Dunne has a point
The Herald reports:
Mr Dunne also launched a stinging attack on comments made in New Zealand last week by British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond when he said: “Frankly we’ve got used to New Zealand being there alongside us, alongside the US, the UK, Australia, as part of the family.”
Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee said the training was made at the request of the Chief of Defence Force Lieutenant General Tim Keating.
Prime Minister John Key has already made it clear he wants to deploy up to 100 NZDF staff in a training mission with Australia which has 600 people in Iraq.
Mr Dunne, a minister and the leader of United Future, described Mr Hammond as a “patronising figure from abroad loftily telling us we are in the club, we are part of the family and it would be lovely to have you along for the next round of unmitigated slaughter”.
He said the debating chamber had plaques on the wall of other times “the family” had acted together.
“Gallipoli, the mindless slaughter of Australian and New Zealand troops in the pursuit of a British objective, Passchendaele and the Somme, so to come here and say to New Zealanders today ‘we love having you on board, you are part of the family but you’ve still got to queue up at the aliens gate at Heathrow’ is unacceptable in the extreme.”
I agree that any action should not be justified on the basis of being part of any family, or club.
It should be justified if it meets the criteria that it is morally the right thing to do, the risk are not too great, and the action will help improve the situation.
Mr Little, the Labour leader, said everybody felt the urge to do something but: “After 10 years of training of the Iraqi Army by the … best-resourced army in the world, what is it that we can do now that is going to make a difference?”
It’s a fair question, but the situation is not fluid. A number of things have changed.
- A new Iraqi Government is less divisive and more able to command army loyalty
- The rise of the Islamic State and their barbaric actions against native Iraqis being so much worse than the previous insurgency. This has changed the dynamic there, and greatly increased the motivations of the rest of Iraq to join together to defeat them.
It is rather more complicated that that, but the point is the situation is not static. Justifying doing nothing on the basis of a previous failure, only works if no variables have changed. And they have.