The War They Sold Us, The Bill We’re Paying
Dr Andrew Klein is right. The War They Sold Us, The Price We Pay, Australia has quietly signed up to another illegal war on Iran and, with customary discretion, sent the invoice straight to its own citizens. We are already paying. At the bowser. At the checkout. At the chemist. The meter is running long before the government has bothered to explain why it switched it on. Even if it could.
This is how modern war arrives. Not with declarations, not with debate, but with a price rise and a press conference. The explosions come later. The explanation, if it comes at all, arrives last and reads like a pamphlet for a product nobody ordered.
We also pay in subtler currency. In the steady domestication of war as background noise. In the way catastrophe is repackaged as content, mined for its dopamine yield, a bridge collapsing in slow motion, an oil rig burning through the night, a grainy clip of impact replayed until it acquires the sheen of inevitability. War as spectacle. War as story. War as something other people do, until it turns up in your petrol bill.
The Australian War Memorial, now politely underwritten by arms manufacturers, completes the lesson. BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Thales. The merchants of death have not so much crashed the party as taken out a sponsorship package.
Remembrance, but make it corporate. Lest we forget, brought to you by the people who ensure there is always something to remember.
Meanwhile in Washington, Donald Trump and sneaky-Pete Hegseth compete to see who can sound most upbeat about lethality, like teenagers comparing horsepower. Bombing a country “into the Stone Ages” an unconscious but not entirely gratuitous reminder of the carpet-bombing of North VietNam is delivered as a punchline, a distraction from the latest domestic scandal, a line designed to travel. It is not strategy. It is not policy. It is performance. Yet Canberra treats it as if it were scripture.
We are told this is about deterrence. About stability. About preventing proliferation. We are always told this. Deterrence has become the diplomatic equivalent of “because I said so”. But deterrence without legal authority is simply pre-emptive war in a better suit. The United Nations Charter permits force in self-defence against an imminent threat, or with Security Council approval. Neither condition has been satisfied. To support such a war without asking that question is not prudence. It is obedience.
Yet our complicity did not begin with the first missile. It was preloaded. The decision was not just rushed; it was rehearsed, the latest turn in a relationship already militarised, already embedded, already incapable of saying no. An unlovely history hums beneath it. Our sycophancy is bipartisan. It has led us here before. It will lead us here again.
Australia’s “great and powerful friendship” now looks less like an alliance and more like a folie à deux, a shared delusion in which one partner sets the fires and the other holds the hose, congratulating itself on its sense of responsibility.
There was no pause for law. No insistence on evidence. Within hours of the first strikes, Prime Minister Albanese offered support. Foreign Minister Penny Wong declined even the courtesy of scrutiny, leaving it to the United States and Israel to explain the legal basis for their own actions. This is not diplomacy. It is ventriloquism with better tailoring.
The government that speaks endlessly of integrity treats the endorsement of war as if it were a diary entry. The legality is not tested. It is outsourced. The rules-based order is invoked like a hymn sung loudly enough to drown out the sound of the rules themselves being broken.
Complicity, But With Good Manners
If a war begins without clear legal authority and proceeds to strike civilian infrastructure, then support for that war is not neutral. It is participatory. International humanitarian law does not cease to exist because it is inconvenient to allies. Those who assist in serious violations may themselves bear responsibility. This is not radical. It is basic.
And assistance is precisely what is occurring. Intelligence sharing. Joint facilities. Interoperability so seamless it dissolves the distinction between ally and actor. When targeting data flows through shared systems, when surveillance feeds are integrated into operational decisions, Australia is not a bystander. It is part of the firing chain.
Pine Gap and the Useful Fiction of Distance
Pine Gap is often described as a listening post, which is a little like describing a power station as a light bulb. It is infrastructure. It is integration. It is the physical expression of a relationship in which distance is rhetorical and involvement is structural.
For decades, analysts from Dr Helen Caldicott to Des Ball and Richard Tanter have explained its role. Recent reporting has filled in the details. Satellite arrays. Signals intelligence. Real-time targeting capability. A system that does not observe war so much as enable it. We are helping Tomahawk missiles find their way into a children’s playground, a hospital or an ambulance depot.
Which makes Canberra’s occasional requests for “clarification” from Washington read like theatre reviews of a play in which it is already on stage. The explanation is not forthcoming because it is unnecessary. It is already baked into the system. Into the agreements. Into the quiet understanding that some questions are not asked because everyone knows the answer.
Australia keeps its eyes politely lowered, its bases open, its systems engaged, and calls this prudence. It is, in fact, participation with plausible deniability.
The Habit of Following
This is not new. It is ritual. VietNam, Iraq. Afghanistan. The same sequence, repeated with minor variations. Alignment first. Scrutiny later. Regret, if it arrives at all, delivered long after the damage is done and the architects have retired to write their memoirs.
We have perfected the art of joining wars we do not need to fight, for reasons that dissolve under inspection, in pursuit of credibility that never quite materialises. We call it loyalty. Others might call it habit.
We follow. We facilitate. We absorb the consequences. Then we explain, with great seriousness, that the decision was made elsewhere.
AUKUS and the Theology of Dependence
AUKUS is sold as strategy. It often reads as faith. A $368 billion act of belief in a future fleet of already obsolete submarines, we will struggle to crew, maintain or deploy, tied to a strategic doctrine we do not control, in conflicts we do not choose.
The Indo-Pacific framing flatters Australia with the illusion of centrality. In practice, it locks us into dependency. If the United States is stretched across multiple theatres, its commitments multiplying faster than its capacity, what exactly are we aligning ourselves with? Strength? Or strain?
A navy we cannot fully sustain, guarding sea lanes we cannot guarantee, in wars we do not declare. That is not sovereignty. It is folly, an epic and darkly comic absurdity that could be an epilogue to Waiting For Godot, 2.0.
The Bill Arrives Early
The economic consequences do not wait for the shooting to stop. Fuel reserves fall below recommended levels. Prices climb. Supply chains tighten. Farmers hesitate. Pharmacists ration. The abstractions of strategy resolve into the concrete arithmetic of shortage.
Thirty-nine days of petrol. Then what.
The government responds with monitoring, reviews, taskforces. The familiar liturgy of control. But the decisions that matter have already been taken elsewhere, in rooms to which Australia is invited only after the fact, if at all.
Meanwhile, the social cost accumulates. External conflict refracted through domestic politics. Suspicion, division, the quiet narrowing of who belongs. War does not stay offshore. It arrives in language, in policy, in the spaces where cohesion is invoked and quietly undermined.
The Question We Avoid
Was it worth it? The question is asked as if the answer might still be in doubt. The more difficult question is why it was done at all. Why a government would endorse a war without clear legal foundation, led by an administration defined by volatility, run by grifters and billionaire bros with consequences already measurable at home?
Why it was done without consent? Why the lessons of previous wars remain politely unlearned? Why the reflex to align survives every failure that should have extinguished it?
The “grifters and billionaire bros” are the Pozzos of the world – men who own the rope, drive the slave, and check their watch every five minutes to see if they are still important. They don’t do it for a “clear legal foundation”; they do it because the exercise of power is the only thing that convinces them they exist.
As Lucky might conclude, it was done for the sake of the “quaquaquaqua” – the noise we make to drown out the fact that the road is empty and Godot is never coming.
If those questions cannot be answered, then the answer is already in front of us. Alliance over autonomy. Secrecy over scrutiny. Habit over judgement. Inertia rules, OK?
We have chosen the alliance. We have accepted the war. We will inherit the consequences. The bill is already in the mail – our boots are well and truly on, and under, the ground.
Footnote: North Vietnam was subjected to some of the heaviest bombing in military history, with over 1 million tons of bombs and missiles dropped by the U.S. during campaigns like Operation Rolling Thunder. From 1965 to 1968, roughly 32 tons of bombs fell every hour, significantly exceeding the total ordnance used in the Pacific theatre of WWII
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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Started with the Yanks saving us from the Japs, and then the 1951 Anzus Treaty,which has progressively locked us in by a succession of third rate politicians prostrating themselves before our ‘great and powerful’ friend.
Whitlam tried to change it,and that ended badly,consequently every government since has studiously avoided upsetting the septics, and here we are, the unofficial 51st State of the USA.
Albanese, demonstrably timid on so many fronts, is not the bloke for the job in hand,so we’ll continue to be a handy forward military staging post…against our biggest trading partner.
If this story was a work of fiction, it would hit the remainder bin double quick.
There is a historical case (or many) to suggest that this Australia was badly founded, developed, raised, befriended by molesters, while we developed badly, owned and controlled, associated with criminalities, used and abused, breaded and circussed to the limit…Real maturity, freedoms, fairness, balance, sense, foresight, all this awaits our slumbering awareness. Can we do better, and together?
P.P. I’m convinced that we couldn’t do worse! This Australian government doesn’t understand the value of the principle of independent national sovereignty.
URBAN WRONSKI Ya nailed it – Utterly !!!
Harry Lime, thank you. Thank you. That is exactly the arc, isn’t it. What begins as dependency gets repackaged as alliance, then hardened into habit, until eventually obedience passes for realism.
ANZUS has long since ceased to be sold to Australians as a bargain between sovereign equals. It is presented instead as a kind of strategic theology. America protects. Australia complies. Our political class genuflects and calls it prudence.
Whitlam understood, however imperfectly, that a country which cannot think independently cannot act independently. The lesson drawn from his fate was not that Australia needed more courage, but that every successor should keep Washington sweet at almost any cost. Since then, too many of our leaders have preferred the safety of subordination to the risks of sovereignty.
So yes, here we are: a convenient platform, a useful depot, a forward operating accessory dressed up as a nation making its own choices. And all of it now pointed, with a kind of sleepwalking bravado, at the very country on which so much of our prosperity depends.
You are right about Albanese, too. Timidity is not a strategy. Nor is silence. Yet both have become defining habits of our political caste.
And yes, if you pitched this as fiction, an editor would send it back as implausible. Too derivative, too unbelievable, too lacking in credible motivation. But as Australian foreign policy, it passes for mature statecraft.
Changes are afoot as the consequences of alliance with the “Regime-Changers”, Israel and its captive master, the US. Some oil-tankers are being allowed passage through the Straits of Hormuz. Not Australia.
One thing which doesn’t often get a mention is how the Americans – when defeated – leave behind their legacy in the form of vast numbers of unexploded ordance in all the places they have been.
A quick look at statistics shows that over 1,000 deaths have occurred in Vietnam and Cambodia since 1975 due to the huge areas of contaminated land where there is thought to be 800,000 tons of unexploded ordnance.
Similarly , Iraq is contaminated by , thought to be, 20 million land mines and up to 6 million UXO right across Iraq which is the legacy of two wars there- the Gulf War and then later, the war against ISIS (2014-2017). These deadly items don’t just kill and maim people, they also kill goats, camels and sheep as well as all the non-domesticated animals.
Afghanistan is considered to be one of the world’s most heavily contaminated countries with unexploded ordnance. The war there has left over 1000, sq. kilometres of live ordnance which claims the lives of around 50 people – 80% of them children- every month.
America has gone merrily on its way to pollute the Middle East for generations to come and to never make reparations to clean up the mess and danger they leave behind.
I am disgusted that places like Pine Gap and other American military interests occupy Australia at all.
Interesting onshore regarding complications of sovereignty, arm manufacturers, outsourcing security and an orange baboon with team in the White House.
One would caution indie media who are contrary to the RW MSM, but share same sources of slightly different US agitprop and ‘analysis’ from think tanks and faux anti-imperialist grifter writers, while avoiding credible expert sources.
An example is rather than going direct, using and synthesising expert sources, is lazy deference to US media, think tanks and corporate supporters’ strategy; following greenwashing of fossil fuels and anti-immigrant bigotry for past generation (see late Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich & white nationalist John Tanton of ZPG Zero Population Growth, supported by the Rockefeller Bros. Fund*).
Example is one indie outlet blaming or accusing of being complicit, the ALP government for the war against Iran while disappearing the local allies of Trump, Netanyahu et al?
Same outlet relies on another media outlet (cut out?) which channels the US MEI Mid East Institute in Washington populated mostly by white Christian conservatives whose corporate supporters are arms manufacturers and fossil fuels including Rockefeller Bros. Fund*…..
Why so easy? Because Oz media has become like the US where it’s about disappearing anything positive about the centre and give it a pummeling.. too easy, cross between the Footy Show and Fox News making demands on a government for instant gratification, without any plan of action, see Trump and Iran…..
Michael Wests round up says it well….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO-CJo8Cleo