by Brian Toohey
2 Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly, Abacus, 1984, pp. 289, 290.
3 Fredrik Logevall, Embers of War, Random House, 2012, pp. 470, 565, 553.
4 Gavan Hogue, ‘Australia did say no to the US on Vietnam 1954’, Pearls and Irritations, 16 February 2017.
5 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953–1956, Doubleday, 1963, pp. 337–8.
6 Bruce Davies with Gary McKay, Vietnam: The Complete Story of the Australian War, Allen & Unwin, 2012, p. 64.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 62.
9 Ibid., pp. 70–8.
10 Anne Blair, There to the Bitter End, Allen & Unwin, 2001, p. 23.
11 Davies, p. 101.
12 Blair, p. 238.
13 Ibid., p. 106.
14 Quoted in Walker, p. 283.
15 John Blaxland, The Protest Years, Allen & Unwin, 2015, p. 284.
16 Blair, p. 237.
17 William Pinwill and Brian Toohey, ‘Armed and ready’,The Eye, June/July 1989, p. 9.
18 Ian McNeill, The Team, University of Queensland Press, 1984, p. 71.
19 Ibid., p. 408.
20 Ibid., p. 411.
21 Garry Woodard, ‘Asian alternatives: Going to war in the 1960s’, public lecture at the NAA, 30 May 2003.
22 McNeill, p. 482.
23 Ibid.
Chapter 52: Testimony from those who were there
1 Transcript, Vietnam: The War that Made Australia, SBS Television. Darren Hutchinson was the development producer/director and Mike Bluett the series director. The series was made by Joined Up Films in association with SBS and with the assistance of Screen Australia, Screenwest and Lottery West. All quotes from the series are from the transcript the producers provided to the author.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Davies is the author, with Gary McKay, of the 2012 book Vietnam: The Complete Story of the Australian War (Allen & Unwin).
5 Frank Walker, The Tiger Man of Vietnam, Hachette Australia, 2016, pp. 270–4.
6 Chapter 54 in this book shows that a minority of the Australian special forces in Afghanistan did not share the values of many Team members.
7 Jason von Meding, ‘Agent Orange, exposed: How US chemical warfare in Vietnam unleashed a slow-moving disaster’,The Conversation, 4 October 2017.
8 Cable from US Embassy, Vientiane to State Department, 30 November 1965, quoted by Andrew Wells-Dang in ‘Agent Orange in Laos: Documentary evidence’, August 2002.
9 AWM115 A305/83/24.
10 Ash Anan, ‘Vietnam’s horrific legacy: the children of Agent Orange’, 25 May 2015, news.com.
11 Jason Von Meding, ‘Agent Orange, exposed: How US chemical warfare in Vietnam unleashed a slow-moving disaster’, The Conversation, 4 October 2017.
12 Among the many outstanding articles written on dioxin, one of the best is Christopher Hitchens, ‘The Vietnam syndrome’, Vanity Fair, 26 March 2007.
Chapter 53: A defeat born of secrecy, ignorance, arrogance and brutality
1 Nora Ephron, ‘The war followers’, New York, 12 November 1973.
2 The first documented evidence that Menzies had not received an invitation from South Vietnam is in Michael Sexton, War for the Asking, Penguin, 1981.
3 Garry Woodard, ‘Asian alternatives: Going to war in the 1960s’, public lecture for the NAA, 30 May 2003.
4 Ibid.
5 Malcolm Fraser with Cain Roberts, Dangerous Allies, Melbourne University Press, 2014, p. 144.
6 Fraser, p. 143.
7 Jeffrey Hays, ‘Vietnam’s relations with China’, Facts and Details, 2014.
8 Drew Lindsay, ‘“Something dark and bloody”: What happened at My Lai?’, MHQ, 7 August 2012.
9 Fraser, p. 129.
10 Ibid., p. 125.
11 Ibid., pp. 146–7.
12 Paul Ham, Vietnam: The Australian War, HarperCollins, 2007, p. 405.
13 Ibid., p. 414.
14 Ibid., p. 405.
15 Ibid., pp. 409–10.
16 For more details, see Christopher Robbins, Air America: The Story of the CIA’s Secret Airlines, Putnam, 1979 and Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Chicago Review Press, 2003.
17 Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, W.W. Norton, 1987.
18 Brian Toohey, ‘Defence cuts cancel nothing that matters’, AFR, 7 November 2012.
19 David Wroe, ‘Long Tan battle commander Harry Smith says Vietnamese sensitivity must be respected’, SMH, 19 August 2016.
20 Greg Dodds, ‘Let’s do without the Vietnam trip’, AFR, 23 September 2016.
Chapter 54: Australian troops should have left Afghanistan within a few months
1 This policy paper was issued in September 2010 by the Williams Foundation, whose board comprises senior retired military officers. The paper named World War II as probably the only necessary war, but it was removed from the foundation’s website following a change in the composition of the board. Alan Stephens was the unnamed author.
2 ‘Our stories: Somalia’, Australian Army, December 2016.
3 Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand, CreateSpace, 2017, pp. 59–62.
4 Ibid., pp. 49–52.
5 Ibid., pp. 63–8.
6 ‘Operation Slipper questions’, fax from Hill to the author, 21 May 2002.
7 Brian Toohey, ‘Don’t shoot until you know who they are’. AFR, 15 June 2002.
8 For further details see Brendan Nicholson, ‘In the line of duty’, The Age, 2 June 2005 and Rory Callinan, ‘In the valley of death’, Time, 30 May 2005.
9 Quoted in Brian Toohey, ‘War leader’, Inside Story, 5 May 2011.
10 Horton, p. 109.
11 For example, John Braithwaite and Ali Wardak, ‘Crime and war in Afghanistan, Part I: The Hobbesian solution’, British Journal of Criminology, 53(2), 1 March 2013, p. 187.
12 David Morgan, ‘Pentagon admits Afghan strategy not succeeding’, Reuters, 11 September 2008.
13 Paul McGeough, ‘Botched mission costs life of chief’, SMH, 29 November 2008.
14 Horton, p. 180.
15 Ibid., p. 195.
16 Email from Defence Media Operations to the author, 25 May 2011.
17 Sharon Davis and Helen Grasswill, ‘Australian commandos’ role in the deaths of five Afghan children questioned’, ABC News, 22 May 2016.
18 Ibid.
19 Horton, p. 184.
20 Dan Oakes and Sam Clark, ‘The Afghan Files: Defence leak exposes deadly secrets of Australia’s special forces’, ABC News, 11 July 2017.
21 Dan Oakes and Sam Clark, ‘Death in Kandahar’, ABC News, 10 July 2017.
22 C. August Elliott, ‘“Land, kill and leave”: How Australian special forces helped lose the war in Afghanistan’, ABC News, 12 July 2017.
23 Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters, ‘SAS soldiers committed war crimes: Secret report’, SMH, 8 June 2018.
24 Andrew Bacevich, ‘The never-ending war in Afghanistan’, NYT, 13 March 2017.
25 Mark Thomson, The Cost of Defence: ASPI Defence Budget Brief 2017–18, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2017, p. 201.
Chapter 55: Howard and Iraq: Knave or naif?
1 Howard in parliament, 4 February 2003.
2 Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD, Intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, 1 March 2004, Chapter 5.
3 Ibid.
4 Brian Toohey, ‘Saddam’s poison power: The inside story’, AFR, 14 February 1998.
5 Submission by W.B. Pritchett to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD, 13 August 2003.
6 John Howard, Lazarus Rising, HarperCollins, 2011, p. 462.
7 Fax to the author from Jane Co
rbin, 29 September 2002.
8 Transcript, 7.30 Report, ABC-TV, 8 April 2003.
9 The War in Iraq: ADF Operations in the Middle East in 2003, Department of Defence, 2004, pp. 21–4.
10 Paul Monk, AFR, 21 March 2003.
11 Greg Sheridan, ‘WMD doubts are ludicrous’, The Australian, 10 July 2003.
12 Tracy Shelton, ‘Gadhafi sodomised: Video shows abuse frame by frame’, GlobalPost PRI, 24 October 2011.
13 Glenn Harland Reynolds, ‘Africans are being sold at Libyan slave markets. Thanks, Hillary Clinton’, USA Today, 27 November 2017.
14 Brian Toohey, ‘How shock and awe turned to fear and loathing’, AFR, 18 March 2006.
15 See for example Latika Bourke, ‘John Howard “embarrassed” by failed WMD intelligence on Iraq’, SMH, 22 September 2014.
16 David Wroe and Deborah Snow, ‘Chilcot Inquiry: Former prime minister John Howard defends 2003 Iraq decision’, SMH, 7 July 2016.
17 Paul McGeough, ‘Chilcot Report: The mind-boggling incompetence of Bush, Blair and Howard laid bare’, SMH, 7 July 2016.
18 Richard Smith, ‘The secret Downing Street memo’, Sunday Times, 1 May 2005.
Chapter 56: Nuclear war: The risks are real
1 Eric Schlosser, ‘World War Three by mistake’, New Yorker, 23 December 2016.
2 William Burr, ‘US war plans would kill an estimated 108 million Soviets, 104 million Chinese, and 2.6 million Poles: More evidence on SIOP-62 and the origins of overkill’, Unredacted: The National Security Archive Blog, 8 November 2011.
3 Schlosser, op. cit.
4 Amy Woolf, ‘Nuclear weapons in US national security policy: Past, present and prospects’, Congressional Research Service, 28 January 2008.
5 For more details, see ‘Cold War strategic ASW’ in the official US Navy magazine, Undersea Warfare, Spring 2005.
6 Quoted in Melissa Healy, ‘Lehman: We’ll sink their subs’, Defense Week, 13 May 1985, p. 18.
7 Office of the Secretary of Defense Department, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2018, Department of Defense, 16 August 2018, p. 38.
8 See Hamish McDonald, ‘The wired seas of Asia’, Asia-Pacific Journal, 20 April 2015.
9 J.A. Battilega, ‘Soviet views of nuclear warfare: The post-Cold War interviews’, in Henry D. Sokolski (ed.), Getting MAD: A Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 2004, pp. 156–7.
10 Fred Kaplan, ‘Nuclear posturing’, Slate, 22 January 2018.
11 Schlosser, op. cit.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid
15 Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘Close calls with nuclear weapons’ fact sheet, 2015.
16 Ibid.
17 1983: The Brink of Apocalypse, Channel 4, 5 January 2008.
18 Union of Concerned Scientists, op. cit.
19 Schlosser, op. cit.
Chapter 57: The West’s reckless Russian policies
1 George F. Kennan, ‘A fateful error’, NYT, 5 February 1997.
2 Andrew Higgins, ‘How powerful is Vladimir Putin really?’, NYT, 23 March 2019.
3 Christian Neef and Mathias Schepp, ‘Vibrant, noisy, and booming: Welcome to the new Moscow’, Spiegel Online, 22 April 2016.
4 SIPRI Military Expenditure Database 2017, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
5 ‘Nuclear weapons: Who has what at a glance’, Arms Control Association, 21 June 2018.
6 Ibid.
7 Larry Elliott, ‘Russia and economic warfare: RIP the free market new world order’, The Guardian, 31 August 2014.
8 Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, ‘NATO expansion: What Gorbachev heard’, 12 December 2017 and ‘NATO expansion: What Yeltsin heard’, 16 March 2018, National Security Archive.
9 Kennan, op. cit.
10 Owen Harries, ‘The dangers of expansive realism’, National Interest, 1 December 1997.
11 Transcript, BBC Breakfast with Frost interview with Putin, 5 March 2000.
12 For a nuanced view of Putin, see the Russian-born American writer Keith Gessen, ‘Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: The many myths of Vladimir Putin’, The Guardian, 22 February 2017.
13 ‘Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland–Pyatt call’, BBC News, 7 February 2014.
14 Kenneth Rapoza, ‘One year after Russia annexed Crimea, locals prefer Moscow to Kiev’, Forbes, 20 March 2015.
15 Steven A. Hildritch and Carl Ek, ‘Long-range ballistic missile defense in Europe’, Congressional Research Service, 23 September 2009.
16 Julian Borger, ‘America’s new, more “usable” nuclear bomb in Europe’, The Guardian, 11 November 2015.
17 For a succinct analysis, see Fred Kaplan, ‘Nuclear posturing’, Slate, 22 January 2018.
18 Nuland in reply to a question from Senator Jeanne Shaheen during the Hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: Russian Violations of Borders, Treaties, and Human Rights, 6 July 2016.
19 Scott Shane, ‘Russia isn’t the only one meddling in elections. We do it, too’, NYT, 17 February 2018.
Chapter 58: Destruction is only a tantrum away
1 Report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, DFAT, 1996, p. 9.
2 Ibid., pp. 9, 10.
3 Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi, Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers, Report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Canberra, 2009, p. 3.
4 Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, ANZUS after 45 Years: Seminar Proceedings, 11–12 August 1997, Parliament of Australia, 1997.
5 Paul Dibb, ‘America has always kept us in the loop’, The Australian, 10 September 2005.
6 Tom Hyland, ‘When Australia had a bombshell for US’, SMH, 6 July 2008.
7 Brian Toohey, ‘US monitored “our bomb”’, NT, 14 December 1980.
8 Stephan Frühling, ‘A nuclear-armed Australia: Contemplating the unthinkable option’, Australian Foreign Affairs, October–November 2018, pp. 71–91.
9 Brian Toohey, ‘America’s secret nuclear strategy’, AFR, 31 August 1976.
10 Ben Dougherty, ‘Nuclear annihilation only a tantrum away, Nobel Prize winner warns’, The Guardian, 11 December 2017.
11 William Perry, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,Stanford University Press, 2015, p. 4.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. xiv.
Chapter 59: The rise of China, India and Indonesia
1 John Keane, When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter, World Scientific, 2017, p. 8.
2 See Peter Jennings, ‘Canberra alone must control our China ties’, The Australian, 3 November 2018.
3 ‘Australia’s trade in goods and services by top 15 partners’, DFAT trade statistics, July 2018.
4 See James Lawrenceson, ‘If China sneezes, there’s no reason for Australia to get pneumonia’, AFR, 9 January 2019.
5 James Laurenceson, email to the author, 6 March 2018, explaining that these figures are based on updated statistics in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook series. Laurenceson is an economist and deputy director of the Australia China Relations Institute at University of Technology Sydney.
6 ‘Figure 2.4: GDP forecasts to 2030’, Foreign Policy White Paper, DFAT, 2017. The figures are in purchasing power parity terms.
7 PwC, ‘The Long View: How will the global economic order change by 2050?’, PricewaterhouseCoopers, February 2017.
8 James Lawrenceson, Do the Claims Stack Up? Australia Talks China, Australia China Relations Institute, UTS Sydney, 28 October 2018, p. 7.
9 Foreign Policy White Paper, DFAT, 2017, op. cit.
10 Kishore Mahbubani, ‘What China threat? How the US and China can avoid war’, Harper’s Magazine, 29 January 2019.
11 David Brooks, ‘The chaos after Trump’, NYT, 7 March
2018.
12 ‘China lifting 800 million people out of poverty “Great story in human history”: World Bank chief’, New Indian Express, 13 October 2017.
13 Mahbubani, op. cit.
14 Simone van Nieuwenhuizen, ‘China: Party of governance and control, not revolution’, The Interpreter, 23 November 2018.
15 Keane, p. 8.
16 Brian Toohey, ‘Xi’s technocrat crackdown risks China’s growth’, AFR, 8 August 2016.
17 Keane, p. 3.
18 Stephanie Nebehay, ‘UN says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps’, Reuters, 11 August 2018.
19 Vicky Xiuzhong Xu and Bang Xiao, ‘China’s Social Credit System seeks to assign citizens scores, engineer social behaviour’, ABC News, 2 April 2018.
20 Charles Morris, ‘We were pirates too: Why America was the China of the 19th century’, Foreign Policy, 6 December 2012.
21 John Edwards, ‘The first rule of a trade war: know thine enemy’, The Interpreter, Lowy Institute, 17 April 2019.
22 National Support for Emerging Industries, National Academies Press, Washington, 2012, p. 1; See Jerome W. Schnee, ‘Government programs and the growth of high-technology industries’, Research Policy, 7(1), January 1978, pp. 3–24; and ‘Uncle Sam’s favorite corporations’, Good Jobs First, 17 March 2015.
23 Department of Defense Testimony, ‘Military technology transfer: Threats, impacts, and solutions for the Department of Defense’, House Armed Services Committee, 21 June 2018.
24 I was one of several Australian journalists who visited Huawei’s Shenzhen campus in 2016 on a trip funded by the Australia China Research Institute’s Chairman’s Council, comprising seventeen Australian companies and four Chinese-linked ones.
25 Mike Burgess, ASD Director-General, ‘Then and now: Coming out from the shadows’, speech to ASPI National Security Dinner, 29 October 2018.
26 The Economist, ‘The right call on Huawei: Technology and security’, 27 April 2019.
27 Geoffrey Sachs, ‘The war on Huawei’, Project Syndicate, 11 December 2018.
28 Chris Uhlmann and Angus Grigg, ‘Spy chief ’s campaign to kill Huawei’, SMH, December 2018.
