Byron Shire Echo – Issue 30.24 – 25/11/2015 by Echo Publications

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Turnbull defies the hotheads on Syria

Volume 30 #24

November 25, 2015

Renewables to rule? For an obviously bright man Malcolm Turnbull is not behaving like one in his ongoing support of more coal mining, especially the ghastly spectre of Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine in Queensland. A friendship – complicity? – with big old-school business and outdated xenophobia has squashed the common sense needed to face the new century in most of the members of the Libs/Nats/Labs as they insist on believing coal is good and that refugees should be detained in overseas hellholes. They run close to the lunatic American Republicans in their denial of reality. Fortunately the Greens have thrown down the gauntlet by declaring in a new policy that our nation could be powered by 90 per cent renewables by 2030, only 15 years away. Given the ‘ordinary’ Australians’ enthusiastic uptake of solar and other renewables, the Greens run the risk of getting a lot of votes at the next federal election. You can check out the Greens’ Clean Energy Roadmap at http://greens.org.au/clean-energy-roadmap. Long-term commentator on clean energy, Giles Parkinson, notes on his Reneweconomy website that ‘even the conservative The International Energy Agency has said that renewable energy and energy efficiency – the two fundamental planks of the Greens policy – can account for nearly three-quarters of required emissions reductions’. However, Parkinson is pessimistic about the change coming about: ‘The reason it won’t happen is that the Greens would not get into power fast enough to effect that change. Even a power sharing arrangement with Labor couldn’t achieve its policy goals, because Labor – despite its proposed 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030 – remains too wedded to the fossil fuel industry.’ It’s a likely scenario but one that I wish Parkinson has got wrong. It requires the full force of an energy-enlightened public – and some fierce input from El Niño this summer – to steer the major parties on a new course. Part of that will be in people abandoning the major energy providers in favour of standalone systems or in supporting new green enterprises like the Enova Energy project (enovaenergy.com.au) proposed for the northern rivers. A last-ditch, people-powered initiative to make world leaders see sense at the Paris climate summit from November 30 on is the global Peoples’ Climate March peoplesclimate.org. au. Obviously the large-scale adoption of renewable energy is crucial to the cause of keeping the planet at a human-habitable temperature. Byron Shire will be participating in the march this coming Sunday November 29 at 10am in Railway Park, Byron Bay, with music and (hopefully short) speeches, followed by a march to the beach at 11.15am, where a photo of a ‘human sign’ will become part of a submission by lobby group Avaaz. See more details and how to help out on the Facebook page ‘Climate Action Day in Byron Bay!’ Michael McDonald

ony Abbott has developed a new strategy to solve the problems of the Middle East: put in the boot. Quite a few boots, actually; boots on the ground. Our former great war leader wants to let loose the Special Air Service regiment to move into Syria (with some local troops, of course, if any can be persuaded) and sort out ISIS for good. In other weeks this would have been dismissed as a gungho thought bubble, but in the wake of the Paris atrocities it has gained a certain resonance: if the Jihadists refuse to play by Queensberry rules, why should we? Bomb them back to the stone age. Tear the place apart brick by brick, raze it to the ground and sow salt in the earth. Invade in vast numbers – Americans, Russians, Iranians, French, Australians, New Zealanders, Heard Islanders – anyone we can find. Shoot first and ask questions later – in fact, don’t ask questions at all. Degrade, destroy, demolish. Let’s finish the bastards for ever. Of course, there will be a few unfortunate consequences, such as massive collateral damage, but hey, them’s the breaks. If ISIS doesn’t worry about civilian deaths, why should we? Fair’s fair. It’s just a kind of moral equivalence. But the rather more concerning consequence is, what happens next? When the blood has dried and the dust has settled, just what is left? Well, presumably the person Malcolm Turnbull has called a murderous tyrant, Bashar alAssad. If there are any rebels left in Syria, the Russians and Iranians can do the mopping up for him, and if they have had enough, he will be quite

happy to do the job himself. Having slaughtered about a quarter of a million of his own people, Assad will have no qualms about butchering the remnants. And let’s be brutally realistic, Assad is not all bad: he protected Christian minorities – at least the ones who behaved. So, in the name of stability, he has to stay unless and until someone can persuade him to leave, which will not be any time soon. This, of course, is roughly the course Turnbull and Barack Obama are proposing, but without the intervening carnage: cut straight to the po-

The fact that foreign troops are intervening is part of the problem, not part of the solution. by Mungo MacCallum litical solution. Not only would that save countless lives, but it would avoid the festering hate and resentment a huge escalation of the western invasion of the country would leave as a sore ready to erupt for the next wave of extremist fanatics. But it’s pretty wimpy – some call it appeasement, the policy of the despised Neville Chamberlain at Munich. The Tony Abbott model is far more hairy-chested. The problem is, of course, that it will almost certainly not work. It would involve not a clean, surgical strike at ISIS, but a long and messy campaign fought town by town, street by street, house by house, and we all know from the bitter lessons of Vietnam how futile this can be against a well-resourced and well-organised guerrilla force. Even identifying the enemy would be near impossible in

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10 November 25, 2015 The Byron Shire Echo

cent history.’ And he went further: ‘The critical thing is the outcome of what you do and plainly a political settlement is the objective; it is enormously difficult, you know the enmities run very deep. But plainly when you look at Daesh or ISIL, its base is a Sunni population that has felt disenfranchised or oppressed in Syria – and with good reason – and has also felt left out of the new government in Iraq.’ The hotheads immediately interpreted the voice of reason as a suggestion that Turnbull would be willing to negotiate with ISIS – to collaborate with terrorism. Shades of the Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, who had talked of ‘racism, Islamophobia, curtailing freedoms through securitisation, duplicitous foreign policies and military intervention’. Both men were forced to re-

iterate that the Paris murders – any murders – could not be condoned, excused or justified in any way. But surely it can be worthwhile to try to explain just how and why such unforgiving and unforgivable acts could be planned. The simplistic line is that it is all a matter of history – genetics, even: the Muslims have hated us for centuries, not for what we do but for what we are: they always have and they always will. But this is just not true: since the sixth century there have been many conflicts between Islam and the West, but for far longer there have been periods of peace – at the very least mutual coexistence. And of course the ISIS leaders themselves have constantly referred to the invasion of Muslim lands as their motive for revenge. It would follow logically from Turnbull’s analysis that not only is the presence of foreign armies counterproductive: the fact that they are intervening at all is part of the problem not part of the solution. In the wake of the Paris killings the idea of withdrawal is unthinkable, and the escalation will presumably continue. But in the end the very deep enmities in the region that Turnbull talked about will have to be confronted, and if the West cannot devise a political solution, then those who have survived within the warravaged countries will have to work it out for themselves. What is clear is that Abbott’s bellicose approach has already been tried – in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq – and has failed. So rather than calling for boots on the ground, he would do better to put a sock in it. And Malcolm Turnbull, for one, would certainly agree.

David Runciman

The Byron Shire Echo

the circumstances, and the outcome would likely be indecisive and unquestionably leave precisely the kind of lingering resentments that have got us into the mess in the first place. As Turnbull pointed out in Manila, he, and more importantly Obama, are not keen to revisit the errors of the past: ‘His view – and I have to say that this is the view of all the countries’ leaders with whom I spoke in Turkey, all of them – his view is that the presence of foreign armies in that theatre at the present time would be counterproductive given the lessons of history, relatively re-

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