Defence Minister Christopher Pyne recently called for an expansion of the Australian weapons industry. It would enable Australia to join the United States and Britain as a major exporter of weapons and further Australia’s strategic goals. The move has a logic: if you want weapons it is cheaper to make them than buy them; if you make them it is more profitable to sell them to others than to keep them all for yourself; if you sell them it is best to sell them to your friends.
When you see weapons at the point of production they look enticing in their new paint, hidden power and contribution to the bottom line. The trouble begins when they are used. They can then blow up people and strategic goals. Consider, for example, the anniversaries listed by Wikipedia for August 4, the day this piece is to be sent out. The list is heavy with events in which weapons were used. Three stand out. On this day in 1914 Great Britain declared war on Germany, bound by the 1839 Treaty of London. This was one of several treaties, designed to ensure peace, which led Europe to war.
Also on 4 August 4, 1964, two United States destroyers reported that they had engaged with North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. It followed another reported attack two days earlier. Finally, on the same day in 2006 seventeen workers from a French NGO were murdered by Government police in Muttur, Sri Lanka, after a battle between Government and LTTE forces. Earlier, the LTTE had been classified as a terrorist organisation.
In all these conflicts Australia had a strategic interest. All of them generated a great demand for arms by both sides. In the Great War the whole economy of many nations was diverted to producing arms and using them. The Vietnam War brought in arms from both the Western and Eastern blocs. Overseas weapons multiplied in Sri Lanka, too, and were decisive in the eventual victory of the Government forces.
Weapons used to further strategic interests, however, often destroy these interests. The Great War caused a huge loss of life, hunger and social dislocation. It led to the Great Depression, social upheaval, the rise of totalitarian regimes and eventually to an even more disastrous war with more powerful weapons. For Great Britain it was the beginning of decline, which compromised all the interests that seemed vital in 1914. The war was profitable for the people who made and sold weapons; in human terms it was a catastrophe.
The reporting of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents as unprovoked attacks on US ships led Congress to authorise the President to take military action in South East Asia and escalate into a war fought to protect strategic interests.
Yet the incidents were not as reported. In the first incident, Vietnamese Patrol boats resisted United States naval incursions into its territory. On 2 August the US ships fired on ghosts, misreading their instruments.
The ensuing war was the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, the eventual withdrawal of the United States and its allies, great loss of life and damage to agriculture in Vietnam. The loss of trust in Government in the United States, and the West, anticipated what happened in the invasion of Iraq. These consequences were hardly among the strategic interests sought.
"To possess weapons to discourage invaders is one thing. To sell them is another."
The murder of aid workers in Sri Lanka was one more atrocity in a bitter civil war in which both sides bought arms from other nations and—if other civil wars are a guide—sold arms to one another. The strategic interests of weapon sellers is to make money. Eventually, the weight of arms prevailed, but the human cost, especially to Tamil people, has been enormous.
It has affected their security, the protection they have under law, their freedom of movement and their culture. It, too, contains the seeds of further conflict in a nation awash in arms. The government’s strategic interests have been secured temporarily, but at what cost?
Reflection on these three anniversaries suggest that the use of arms is more likely to hurt than to further national strategic goals, and, more importantly, that it causes incalculable suffering to human beings. Australians should spurn Mr Pyne’s proposal. To possess weapons to discourage invaders is one thing. To sell them is another.
As amateur economists Australians should count the cost of rebuilding nations after they have been pulverised by military action. As amateur political scientists they should ask how our record of using arms has helped or hindered our strategic goals.
As human beings they should imagine the grief and suffering of people affected by military action and ask themselves if they want to build a nation on increasing it.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.