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Australian PM says Chinese naval base in Solomon Islands would be ‘red line’

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West Dundee Hawkeye

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Sep 28, 2003
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Australia Red Line

Australia’s prime minister warned over the weekend that a Chinese naval base in the Solomon Islands would be a “red line” for his country.

Days after the government in the Solomon Islands announced a new security agreement with China, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters in his country the news was a “shared concern” in the southwest Pacific region, including with the islands of Fiji and Papua New Guinea, according to ABC Australia.

“I share the same red line that the United States has when it comes to these issues,” Morrison said on Saturday. “We won’t be having Chinese military naval bases in our region on our doorstep.”
 
2020 White House has brought open season to :
1) the US borders
2) military invasions , by enemy country
3) military expansion, by enemy country
 
doughuddl2 said:
2020 White House has brought open season to :
1) the US borders
2) military invasions , by enemy country
3) military expansion, by enemy country
Click to expand...
I'll give you #1 - the immigration is a complete and utter disaster under Biden.
#2 - remember that Trump wanted to get out of NATO...Gee, I wonder why. Maybe because a NATO without the U.S. is much more vulnerable to Russia. Trumps buddy Putin wanted the U.S. out and Trump was willing to help his friend.
#3 - China was expanding during the Obama administration and through Trump, so way before 2020. Russia was in Syria during Trump.
 
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steelrain said:
I'll give you #1 - the immigration is a complete and utter disaster under Biden.
#2 - remember that Trump wanted to get out of NATO...Gee, I wonder why. Maybe because a NATO without the U.S. is much more vulnerable to Russia. Trumps buddy Putin wanted the U.S. out and Trump was willing to help his friend.
#3 - China was expanding during the Obama administration and through Trump, so way before 2020. Russia was in Syria during Trump.
Click to expand...
#2 Trump lambasted the Europeans countries that had for decades refused to adequately and as agreed fund their militaries. He pointed out, correctly, that they were taking advantage of us and threatened to move troops to NATO members that were meeting the 2% of GDP spending stipulation.
Trump was obviously cajoling NATO members to increase spending so that they would decrease spending to spite him and advantage Putin.
Master Stategist 4D Chess!

#3 Russia moved into Syria to help the UN recognized government put down a jihadist insurgency. Turkey and the U.S. also invaded Syria while Obama was president. Trump tried to end the invasion of Syria that Congress never explicitly authorized and that Obama embarked upon holding up the 9/11 authorization to use military force as the justification. Trump tried to get our troops out of there and the Establishment fought it tooth and nail.

Our unauthorized invasion persists in Syria into a third presidency. It’s absurd, but absurd has been normalized.
 
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seminole97 said:
#2 Trump lambasted the Europeans countries that had for decades refused to adequately and as agreed fund their militaries. He pointed out, correctly, that they were taking advantage of us and threatened to move troops to NATO members that were meeting the 2% of GDP spending stipulation.
Trump was obviously cajoling NATO members to increase spending so that they would decrease spending to spite him and advantage Putin.
Master Stategist 4D Chess!

#3 Russia moved into Syria to help the UN recognized government put down a jihadist insurgency. Turkey and the U.S. also invaded Syria while Obama was president. Trump tried to end the invasion of Syria that Congress never explicitly authorized and that Obama embarked upon holding up the 9/11 authorization to use military force as the justification. Trump tried to get our troops out of there and the Establishment fought it tooth and nail.

Our unauthorized invasion persists in Syria into a third presidency. It’s absurd, but absurd has been normalized.
Click to expand...
Which side were you on in #3? Russia's or the USA's at the war's on-set?
 
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globalhawk said:
Which side were you on in #3? Russia's or the USA's at the war's on-set?
Click to expand...
I don’t conflate the neocons’ side with the USA’s side.


From: Jake Sullivan
To: Hillary Clinton Date: 2012-02-12 09:01 Subject: SPOT REPORT 02/12/II
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05789138
Date: 10/30/2015
RELEASE IN FULL
From: Sullivan, JacobJ <SullivanJJ@state.gov> Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2012 4:01 PM To: Subject: Fw:SPOTREPORT02/12/11(SBU)

See last item - AQ is on our side in Syria.
 
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seminole97 said:
I don’t conflate the neocons’ side with the USA’s side.


From: Jake Sullivan
To: Hillary Clinton Date: 2012-02-12 09:01 Subject: SPOT REPORT 02/12/II
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05789138
Date: 10/30/2015
RELEASE IN FULL
From: Sullivan, JacobJ <SullivanJJ@state.gov> Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2012 4:01 PM To: Subject: Fw:SPOTREPORT02/12/11(SBU)

See last item - AQ is on our side in Syria.
Click to expand...
What do you most believe is true? The USA or Russian pretext for supporting separate sides?
 
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seminole97 said:
#3 Russia moved into Syria to help the UN recognized government put down a jihadist insurgency.
Click to expand...
And the difference between this and Saudi Arabia moving to help the UN recognized and *actually elected* government in Yemen put down an insurgency is what, exactly? Oh, that's right, the difference is that while Syria is a Russian-backed dictatorship putting down a popular insurgency, the Saudis in Yemen are fighting an minority backed by Iran and Russia.

Always supporting Russia's side, isn't that right, You Fu cking Russian Stooge?
 
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globalhawk said:
Let's make this easy. Who did you support in the Syrian war? You had to be partial to some group right?
Click to expand...
I was on the side of America, so I had no dog in that fight. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see the American made TOW missiles and other weapons funneled into that conflict end up in the hands if jihadists.
I didn’t think Nobel Peace Prize toting Obama could get talked into going along with that, but he followed up by sending in US troops to ethnically partition the country.

I’m of the Washington - John Quincy Adams School on these things.

"Regime Change" Doesn't Work, You Morons​

How many examples of "regime change" blowing up in our faces do we really need before realizing that it's a disastrous policy? Will we really try it with a nuclear-armed adversary?​

…
2016, the Washington Post published an article by a Boston College professor named Lindsay O’Rourke noting the United States had either toppled or attempted to topple other countries’ governments 72 times between 1947 and 1989. The list is an astonishing compendium of disasters. We apparently can’t even murder people competently, spending taxpayer money on Dr. Evil schemes to make Castro’s beard fall out or have him walk past exploding sea shells (the CIA even spent a million in Indonesia on a failed plot to make a porno movie using a man in a General Sukarno mask) while real assassinations, O’Rourke wrote, were only ever pulled off by foreigners:

Not a single U.S.-backed assassination plot during this time actually killed their intended target, although two foreign leaders — South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo — were killed by foreign intermediaries without Washington’s blessing during U.S.-backed coups.
Click to expand...
O’Rourke also concluded that “after a nation’s government was toppled, it was less democratic and more likely to suffer civil war, domestic instability and mass killing.” The Cato Institute came to the same conclusion, noting that regime-change efforts “are likely to spark civil wars, lead to lower levels of democracy, increase repression, and in the end, draw the foreign intervener into lengthy nation‐building projects.”

“Regime change” is a theory of pre-emptive conquest and therefore based on the same lunatic logic that drove Putin to invade Ukraine.
…
Yeltsin’s rep as a Western puppet who brutalized the press, blew off a national non-payment crisis suffered by miners and other working-class laborers, and didn’t crack down on years of rampant capital flight (engineered by his thieving oligarch pals) out of a starving country, led directly to the widespread support for his hand-picked successor, the vicious nationalist Putin. This raises the question: if we succeed in deposing Putin over Ukraine, what evidence is there that we won’t end up with someone even worse than Putin in the Kremlin in very short order, like we did last time? Who thinks we wouldn’t screw this up on a grand scale, given that we already botched it once? Any replacement for Putin the U.S. would find acceptable would have to evince a range of views putting him or her directly at odds with most of the population, like for instance a tolerance for NATO expansion. The seeds of reaction would be there from the jump. That’s in the lucky case we don’t provoke civilization-ending nuclear war en route to helping install a new Russian leader.

The people who run our foreign policy look back at the incredible record of failure of American regime change efforts — hundreds of thousands dead in Indonesia, maybe two million in Indochina — and are incapable of seeing the basic truth on that was on display for all the world to see in Iraq, and also now in Ukraine: people will fight to the death rather than accept any kind of foreign rule. For people like this, regime change efforts never failed because they were doomed insane paranoia, but because of overlooked logistical errors, like not sending ground troops into Laos to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who became a #Resistance hero for speaking out about his differences with Donald Trump, wrote a whole book called “Dereliction of Duty” that argued America lost in Vietnam because Johnson and Kennedy wouldn’t listen to the Joint Chiefs, who “always knew what was needed to win in Vietnam,” like a “large increase in the number of advisers.” He leaves out our massacres of civilians, herding of locals into “strategic hamlets,” and use of child-disfiguring Agent Orange, and the resistance all this inspired. McMaster is now a go-to quote about the need for regime change in Russia. These people will never stop believing regime change just needs more time under the hood, and it’ll work the next time.

As was the case with Saddam Hussein, the argument here isn’t for leaving a monster like Putin in power. It’s about not inviting something worse to take his place — an Ayatollah, Islamic State, a resupplied Taliban — through inerrant arrogance and incompetence. Are we really going to do this again? How many times is enough?
 
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seminole97 said:
I was on the side of America, so I had no dog in that fight. I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see the American made TOW missiles and other weapons funneled into that conflict end up in the hands if jihadists.
I didn’t think Nobel Peace Prize toting Obama could get talked into going along with that, but he followed up by sending in US troops to ethnically partition the country.

I’m of the Washington - John Quincy Adams School on these things.

"Regime Change" Doesn't Work, You Morons​

How many examples of "regime change" blowing up in our faces do we really need before realizing that it's a disastrous policy? Will we really try it with a nuclear-armed adversary?​

…
2016, the Washington Post published an article by a Boston College professor named Lindsay O’Rourke noting the United States had either toppled or attempted to topple other countries’ governments 72 times between 1947 and 1989. The list is an astonishing compendium of disasters. We apparently can’t even murder people competently, spending taxpayer money on Dr. Evil schemes to make Castro’s beard fall out or have him walk past exploding sea shells (the CIA even spent a million in Indonesia on a failed plot to make a porno movie using a man in a General Sukarno mask) while real assassinations, O’Rourke wrote, were only ever pulled off by foreigners:


O’Rourke also concluded that “after a nation’s government was toppled, it was less democratic and more likely to suffer civil war, domestic instability and mass killing.” The Cato Institute came to the same conclusion, noting that regime-change efforts “are likely to spark civil wars, lead to lower levels of democracy, increase repression, and in the end, draw the foreign intervener into lengthy nation‐building projects.”

“Regime change” is a theory of pre-emptive conquest and therefore based on the same lunatic logic that drove Putin to invade Ukraine.
…
Yeltsin’s rep as a Western puppet who brutalized the press, blew off a national non-payment crisis suffered by miners and other working-class laborers, and didn’t crack down on years of rampant capital flight (engineered by his thieving oligarch pals) out of a starving country, led directly to the widespread support for his hand-picked successor, the vicious nationalist Putin. This raises the question: if we succeed in deposing Putin over Ukraine, what evidence is there that we won’t end up with someone even worse than Putin in the Kremlin in very short order, like we did last time? Who thinks we wouldn’t screw this up on a grand scale, given that we already botched it once? Any replacement for Putin the U.S. would find acceptable would have to evince a range of views putting him or her directly at odds with most of the population, like for instance a tolerance for NATO expansion. The seeds of reaction would be there from the jump. That’s in the lucky case we don’t provoke civilization-ending nuclear war en route to helping install a new Russian leader.

The people who run our foreign policy look back at the incredible record of failure of American regime change efforts — hundreds of thousands dead in Indonesia, maybe two million in Indochina — and are incapable of seeing the basic truth on that was on display for all the world to see in Iraq, and also now in Ukraine: people will fight to the death rather than accept any kind of foreign rule. For people like this, regime change efforts never failed because they were doomed insane paranoia, but because of overlooked logistical errors, like not sending ground troops into Laos to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who became a #Resistance hero for speaking out about his differences with Donald Trump, wrote a whole book called “Dereliction of Duty” that argued America lost in Vietnam because Johnson and Kennedy wouldn’t listen to the Joint Chiefs, who “always knew what was needed to win in Vietnam,” like a “large increase in the number of advisers.” He leaves out our massacres of civilians, herding of locals into “strategic hamlets,” and use of child-disfiguring Agent Orange, and the resistance all this inspired. McMaster is now a go-to quote about the need for regime change in Russia. These people will never stop believing regime change just needs more time under the hood, and it’ll work the next time.

As was the case with Saddam Hussein, the argument here isn’t for leaving a monster like Putin in power. It’s about not inviting something worse to take his place — an Ayatollah, Islamic State, a resupplied Taliban — through inerrant arrogance and incompetence. Are we really going to do this again? How many times is enough?
Click to expand...
Geez. I hope someone is at least paying you to cut and past.
 
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Slappy Pappy said:
And the difference between this and Saudi Arabia moving to help the UN recognized and *actually elected* government in Yemen put down an insurgency is what, exactly?
Click to expand...
It was a single candidate ‘election’, with the candidate selected by the invading powers to try and restore control they lost to a public revolution against the prior dictatorship.

You knew the election was a sham, right?

You weren’t fooled by White House letterhead into thinking there was a democracy put in operation by the Saudi invaders, were you?

For real?
 
The Solomon Islands should have done better research. The Chinese are bad guests. They get pushy, and don’t leave when asked to.
 
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HawkeyeGenius said:
The problem is that Australia won't do a thing about it except condemn it. They'd want the USA to take action.
Click to expand...
Yep. Must be nice to fund extravagant social welfare programs because daddy watches over everything. They seriously get like 7 weeks of mandated vacation.
 
globalhawk said:
Reuters, AP, Al-J, Korean Times, BBC, WSJ, FoxNews online, Mix of European/Oceania/S. American
Click to expand...
What did you think of the BBC coverage of the Douma whistleblowers?

The following is a transcription of an interview given by Jonathan Steele (former Senior Middle East Correspondent for the Guardian) to Paul Henley, on the BBC World Service programme, Weekend, on 27 October 2019

Jonathan Steele: “I was in Brussels last week … I attended a briefing by a whistleblower from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He was one of the inspectors who was sent out to Douma in Syria in April last year to check into the allegations by the rebels that Syrian aeroplanes had dropped two canisters of chlorine gas, killing up to 43 people. He claims he was in charge of picking up the samples in the affected areas, and in neutral areas, to check whether there were chlorine derivatives there …
Paul Henley: And?
JS: … and he found that there was no difference. So it rather suggested there was no chemical gas attack, because in the buildings where the people allegedly died there was no extra chlorinated organic chemicals than in the normal streets elsewhere. And I put this to the OPCW for comment, and they haven’t yet replied. But it rather suggests that a lot of this was propaganda…
PH: Propaganda led by?
JS: … led by the rebel side to try and bring in American planes, which in fact did happen. American, British and French planes bombed Damascus a few days after these reports. And actually this is the second whistle blower to come forward. A few months ago there was a leaked report by the person who looked into the ballistics, as to whether these cylinders had been dropped by planes, looking at the damage of the building and the damage on the side of the cylinders. And he decided, concluded, that the higher probability was that these cylinders were placed on the ground, rather than from planes.
PH: This would be a major revelation…
JS: … it would be a major revelation …
PH: … given the number of people rubbishing the idea that these could have been fake videos at the time.
JS: Well, these two scientists, I think they’re non-political – they wouldn’t have been sent to Douma, if they’d had strong political views, by the OPCW. They want to speak to the Conference of the Member States in November, next month, and give their views, and be allowed to come forward publicly with their concerns. Because they’ve tried to raise them internally and been – they say they’ve been – suppressed, their views have been suppressed.
Click to expand...
 
steelhawkeye said:
Long service leave is not annual leave. If you're original point wasn't about annual leave, you didn't have much of a point to begin with.
Click to expand...
It’s mandated 8 weeks of vacation. Reread what I said. Maybe I was misleading, maybe not. What I said is not false. What you said is clearly false. Again, what’s it like to be wrong?
 
NCHawk5 said:
It’s mandated 8 weeks of vacation. Reread what I said. Maybe I was misleading, maybe not. What I said is not false. What you said is clearly false. Again, what’s it like to be wrong?
Click to expand...

So what was your original point? That since Australia doesn't spend billions on military every year, they can afford to mandate that private companies give their 7-10+ year tenured employees a lump sum of 7 weeks of vacation time. Great argument!
 
steelhawkeye said:
So what was your original point? That since Australia doesn't spend billions on military every year, they can afford to mandate that private companies give their 7-10+ year tenured employees a lump sum of 7 weeks of vacation time. Great argument!
Click to expand...
Well, obviously. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that social spending is social spending whether it’s coming from the G variable or not. We’re married to the government.
 
globalhawk said:
Copy and paste.
Click to expand...
I didn't claim that I provided the original transcription, so I really don't get the reply.
I was trying to avoid the question where you asked what I meant by my question of the BBC's coverage of the Douma whistleblowers.
You mentioned you use them as a source, what did you think about what the whistleblowers said? Have you seen anything about the concerns they raised?
 
The Solomon Islands recently denied the Oliver Perry, a Coast Guard cutter, docking rights, forcing the ship to sail from Guadalcanal, to Port Moresby in Papua-New Guinea to refuse and replenish. The Perry is based in Guam, and has been on patrol enforcing fishing regulations. It is believed that a move by the Solomons to move closer to China prompted the snub.
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/as...islands-coast-guard-cutter-china-7106824.html
 
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Australia has been a very reliably ally...

On 4 July 2018 Australia and the United States of America celebrated the first 100 Years of Mateship.

The date marked the 100th anniversary of the first time our troops fought side by side in an offensive action, at the Battle of Hamel on France’s Western Front. They fought under the command of one of Australia’s most revered military leaders, General Sir John Monash.

The battle plan devised by General Monash was radical for its time – it marked the first time tanks had been used as protection on a battlefield for the advancing infantry and the first time aircraft had been deployed to drop ammunition to ground troops.

General Monash predicted that the offensive would last for 90 minutes. Incredibly it took the Allied forces just 93 minutes to secure victory and turned the tide against the Germans on the Western Front.

Since that day, which helped turn the tide of the First World War, Australian and American soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and women have served alongside one another in every major conflict. This is symbolic of the deep and enduring bond, mutual respect and close co-operation that exists between Australia and the United States.

 
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West Dundee Hawkeye said:
“I share the same red line that the United States has when it comes to these issues,” Morrison said on Saturday. “We won’t be having Chinese military naval bases in our region on our doorstep.”
Click to expand...
It is totally OK when we or our allies say things like this, but Putin is Hitler when he does it.
 
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