The rapidity with which Bill English fell in behind Trump’s unilateral strike on Syria shows how little the NZ government values the UN Security Council, despite just having completed two years on it. New Zealand sidelined the Security Council and supported a US strike contravening the UN Charter. Article 51 of the Charter allows one nation to strike another only in “self-defence”. America wasn’t being attacked by Syria.
The world now waits and watches with amply baited breath to see what Putin and Russia will say or do in response. Not for the first time, the hopes for continued (broad) peace in our time rest upon burly Russian shoulders and pragmatic Slavic restraint.
What has also become clear, since the missile launch, is that the American congress was not consulted or advised before the order to attack Syria was given. President Trump decided to make war upon another sovereign state unilaterally – apparently unconcerned that his decision was in clear contravention of Article One, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution which states that “[The Congress shall have Power…] To declare War” – not the President.
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there:
Oh, say! does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Around the end of January this year, a US Navy SEAL team , using armed Reaper drones for cover, carried out a commando raid in Yemen, attacking what the Americans said, was a compound harbouring officials of Al Qaeda .
The idea that “war is a racket” and that wars are fought to line the pockets of profiteers is part of a tradition that comes out of an ideological consensus that is so widespread as to be nearly invisible.
Trump’s claims that Hillary and Obama created ISIS (a statement he now claims was sarcasm) misses the target.
New Zealand’s participation in the Vietnam War, no matter how marginal, represented a shameful capitulation to American pressure. It was an immoral war which we should never have joined, and the idea of “celebrating” its fiftieth anniversary should be repugnant to all thinking New Zealanders.
13 years after the deeply flawed and divisive decision to invade Iraq as punishment for a group of Saudi’s who had no connection with Iraq flying planes into the World Trade Centre, the Chilcot report has finally been released and it paints a grim and disurbingly naive British and American leadership who went to war based on little more than ego and bullshit.
“We’re not insulated from the sort of thing that we saw in Orlando.” – Gerry Brownlee, re NZ extension of troop deployment in Iraq
