Rudd heads to Washington and reaffirms war policy

Vanguard October 2010 p. 2
David B

Foreign Minister Rudd had hardly been signed into the Ministry before he went for a cosy stroll with US Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich. No paradigm shift here. The reality of imperialism’s rule and the Australian government dependence remains.

His next move was to jump on a 747 heading to Pakistan, and then on to the prime Foreign Affairs destination of Washington, to pay homage to the imperial masters.

Afghanistan election farce
While Rudd was glad-handing in Washington, Afghans were being murdered in an election farce in Kabul.

More than 1,000 of the 6,835 polling stations were ordered closed before the poll took place. Of 17.5 million registered voters, just 4 million took part. Many of the votes cast are expected to have been fraudulent as were more than a million in last year’s Presidential poll.

Foreign poll observer teams were a fraction of last year’s; as few as 7 from the European Community. The result will build on the corrupted outcome of the presidential poll last year. In that poll, at hundreds of polling stations, one candidate received 100% of the vote. Most were in the south east, in Hamid Karzai’s strongholds particularly.

While the election farce proceeded, the President’s brother Mahmoud was at the centre of a banking scandal in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been loaned off the books by the Kabul Bank with no action by the central Afghan Bank. This is typical of the carpet-bagging traitors serving in the American sponsored regime.

The Afghanistan commitment of 1550 Australian diggers has cost 20 diggers lives, with many more injured.

It has also cost thousands of Afghan lives in bloody occupation. It all has the new Gillard Labor government’s support. The new Foreign Minister pathetically reassured his American hosts that Australian troops were in Afghanistan “until the job is done”.

Labor’s leaders have wasted no time renewing their commitment to a foreign policy of dependence with the US Alliance at its core. It deeply engages Australia in imperialist interference and aggression in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions, in Central and North Asia, hosting military and intelligence bases for the US.

The government also remains a cipher of the US in international climate change diplomacy, targeting China and India in particular, and providing cover for American and Australian inaction. Rudd excelled in that role in Copenhagen, making his contribution to its failure.

In the region, the Australian government continues to interfere and bully East Timor, the Pacific Islands and Papua New Guinea. Troop and police deployments are common and continue in the Solomon Islands. It is a shameful policy approach based on aggression and war, servility to US imperialism, sacrificing many young Australian lives, the lives of many thousands in occupied countries, as well as goodwill in the wider world.

No more support for American wars – get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines
No US Alliance – no foreign military bases on Australian soil