Imperial Folly: If the Anzac legend is about anything at all, it is about young Australian and New Zealand men transcending the idiocy and mendacity of their leaders and the hopelessness of their situation to assert a set of values and qualities unique to the places they called home.
IF ANYTHING can still be considered “sacred” in New Zealand
it’s Anzac Day. For Pakeha New Zealanders, in particular, the commemoration of
the Anzac landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 holds a visceral significance
which Waitangi Day has never achieved. That the day has survived the passing of
all those who were actually there bears testimony to its status as one of the
most potent symbols of our national identity.
In her nine years as Prime Minister, Helen Clark devoted
considerable energy (and a not insignificant amount of taxpayer cash) to
enhancing the power and reach of Anzac Day. Ms Clark’s purpose was to
underscore the military tragedy’s role in nudging New Zealanders forward from
their reflexive identification with the British Empire towards the first,
tentative, notion that they might, one day, become something more than mere
“loyal subjects” of the King-Emperor.
You might, therefore, think that Ms Clark’s successor,
contemplating the hundredth anniversary
of the Gallipoli landings, would be anxious to ensure that nothing happened to
besmirch or cheapen the solemn character of this major historical
commemoration. But, in this matter, as in so many other matters of late, our
current prime minister, John Key, is full of surprises.
At his post-Cabinet media conference on Monday, Mr Key
announced that: “it’s not impossible that they [the training components of
Australian and New Zealand military contingents poised to join the
international effort against Islamic State] could be badged as an Anzac unit.”
Mr Key and his Australian counterpart, Tony Abbott, have
clearly been mulling over the possibility of resurrecting the Anzac “badge”
ever since the two politicians teamed-up in the West Australian port of Albany
to jointly preside over commemorations of the original Anzacs’ embarkation for
Egypt on 1 November 1914.
It is difficult to know where to begin the list of reasons
why the Prime Ministers’ suggestion should be dismissed out of hand.
Perhaps we should start by reviewing why the original Gallipoli
Campaign proved to be such a disaster.
In April 1915 New Zealand was ordered into a hastily
improvised invasion of the Ottoman Empire with no clear understanding of what
we were being asked to do – or even if we could do it. If the Anzac legend is about
anything at all, it is about young Australian and New Zealand men transcending
the idiocy and mendacity of their leaders and the hopelessness of their
situation to assert a set of values and qualities unique to the places they
called home.
We honour the 2,779 young Kiwis who fell in that fight not
simply for their tremendous courage, but also for the terrible lesson which
their utterly needless deaths have, hopefully, inscribed upon our national
memory. That it is terribly wrong for our leaders to send young New Zealand men
and women to right wrongs that we, as New Zealanders, did not commit and which
we cannot hope to end.
Mr Key has stated that he has no intention of “doing
something that’s disrespectful”. But allowing us to be drawn into a joint role
with the Australians under some sort of sentimental throwback to the Anzacs is,
as Labour’s Andrew Little noted: “pretty cynical”.
Especially since it would be a joint mission without clear
objectives; lacking any reliable metric for success; and which will likely end
with New Zealand’s soldiers being hastily withdrawn amidst recrimination and
disgust.
Dry Run? US Marines and New Zealand soldiers conduct joint military exercises, "Dawn Blitz", at Camp Pendleton, California, in 2013.
Iraq is a failed state riven with corruption and religious
enmity. Its standing army is a standing joke. Nine tenths of the men we’d be
“training” have no wish to either kill or die for a regime they neither respect
nor trust. The remaining tenth will gladly put themselves and their weapons at
the disposal of Islamic State. Nowhere in Iraq is “behind the wire”. The whole
country is a combat zone.
If the “strategic studies” departments of our universities
were worthy of the name they would be condemning the madness of sending foreign
troops to Iraq in order to crush a movement brought into being by the presence
of foreign troops in Iraq. With Australian planes strafing IS positions and its
special forces readying themselves for combat, nothing could endanger New
Zealand’s “home front” more than publicly joining our name with that of the
United States’ gung-ho “Deputy Sheriff”.
Imperial folly has claimed enough New Zealand lives. No
more.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 December 2014.
