Sod the Rule of Law - This Is War

Ken Parish, of Charles Darwin University and Club Troppo has written an impassioned post on Tony Abbott’s recent appearance on 2GB, where the Leader of her Majesty’s Increasingly Seditious Opposition decried the way soldiers in Afghanistan were “being stabbed in the back by their own government and … a lot of people think that’s what’s happening.”

Just to keep things clear - Tony Abbott wasn’t decrying the fact that a lot of people (25,963 the last time I checked out the on-line petition) think “that ‘s what’s happening.” What he’s decrying is the prosecution of Australian soldiers for killing six civilian non-combatants, five of whom were children. Despite the fact that this is happening under a system of military justice that was introduced by the Howard government, Tony Abbott has decided that if Alan Jones isn’t happy with it and Alan Jones’s audience isn’t happy with it then there’s political mileage in it. Political principle is nowhere within cooee of the position that Abbott has taken.

Along with Alan Jones, his audience and the 25,963 signatories to the petition - like Anonymous of Boovil, Queensland, Anonymous of Canberra, Anonymous of Castle Hill and Anonymous of somewhere in Australia -Tony Abbott has revealed his indifference to the rule of law. He’s not even prepared to defend laws, and legal arrangements that were introduced by a government of which he was a member. He’s not alone on that score - at least one prominent conservative commentator has taken a similar position.

Strange as it might sound, the rule of law extends to the conduct of war: without constraints on the conduct of war there is no civilisation, merely barbarity with, here and there, then and now, occasional remissions. There is a long standing tradition of examining both when it is justified to go to war and what actions are justified during war.

One outcome of this tradition in modern times is that it is considered unlawful to kill non-combatants, either knowingly or by way of collateral damage. On the face of it, killing six non-combatants, five of them children, appears unlawful in the conduct of a war. This is the issue in the prosecution of three reservist commandos for manslaughter, dangerous conduct and failure to comply with a lawful general order. On the face of it, their actions were unlawful. Or so says the Director of Military Prosecutions whose office was established by the Howard government in 2005; there is a case to answer.

At least that’s the way I see it - but then I don’t see myself as the gatekeeper of the nation’s values - I’m just some bloke with too much time on my hands, a few too many opinions and not enough pull to get a free trip to Afghanistan to play with the machine guns.