Obama Invites Tony Abbott To Disneyland

Poverty The Root Of All Evil

The recent Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan was an evocative illustration of how the great tragedies of our age stem from economic disparities that are untreatable with military or political misadventures. How the great powers refuse to address inequality, the root cause of the age of terrorism, at any cost.

Has it occurred to the reader that, almost exclusively, every lunatic Islamist terrorist is based in a country that does not have electricity or running water outside it’s capital? Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan are countries that are heart wrenchingly under resourced. They are the disowned second cousins of the international family.

These countries have people that are disenfranchised of every ‘ism’ you can throw a stone out. They are both disenfranchised citizens and consumers. They are the great unwashed who are thrown our crumbs.


In recent times the North effortlessly ignored them. With globalisation we dare not. The world’s people now view their personal situation in a much broader perspective. They look further than the village to assess what is right and what is wrong in their life.

The starving Sudanese farmer, whose crop has failed and whose family is victim to murderous bandits, can be convinced by militant opportunists that his situation is a sinister American sponsored plot. Twenty years ago the farmer would think anyone who made that claim had been hit on the head by a speeding rickshaw.


American Express gold card members are thin on the ground in Northern Sudan but intelligence is not the monopoly of the wealthy. With the penetration of cable television and Internet untold millions are now witness, in streaming video, to just how shamelessly ostracized they are by the players of global business and politics.

This also gives rise to jealousy, imagine underemployed Abdul, watching the hedonistic Kardashians on YouTube, in conjunction with the biting shame of poverty, you will have no dearth of combatants who will be spellbound by the teachings of prophets who envision a just world.

The West was all but consumed by this phenomena. Hitler prayed on the weak and feeble minded in the height of the Great Depression. Promising exactly what any Al Qeada propaganda officer, worth his salt, does today. Order in chaos. Bread for the poor. Expedited justice. A classless society. Above all, belonging. 

Post war, during the sixties, smelly opinionated students everywhere worshipped Che Guevara. The bearded violent revolutionary who did not hesitate to kill and imprison Cubans who detracted from an overwhelmingly radical philosophy.

He is responsible for the execution of hundreds of former regime members who didn’t perfectly fit his fundamentalist mold. Not dissimilar to another bewildered bearded prophet who killed scores of Americans who didn’t enroll in his cockeyed school of Islam.

Both Guevara and Bin Laden had philosophies that nourished themselves on the biting indignity of exploitation. The genesis of inequality. Bin Laden, who was as mad as a March hare, was the modern Guevara.  Same manure different bucket. Both figureheads of organisations that violently overreacted to what they believed was larger state sponsored violence.


Now with globalisation, the West has to contend not with a single strategically relevant population, that is easy pray to a master manipulator, but a matrix of impoverished communities plugged in to a network we all share.  London, Madrid, Bali and New York were horrific scenes of carnage that were born of philosophies nurtured in the backwaters of the world.  Countries that no longer are beyond reach or, as these crimes have evidenced, not beyond us being touched.


The North justifiably labels these crimes as terrorist but how long can they also see them as Jihadist or Communist or any other philosophy? A Somali identifies with Islam, and this is a readily available vehicle, but it is not the driver. As the American revolutionaries easily identified with an inflexible school of Christianity but they were driven by a desperate need to assert their rights that had been so shamelessly defiled by the Crown.

The war on terror, a stillborn idea from the fact you can’t wage battle against an emotion, should be a war against poverty. How many Talibanis could be arsed patrolling the deathly cold Khyber Pass if they could be at home watching football on a two metre wide plasma television, with a goat roasting in an oversized barbeque that looks like a milk factory. Or more seriously, how many Afghan patriots would pursue violence if their children had access to the same health services that Westerners afford their pets?

Giving violent misfits a middle class life would have cost a fraction of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have reportedly cost US Dollars $1,292,164,039,372.  If I’m not wildly off mark that is $1.2 trillion dollars. Thus far, the cost of the war in Afghanistan is $465,056,330,769, which I’m guessing is a lot of textbooks and hospital beds in any borough.

India’s own litany of mutinies is painted over with the same brush. In the Indian Government’s eyes Maoists are terrorists that need to be eliminated.  This is the easiest route as addressing the real problems of acute poverty, that is breeding armies of youth who literally have nothing to lose, is well and truly stuffed into the ‘too hard basket’. Bureaucrats studiously ignoring the numbing fact that hunger is the worst form of terrorism.

How different are the motives for Kashmiri Azadis? Nagas? ULFAS? How much of their revolutionary zeal is driven by ethnic and religious identity? How much of their hatred stems from suffering poverty?  From not having a ticket on the great Indian economic miracle?

With Governments internationally refusing to acknowledge the true motives behind terrorist behaviour how can they win this abstract war? If they want militant organisations to stop mushrooming should they stop keeping the South in the dark and feeding them shit?

Asia Pacific's Muggy Cold War

The endless run of Asia Pacific conferences attended by the region’s powers has founded a deeply troubling new paradigm.  With the US insisting that China must be contained by the multitude of smaller states that surround her.

Sound familiar? A muggy cold war? Beijing the new Moscow?

India plays no small part in this US obsession with the meteoric rise of China, who in ten years will enjoy a GDP that will surpass America’s. The State Department sees India as a wonderfully heavy counter weight to the Red menace.

This has manifested itself with Gillard declaring, without consulting Rudd, her Foreign Minister, who vehemently opposes the policy, that Australia will indeed supply India with Uranium. This was hot on the heels of Gillard meeting with Obama, Australia’s Commander-in-Chief in Hawaii.

The State Department will not be devastated by India being armed to the teeth with Nuclear weapons, vaguely pointed at Shanghai, and of course even less concerned if Indian manufacturing is better fueled by nuclear plants.

Obama and Gillard’s announcement of the establishment of a new US marine base in Darwin has ramifications. It embitters an Australian, Chinese relationship that means so much more to Australia than it does to China.

The Australian mining sector has a steadily increasing trade with India but it is still a fraction of the coal and ore exports to the devouring dragon. This establishment of the Marine base is a celebrated snub to China.  Australia really is playing with fire and has not appreciated just how catastrophic a Chinese response would be for this country.

For Chinese wealth is matching her military power but her real immediate power is economic. They are offended by Australia having a foreign policy that is lazily xeroxed from the US State Department. If China decided to flex her tail and discourage Chinese importers of Australian minerals then the US would be in no position what so ever to help.  Regardless of how many garrisons dot the coast.

If China does exert economic pressure then Australia will back track shamelessly and will strongly reassess her role in the effeminate constraining of China. She cannot afford to do otherwise, when elections are at stake ANZUS be damned.

Can India afford to help tame the dragon? High on the agenda, in this long season of expensive talk shops, was the fact that China has laid claim to the better part of the South China Sea.

This area is sickly rich in oil.  India’s thirst for black gold is desperate. India is increasing her reach in exploration by scouting for new partners in the region. This Chinese claim of the Sea confidently challenges that. It will be strongly in India’s’ interests to side with the region’s powers against this stake.

The Chinese claim has also scared the living daylights out of the US. Her navies 7^th Fleet have used the South China Sea as her own by perpetually patrolling the area for decades in enormous convoys.

Paul Keating, the former Prime Minister of Australia,  very recently made the observation that China had good grounds for this claim as the predicted US reaction to the equivalent, the Chinese Navy patrolling off the coast of Florida, would not be polite.

I am of the mind that it should not be a given that India side against China. In fact India should take a leaf out of Lee Kwan Yew’s, Singapore’s former dictator, wizened diplomacy. My Father asked him why he let the Russian fleet in after the Americans fleet had barely just set sail out of Singapore’s docks. “Oh David, you are so young.”

He was a Statesman who knew how to play each superpower off each other.  I believe India could benefit enormously from this.  One month Washington’s darling and the next up for anything with Beijing.  India must not be bullied into playing this counter weight role to China just because it fits the US’s motives so beautifully.

India should not get involved in this game that is the same manure in a different bucket. For all the buzz that this is a new Asia Pacific stand off; China and the US have a long and bloody relationship in our region.  Korea, Malaya and Vietnam were deathly conflicts that extinguished millions of civilian’s lives and Korea ploughed the ground for future global nuclear war. This is plainly evident in North and South Korea.

Comically, the US’s Asia Pacific policy during those conflicts was  strongly motivated by their determination for Communism to not threaten the capitalist way of life. Now their motivation is to stop China being so shamelessly capitalist and threatening the US’s entrenched policy of living beyond her means.  Which, co-incidentally, is only made possible by China being, by far, the largest buyer of US treasury bonds.

India has it’s own destiny to reclaim and cannot be distracted by signing up as the US’s wingman in this fast developing geopolitical nightmare.