Tag Archives: War

They call this a peace flotilla

Posted on by Brad Heap

I haven’t formed a complete opinion about Israel’s storming of boats in international waters, politically it doesn’t sound right.

However, upon seeing this footage there is no way that you can claim that the flotilla was acting peacefully. Sure if you are being raided your response would be to fight back, but the savageness of the attack against armed soldiers leaves little wonder in my mind as to why people got killed. You don’t go into a gun fight with knives.

Update: Just released IDF video of the “aid” they were carrying:

Remembering the Glorious Dead for the right reasons

Posted on by Brad Heap

There is a very unpatriotic opinion article in the Sydney Morning Herald today suggesting that we don’t honour the ANZACs.

While the author, Martin Flanagan, does well to point out some of the history surrounding the Gallipoli campaign his tie in arguments against remembering the dead simply do not stack up.

Gallipoli was a military disaster. We should note that in justice to the young men who died there. Do we owe them less than we owe those who die in bushfires like Black Saturday? We should also note it in justice to future generations. The voices that urged Australia into the invasion of Iraq were of the same character as those that propelled Australia to Gallipoli in 1914.

Flanagan is correct in stating that Gallipoli was a military disaster, one of the primary reasons for this was that the ANZACs landed at the wrong beach. But I do not want to get bogged down in historical arguments. The most offensive and false claim by Flanagan in this statement is comparing the Gallipoli campaign to Iraq. There is a big difference in roles between the two, in Gallipoli the ANZACs were defending, sure they were invading Turkey, however the only reason for doing so was to defend the British Empire and end the war, they did not start the war but their goal was to end it. In Iraq the Australian Army is among the aggressors, they did start the war and they did make the choice to attack.

What the Australians won at Gallipoli was huge respect, including from their enemy. It really is time we started making clear to young Australians that the Anzacs didn’t die protecting Australia from being invaded. Rather, we were invading a country on the other side of the world – to wit, Turkey – with whom we had no difference as a people outside the larger politics of the day.

Surely it is time we owed Turkey, and Turkish Australians, that respect. Look at the respect Turkey shows our dead.

I ask this question most seriously. Does any country in the world – other than Turkey – permit a people who tried to invade it to commemorate the fact of that attempted invasion on their shores each year? I know of not a single one. Imagine if the descendants of the Japanese pilots who bombed Darwin held an emotional service beneath the Japanese flag on the shores of Darwin Harbour each year.

Again there is a massive difference between the attack on Gallipoli and the attack on Darwin. The attack on Gallipoli formed the basis of the ANZAC bond that has seen NZ and Australian troops work together jointly in a number of wars, exercises, rescues, peacekeeping missions, trade and politics over the last 95 years. It also formed the basis of maturing as two nations independent of Great Britain and through the war a bond with Turkey.

The services at Gallipoli are not the celebration of war they are remembering the dead, the dead who died serving their country, defending their country, and believing in their country. They are also about respecting those who fought to give us the freedoms we enjoy today – including the freedom to criticise what they fought for.

The difference with the attack on Darwin is that the scars between the actions of Japan and Australia have never fully healed. The way in which the author compares the attack suggests this. The way in which Japan and Germany among other countries avoid talking about the war also suggests that they are not at a point yet to move on from the past. The attack on Darwin was an attack and only an attack, the Gallipoli campaign was a lot more than just an attack, it was the forming of nations and what is honoured on ANZAC day is those who helped form those nations not those who needless died in a failed campaign.

NZ troops attacked in Vietnam… opps… Afghanistan

Posted on by Brad Heap

Not very good news reading the paper this morning.

Taleban ambush targeted newly arrived NZ troops

New Zealand troops were fortunate not to be killed in a Taleban ambush deliberately set up to unsettle them just days after their arrival in Afghanistan.

The insurgents hit the patrol convoy with rocket-propelled grenades before firing bullets into their windscreens as they reversed up a one-lane road in the mountainous Bamiyan province.

The Taleban then mounted a further attack before the New Zealanders were bailed out by two American Apache helicopter gunships.

It should be noted at this point that these are not our SAS troops. These are our normal army troops. Most people do not realise that we have troops in Afghanistan but we do, they have been there for a number of years now.

Meanwhile the editoral discusses how the whole situation is becoming another Vietnam, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10606904

According to United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the decision by presidential challenger Abdullah Abdullah not to participate in next weekend’s runoff election is not “unprecedented” and will not affect the legitimacy of the vote. David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, says most polls show Dr Abdullah would have lost anyway, “so we are going to deal with the government that is there”. Both statements represent a flight from the reality of the US being consigned to work for the next five years with a discredited, corrupt and unpopular Kabul administration. In one step, Afghanistan has begun to look much more like Vietnam.

The runoff may still be held in an attempt to manufacture a veneer of credibility for Mr Karzai’s second term. But by any yardstick a poll with just one candidate is a farce, and will be recognised as such worldwide. And that creates still bigger problems for Mr Obama as he ponders a request from General Stanley McChrystal to send an extra 40,000 troops to Afghanistan to combat an increasingly assertive Taleban. The President has insisted that such support would be provided only to a government whose legitimacy and democratic mandate was unquestioned. This condition is now unlikely to be met.

He knows parallels with the unpopular Vietnam War, during which the US propped up several illegitimate regimes, are being made increasingly. A repeat of that experience is unthinkable. A unity government in Kabul may not work and is certainly not the ideal solution in the long term. But it is now essential to deliver some legitimacy to the struggle against the Taleban.

The United States has not won a war since WWII, Iraq and Afghanistan look destined to become two more versions of Vietnam. The question now is how does the US pull out of both countries in a manner that does not have them descend into civil war, at the same time not letting terrorists rule the roost, and trying to keep some stability in the middle east? It is a hard task that I don’t think anyone has the solution to.

Not a good look

Posted on by Brad Heap

I saw this image on the news tonight and at first I could see the funny side of it. The biggest problem however is we do not currently have combat troops in Afghanistan instead we have peace keepers and a reconstruction team. A New Zealand company’s logo and NZDF troops next to an American bomb is not a good look for a mainly pacifist nation.

FrogBlog has a good story on the other implications of the issue: http://blog.greens.org.nz/2009/09/04/no-limits-to-civilian-suffering-in-us-bombing/

Red Dawn

Posted on by Brad Heap

The 1984 movie Red Dawn was on C4 last Sunday night.

It is the first time that I have seen it. Wikipedia makes out that it is very violent. It is clear after watching it how much our views on acceptable violence have changed in the last twenty five years. Sure there is blood and a bit of swearing, and lots of guns (it is a war movie), however it probably has less violence in it then the nightly news.

The thing that hit home about the movie was how real it was and how if the events of the movie happened today just how unprepared we would be. The movie is based on the notion of the states allied with the former USSR invading the United States, and a group of high school students go bush and then fight back. (The plot is very similar to that of tomorrow when the war began books.)

The whole idea of going bush is so foreign to so many people today, and I doubt many would be able to survive for two years on their own. I have to really wonder how many people know (or have) shot a gun, ate wild animals, or even just gone overnight in a tent before.

I know that if I was with the right people I could do okay, the only thing that I have not done is shot and eaten wild meat. However I have fired a rifle before (.22 on a range, and another (airgun I think) on a farm). And I have a fair amount of experience in the bush. But just how many others would be able to actually survive more than 48 hours? Is it time to introduce outdoor training and survival skills at schools in the same manner we teach people beach safety?

Since when do people in NZ throw shoes at others because of their nationality?

Posted on by Brad Heap

Okay,I have been very reluctant to blog about the ongoings in Israel partly because I have been busy, and partly because Kiwiblog have been doing a good job of keeping the issue balanced, at least in the NZ Blogosphere.

But the reason why I am blogging now is because John Minto and his rent a protest crowd have really got my back up in the last two days.

Now I will come back to Minto and his bunch of loonies in a few minutes but first lets get things in perspective.

Israel is not a large country. I have combined an image of Israel and part of the north island together to show it in comparison to NZ.

The Gaza Strip is highlighted in Red. It is about the same size as the distance from Manukau to Huntly. 100km max. And Gaza city itself is about the same size as Auckland City, as in the city city, not Manukau, Waitakere or the shore.

isnz

So as you can see they are fighting over a very small piece of land, but at the same time a very heavily populated land. So as you can expect when you are dropping bombs or firing tank shells civilians are naturally going to be caught in the crossfire.

However that is no excuse for not defending yourself. And that is what Israel are doing.

Israel has spent the past week inside its own land trying to prevent terrorists from firing rockets and random into civilian towns. Rockets that have rained down for the last 8 years, or 400 weeks for those of you who want things in perspective.

Israel is the only jewish state in the world. There are many many christian states, many muslim states, and many states of other religions, but only one jewish state. And more importantly for those who don’t believe in religion, Israel is the only democracy in the Mid East.

And so I find all the protests against Israel quite ironic. But at the same time it doesn’t surprise me when they are vastly outnumbered in terms of supporters (primarily due to religious beliefs).

Okay so lets come back to New Zealand.

Firstly Wellington. There was a lovely “peaceful” protest down there earlier this week. And I say “peaceful” in quotes because I am disgusted by the actions of a priest of the catholic church who thought it was wise to mix blood with paint and smear it on a jewish memorial.

Now two things strike me about this action. The first is that how would NZ’s respond if an environmentalist decided that Sir Ed’s grave was a good place to smear blood on after all he sent polluting tractors to the south pole and therefore help start melting the ice caps by putting out too much heat and carbon. People would think that they are crazy and demand that they be prosecuted to the nth degree of the law. However NZ just turns a blind eye to the actions of a high ranking public individual who vandalises a memorial. Would I be arrested if I were to throw red paint over his church for all the killing the catholic church has done through the ages?

The second thing is this. The accidental symbolism. In jewish custom smearing blooding over a door frame protects you from G-d’s destruction. That is the Exodus story. The passover. This priest appears to have accidentially asked G-d to passover Israel’s sins, so in a way I thank him for doing that.

And now lets come to today in Auckland. John Minto is the hero of the 1980s and the anti Springbok tour protests. At the time they were good things. Because they actually had an impact because they were a nationally sanctioned team.

But today, threatning to throw shoes at an Israeli individual who has no ties to the Government is disgusting. Whatever happened to welcome to New Zealand, what ever happened to respecting everyone? Since when did NZders’s throw shoes at people just because of their nationality?

And for those who have no idea what I am blogging about check this out: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10550934