There was no war, but there were sanctions, post September 11, against a middle eastern dictator that had already started a few wars including the 'first gulf war'. AWB violated those sanctions. It broke the law to give money to Saddam. The actions were immoral regardless of whether a war started at a later date. The AWB can hardly claim they had no way of anticipating the next war. The sanctions were in place to stop Saddam getting the money for his next war, which if you consider his history was inevitable - if idiots like the AWB funded it.

Your argument is like saying that drink driving is only immoral if you kill someone.

freediver wrote on Apr 8^th, 2008 at 5:37pm:


I think you may need to read my posts for the first time.  I have stated re-stated and now re-stated again - their actions were not merely immoral, they were illegal.

But to state they had fore-knowledge of a war and helped fund it is entirely fictional.  I watched the Liebor Party make the same absurd claims nightly.

Why was a war inevitable?

But to state they had fore-knowledge of a war and helped fund it is entirely fictional.

Sigh. Another strawman.

But to state they had fore-knowledge of a war and helped fund it is entirely fictional.

The real crime was not the alleged breaking of UN sanctions by AWB and many other companies, but the sanctions regime itself that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Washington insisted on maintaining the sanctions via the UN “oil for food” scheme as a means of preventing its European and Asian rivals from securing control over Iraqi oil fields. Amid continuing pressure to lift the sanctions, the US toppled Saddam Hussein to subjugate the country and its resources as part of broader ambitions to establish US dominance throughout the Middle East.

Australia’s participation in the war was driven by equally predatory considerations. Above all, it sought to reinforce the US-Australia strategic and military alliance and thus secure Washington’s backing for Australia’s own neo-colonial interventions in the Asia-Pacific region. It was also seeking to preserve Australia’s grip over the multi-million dollar Iraqi wheat trade, against its US and Canadian challengers.

Documents released by the Cole inquiry just days before its final report reveal that the Howard government and the AWB were deeply concerned about the impact of the impending war on Australian wheat exports. More than a year before the war, one of the government’s most senior diplomats, UN ambassador John Dauth, tipped off AWB chairman Trevor Flugge—one of the so-called “dirty dozen”—that Australia would join a US-led invasion.

Clearly, with an invasion looming, one of Canberra’s quandaries was how to shield Australia’s wheat trade. Dauth promised Flugge that he would ensure AWB had “as much warning as would be possible” of the war, so that it could cover its tracks on its dealings with the Saddam Hussein administration and prepare to deal with a US-led occupation.

It is worth noting that Dauth’s briefing of Flugge, recorded in confidential AWB board minutes for February 2002, contradicts all the claims made by Washington and Canberra that no decision was made to invade Iraq until early 2003, when the pretext was that Iraq had blocked effective UN weapons inspections. With remarkable accuracy, he predicted that the Iraq regime’s offer to invite UN weapons inspectors to return was likely to stave off US action for only 12 to 18 months.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/awb-d09.shtml

Perhaps he was Aussie.

Quote:


Yay!!!!!!!!!

Give DT a lolly.

The UN set up sanctions. They weren't pouring money in, they were restricting the flow of funds to Saddam - to the extent they could with people like the AWB execs trying to get around it to give Saddam money.

How could AWB (a commercial concern) know what was going to happen in the future?

This question has been answered in many forms already. For example I posted this above:

You don't have to have 20/20 forsight to argue that your actions contribute to their result.

We are not saying AWB put the bullets in the guns, we are saying they were complicit - that their immoral actiosn contributed to the deaths and that they should have known better.