Monday, October 20, 2003

Australia's Governor General backs pre-emptive war and Vietnam war: This is a disgrace, Howard's second appointment is worse than his first, the pedophile-protecting priest, if that's possible. The least the Governor-General could have done was taken note of the huge protests against the war earlier this year, the statement from Kofi Annan that the war was without UN sanctio, the statement from Hans Blix that Iraq had no WMDs, the fact that the war has been a fiasco, and had the sense to keep his mouth shut.

The Vietnam war destroyed 3 countries and killed an estimated 2-3m Indochinese, 58,000 Americans and 500 Australians, for no gain whatever. It was in large part based on a lie as well, the Gulf of Tonkin 'incident'. The Iraq war, of course, is yet to conclude, but it is plain as can be it was based on a mammoth lie, the alleged WMDs and terror links. A similar lie is that instead of fighting nationalist resistance to imperialist and colonialist powers, the war on Iraq is falsely described as a 'war on terror' just as Vietnam was falsely described as 'war on communism'. It is revealing, yet sad, that 40 years later senior people seem to have learned nothing.

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