Mere hours after the first missiles struck Tehran, Australia had signed up for the new US/Israeli war. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was one of the first and most enthusiastic world leaders to declare support for the attacks, in which Israel and the US have so far carpet-bombed capital cities, killed 165 Iranian schoolgirls plus thousands more civilians, started catastrophic fires in Tehran oil facilities and expelled half a million people from Southern Lebanon.
A joint statement from the PM, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles on 28 February stated: “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security”.
Albanese’s response is sycophantic even compared with some of the US’s other close allies. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially resisted using British bases for the strikes, and France and Germany called for negotiations rather than supporting them. The speed and strength of Albanese’s support mark Australia out as the most willing to blindly follow the US into war.
And blindly it was. Wong has confirmed that Australia had no advance notice of the strikes. When asked about the justification, she told a press conference, “I’ll leave it for the United States and Israel to speak of the basis, the legal basis for the attacks”. Members of Labor’s right faction anonymously voiced concern to the Guardian about how rapidly Albanese, Marles and Wong declared Australian support for the war, while similar concerns were raised in a meeting of the party’s left faction in early March.
Labor’s enthusiasm for this war is in sharp contrast to the party’s response to the Iraq war in 2003. When Liberal Prime Minister John Howard sent the first Australian aircraft to Iraq in 2003, Albanese attacked him during parliamentary question time, saying: “What the lights in the sky represent is the death of Iraqi civilians, something for which I think Australia is taking part much to our shame”. Labor leader at the time, Simon Crean, denounced the war, and Labor MPs spoke at demonstrations against it. Australian unions came out against the war and supported the marches.
The difference is that, back then, Labor was in opposition. Now, the party runs the country. This means it is responsible for upholding the interests of Australian capital, and that includes its interests overseas. Being in alliance with the world’s only superpower, the United States, is key to that—the alliance provides protection for Australian businesses overseas, favourable trade agreements and security guarantees that the Australian capitalist class depends on. For the political class, their role is to demonstrate commitment to the US alliance, whatever the US decides to do politically and militarily.
Labor’s support for war this time has knock-on effects—especially when it comes to unions. This illegal, illegitimate and murderous war is not being met with the same opposition from unions as in 2003, when they were an important part of the anti-war movement. Just like with the Gaza genocide, keeping Labor in power matters more to union movement leaders than principles like standing against militarism and war.
What makes the situation even worse is that this time around—unbelievably—the war has even less official justification. Trump, Netanyahu and Albanese have barely bothered to pretend there is a legitimate case for bombing Iran. In the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003, real effort was put into deceiving the public to justify the invasion. Dodgy dossiers about weapons of mass destruction were concocted, fake intelligence leaks were orchestrated and there was a lot of lofty talk about bringing democracy to places the US President George W. Bush struggled to even pronounce the names of.
This time, the aggressors haven’t even taken the time to make up coherent lies, relying instead on the doctrine of “might is right” and extreme arrogance. As White House advisor Stephen Miller put it, “We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we’re going to conduct ourselves as a superpower”. Trump’s warlords will burn and blast their way through any person, school or city they choose. Unsurprisingly, this is the least supported war in US history. Except, of course, in Canberra.
Labor’s response to this depravity is simple: they’re in. Labor minister Mark Butler told the Today Show that “all of us are nervous about this becoming a very long, protracted war”. Butler’s statement was an admission that the government knows that it’s a huge gamble to enter a war led by an erratic far-right president in an explosive region with no clear plan or path out. They know that it could mean slaughtering tens of thousands. They know that it could make some of the oldest cities in the world uninhabitable for generations. And they know that the money they’re pouring into weapons of mass murder could instead solve the housing crisis in our own country.
But for them, maintaining the US alliance trumps any and all of these considerations. If ever there were a case against the idea that changing who is in power will never be enough to make society decent and fair, Labor’s response to this war is it. We need to get rid of the system in which supporting senseless death and destruction makes political and economic sense and is a requirement of being in power.
