How have the past policies of developed western countries (particularly the US and UK) towards the Middle East played a role in fostering the problems we now face, such as the terrorism of Islamic groups such as al-Qaeda?

Tanya Plibersek; Tony Abbott; Peter Macdonald; Andrew McNaughtan; Tony Abbott 2;

Donna Mulhearn: Can I just say, still on democracy, that I just think that this meeting is a great example of grassroots democracy, and we should be doing more of it, and I think it’s great that Tony Abbott has come out tonight to face this question: I think he’s very brave. (Applause)

OK, the rise of terrorism and groups such as Al-Qaeda. I don’t believe that terrorism’s about religion. I spend a lot of time looking into the faiths of the world: the beautiful faith traditions, and I spend a lot of time exploring each of the traditions, and it’s been a wonderful journey, and it’s been very beautiful to discover the teachings of peace and justice that exist in all the religions. And so I don’t believe that terrorism is about Arabs and Muslims wanting to hurt Christians, it’s not about that at all. I believe that the root causes of terrorism are poverty, neglect, dispossession of land, and lack of dignity. Look at Palestine and Israel, look at that tit-for-tat, tit-for-tat. And as we speak, bulldozers are knocking down homes of Palestinians in the West Bank, and no doubt that will be responded to in kind, and both acts of violence I believe are terrorism. Although only one of them is called terrorism, and that is the Palestinians, but I believe that knocking down the family home is an act of terrorism.

I believe that our world leaders need to rise above the cycle of violence and respond with maturity and wisdom. I think it’s time that we break the cycle, because George Bush calls his crusade, as he called it once, a war – the war on terrorism. We’ve already defined that war is terrorism, so that means we are in Terrorism on Terrorism. That means it’s never going to end. When’s it going to end? It’s going to go on forever and ever, and our children and our children’s children will suffer. Someone needs to rise above all of this, and say: I will be the one to break the cycle, and after September 11, things could have been different. If George Bush – and it would have been very, very difficult – could have just paused for a moment, and reflected, and asked the question: why did this happen? What is really behind this? Then I think maybe we could have saved ourselves two wars, and a lot of suffering. But it does take a lot of maturity and wisdom to do that, and – but someone needs to do it.

And I also believe that the policies that the US and UK have inflicted, which is the wording here, “towards the Middle East” – I’d like to expand that to developing countries, because I believe that there’s been a real corporate colonialism towards the developing countries, and I’ve travelled a lot through developing countries, and I can’t believe how Pepsi and Coca-Cola can find their way in there. Every little tiny village I’ve been in in remote Zambia has a Coca-Cola stand. Like, it’s just unbelievable that the quest for the dollar, the quest for corporate dominance, I believe it is also so offensive to these people who are responding in this way. So, I believe it’s about dignity, about dispossession of land, about poverty, and neglect. And I believe that if we actively respond to those issues, if George Bush said: alright, let’s think about this, let’s reflect, let’s take some time, and let’s go to look at the root causes of poverty and respond to those. So let’s provide clean water for countries, let’s have people not fight for their survival every day, and fight for their family home, then I think we’ll see a break in the cycle of violence, and we’ll see an end to terrorism. (Applause)

Tony Abbott: I don’t pretend for a second that the policies of countries like Britain and America, and indeed Australia for that matter, are always perfect: we’re only too human, we often lack information. Sometimes we have insufficient appreciation of all the subtle nuances of different issues around the world. So I don’t think our policies are always perfect by any means, but I think the idea that somehow, America, Britain and Australia are to blame for terrorism defies rationality. The roots of terrorism are not in poverty, the roots of terrorism are in hatred, and I don’t believe that poor people for a second have a monopoly on hatred. It’s interesting that the September the 11th terrorists were not poor people at all, they were generally speaking middle class people who had had access to what by ordinary middle-eastern standards were very privileged upbringings, and yet they flew civilian jetliners into civilian towers, and why? They did that because they believed that western civilisation is a satanic perversion. Now, we might shrink from that, but that is what these people believed. They did not, in the end, attack the symbols of western power and prestige because of anything the west had done, but because of what they thought the west is. Now, funnily enough, many of the things we in this room might take great pride in are things that most enrage a certain type of Islamist fundamentalist. So, I think that is basically the problem.

Now I don’t think that there is any easy answer to this. You do not stop someone from killing you by turning the other cheek, if that person is determined to kill you come what may. It may well be a heroic thing to do, to turn the other cheek, but it certainly isn’t going to stop that person from killing you. I think we are in for a long and difficult struggle against this particular form of terrorism. I think that it could quite easily last just as long as the ant-terrorist struggle in Northern Ireland, it might last just as long as the cold war lasted, and what we need to do is, where we can, use our intelligence services, where we can, deepen our contact with the governments of countries where we think that terrorism might be active. But in the end whatever we do we have to, as a culture and as a civilisation, be our best selves. I think there is much to be proud of in western civilisation. I think that our traditions of freedom, of pluralism, of acceptance, of inclusivity, are our greatest boast, and I think these are what make western countries attractive to so many other people from all round the world, and I think that is what we have to be pre-eminently in coming months and years, if we are to minimise and eventually defeat the scourge of terrorism.

Peter Macdonald: [First sentence missed while changing disk] … subtle nuances and so on that you made reference to, but it does invite us to look at the history, and look at the link of the effects of that history, on the root causes of terrorism. The history of US and UK foreign policy in the Middle East is scattered with examples of meddling. We’ve been meddling for years, they’ve had vested interests, particularly with regards the oil, there’s been constant bias in their foreign policies in that area, and mixed in with that bias is sheer indifference to the rights of certain peoples within that region. I just want to deal with the British first, and they’ve got a lot to answer for: but that really goes into the Palestine question. I mean it started with the Balfour Declaration after World War 1: they were the ones that before World War 2 talked about the partition of Palestine. It was the British really, as I recall as a youngster, who stood by in 1967, when there was the war, the Six Day War, which basically saw the annexation of vast amounts of Egypt and Syria and Jordan, and it’s those occupied territories that now are the focus of all subsequent wars in that area. So, of course history teaches us some important lessons.

The Americans, as well, have blood on their hands, quite frankly. They’ve been propping up unpopular and undemocratic regimes for fifty years in the name of, frankly, oil security. And the use of US power in that area has been based on oil economics. We know some of the root causes of terrorism are lack of civil liberties, unresolved grievances, a feeling of disempowerment. And all of these are evident in the Middle East, and have to be dealt with in a complex way. Terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda see themselves as heroically oppressed, and they see powerful groups such as the United States as evil. And these are the things at the wellsprings of terrorism, and not poverty, as has been claimed. The use of United States power since 9/11 is based on their national security strategy, which has been stated by the Americans as being global hegemony. And this is simply fostering more hate and more resentment throughout the world. Frankly, the US administration’s foreig n policy in that region, taking into account Afghanistan and Iraq, is based on lawlessness and violence, in my view, and a pre-emptive strike, which we saw in Iraq, was described as the supreme crime as defined in Nuremberg. George Bush said: there is no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland. Unless the underlying grievances are dealt with, it will be an unending war. The sad thing is that Australia is complicit. (Applause)

Tanya Plibersek: How have past policies fostered some of the problems? Well, I guess the first thing to say, and it carries on from what Peter said, is: the United States and Britain have a long history of meddling, that’s true. They also have a long history of arming and training organisations that they then fall out with, and I thought was one of the great ironies of the discussion of the weapons that Saddam Hussein may or may not have had, and the fact that he had used them against his own people and he had used them against Iran. Well, he used them against Iran using satellite photos that showed Iranian troop positions that were provided to him by the United States. If we’re talking about how past actions have contributed to what happened in Iraq, it’s really very plain.

But I think it’s interesting that we go from a question about terrorism and groups such as Al-Qaeda to talking about Iraq, because this is one of the points that has been confused again, again and again in this debate. There are no proven links between the government of Iraq and Al-Qaeda; the government of Saddam Hussein, brutal as it was, was basically a secular government, and his adoption of , you know, building relationships with Islamic fundamentalists came a lot later when he recognised that there was a significant external threat to the country, and though that having some allies in the region would be a good thing. Early on, it was clear that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t be likely to share weapons with groups like Al-Qaeda, because they saw him as a secular traitor and would be as likely to use the weapons on him as anyone else.

Saudi Arabia, however, is a country that has proven links with terrorist organisations, including funding them and funding training schools in various countries. It is possibly the easiest proof that this war was not about terrorism, that you have a country virtually next door to Iraq that has traceable links, financial links with terrorist organisations, and we have very cordial relationships with Saudi Arabia. It’s not about terrorism; it was never about terrorism.

I think that the debate about whether poverty in the world is related to terrorism is a very interesting one. I think what you can certainly say, that poor and dispossessed populations are fertile breeding ground for supporters of extremist organisations. I don’t believe poverty causes people to become terrorists, because it’s true that plenty of the money is coming from Saudi Arabia, and plenty of the people involved are very wealthy, and Osama Bin Laden is a pretty good example of someone who has money coming out of his ears, but is a racist and a bigot, and a religious bigot. And I think that at the end of the day, poverty sets an environment where it’s very easy to recruit, because people have nothing to lose, but it’s not the only cause of terrorism. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have to address poverty, because one of the questions later on is whether Australia has benefited or not from going to war with Iraq – obviously I think it hasn’t, but our own benefit, our own national benefit is not the only question we should ask in, when we are talking about international relations, and, you know, peace and justice in the world, and whether poverty is a cause of terrorism or an environment for it at the end of the day doesn’t matter, we’ve still got, you know, more than half of the world’s population living in desperate circumstances and the majority living on less than a dollar a day, with not enough food to eat, no electricity, no clean water, and life expectancies that we wouldn’t put up with in this country.

Andrew McNaughtan: Thanks to everyone for their answers, and thanks to David and Sue for being the driving force behind putting this on tonight. Look, I asked this question – I’m the convenor of the Australia East Timor Association, and when I worked on Timor and understood the issue over many years, I began to understand how that issue was a by-product of decisions made in the capitals of power, particularly in Washington. You know, the problem arose there to a large extent, and it’s prompted my thinking more and more about what’s been going on in the Middle East and looking a bit into what’s happened. On your seats you’ll find a leaflet that talks about some of this. I mean, Osama Bin Laden worked for the United States, OK, when he was in the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen was the implement the United States used with the intention of dealing a blow to Soviet Russia, and they actually enticed the Russians into Afghanistan, according to Brzezinski, Carter’s Foreign Policy Advisor, got them in there as a great place to destroy them. The mechanism they used was the Mujahideen, backed by the CIA. Out of that has come Osama Bin Laden.

Saddam Hussein is another trusted American puppet. He was used to quell the Islamic Revolution in Iran, which was again the by-product of American meddling in Iran where they overthrew a popular government to impose the Shah to control the oil. That backfired in the Islamic Revolution, so they turned to Saddam, and asked him to attack Iran, which he did. Then they gave him biological and chemical weapons to do so, the very chemical and biological weapons that we now had to go to war in Iraq for – well we really went for the oil, but the pretext was the chemical and biological weapons the west and America had given Saddam to kill the Iranians, who were a new enemy. So, as far as I’m concerned it’s a moral cesspit, and the whole thing is a farce, and it’s a front for imperial policies that are the same old policies – and I think that’s what I find disturbing.

Now, I really thank Peter for his answer, which I think the most got to the nub of the issue. Tony, I just want to say two things: if you say that all of this is coming from a mindless hate – well, you say that religious zealotry lies at the base of it. Now, as Donna said, the Islamic revolution preaches peace and compassion as well as Christianity does. I don’t think it’s really religious. It’s hatred, but we really ought to ask why? And I think the sort of things I have mentioned then have a lot to do with it. I think the Islamic world sees the western world as materialistic and hypocritical, and I think that’s coming closer to what’s driving it.

Now I think if you want to stop a problem, you’ve first got to define the problem honestly, and then start dealing with what’s going on. I’m not saying that, you know, that the west is terrible and the west deserves it. I’d just like to debunk, I think, another furphy that Tony brought up: he said: well, we’re, you know, a wonderful people, we have a great society, they hate us for that. I don’t think that’s true. I think that there are many things in the west that are good, and the capacity to hold these discussions and so forth is a great aspect of western culture, but there’s a big difference between what we do in our own countries, and what the spooks and the military and the intelligence services of our countries and particularly the United States do in other people’s countries. And I think … (Applause) And in essence I think what they want is a lot of what we’ve got. I don’t think they hate us, I think they see us – a lot of the policy that’s inflicted on them is hypocritical, because we speak with forked tongue, we do one thing for us, we take all the resources for us, and we screw them. And they know it, and that’s what’s really behind it. (Applause)

Tony Abbott: Andrew, look, I think there is some truth in what you say, and certainly I think that we have all raised the ugly American into a caricature, and there’s no doubt there are ugly Americans, ugly Britons, ugly Australians, ugly Frenchmen and so on, who don’t do the image of the western world any good, and who do not live up to the best values of our civilisation. I’m sure in the end you’re right, the people of Iraq, and I suspect the people of large swathes of the wider world would like the best aspects of what we have in a country like Australia: political freedom, social pluralism, economic progress. They would like those things, and I think that at our best, that is what we try, in our own way, to promote in these countries. Now, we don’t always do it perfectly, no doubt that, we don’t always do it perfectly, but I think in our own way, that is what we’re trying to do.

And Donna, I mean I don’t obviously share your perspectives on too much about Iraq, but the fact that a young Australian would go to Baghdad to try to run an orphanage is a magnificent thing, it really is, and sure, I am quite confident that the Australian government would be only too happy to try to support one way or another that kind of venture. We do it all the time, and I’m sure will continue to do it.

Donna: How much?

Genia McCaffery: That’s a very positive sign. No, no, no, Andrew, because otherwise what’s going to end up happening is … so our fifth question comes from John Valder …

© NSPD 2003. Last modified 22/10/03.