What a spiteful, divisive, unethical and prejudiced political force the Greens are in Australian politics.
This is evident from their grotesque attack on Major-General (retired) Jim Molan, a new Liberal senator for NSW and one of the bravest and most important soldiers Australia has produced in the past 40 years.
Molan is neither the pope nor a secular saint. It is perfectly legitimate to criticise his views. What the Greens did, in calculated, extreme and grossly insulting comments, was attack his character, substantially on the basis of his military service.
Greens senator Nick McKim labelled Molan “a blatant racist … who revels in trampling rights and freedoms”.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale accused Molan of overseeing “a humanitarian catastrophe” during the allied assault on Fallujah in Iraq in 2004. Quoting a United Nations Special Rapporteur with a long history of extreme anti-Western activism, Di Natale said: “At the time of the assault on Fallujah under the command of now-Senator Molan … coalition forces used hunger and deprivation as a weapon of war against the civilian population.” This is a charge Molan strenuously denies.
Di Natale asked Defence Minister Marise Payne whether she was concerned that Molan’s views influenced his approach to the campaign in Fallujah.
The most extreme attacks came from Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt, who said that if there were a proper inquiry into the Iraq war “like there has been in other countries, I think you would find Jim Molan would probably be up for prosecution rather than praise for his role in the atrocities in Fallujah”.
Bandt added: “When you share white supremacist videos and then you justify it by saying: ‘Oh, I’m doing it to stimulate debate’ — and that is the line that came out of his office — you are a coward, you are a complete coward.”
Bandt subsequently apologised for his remarks, and then further extended the apology yesterday.
Everything the Greens have said here is wrong. They have not only been unfair to Molan, they have turned reality on its head. They have proved that far from being progenitors of more ethical politics, the Greens are a narrow, sectarian group imprisoned in their own prejudices.
Here are a few key facts. Molan was for a time the defence attache in Jakarta. He was there for the fall of Suharto in 1998 and the East Timor independence referendum in 1999. In East Timor he personally oversaw the evacuation first of Australian personnel and later UN staff, including many Indonesians. In June 2000 Molan organised the evacuation of 800 Australians from Solomon Islands.
In 2004 he was appointed chief of operations under US General George Casey for the entire US-led UN coalition in Iraq, during which time the second operation in Fallujah took place.
One year ago, long after he left the military, Molan re-posted on to his Facebook page two videos that had come from the British First group and showed apparently Islamist violence in Europe.
Let’s interrogate these matters.
Adam Bandt may think Molan “a coward, a complete coward”. It is probable that Bishop Carlos Belo, and some Philippines nuns, have a different view. At the time of the fall of Suharto, Molan’s wife had to self-evacuate with the couple’s four children from an extremely dangerous part of Jakarta to a safer area.
Jakarta was roiling during this time under extremely violent rioting, an at times heavy-handed military and police response and some rogue military snipers who were shooting people indiscriminately. I spent a little time in Jakarta myself during this period and for a little while it was a terrifying city.
Molan, as defence attache, was on the streets every day morning until night, as were eight other members of his team, getting a sense of what was going on so that the Australian government could respond effectively and the embassy would know when and how to carry out the evacuation of Australian nationals.
Molan is tall and blond. He was a highly visible target.
But Dili was much more dangerous. Molan took four members of the Jakarta defence attache team with him to Dili to organise the evacuation of Australians, then later of UN staff. He and the four others drove a vehicle each and went round Dili picking up Australians and others who needed to leave. This was at a time when murderous, pro-Indonesian militia were rampaging through Dili murdering and burning.
Molan also had to talk the Indonesian military, whom he knew very well, into accepting an Australian peacekeeping force and not firing on it, and disciplining the militia not to fire on the Australians, either.
In Bandt’s world, none of this may excuse a man from cowardice — it probably doesn’t compare with the moral gravity of having to choose, say, between skim milk and soy for a $5 latte in Carlton — but it is possible that some East Timorese have a different view.
There was one especially tense confrontation on the tarmac at Baucau Airport. In one of those desperate coincidences, a group of pro-Indonesian militia were to be flown to West Timor on the same day that UN expatriate staff were to be flown to Darwin. The Indonesian UN staff were also there to be evacuated. The international staff, heroically, were refusing to leave unless their Indonesian colleagues joined them.
Then it turned out that Bishop Carlos Belo, the Nobel Prize winner, was there. He had to flee his Dili home because it had been attacked and burnt to the ground. The militia had declared they would kill Belo. Molan was in command of no force although there were some Australian security personnel discreetly placed on the evacuation planes.
The militia commander at the airport kept drawing his pistol. In hours of tense, difficult conversation and negotiation, Molan got the UN staff out, including Belo.
There is no doubt that Molan saved Belo’s life. One night in East Timor Molan had a long conversation by phone with John Howard. He had to convince Howard that the Indonesians would not fire on an Australian peacekeeping force and the deployment of the force should go ahead.
On another occasion Molan was speeding towards the airport with half a dozen Philippine nuns in his car. A pro-Indonesian gunman on a motor bike with a rifle slung over his shoulder was chasing Molan’s vehicle and trying to take his rifle off his shoulder, presumably to fire. A sudden block on the road forced Molan to screech to a halt, the gunman hit the back of Molan’s transport and his body pitch-forked into the back of Molan’s vehicle, among the nuns. Molan could see the man’s neck was broken. He could also see a crowd beginning to gather. So he reached back from the driver’s seat, pushed the Indonesian body out the back, and sped off to the airport. Once there he unloaded the nuns, who flew to safety, smashed out the rest of his back windscreen, and resumed evacuation operations.
No doubt, though, Bandt is the best judge of a man’s cowardice.
In Iraq, Molan was lent by Peter Cosgrove, then chief of the Defence Force, now our Governor-General, to be the chief of operations in US General Ricardo Sanchez’s headquarters. At first Sanchez did not want a non-American in such a senior job. Molan was given the task of restoring Iraq’s infrastructure. He did this so well that Sanchez’s successor, General George Casey, appointed him to the chief of operations role.
The legality of the original US-led invasion of Iraq, in which Australia participated, is disputed, although the Australian government believed it was justified by previous UN resolutions. By the time Molan got there the operation had explicit UN authorisation and involved 28 nations.
Fallujah had been a city of 300,000. By the time of Molan’s operation it had between 10,000 and 30,000 inhabitants. Most had fled to government-controlled areas. The extreme Sunni Islamist insurgency, which later became Islamic State, was savagely barbaric.
In a book I wrote on the US alliance 10 years ago, Molan told me: “We conducted Fallujah both to protect the Iraqi people and to protect the Iraqi political process (the upcoming national election). Fallujah was a safe haven for straight-out terrorists, not insurgents. There were 19 improvised explosive device factories, six car bomb factories, torture chambers, TV stations” and the insurgents’ command centre.
“The responsible use of military force by the Americans cost (US) marine lives. We could have flattened the city in a night and killed everyone there (and lost no marines) but that would have been wrong.”
In Iraq, Molan faced death a dozen times, more than that. The house next to the one he lived in was destroyed by rocket fire. He was many times fired on. He had a close protection unit of Australian and US special forces. Once he was dozing in a Blackhawk helicopter between Baghdad and Mosul when he opened his eyes to see a 23mm anti-aircraft gun blinking at the chopper, just about to fire. Luckily the pilot took radical evasive action at that moment.
Still, as Adam Bandt would no doubt know, you never know where cowardice is hiding.
The two videos that Molan re-posted to his Facebook page last year showed genuine violence in Europe, in at least one case certainly Islamist violence. In one, Molan was particularly, almost technically, interested in the restraint French police showed under attack. Like almost everyone else, he had never heard of the British First group, nor known anything of its politics, until Donald Trump got into trouble for re-posting their material. Of course, the failure of mainstream politicians to discuss Islamist violence in Europe is one factor that has driven the growth of extremes.
Three political conclusions from the Molan affair are inescapable.
One, the Greens are truly a destructive, vicious political force, always happy to attribute great moral courage to themselves while foully and often baselessly attacking the motives and character of anyone who disagrees with them. They seem to have an unhealthy hang-up about the military.
Second, what idiots the Liberals were not to preselect Molan earlier, favouring anonymous identikit candidates instead. Molan is in the Senate by fluke. If the Liberals are to revive as a party they need big personalities who represent real constituencies and bring varied life experience to the parliament. Just having Molan there has enraged the Greens and polarised voters in favour of the government.
And thirdly, while this controversy has run OK so far for Molan, the Howard government never appointed a soldier of his seniority to Iraq again, despite US requests. I suspect this is because even the Howard government was scared of having to take political responsibility for genuinely big battlefield decisions. We claim to want influence, but are often scared of it.
If only we had a few more “cowards” like Jim Molan.
GREG SHERIDAN
Foreign Editor
silmarillianblog 