On the same day it was reported that hundreds of Australian citizens were traveling to the Middle East to take part in jihadi-style terrorist attacks on Syria, Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr used national television to suggest that the ‘assassination’ of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad might be a way out of the Syrian crisis.

‘This sounds brutal and callous’, he told the ABC, ‘[but] perhaps an assassination combined with a major defection, taking a large part of its military, is what is required’ [http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/10/04/3603727.htm]. Such vicious remarks are regularly heard in the USA, but rarely in Australia.

Carr’s words were carefully chosen. As an experienced (if currently unelected) politician he knew very well the comment would attract attention. But there are good reasons why foreign ministers rarely promote assassination: it violates diplomatic protocols, is against international law and probably constitutes a criminal offence under Australian law.

All of this raises the question of whether the Australian Foreign Minister, in openly backing more terrorism, is acting as an agent of Washington. There is no Australian interest in such outrageous behaviour.

The extraordinary comments come at a time when the Syrian ‘revolution’ has been progressively exposed as foreign funded and mostly populated by foreign Islamists. The myth of peaceful civilians being massacred by a brutal government is still in circulation, but has no credibility with those who have followed the detail of the crisis.

With the US reluctant to enter another war, the Syrian Army is regaining the upper hand. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) gangs have resorted to desperate measures in attempts to secure more direct NATO support, in particular a Libyan-styled bombing campaign. First the FSA massacred civilians, then blamed it on the government, prior to UN Security Council meetings. When that did not work, they tried shelling Turkish border areas. None of this, so far, has managed to incite direct NATO intervention and, without such backing, the foreign fundamentalists are going down. Some Libyan fighters have already returned to Libya.

Extreme measures have been discussed several times. One of the last plots between French President Sarkozy and the Saudis was to try incitement of US aerial attacks, so as to assassinate President Assad. President Obama refused such attacks; but that does not mean assassination is off his agenda.

At first glance the question of Carr as a foreign agent may seem a bit ridiculous or, better put, redundant. Australian governments, whether led by Liberals or Labor, have backed US military adventures and aggressions for more than half a century. The Gillard government’s diehard commitment to the moribund Afghan war is testament to that.

However let’s recall that Bob Carr was chosen by his party to fill a Senate vacancy left by factional colleague, Mark Arbib. That former Senator had been driven from office after Wikileaks revealed he had been ‘a confidential contact of the United States Embassy in Canberra, providing inside information and commentary for Washington on the workings of the Australian government and the Labor Party’ (The Age, 9 December 2010). Arbib was involved in the backroom coup which replaced Prime Minister Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard.

Labor’s links with the US government have a long history. John Grenville, former Assistant Secretary of Victorian Trades Hall, said ‘it was generally accepted that the US Labor Attaché was the station agent for the CIA’. The CIA gave money to various unions (in particular the Australian Workers Union and the Iron Workers Union) to ‘fight communism’ in the Labor Party and the unions. Many Australian unionists were taken to the US for training. The Arbib case shows such links remain strong in the post-cold war period.

Carr was drawn into the federal Labor government to shore up Labor’s faltering image with the mining-finance-media oligarchy. A closer ‘lock step’ with the US was surely part of this, and an important element of Carr’s new role.

Yet Labor has not always been dominated by Washington on all matters. There have been moments of partial autonomy, as in the current government’s attempts to craft some joint health programs with Cuba in the Pacific. US policy and law prohibits any such interaction with Cuba. However Cuba runs the largest and most effective health aid programs in the world and the Labor government, on this issue has decided to not stay loyal to the US.

Not so on Syria. And some things take Carr’s behaviour out of the ordinary ‘subservient’ category. He is putting in some extra effort.

First, there was his 180 degree turnaround on the new wars of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Before being appointed to the Senate he was a critic of the Libyan intervention. ‘The hasty [and] ill-thought out nature of the western commitment to Libya is clearer by the day', he wrote in his blog (May 4, 2011). ‘Will you please assure us [he asked the big powers] that there is no ally of Al Qaida in the rebel forces … [yet] by declaring it a battle for regime change, the Americans and the Europeans have now made a negotiated settlement unlikely.’

Nevertheless, as Foreign Minister Bob Carr has abandoned the idea of any ‘negotiated settlement’ and presents ‘assassination’ as the way forward for ‘regime change’. Yet in Syria the ‘Al Qaeda’ character of the ‘Free Syrian Army’ gangs has been better demonstrated than it was in Libya, mainly through the on-line video they have posted of their own multiple atrocities. As if that were not enough, the US Ambassador in Libya, Chris Stevens, who had been recruiting Salafi gangs to send to Syria, was murdered by those very same people.

Carr’s reputation as a studious person makes worse his lies about Syria. He claims the country has experienced: ‘decades of rule by one man’ (in fact Bashar has been President since 2000), that Bashar Al Assad is in an ‘inherited presidency for life’ (in fact, he was recruited by the Baath Party after the death of his father and voted in through a plebiscite; there will be a competitive election next year), that ‘normal political frustration is now being vent with a fury’ and ‘nobody knows’ the extent of Islamic extremists in the FSA.

In fact, Syria’s new constitution allows multi-party elections and competitive Presidential elections with fixed terms. Carr simply refuses to acknowledge any of this.

The fact that the violent ‘fury’ is coming mainly from Islamists, most of them foreigners, has been well documented in recent months by many European journalists and observers. These fanatics are not fighting for civil freedoms, but to overthrow a pluralist, secular state, which they despise. They want to set up a sectarian ‘caliphate’. They say this openly and there is hardly any shortage of evidence, even in the western media.

German Rainer Hermann for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), along with Russian journalist Marat Musin and fellow German Alfred Hackensberger, documented FSA complicity in the massacres at Houla. John Cantlie, British photojournalist (The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, the BBC) was kidnapped by ‘foreign jihadists’ in Syria. Robert Fisk for the Independent reported on the numerous foreign jihadis in Aleppo. The Catholic News Agency reported on 50,000 Christians being ethnically cleansed from Homs by fundamentalists. The New York Times, Time magazine and many others have reported on Al Qaeda-style groups carrying out atrocities in Syria.

Yet the Australian Foreign Minister hides behind the routine media lies that draw exclusively on opposition sources (like the London-based one-man band the ‘Syrian Observatory for Human Rights’) to deny foreign funded terrorism and blame all atrocities on the Syrian Government. Melkite nun Mother Agnes Mariam recently told a Sydney audience that an overwhelming majority of opposition fighters in Syria were foreigners and that the most egregious sin of the current crisis was precisely those lies: saying ‘black was white and white was black’.

As part of the Washington-aligned stance taken by Minister Carr, we can expect to find a parallel money trail. A fair portion of the $200 odd million pledged by the US for ‘humanitarian’ support for Syria (hospitals, refugee camps) has been directed into FSA controlled camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. Here they also access their NATO and Israeli weapons. The rockets recently fired into Turkey were NATO munitions. (And by the way, there have been huge demonstrations in Turkey against their own government’s hosting of the FSA and its aggression towards Syria.)

What does this lead us to believe about Australia’s $24.5 million in ‘Syrian humanitarian aid’? AAP says this makes Australia the ‘largest national contributor to the conflict behind the United States and the United Kingdom’. Carr says the money is for ‘medical aid’, ‘emergency food’ and ‘shelter and health care in refugee camps’. But who is administering this money? The jihadis are calling for food and medical aid, as well as weapons. There is little reason to believe that a foreign minister who openly advocates terrorism would have any real scruples about funding it.

We are entitled to draw reasonable conclusions based on this evidence. I say that Bob Carr, in betrayal of his trust as an Australian Minister, is either an agent of Washington or is acting much the same as one. Further, it seems likely that Australian aid money, said to be for humanitarian purposes, is being directed to groups under the control of the same terrorist gangs carrying out repeated atrocities against the Syrian people.

If there were an independent media in Australia it would expose and shame Bob Carr. If there were independent legal officers he would be prosecuted for his shameless advocacy of terrorism.

About the author: Tim Anderson has degrees in economics and international politics, and a doctorate on the political economy of economic liberalisation in Australia. He has been published in a range of academic journals, most recently in: Health and Human Rights, the Pan-American Journal of Public Health, The International Journal of Cuban Studies, the Australian Journal of Human Rights, Latin American Perspectives, the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Critical Public Health, the Journal of Australian Political Economy and Pacific Economic Bulletin.

Bob Carr: An Agent Of Washington?

Bob Carr has once again shown that he is totally unfit to represent Australia’s foreign interests & in doing so, has further demonstrated that Australia’s aspirations to take-up a seat on the UN Security Council are simply beyond its current capabilities.

In calling for the assassination of President Assad of Syria, contrary to international law, some might argue that our Foreign Minister is guilty of criminal negligence, whilst many would see his behaviour as clumsy, inept, irresponsible & certainly politically reprehensible at the very least.

Given the readiness of some of our political leaders to promote such behaviour, doubtless most Australians will hardly be surprised when the shoe finds the other foot?

Bob Carr is not a Foreign Minister’s fantasy.