legitimacy and would be a natural target for assassins.

If Israel can’t find a government for Gaza, someone else will have to. Here the main initiative will have to come from the Arab world, probably in concert with the United States. This seems to be what many analysts anticipate happening after this war. It is possible, for example, to imagine at some point a multilateral conference including the main Arab and Western players, with Israel on the sidelines, given the job of coming up with a viable government for Gaza and managing the influx of aid necessary if the territory is to recover from the traumas of the past weeks and look to possibilities for future development. It would also need to consider both Gaza’s internal security and how to stop it causing trouble to its neighbours (Egypt as well as Israel) in the future.

In principle, this process could be confined to Gaza, but Arab governments are unlikely to cooperate unless the future of the West Bank is also tackled. The trade that Israel faces in return for insisting that Hamas plays no part in the territory’s government is that the “two-state solution” is put back on the agenda. Most Western governments have already been quite explicit on this matter.

Netanyahu has been around long enough to know that dismissing the two-state solution out of hand isn’t realistic, even though he has built his career on subverting the idea. That’s why he was content to leave the rejectionist Hamas in charge in Gaza as he made life difficult for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The encroachment of settlements on the West Bank has made the prospect of a viable Palestinian state there seem even more remote.

All one can say is that this war changes a lot. When the two-state solution has come up, as it did for example in the prewar talks with Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu has paid lip service to the idea and pointed to the rivalry between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to show why progress is impossible.

But that excuse won’t work if a way can be found to get Hamas out of Gaza. Netanyahu is unlikely to be on the scene for much longer. After all this, Israel’s Western and Arab partners are not going to want to let the situation drift away into catastrophe again. If there is to be any resolution of the current conflict, the starting point will be taking the fate of Gaza away from both Hamas and Israel. •

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It’s true that the country’s military-authored 2008 constitution gave the civilian government no effective oversight of the military and other security services. But while Suu Kyi’s lamentable defence of its actions before the International Court of Justice in 2019 did her no harm domestically, it brought her international celebrity to a shuddering halt, alienating democratic governments around the world. Foreign aid continued to flow, but Western investment dried up as corporations registered the reputational risk of operating under a regime tainted by horrific human rights abuses.

At the time, like other Myanmar analysts, we considered a military coup unlikely given the cosy, profitable arrangement the military had designed for itself under the 2008 constitution. But a more general principle should have given Suu Kyi pause for thought before she travelled to the Hague: authoritarian leaders, and bullies more generally — including Myanmar’s military leaders — see compromise or acquiescence as weakness.

We weren’t surprised when the National League for Democracy was re-elected with a thumping majority and seemed set to consolidate its power. In the light of the hardship and abuse of the long years of miliary government, Suu Kyi’s win offered at the least a glimmer of hope.

Yet her government’s second term was cut short even before it started. On 1 February 2021, the first day of the new parliament, the military commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing, ended a decade of reforms and semi-democratic rule and returned the country to the authoritarianism of the pre-2011 era. Suu Kyi was arrested and returned to her former role as political prisoner, as were the president and other National League for Democracy leaders.

As we wrote on the day of the coup, Myanmar’s people had enjoyed a decade of increased political and economic freedoms. The military was therefore likely to encounter “uncooperative subjects” as it sought to reimpose authoritarian rule.

That proved to be an understatement. The early opposition to the coup, nonviolent, almost festive, filled the streets of Yangon and other cities and towns around the country. The protesters were watched closely by the police, and sometimes the military, but little action was taken. A civil disobedience movement took hold, with striking or uncooperative workers paralysing major parts of the economy. Doctors, teachers, university lecturers: they all voiced their opposition to the military’s strangling of the government.

A month into these nonviolent protests the security services launched a more forceful response. Indiscriminate live fire into the crowds killed and injured protesters. National League for Democracy politicians and other protesters were arrested and tortured to death. A grim new chapter of reprisals and crackdowns had begun.

Under these conditions, opposition to the junta transformed from open, nonviolent action, with the risk of being abducted or shot, to an armed underground movement. The disparate militias of the newly formed People’s Defence Force are playing the key role, often supported by ethnic armed groups long opposed to the military.

The country descended into civil war — not only in the remote borderlands, where fighting led by ethnic armed groups has smouldered since independence in 1948, but also in the main cities and, perhaps most importantly, in the normally docile central dry zone populated by the numerically dominant Bamar (Burman) majority. This is the heartland from which the military usually draws much of its political strength and recruits.

A parallel National Unity Government was established, and the National League for Democracy’s UN ambassador managed to retain his position despite repeated attempts by the military junta to remove him.

The Myanmar people, their dreams having been so brutally dashed, are unlikely to accept a return to the uncomfortable compromises of the 2008 constitution. The army, having so carelessly discarded its comfortable and lucrative relationship with Suu Kyi’s League, now faces a popular and determined opposition implacably opposed to allowing it any role in government.

The catastrophic error of judgement by Min Aung Hlaing and the military leadership hasn’t only devastated much of the country. It has also destroyed any chance of peaceful coexistence between military and civilians for the foreseeable future.

This unravelling of constitutional rule made it necessary to revise our book. Our assumption had been that the National League for Democracy would govern for another five-year term, in coalition if necessary with some of the ethnic minority parties. The chance that another party would emerge to dominate Myanmar politics seemed remote, particularly while Suu Kyi remained at the League’s helm, and nor were the military-backed parties likely to cobble together a governing coalition.

We had a provisional agreement with our publishers to issue a second edition in the lead-up to the anticipated 2025 election, but these decisions are always conditional on first edition sales and other factors. Now the book required much earlier updating. Routledge accepted our proposal to accelerate the process, and the result is a fully revised second edition, just published, with extra chapters on education, health and the coup in historical context.

One difference in the new edition is that it draws on (and links to) articles published by the growing number of open-access policy outlets that provide fast — in some cases almost instant — research findings and analysis of regional issues. For Australian academics working on Myanmar politics these include the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Strategist, the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter, the Australian Institute of International Affairs’s Australian Outlook and the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum. The Conversation also provides an invaluable space for academics to reach a more general audience with short research-based articles, and Inside Story publishes longer essays.

While these outlets don’t provide all the rigour of refereed journal articles, they overcome the delays in traditional academic publishing that can be frustrating for academics analysing contemporary events. Having this political analysis available much more quickly and free of charge is crucial, particularly when dealing with a region like Southeast Asia where local academics, analysts and members of the public are much less likely to have access to paywalled journal articles and books.

We are particularly pleased that help from our contributors’ institutions has enabled us to make the book available for download free of charge. We see it as a crucial social justice issue that the contributors’ analyses are freely available to readers in Myanmar, Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, with much of the world’s focus understandably on conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, the Myanmar crisis has been relegated to footnote status. Although the United States’ BURMA Act earlier this year raised hopes of more international support for the opposition movement, little progress is evident.

Myanmar’s military continues its brutal campaign of attacks on civilians, including the burning of villages and indiscriminate air strikes on civilian targets. A single attack in central Myanmar in May killed more than 160 people, including children.

While the privations and suffering of the Rohingya that we described three years ago have spread across much of the rest of the population, we should not forget the terrible situation of that community. Over a million Rohingya refugees have spent more than six years in Bangladeshi border refugee camps at the mercy of criminal gangs, their already tiny food rations further reduced in recent times.

As investigations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity slowly wind their way through the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, and courts in Germany and elsewhere, the Rohingya and Myanmar’s wider population experience no respite.

The top generals have been excluded from most diplomatic engagement, and are only welcomed by Russia, China, North Korea and a few other authoritarian regimes. Even ASEAN, which has tended to tolerate a fair bit of bad behaviour in Myanmar, recognises that the military regime in Naypyitaw presents a reputational risk for the entire region. An empty seat at ASEAN symbolises much wariness about legitimising the violence and devastation unleashed by the coup and sends a signal, albeit a weak one, to other autocratic regimes.

Like Ukraine, Myanmar is suffering the consequences of terrible decisions by ruthless, isolated leaders. As we look ahead it is crucial that we don’t ignore the crimes of these despots and the need to find just outcomes.

The answers will usually be found on the ground, in the hard slog of defying dictatorial rule. But let’s not ignore the contributions that can be made by democratic states prepared to resolutely oppose these dictatorial regimes. A concerted international effort to support the National Unity Government materially, diplomatically and militarily could easily alter the dynamics in Myanmar. •

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Rightly, a barrage of words has been fired to describe Hamas’s recent attacks: atrocious, abhorrent, despicable, outrageous, inhuman, nihilistic. They are all well chosen. The biggest shock lay in the assault’s surprise, brutality and short-term success. How could the much-vaunted and feared Israeli intelligence and defence establishment be caught out so badly?

Martin Indyk, who served twice as the US ambassador to Israel, suggested a “total system failure on Israel’s part.” Through sophisticated spying Israelis are accustomed to knowing exactly what the Palestinians are doing. Israel has built a very expensive wall between Gaza and its side of the border. How was it possible, Indyk asked, for “a ragtag band of terrorists” to beat the “mighty” Israeli intelligence community and defence forces? The answer, in part, “was hubris — an Israeli belief that sheer force could deter Hamas, and that Israel did not have to address the long-term problems.”

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to the late Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, spoke of Israel’s two-layered strategic failure. Netanyahu and his current coalition, “the most extreme ever,” downplayed or ignored warnings from several Arab states about Palestinian grievances. Netanyahu pursued the illusion that even under his draconian policies — which have long turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison” — Hamas would abstain from the sort of attacks that might jeopardise its hold on power in Gaza.

Haaretz journalist Amira Hass argued that Israeli security forces neglected the defence of communities near the Gaza Strip because they were preoccupied with “defending the settlers in the West Bank, their land seizures, and their rites of stone and altar worshipping.” Such neglect, she said, was inherently connected to one of the chief goals of Netanyahu and his religious Zionist supporters, accelerating the de facto annexation of most of the West Bank and increasing the settler population there. Haaretz editorialised that the government had left the Gaza border communities unprotected as “the IDF provided security for every settler whim.”

Netanyahu has been an ardent champion of West Bank settlements, the growth of which makes the idea of a viable Palestinian state fanciful. He has desisted from annexing (at least) large chunks of the occupied West Bank only because of likely US disapproval. UN figures show that in the ten years to 2022, the population of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, grew to around 700,000. The settlers live illegally in 279 Israeli settlements across the West Bank, including fourteen settlements in East Jerusalem.

The company Netanyahu keeps should give considerable pause for thought. On 1 March this year the head of a pro-settler party, Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, called for the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara to be “erased.” This followed a settler rampage through the village that one Israeli general described as a “pogrom.” A US State Department spokesperson described Smotrich’s comments as “irresponsible… repugnant [and] disgusting.” Undeterred, Smotrich followed up by declaring that “there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.”

Last August, Netanyahu’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, exhibited a similar sneering condescension, declaring that his family’s right to move around the West Bank “is more important than freedom of movement for the Arabs.”

Israelis mourning their dead might reflect on the awful reality that, stretching back to the 1980s, Israeli governments have provided limited funding and intelligence assistance to Hamas, at first seeing the Islamist organisation as a useful counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation under the quixotic Yasser Arafat. This assistance continued after the formation of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s nominal partner in any “peace process.”

Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy, commented recently that Netanyahu’s various governments ended up weakening the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas — who wanted to negotiate — while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israel’s destruction. Hirsh quoted Gilead Sher, chief of staff to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, who has said that Netanyahu’s policy to “nearly topple” the Palestinian Authority fostered Hamas’s “sense of impunity and capability.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal that “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

Hamas calculated, correctly, that its break-out in Gaza and Israel’s inevitably harsh response would freeze steps towards normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the Gaza attacks the Saudis issued a statement accusing Israel of ignoring their repeated warnings of an explosion “as a result of the continued occupation and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.” Martin Indyk commented that the image of American weapons in Israeli hands killing large numbers of Palestinians will ignite a “strong reaction” around the Arab world. President Biden’s whistle-stop visit to Israel has done nothing to dampen that reaction.

Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas political leader who lives in exile in Qatar (Hamas’s military commanders are based in Gaza) explained the motivation for the Gaza attacks as a profound sense of frustration and defeat. But Hamas’s embarrassment of Israel comes at an unimaginable cost to the people of Gaza. The Economist has calculated that the scale of Israel’s bombardment — 6000 bombs dropped in six days, compared with 2000 to 5000 per month across Iraq and Syria during the American-led air campaign against Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 —  suggested that “the definition of military targets is being stretched to breaking-point.”

On 10 October, the Israeli Defence Forces’ Major General Ghassan Alian declared that “Human animals must be treated as such… There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, weighed in, asserting at a press conference that all citizens of Gaza were responsible for the Hamas attack. “It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”

Such nonsense points to the glaring double standard in some commentary about Gaza. Hamas’s rule is rightly derided as brutal and authoritarian, yet there seems an expectation that ordinary Palestinians should miraculously rise up and overthrow it. In the New York Review of Books Fintan O’Toole wrote that “Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that Hamas cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s.” That is the sickening truth.

Ben Saul, head of international law at Sydney University, has argued that Hamas should be held accountable for its “atrocious war crimes.” He added, though, that Australian defence minister Richard Marles’s claim that Israel was acting within the rules of war indicated only that Marles was “poorly briefed.”

One stark Israeli violation, Saul wrote, was its medieval “complete siege” of Gaza, with no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. “A sixteen-year blockade has already debilitated Gaza. This latest turning of the screw is unlawful and could constitute the war crime of starving civilians. It could also be unlawful collective punishment if it aims to retaliate against all Gazans for Hamas’ sins.”

Running against Netanyahu in the Israeli 2019 general election, the former Israeli army chief Benny Gantz released a campaign video boasting that during the 2014 Israel–Gaza war, “parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages.” Gantz is now part of the emergency war cabinet and is no doubt keen to finish the job. Israel clearly has the capacity to level what is left of Gaza city, killing many (more) thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, including Hamas and other Islamist militants.

That might trigger a wider war. Martin Indyk has commented that if the Palestinian death toll rises, “Hezbollah will be tempted to join the fray. They have 150,000 rockets they can rain down on Israel’s main cities.” Even if that doesn’t happen, the question of “what now?” only comes sooner. If Hamas is obliterated, what then? Who will rule Gaza? The Israelis? They tried that once before, with unhappy results. The Palestinian Authority? It struggles to maintain its shaky rule in the West Bank.

Whatever the future, it will be troublesome, to say the least. In one way or another we will all pay a price. •

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Now their voices can be heard, clearly and sometimes passionately, in journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City, published this year to coincide with the invasion’s twentieth anniversary. This is a compelling, challenging, disturbing and ultimately illuminating account of what happened to the people of Iraq and their homeland over the two decades after they were invaded and conquered. It exposes the ignorance and demolishes the myths and false assumptions of many Western policymakers, think-tank analysts, pundits and correspondents — myths that Howard clung to in his speech.

Abdul-Ahad grew up under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, an absurdly quintessential Third World tyrant. It was a time of futile and costly wars with Iran and Kuwait and the West, of repression, poverty and hardship exacerbated by foreign sanctions. It was a period that made many Iraqis optimistic that the Americans would bring change.

If Abdul-Ahad — an architect and army deserter at the time — shared that optimism, it quickly faded on the day American tanks rumbled into Baghdad in April 2003. He watched with dismay as US marines pulled down a statue of Saddam one of them had draped in the American flag. He had thought the facade of liberation would last at least a day, “but no, with all the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, [the marine] covered the face of the defeated dictator with the flag of his victorious nation; briefly, but long enough to seal the fate of the invasion in the eyes of many.”

The next day, after a chance meeting with a correspondent from the Guardian, Abdul-Ahad was hired as a fixer and translator and eventually a reporter — in which job he embarked on a journey through a country he increasingly couldn’t recognise, a devastated human and physical landscape of unspeakable brutality, destruction, indignity and corruption. He felt like a stranger in a foreign land.

Whatever optimism his fellow Iraqis felt when the Americans arrived soon dissolved, too, eroded by the occupiers’ sheer inefficiency and shattered by the first car bombing. Abdul-Ahad witnessed and reported on many such atrocities in the coming years, so many that “they are all welded in my head into one newsreel of charred human remains mixed with shreds of tyres and crumpled debris.”

Instead of peace, the US occupation unleashed something terrible, imposing a political system that gave power and the spoils of office, along sectarian and ethnic lines, to a “coalition of corrupt, imbecilic religious warlords to rule the country for the next twenty years and create one of the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Militias — “hundreds of cells with hundreds of motives” — emerged soon after the invasion. Many were criminal gangs; others sought simply to protect their neighbourhoods; still others were nationalists humiliated by foreign occupation. Later came Iraqi and foreign jihadis chasing fanatical dreams of a pure Islamic state. The occupation ultimately transformed what had been a fissure between Shias and Sunnis into an abyss.

In Baghdad and elsewhere, men with guns controlled every aspect of life, even as the United States and its allies deluded themselves they were bringing democratic progress. A year after the invasion, “people started uttering the unthinkable, that maybe life under Saddam was better.”

Abdul-Ahad takes his readers through the bomb-shattered suburbs, shrines and markets of Iraqi cities and towns, across barricades and streets awash with sewage, to meet ordinary Iraqis — teachers, doctors, soldiers, refugees. With a reporter’s eye for detail and ear for a telling quote, he brings us their faces and voices. His writing is wry at times, sometimes caustic, usually sensitive but not sentimental.

A bridegroom in a mixed Sunni–Shia marriage recounts his wedding day — a perilous military-style operation to get the wedding party across militia checkpoints — and describes “my bride and her relatives yellow with fear.”

We meet a schoolteacher, a man with a cheerful face struggling in a collapsed education system, who insists to his students that Iraq is not a sectarian country, and who limps to and from class, the result of having been shot three times because he spoke out against the clerics and urged his students not to join their militias.

We join a dreary queue at the passport office where fear and anxiety fill the air. A Christian man in his sixties, a teacher accompanied by his three daughters, insists the official writes his occupation in his passport. But there is no space for profession on the new passport form. The teacher insists his occupation be included because he wants a visa to go to Australia. Don’t worry, a man in the queue tells him, no country will give Iraqis a visa anyway. A big-bellied bureaucrat openly boasts that he takes bribes — “I only take $500” — to speed up the passport process.

In the cramped waiting room of a medical clinic, a gaunt psychiatrist with a soft reassuring voice describes how “the pressure, the war, the economic situation, fear, anxiety — all chip away at patients’ resistance.”

A Sunni militia commander, a middle-aged man with soft brown eyes, acknowledges having rejoiced when Saddam fell, but also having then joined the insurgency: “As time passed, and the occupation became more visible, patriotic feelings inside me grew greater and greater. Every time I saw the Americans patrolling our streets, I felt ashamed and humiliated.”

Abdul-Ahad takes us into the courtroom for Saddam’s trial, the former dictator slowly and deliberately entering the room, sighing and sitting down “with the air of one settling down to a day’s work.” We learn how, after his hanging, Saddam’s corpse was flown to the house where prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was celebrating his son’s wedding: “The grotesque pettiness of Iraq’s new masters ran rampant as the shroud was pulled back to allow guests to photograph the corpse.”

On a sweltering and humid day we go to a Baghdad morgue, where crowds of anxious relatives press against the fence to find and reclaim the bodies of family members. The morgue is stacked with corpses, mostly the victims of death squads, and there’s no room for the crowd to enter, so officials improvise a “hellish slideshow” on a computer monitor that families watch in silence as pictures of the mutilated dead flicker on the screen.

Two years after the invasion, Iraq was sliding towards civil war, a conflict more complex than the West’s binary narrative of Sunni versus Shia. As Abdul-Ahad points out, this war included “a wide range of localised schisms and fault lines, feuds based on class or geography or long-dormant tribal feuds.”

These rifts were exacerbated by the Americans, who, “like conquerors, aimed to simplify their occupation by breaking it into components,” using Shias to fight Sunni insurgents, and in the process entrenching and exacerbating sectarianism.

Six years after the invasion, Maliki had concentrated unaccountable power through patronage, shadowy intelligence services and all-encompassing corruption. Security officers took bribes from families to release their sons from detention and torture, and then sometimes killed them anyway.

By the invasion’s tenth anniversary, Islamist jihadis had entered this ghastly scene, seeking to impose an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam not only in Iraq but in Syria and across the Middle East. Abdul-Ahad travelled to Syria to meet the groups who called themselves ISIS and were consolidating their power. He met an ISIS commander who spoke of his dreams of a borderless Islamic state: “I can’t remember much else of what he said in the meeting because I was terrified and trembling with fear.”

By the middle of the following year, ISIS had swept into western Iraq and on to Mosul, Iraq’s second city, where Maliki’s “brave new army” collapsed, partly out of a justified fear of the ISIS fanatics and partly because all-pervading corruption had eaten out its heart. Recruits who had paid to be enlisted to escape lives of dismal poverty found their wages stolen by their officers. Non-existent “ghost soldiers” padded out the payroll.

When ISIS captured Mosul many welcomed their discipline, administrative efficiency and promise to restore basic services and end corruption. Instead, the extremists turned Mosul into a huge prison controlled with brutality and viciousness. “They brought terror into our hearts and inside our own homes,” said one resident. “I feared my neighbour, my brother and my son… They used to say Saddam’s regime was brutal. Well Saddam was a picnic compared to them.”

The brutality of ISIS prompted many men to join the army, which was supported by US air power. Abdul-Ahad joined these soldiers — young but old before their time; devoted to war yet cynical about their senior officers — as they fought to reclaim Mosul. They were brave and selfless, too, but also capable of the worst acts of barbaric cruelty.

Abdul-Ahad portrays them dispassionately, with gritty, graphic, courageous reporting. While his writing is clear and compelling, at times it is so confronting that it’s hard to read — as when he describes captured ISIS prisoners being tortured for no purpose “beyond the primordial imperative to exact pain and revenge and prove to the soldiers that they had defeated ISIS.”

Having humanised the people he encounters — victims and perpetrators alike — he then goes beyond his masterful on-the-ground reporting. Placing these human stories in a wider political and social context, he demolishes the myth that the quick military success of US forces was subsequently marred by ill-advised decisions and a lack of planning for the second phase of the US adventure — the occupation and handover. In his 2013 speech, Howard understated these failures as “problematic.”

That’s not how Abdul-Ahad sees it. He argues that the occupation was bound to fail not because of lack of planning but “because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.”

A Stranger in Your Own City also debunks another central tenet of the pro-invasion narrative — that Iraq’s main religious sects are monoliths that had either uniformly supported and benefited from Saddam (the Sunnis) or uniformly opposed and suffered under him (the Shias). It’s another element of the narrative that Howard endorsed in his retrospective speech, declaring in coldly passive language that “it was inevitable that after Saddam had been toppled a degree of revenge would be exacted.”

Despite all that he has witnessed and Iraq has endured, Abdul-Ahad sees signs of hope in an outburst of popular dissent by euphoric young Iraqis in 2019, known as the Tishreen Uprising. While it failed to bring down the post-2003 system, it showed how young people led by secular activists recognised the US-bequeathed democracy to be a kleptocracy of fossilised hierarchies and archaic bureaucratic rules, with a security system of violence, torture and killings. The Tishreen protesters saw themselves as victims of a “terrible con perpetrated by those professing to defend them and their sect against the ‘other’.”

“Tishreen showed the power of the people when not cowed by sectarian fears,” Abdul-Ahad writes, “and indicates that the post-2003 state can no longer satisfy its own people.” He concludes that the failure of Iraq’s leaders to heed the warnings of Tishreen will lead to their demise. •

A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad | Hutchinson Heinemann | $59.99 | 480 pages

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I was lucky enough to work with Ken Inglis and friends on Dunera Lives: A Visual History, published in 2018. The book is an attempt to tell something of the Dunera story through 500 images, one of which attracted far more comment than any other. This was the grainy black-and-white photograph reproduced above, taken on 14 December 1938, a month after the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht.

The photo shows fifteen-year-old Gerd Bernstein (Bern’s original name), dressed in a suit, raising a glass to his family. His mother Helena, father Otto and maternal grandmother Sophie Maas sit at a table in their Berlin home at Wielandstrasse 17. A picture of young Gerd hangs on the wall.

The faces most exposed to the camera are those of grandson and grandmother. Gerd looks thoughtful and hesitant, even sad, while on his grandmother’s face I see both love and terror — love for him, and terror about what the future holds for her Jewish family. The next day Gerd left Berlin on a Kindertransport, bound for Britain. On 17 December, alone in Britain just two days after leaving home for a strange and unfamiliar country, he turned sixteen.

His parents survived the war despite his father Otto’s imprisonment in Theresienstadt concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. Otto was the sole survivor among the hundred people with whom he was transported to Theresienstadt; Sophie died there.

After the visual history appeared, Bern and I discussed readers’ reactions to this photograph and the intense, heavy sadness it prompted in many, me included. Bern would have none of it. He thought this response muddled, our emotions skewed by knowledge of the Holocaust.

In Bern’s mind, this photograph showed a moment in the life of his family, no more and no less. To view the photograph through the lens of the Holocaust was a mistake, and he made a point of reminding me that in 1938 the Nazis had not yet embarked on the systematic destruction of European Jewry.

Bern’s position on the photograph reflected his historical preferences. The substance of any history, Dunera’s included, is in the detail. He saw history through a lens that allowed little room for the floating of partly conceived ideas and none at all for speculation, no matter how worthy the intention. If there were a place for emotion, it was after the facts were established. Perhaps his approach could be called traditional. I can’t imagine Bern thinking much of the modern belief that histories can be retold on the basis of emotions.

Whatever the merits of Bern’s approach, it made him a wonderful informant. His view of the past as the stuff of hard facts meant that he spoke only about what he knew. If he didn’t know the answer, he said so. If he thought the question irrelevant, he made that clear too, then explained why. He punctured myths, of which Dunera has more than its share, and raised questions that forced historians and others to think anew about key moments in the story.

Recently I asked him about an incident that looms large in Dunera history and memory. On the voyage to Australia, British guards treated the internees with calculated brutality in a gross, and in some cases criminal, dereliction of duty. The Dunera canon tells that guards, as part of this sustained assault, forced internees to walk over broken glass strewn across the deck of the ship.

The glass was there, Bern told me, but he doubted it was placed deliberately, and he and others simply stepped around it. While the weight of evidence about this incident is against him, I know that Bern, as a historian of the Dunera, never spoke idly. On that basis alone, his account demands consideration.

Ken Inglis cherished Bern’s clarity and commitment to accuracy. They corresponded from the start of Ken’s Dunera project — which also led to a second book, Dunera Lives: Profiles, in 2020 — exchanging emails regularly until Ken’s death in December 2017. Their voluminous correspondence, now part of the Inglis Dunera papers at the National Library of Australia, reveals two scholars in respectful and admiring conversation, one testing notions and ideas, the other encouraging or discouraging those possibilities.

While Bern was an oracle on Dunera, on one aspect of the story he had no answers. When the Dunera internees arrived in Australia, most were incarcerated first at Hay in western New South Wales. Because the camps there could house only 2000, around ninety-five of the internees, seemingly chosen at random, were taken instead to Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, along with other men who had travelled on the Dunera and been deemed dangerous by British authorities.

Bern was part of this Tatura rump, and there he stayed for the duration of his internment, which lasted until January 1942. Thus, he knew nothing of camp life at Hay. Ken would chuckle at this inconvenience, suggesting that Bern had been remiss in not arranging his internment to suit the needs of future historians.

Bern exerted a strong influence on the writing of the two volumes of Dunera Lives, saving us from mistakes and misinterpretations, and suggesting lines of enquiry that emerged as themes in the books. He was our most prolific and important informant. If our telling of a story differed from the one he knew, he always gave our version a fair hearing. On the odd occasion, we might even have convinced him.

On other occasions, not at all. In Dunera Lives we took a strong line on Winston Churchill’s role in the Dunera affair. While Churchill’s wartime government would later issue an apology of sorts to the Dunera internees for the appalling treatment they suffered, by that time many had already concluded that British liberalism was a chimera. Bern was of the opposite view. He held that Churchill had no choice but to act as he did, and that to suggest otherwise was to allow historical judgement to be derailed by the luxury of hindsight.

This position was entwined with another view to which Bern stuck fast. The Dunera had delivered him to Australia, where he made a rewarding and productive life. As he said often, there was nothing for him in postwar Europe, whereas in Australia, as a young man with energy and purpose, he was able to embrace education and new beginnings, free of the restrictions and prejudices that had shaped his life in Germany.

For Bern, his good fortune was the story, and this mattered more than issues such as the question of Churchill’s culpability. He thought the Dunera the luckiest thing to ever happen to him. Perhaps the fact that his parents survived the Holocaust also influenced this position.

Bern was an unusual Dunera boy in other ways, too. While happily Australian, he maintained strong links to his homeland. He returned to Berlin and Germany often, visiting past haunts and chasing up friends. He continued to speak and read German, and listened to German news on the radio. A couple of years ago Bern wrote to tell me about the Exilmuseum in Berlin, after he had heard mention of the nascent institution on a German radio program. He wondered if the museum’s curators would be interested in learning about the strange story of the German and Austrian exiles who in 1940 found themselves interned in rural Australia. They were.

For other Dunera boys, such engagement with Germany and Austria was anathema. Their wartime experiences and knowledge of the Holocaust poisoned their feelings for the land of their birth. Many never returned to Germany and Austria; many chose to avoid Germanic culture and language.

Bern too knew the pain of persecution and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism forced him and his mother to flee Germany for Britain. Hitler’s regime murdered his grandmother and imprisoned his father. But never did he allow the pain and injustice of the past to determine the direction of his life. It was a remarkably brave choice, and one that not all Dunera boys were able to make, or even wanted to.

Bern’s longevity conferred a sad and perhaps unwanted title. He was the last Dunera boy in Australia, and among the last anywhere. It is thought that there is a Dunera boy alive in France, and another in New York, and possibly others of whom my colleagues and I don’t know, though it is unlikely that these “unknowns” would number more than one or two.

Bern accepted his position with grace, acknowledging the dubious honour as a responsibility rather than a burden, which surely it was. To the best of my knowledge, he never refused a request for an interview, and was diligent in answering questions from scholars and members of the Dunera diaspora. Perhaps he saw duty in these tasks; the Dunera had led him to a good life in Australia, and provided both a scholarly purpose in his later years, and enduring friendships.

On what proved to be his last weekend, Bern travelled to Melbourne, where he delighted in the company of Peter Danby’s family. Danby, originally Peter Danziger, was also a Dunera boy, though the friendship was older than that, the two having met in Britain. Bern was accompanied by Peter and Joanna, two of his three children. The Brent–Danby friendship is now carried by the next generation.

In September 2022 I took the British author and activist Jennifer Nadel to meet Bern in his Canberra home. Jennifer’s father, George Nadel, was a budding scholar when he was deported to Australia on the Dunera. She knows little about his internment, but enough to realise that George’s postwar silences hid deep trauma. For Jennifer, Dunera has been a difficult and painful word.

Aside from their Jewish heritage, George Nadel and Bern had little in common. George was born Austrian, Bern German. Both had a passion for history, though they were driven by differing approaches and emphases. George, who went on to found and edit the venerable journal History and Theory, was an academic who practised history in more formal worlds and ways than Bern. If Bern were ever a reader of that journal, I imagine him warming more to the history than the theory. Bern saw the Dunera as a ship of salvation; for George, the Dunera seems to have heralded only misery.

And yet both men survived the Dunera, and by 2022 Bern was one of very few people anywhere in the world who could talk directly of the experience. Through Bern, Jennifer was given a privileged glimpse of a past about which George never spoke. As we drove away from Bern’s home, she said that his German-accented English, and certain of his mannerisms, evoked fond thoughts of her father.

When I wrote to Jennifer to tell her of Bern’s death, she immediately recalled his bearing and presence, and the importance to her of their meeting. Bern’s willingness to act as a conduit to the past, to talk openly and directly about Dunera, helped many people like her to better understand the story and their part in it. In so doing he aroused emotions. I wonder what he made of that.

Jennifer described meeting Bern as a privilege. It’s the right word. To have known, talked and corresponded with him was a privilege, and something I cherish. Ruhe sanft, lieber Bern. •

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