Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Wednesday, 16 March 2016

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Isherwood: Reject US militarisation of Australia

Citizens Electoral Council National Secretary Craig Isherwood made the following remarks in response to plans enunciated by US Air Force Gen. Lori Robinson, of the United States Pacific Command, for an expanded “rotation” of US forces—including nuclear-capable B1 strategic bombers—in northern Australia, supposedly provoked by the “seriousness of the tone that is being set by China’s militarisation of the South China Sea”.

“How stupid does the US government think Australians are?” asked Isherwood. “Or our own government, for that matter? This has nothing to do with ‘upholding international law’, and everything to do with threatening China with war.

“Let’s consider a few simple facts. First: the international law concerning ‘freedom of navigation’ is called the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea—and the United States has never ratified it! So when US officials bluster that ‘we will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows’, they are claiming privileges attendant to a treaty their own government rejects, while telling everyone else to obey rules that they insist do not apply to themselves.

“Secondly: the week before last, the USS John C. Stennis, a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, spent five days tooling around the eastern part of the South China Sea accompanied by its ‘Carrier Strike Group’—two Aegis guided-missile destroyers, one guided-missile cruiser, and a ‘fast combat support’ supply ship; the US Pacific Command and the Obama Administration have indicated that many more such missions are to follow. Those boats between them carry enough manpower, firepower and air support to blockade every shipping lane, board or sink every vessel, and invade, occupy, or bomb any island for hundreds of square miles. This is the threat to ‘freedom of navigation’! And the main purpose of Aegis destroyers is to penetrate onshore defences, knock out the target’s nuclear first-strike capability, and deliver a nuclear strike of their own; they are billed as a ‘missile defence system’, but are just about the most offensive weapons in the world. As for the B1 long-range bombers we are being asked to host, their only purpose is to lay waste to vast areas of countryside—primarily with nuclear weapons.

“China, on the other hand, has stationed a surface-to-air missile battery on, and allegedly flown fighter jets over, an island its citizens have inhabited since the 1950s—as have other countries, on the islands they claim. And—also like most other countries in the region—China has turned a handful of submerged stone reefs into artificial islands; upon these it has constructed runways, port and storage facilities, and lighthouses. So who, exactly, is doing the ‘militarising’ around here?”

Mr Isherwood rejected Gen. Robinson’s notion of a “rotational deployment” as a transparent fraud. “Call it what you will”, he said, “the United States is planning a permanent military presence on our soil. It’s the same ruse they have employed in the Philippines for years, in violation of that nation’s Constitution. Filipino patriots aren’t buying it, either—but you won’t hear that from the Australian news media, because we’re supposed to believe that the poor defenceless Philippines is desperate to have Uncle Sam protect it from neighbourhood bully China.

“In truth, China and ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, are perfectly capable of sorting out their differences for themselves, the same way the Chinese have resolved seemingly intractable border disputes with Russia, India, Mongolia and others over the years: via peacefully negotiated, mutually beneficial settlements, and not the bellicose bluster, shows of military force, and threats—not to mention regime-change operations and outright invasions—beloved of the Anglo-American neo-cons who have hijacked US foreign policy in recent decades, including under Obama. The infamous 1992 US Defence Planning Guidance, the so-called ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’, stated their agenda: that the USA ‘must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’. This, the more recent Revolution in Military Affairs/‘Air-Sea Battle’ doctrine, and Obama’s ‘Asia Pivot’ are all explicitly aimed at ‘containing’ China.

“This latest proposal to station long-range bombers in the Northern Territory is nothing but the final step of a process that has been going on for decades: turning Australia into an unsinkable aircraft carrier for a war on China. This is exactly what the late Malcolm Fraser was talking about when he dubbed the United States and the UK Australia’s ‘dangerous allies’: we are painting a nuclear bullseye on our heads for no reason except to preserve a post-WWII Anglo-American-led global order that is declining economically and thus resorting to its only advantage to maintain hegemony—military might.

“China is a target because, alongside its BRICS partner Russia, it is leading the world away from the death-march imposed by the City of London and Wall Street, and into a new, more just order based on national sovereignty and peace through economic development, as embodied in the world-spanning ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative, long known to CEC members as the World Land-Bridge. Australia, and indeed all nations, have been invited to join this global renaissance, and join it we must—or collapse into a new dark age of our own making. Will there be teething troubles along the way? Almost certainly—and we will solve them with dialogue and cooperation, not geopolitics and nuclear missiles.”

Click here for a free copy of the Australian Alert Service, the CEC’s weekly magazine reporting on the fight to free Australia and all nations from the control of the City of London and Wall Street.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

Click here to refer others to receive regular email updates from the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia.