Pete Hegseth is the Peter Principle applied to the largest weapons arsenal in human history. Pine Gap guides the missiles. Australian-made F-35 parts are in the payload. And our media calls it a partnership. Part Two of Urban Wronski’s investigation into what Australia’s press is not reporting, and what our silence is costing.
Australia’s mainstream press hasn’t just failed the Iran war test. It has “Ajax-ed” the crime, scrubbing blood and guts from the ledger of history. When 170 girls are obliterated in a classroom in Minab and the ABC calls it “more than 100 children dead in a strike,” the anaesthetic is working. By Urban Wronski.
On the morning of April 7, Donald Trump posted that a whole civilisation would die that night. He was not bluffing. Part Two of Urban Wronski’s Operation Epic Fury series examines the systematic destruction of Iranian universities, libraries and cultural institutions, the weapons tested on children, and what it means that none of the rules are being enforced.
Operation Epic Fury” sounds like it was coined by a fourteen-year-old playing too much Call of Duty. In many ways, it’s a perfect fit for the Peter Pan that Donald Trump has running the Pentagon. Urban Wronski on the War of Donald’s Ear — how two homicidal maniacs borrowed one very willing ear, and launched a war.
Trump burned two C-130s on an Iranian runway, declared total victory, and is now threatening to demolish the power grid of 92 million people. Tonight is the deadline. Urban Wronski on the Easter debacle built on assumption, sustained by bluster, and ending in wreckage that no quantity of “WE GOT HIM!” can unbog.
Bryan Dawe is seated. John Clarke enters in a suit, slightly harried, carrying a reusable shopping bag with “ALBO” written on it in texta.
Australia sent troops to a war it hasn’t declared, through a base it won’t discuss, after a school massacre it can’t explain, while the Prime Minister assures us that transparency is everything. Clarke and Dawe, imagined for the age of Operation Epic Fury.
To make sense of Trump’s war on Iran, imagine a Russian
babushka doll. The outer layer is the story the Pentagon feeds
us. Inside it: petrodollar entanglements, Kharg Island
war-gaming, the strategic patience of Moscow and Beijing,
Netanyahu’s fantasy of the purifying blow. At the very centre,
smaller than it should be, is Australia. Urban Wronski opens
all six layers and does not like what he finds.
Lindsey Graham is evoking Iwo Jima. Iran is mining Kharg Island’s shoreline. Seven thousand five hundred US Marines are days away from the Persian Gulf. The war is 26 days old, has cost $18 billion, and the White House’s official position is that they need about a month to “get Iran by the balls.” Australia is calling for de-escalation. The crease in the trousers remains arrow-straight.
INTERVIEWER: Are we at war with Iran?
ALBANESE: No.
INTERVIEWER: Then why did they bomb our base?
ALBANESE: Because they’re Iran.
One interviewer. One Prime Minister. Forty-five satellite dishes, three submariners, one Wedgetail aircraft, a peace negotiation bombed flat, a hundred and seventy schoolgirls, and a pocket square without a mark on it. A political interview in the tradition of Clarke and Dawe.
Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration has no exit strategy, no agreed objective, and a secretary of defence who believes God has a plan for the outcome. Inside the fractures, the contradictions, and the slow drift toward a quagmire nobody in Washington will name out loud. By Urban Wronski.
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