British Troop Redeployment, Australian Troop Addition. Britain announced this past week that it would be withdrawing troops from its zone of occupation, in the Shiite area of southern Iraq. The British government said that conditions were so improved there that its troops could go to Afghanistan instead.
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If Blair is sincere about wanting to help bring peace to Iraq, he should be redeploying British troops northward to help in Baghdad, Anbar Province, and other areas still in tumult. If Blair does not help out where help is really needed, what kind of ally is he?
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Britain is planning to withdraw some 1,600 troops from Iraq and redeploy about 1,000 of those to Afghanistan. The claim is that they aren't needed in southern Iraq now. The reality may be different. According to the Los Angeles Times two days ago:

[The redeployment] was widely seen Wednesday as a telling admission that the British military could no longer sustain simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The British military is approaching "operational failure," former defense staff chief Charles Guthrie warned this week.

"It's either [move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan], or you risk in some ways losing both," he said. "It's the classic case of 'Let's declare victory and get out.'

Perhaps Bush should try that. If Blair can get away with it, why not Bush?
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Is Britain pulling its own weight? Britain has about 60 million people overall, and will after this redeployment have at most 7,500 troops in Iraq and 6,000 in Afghanistan, for a total of less than 14,000. The U.S. has about 140,000 troops in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan, for a total of 158,000 (from what I can determine by Internet search). If we had the same level of representation, per capita, as Britain, we'd have 70,000 troops total in both places. Put the other way around, if Britain had the same representation per capita as we, they'd have 31,600 troops in the field, more than twice what they have actually fielded.
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Barack Obama asked a question of the same sort about Australia after the stupid, meddling Prime Minister of Australia said that Obama's call for the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq sent the wrong message, and that Americans should therefore reject Obama's bid for the presidency. Obama responded that if Australia is so adamant about the importance of staying the course in Iraq and seeing to it that Iraq achieves a stable democracy and does not become a haven for terrorists, Australia should send more troops to Iraq. Put your guns where your mouth is, as it were.
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Well, Australia is talking about increasing its forces in Iraq, by 70. That is not a typo. 70. Not 700, not 7,000, not 70,000. 70. The total Australian contribution to this Iraq effort that Howard says is so important is around 1,400. It has another 550 or so troops in Afghanistan, and is talking of increasing its contribution by another 530 or so. Let's see how that compares to the U.S. engagement, per capita.
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Australia has about 1/15th our population. Divide the U.S. troop level in Iraq and Afghanistan (c. 158,000) by 15 and you get 10,533. Australia's actual contribution will, after increases in Afghanistan, total around 2,500, 1/4 the per capita contribution the U.S. is making. Australia talks mighty proud for a country that is doing so little.
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Australia has been in the news a lot more, lately, than usual. Ordinarily, if we hear anything at all from Australia in six months, that's a lot. Now, the Australian Prime Minister's hawkish comments, and criticisms of his stance by the leader of the opposition, have made U.S. news several times. And U.S. Vice President Cheney is currently on a visit to Australia, from which he is attacking various Democratic candidates for President. Interesting timing.
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You see, I posted only February 15th the first presentation on Australia to be hosted on the website of the Expansionist Party of the United States ("XP"). "Australian-U.S. Union, a Personal View", by Bill Dekmetzian of Hobart, Tasmania, advocates that Australia join the Union. Were Australia part of the United States and entitled to vote for President, the remarks by John Howard, its present Prime Minister (an office that would vanish into history), would be legitimate political debate instead of the intolerable foreign interference in our elections that it is now. Howard could even challenge for the Presidency himself — assuming that the annexation of Australia were accomplished by treaty that provides that anyone who acquired Australian citizenship by birth would be deemed to have acquired U.S. citizenship by birth, and thus be eligible to run for President.
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Dekmetzian, the author of XP's presentation, is concerned that the case of David Hicks, an Australian held captive by the Bush Administration in Guantanamo, is poisoning Australian attitudes toward the U.S. Melbourne's distinguished newspaper, The Age, reported the appearance of Hicks's American lawyer today in South Australia:

In Adelaide to have talks with Hicks' family, Maj Mori used [a] rally, entitled David Hicks - Where to now?, to criticise the Australian government's support of the military commission system created to try Guantanamo Bay detainees. * * *

"The new system, like the old system, cannot be used to try Americans and that can be the very first signal that it is not a fair system," Maj Mori said.

"If it is not fair enough for an American citizen then how is it fair enough for an Australian? It is not."

Two points emerge plainly. (1) If Australians wish to gain release for David Hicks, they must first get their own government to reverse its stance that the imprisonment of detainees in Guantanamo and their subjection to military tribunals is just fine, which it has not done. And (2) if Australia were part of the United States, Mr. Hicks could not be tried by military tribunal.
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Australia is independent of the United States only by accident of history. In World War II, the U.S. almost certainly could have forced Australia to join the Union as a condition for sending U.S. forces to defend Australia against Japan, which was roaring near. For reasons that escape me, FDR made no such demand.
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There has been some talk in historical circles recently that Winston Churchill proposed union of Britain and France in World War II, and even that France's Premier Guy Mollet proposed merger a second time, to British PM Anthony Eden in 1956, to keep both independent of the Soviet Union and United States. See, for example, this mention in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, which discusses not only that proposal but others:

But proposals for Anglo-French unity are not new.

Winston Churchill, in a last-ditch attempt to keep France on the side of the Allies in World War II, appealed for a full union of the two nations in June of 1940.

After the war, Ernest Bevin, Britain's foreign secretary, also toyed with the idea of a "Western Union", a European - and African - bloc led by Britain and France.

None of that happened, exactly, tho the EU's Lomé Convention; and later Cotonou Agreement have created a neo-colonial 'community' of former colonies with their former overlords.
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Apparently, Charles de Gaulle in 1940 was prepared to accept union of Britain and France, because German Panzer divisions were rolling across France. But once France had a new, German-installed government, the plan hadn't a chance, at the one point in time it might have happened, the WWII emergency.
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The U.S. wasn't thinking expansively in World War II. Everything was defense. FDR made no annexation demands upon Australia as a condition to the U.S. saving it from imminent conquest by the exploding Empire of Japan, and even allied us with the Soviet Union, a deal that led to catastrophe for East Europe and then the planet, as wartime alliance turned to Cold War, with a nuclear arms race and many hot-spot proxy wars.
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Perhaps we can do, in peacetime, what we didn't do in wartime, add Australia to our Union. But perhaps we shouldn't call this "peacetime", when both Australia and the United States have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both are fiting a "War on Terror". Might this new war spur a political union that, as far as I can see, would have no downside? Time will tell.
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Americans should pay more attention to Australia. It might be voting for President someday.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,154 — for Israel.)



- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:26 PM