The pro-war case sinks to a new low in today’s Oz. David Martin-Jones wants to nail Australian opponents of war with Iraq with hypocrisy because they supported intervention in East Timor without UN authorisation. The only problem is he can’t find anyone to pin the tag on, apart from unnamed Sydney demonstrators who accused Howard of being “In bed with genocide” (a slogan which could equally refer to Australia’s long-standing complicity in the illegal occupation of East Timor), and (also unnamed) figures in the ALP who wanted Howard to “do something”. As far as I know, no significant public figure in Australia advocated a military intervention to forcibly eject the Indonesians, even in the period of militia rampages after the referendum, and of course, the actual intervention took place only after the Indonesians had announced their withdrawal.

In fact, it’s Martin-Jones who’s the hypocrite here. Suharto was an evil dictator who invaded a neighboring country in defiance of the UN and murdered hundreds of thousands of people in both Indonesia and East Timor. The moral case for an invasion to overthrow him was just as strong as the case against Saddam, but we didn’t hear it from Martin-Jones or, as far as I know, from anyone currently supporting war. Of course, the practical arguments against an invasion were so overwhelmingly strong (militarily risky, bound to generate hostility in the region and resentment of occupying forces, likely to lead to the breakup of the country etc) that no-one even contemplated it, but people like Martin-Jones contemptuously dismiss similar concerns in relation to Iraq.

(As someone will doubtless point out, there’s still the separate issue of WMDs, but the US case here has fallen to pieces – the only reasonable argument for invasion is based on the nature and history of Saddam’s regime).