"Politicians from all sides have been sending Australians overseas to fight for over 100 years."
The Australian War Memorial has a tiny but fascination exhibit relating to the Boer War where Aussie troops went sent to South Africa to help British troops suppress Dutch farmers ('Boers') who disliked British rule.
The British targeted everything that could give sustenance to the 'Boers' under their "Scorched Earth" policy making it harder and harder for the Boers to survive.
Under British commanders, Aussie troops swept the countryside, interning women and children in concentration camps, destroying crops, burning down homesteads and farms, poisoning wells, and salting fields - out-and-out Aussie terrorism (against defenceless woman and children) in the name of British imperial honour and glory - while British and Aussie women and children slept safely in their beds.
There is a diary on display in the Australian War Memorial in which an Aussie soldier describes his moral dilemma as thousands of civilian Aussie captives slowly died (amid fly-blown pain and squalor) of starvation and disease in Belsen-type horror camps as a 'beastly business'.
I'm grateful the Memorial has not tried to 'air-brush' our participation in brutal imperial conquests on behalf of great and powerful empires.
What the 'Coalition of the Willing' has inflicted on Iraqi and Afghan families (in a display of imperial might) could also be described as a 'beastly business'.
From my Macquarie Dictionary:
Beast: any animal except man. A coarse, filthy or otherwise beastlike human.
Perhaps the only honest statement to emerge from US military about its war on Iraq came from a US Marine who was asked (on TV) why he had joined the Marines:
