By Darryl Mason
The staff cutbacks at The Australian are starting to bite. The lead editorial yesterday in the once psychopathically pro-Iraq War minded newspaper :
The editor of The Australian is clearly working under tight budgetary limitations. What other reason can there be for such blatant recycling of old arguments against the Iraq War voiced by hundreds of thousands of Australians, and hundreds of millions of people around the world?
While there is no doubting the moral and strategic sense of the war to liberate Iraq from the despicable despotism of Saddam Hussein, the campaign there took resources and attention away the first front in the war on terror.
With money and good management, Afghanistan may yet be the front where terrorism is decisively defeated.
The kind of morality that results in unimaginable chaos, the finishing off of already debilitated infrastructure, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, entire families full of children, thousands of doctors, civil servants, teachers, university professors, nurses and the creation of more than 3 million refugees.
The Australian newspaper, you may remember, joined the rest of the Murdoch national and worldwide media empire's downright nasty and sick assault on those who said Afghanistan was where Al Qaeda came from and so that was where the war should be fought, and that winding back in Afghanistan, after so much progress, to attack and invade and occupy Iraq was downright fucking insane.
The people who, back in late 2002 and early 2003, made all those kinds of arguments against the War On Iraq - including millions of World War I & II and Korea and Vietnam veterans in Australia, the US and the UK - were unanimously portrayed by Murdoch's newspaper and television empire as being pro-terrorist and supporters of Saddam Hussein.
And now, six years later, The Australian newspaper tries to justify its backing of the 2002 turning away from Afghanistan to ramp up the War On Iraq for "moral" reasons? Strategic reasons? So Iran can become the dominant nation in the region, and the United States can pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to brutal Sunni fighters to stop them killing American soldiers?
Is the editor of The Australian typing over a bucket of ether?
The editor of The Australian and Rupert Murdoch can go and fuck themselves.
They lied to Australians, day after day, weeks into months, about a threat that didn't exist, cramming headlines with absolute bullshit pro-war propaganda, while ignoring the obvious truth that hundreds of thousands of other Australians seemed to have no problem locating online for themselves.
The Australian newspaper's complicity in helping to manufacture the reality for a senseless war that killed hundreds of thousands of people will never be forgotten.
