LONG AND WINDING ROAD:

The road to war:  Australia became part of a planned military strike against Saddam Hussein long before the United States even admitted he was in their sights. National Affairs Editor Tony Wright pieces together our long and secret involvement in the 'War on Terror' and our role as a founding member of George W. Bush's coalition of the willing. (Tony Wright, The Bulletin)

In the new world, which is to say the world dominated by a single superpower, the United States, the big things begin at MacDill Air Base in Tampa, Florida. This is the home of the US military's Central Command. The Americans, always in a hurry, have shortened its name to an ugly contraction: CentCom. The most powerful military men who have ever walked the Earth stride in and out of its entrance beneath the slate-coloured slab of a metal wall that speaks of blunt might and refuses to be softened by a wide lawn and silver birch trees that spread beyond its doors, or by the moist sea breeze that whispers and tumbles in across Tampa Bay from the Gulf of Mexico.

Within, the shape of the 21st-century world is planned on a giant screen linked in real time, through banks of computers and satellite dishes, to similar command centres across the planet. Right now, its facilities--duplicated right down to another giant plasma screen--are linked most importantly to a desert camp in Qatar on the Persian Gulf.

CentCom is one of nine unified combatant commands that control US forces across the length and breadth of the world. Each has a self-appointed Area of Responsibility, and CentCom's is, since the death of the Cold War and the birth of global terrorism, by far the most important to 21st-century America: the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and the northern Red Sea; the Horn of Africa; and South Asia and Central Asia.

It was inside CentCom that Australia began its latest march to Iraq. That march began a long time before the nation--or, indeed, even those most intimately involved--had much of a clue that it might lead to Australian troops flitting about the deserts of Saddam Hussein's country, or its fighter pilots bombing Iraqi emplacements, or its navy sailors removing mines in the far reaches of the Persian Gulf.

It began just two weeks after September 11, 2001, when hijacked jet aircraft smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and into the walls of the Pentagon in Washington, a few blocks from a hotel where Prime Minister John Howard was holding a press conference.

That night, President George W. Bush wrote in his diary: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today." There would be an intriguing echo of this allusion 18 months later, a day before Australia finally sent its troops across the borders of Iraq. John Howard, mounting his final arguments for the assault in his address to the National Press Club in Canberra's Parliament House on Wednesday, March 19, 2003, was asked why he did not wait for proof that Saddam was collaborating with Osama bin Laden's terrorists. "I mean," he said, "if you wait for that kind of proof, you know, it's virtually Pearl Harbor."

Howard had long been on song with Bush. The hip Democrat Bill Clinton was not Howard's style at all but the prime minister was a fan of Bush even when he was still Republican governor of Texas.

On September 11, 2001, Howard declared from Washington that Australia would be "resolute in our solidarity with the Americans" in whatever retort might be planned. "Now is the time for calm but lethal responses," he said on radio. "Now is the time for the civilised world to work out the most effective way--not talk about it, not telegraph it--but work out and implement the most effective way of responding." He was as good as his word.

Without talking about it--before or since--a small group of soldiers from Australia's secretive Special Air Service Regiment found their way to CentCom at MacDill Air Base, Tampa, in the days following September 11. There was irony in their journey. The men of this unit had been involved only weeks before in a dubious operation: the boarding of the MV Tampa in an effort to ensure that 438 asylum-seekers--most of them Afghans and Iraqis--did not reach Australian soil. The MV Tampa had been named after the Florida city of Tampa, home of CentCom and an important freight port on the Gulf of Mexico.

The Australian SAS Regiment is familiar with Tampa and its military bases. They are regular visitors at CentCom. Indeed, liaison teams from the three arms of Australia's defence force have been guests at CentCom for years, although until recently they were not part of the inner circle of the US military planning machine.

But this visit was different. The federal government, through Howard and his then defence minister Peter Reith, was straining at the bit to prove to Bush and his administration that Australia was at one with the American superpower. The appearance of the men from the SAS was an unambiguous message: Australia wanted in with anything that was being planned. It was pounding on the door.

The more you know, the more obviously inane all the Bush "wobbly watch" stuff becomes. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 5, 2003 1:54 PM