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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 245 ..


MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Given that we are discussing such a motion, I will finish by quoting from an interesting little article in the Spectator by a person who went to a peace rally at which, as what he described as a bit of a stunt, there was a soccer match between some Americans and some Iraqis which the Iraqis won. He said:

I fell in with a young Iraqi student. He spoke quietly and kept moving out of earshot of the whooping peace-pack around us. He had fled Baghdad 11 months ago, he said, after several of his friends were executed. "The Iraqi people fear the sons more than Saddam. The sons are more cruel,"he told me. "Are you against the war?"I asked. He shrugged. "If it will come, it will come. Everyone close to the regime is selling their property. They're buying apartments in Syria and Jordan."That was news to me. He said, "But the Iraqis will fight."Another shrug. "The first bomb that falls, the first sign of war, the regime will collapse. Everyone knows this.""And then you can go home,"I said. He smiled but didn't reply. It seemed like treachery to support the aggressor in this atmosphere of stagy fraternalism. He left me with a chilling sound bite: "Saddam's survival is Iraq's death."

It is a horrible situation in which we find ourselves, but it is very important for the whole United Nations to enforce the sanctions it has applied, to enforce the resolutions it has passed and, if need be, to use military force to do so. I think that what the government has done is reasonable in the circumstances.

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Order! The member's time has expired.

MR BERRY (9.50): I will be opposing Mr Stefaniak's amendment. Who would trust the federal government on the issue of war? I want to go back to some of my early experiences with war. I remember as a young boy in a catholic school being called upon to pray for the conversion of communists when the Korean War was in progress. Later, I got to talk to an airman who was to fly in Korea. Among other things, he told me about how the clergy would come along and bless the soldiers and airmen as they went off to war.

He also told me how, in the briefings before they left, they were told, "Make sure that you attack up and down the roads and not up and down the rivers when you go for a bridge because, if you attack up and down the rivers, any ammunition that misses the bridge will hit the rivers and there will be nothing there. You should attack up and down the roads because usually there will be a town on each side of the bridge and you will do some collateral damage and might get one of the commies."I thought to myself at the time that war was a thing to be avoided at all costs.

My earliest memories of the Vietnam War go to all of the demonstrations which occurred at the time. To this day, I regret that I was not an active part of that, but I was always an opponent of the Vietnam War, and I was right. When Gough Whitlam said to the soldiers in Vietnam, "I support you, but I will be getting you out of there as quickly as I can,"that was the right thing to say. What did we profit from in Vietnam? I will come to some of the things that Mr Pratt said later. We were all going to be subject to the domino effect if Vietnam fell and we would have communists on our shores not long after. We were misled then by the Americans. We were misled then by the Australian government, a conservative government. Our men and women were sent overseas to kill people they had no argument with.


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