CNN reports that the US has named the ongoing operation against Houthi in Yemen “Operation Poseidon Archer, suggesting a more organized and potentially long-term approach.” New Zealand has joined it – cue the slippery slope.
New Zealand is sending six specialists with targeting expertise according to Defence Minister Judith Collins.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon stated repeatedly at Monday’s car-crash Beehive Press conference that their deployment would finish at the end of July. Luxon also stated that the decision was not linked to the Israeli-led and US-supported massacre in Gaza. The second statement is utterly not believable, and events may prove the first to be wrong. The US is yanking our chain.
This has all the appearance of us being drawn into another US-led swamp. The Houthis have seen off Saudi Arabia’s efforts to bomb them back to the stone age, and have shown they have accurate long-range missiles in their inventory. President Biden has admitted that the US bombing is unlikely to stop the Houthi attacks on Israeli shipping, but it also won’t stop the US doing the only thing they know which is to keep on bombing.
Defence Minister Judith Collins’ admitted that the New Zealand service-persons will be involved in “targetting” which they are “very skilled at.” I think it is highly likely that some of the defence personnel sent to assist Ukraine were also involved in targetting, using information from US and NATO reconnaissance aircraft and spydrones.
Now that warfare has shifted from boots on the ground to eyes in the air, this means they are active participants in war.
Labour’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson David Parker has said that this is an operation that we do not need to get involved in. He reminded us that unlike Australia we did not join US President George Bush’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq in 2003.
The National/NZ First/ACT government are leading us into a “coalition of the captured.” It is one of a piece with the AUKUS agreement, which the coalition government is also pushing us into.The fundamental issue is not about capability, it is about our sovereignty
Its most pungent manifestation came with a recent comment which was first aired by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and widely attributed to President Biden’s Asia ‘tsar’, Kurt Campbell. Campbell described the AUKUS agreement as “getting Australia off the fence. We have them locked in now for the next 40 years”.
The last thing New Zealand needs in this shifting world is to be locked into the US embrace as it moves from one disastrous losing war to another, leaving behind millions and millions of lost and ruined lives.
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