Rudd and Obama Reaffirm Alliance; Quiet on Sending More Australian Troops
It’s no real surprise that in the first face-to-face meeting between Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and American President, Barack Obama, they both went to lengths to reinforce the importance of the Australian-American alliance.
Despite the ‘nicer’ face Rudd and Obama put on, compared to Howard and Bush, this reinforces the idea that in fact there is nothing new in the changing of the guard in both countries.
Notably, they both support an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. But they’ve chosen to avoid the question of Rudd sending more troops alongside the 17,000 Obama plans to send.
With two Australian soldiers killed recently (not to mention to innumerable Afghani civilians!), Rudd continued to reinforce the importance of the war but I think he’d be a little bit hesitant to send more troops at the moment. People will be starting to ask the question, what did these soldiers die for?
And to repeat a point made in a previous post, it just seems insane to spend millions, possibly billions more, on destroying a country and killing its civilians, when we’re heading into an unprecedented economic crisis and the money could be better spent helping ordinary working-class people who are bound to be hit hard by rising unemployment.
