This x1000000
=======================================
Australia is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. That is because Australia is a long way from the North Atlantic.
That did not deter the Prime Minister from offering the Ukrainian government military support and military advice in its struggle with Russian-backed separatists.
What vital Australian interests are at stake in Ukraine has not been explained. What useful military advice Australia has to offer has not been spelled out.
Tony Abbott has been equally eager – pantingly eager, it must be said – to join a new coalition, put together by US President Barack Obama at NATO's recent summit in Wales, to "degrade and destroy" the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
None of the 10 nations that have so far joined the coalition is willing to commit ground forces. The degradation of ISIL will be carried out from the air. How that will be done without risking massive casualties among the long-suffering civilians of northern Iraq and eastern Syria has not been clarified.
But we are assured it must be done. ISIL poses a real threat to Australia's own security, because, like a virus, its ideology will be carried home by those deluded Australians who have volunteered to fight in its ranks. Terrorism and jihad will return to our shores.
That is less likely to happen, it seems, if Australia joins in the aerial bombardment of northern Iraq. Even though, as Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop confusingly told us over the weekend, ISIL cannot be destroyed. As the Americans say, go figure.
Meanwhile, there is another deadly virus loose in the world. A real virus that poses, I would have thought, at least as serious a threat as the jihadists of ISIL to the health and security of Australians – and the citizens of every other nation on earth.
On September 2 – just two days before the leaders of 28 of the world's wealthiest and most militarily powerful nations met in Wales – the President of Medecins Sans Frontieres International made a desperate plea at a briefing to the United Nations in New York.
"Six months into the worst Ebola epidemic in history, the world is losing the battle to contain it," said Dr Joanne Liu. The international response had been "lethally inadequate". What was needed now, she declared, was the sort of expertise in dealing with biological threats that only advanced nations' armed forces possessed.
In a moving interview on RN's Breakfast last Friday, the President of MSF Belgium, Dr Meinie Nicolai, repeated Liu's call. MSF was being overwhelmed in West Africa, she said. "We cannot do this alone."
In other disasters, she pointed out, advanced nations had been quick to respond. "If we have an earthquake, for example … there's a lot of armies who come with their surgeons, with their capacity to quickly set up a field hospital; that capacity we need now in West Africa for Ebola ... funding alone is not enough. We need people who take the responsibility to open new treatment centres, help us deal with the dead bodies, help us inform the population, to do contact tracing; there is so much work to do."
So, what was the response to MSF's plea in Newport, Wales, last week? There was none. So far as I can see, no one at the NATO summit had a word to say about Ebola.
Over the weekend, it is true, Obama promised the deployment of "military assets" to West Africa. The French government is sending 20 experts in infectious disease control. The British government has committed £5 million ($8.5 million) to help charities such as MSF.
But it is not exactly an overwhelming response. And Abbott has been nowhere to be seen.
Of course, any government would think twice before ordering its military forces to deploy field hospitals to West Africa. The heroic doctors and nurses who man MSF's Ebola clinics right now are putting themselves at far greater risk of death – and a horrible death at that – than the pilots who will soon be dropping bombs on ISIL, or the "rapid response force" that NATO has decided to set up as a result of the crisis in Ukraine.
Can any head of government, in good conscience, order the men and women in their nation's military medical corps to take such risks? What kind of backlash could those leaders expect when the first body bags come home?
And yet, if Abbott had stood up in the past few days and committed an Australian field hospital – perhaps manned by volunteers ready to face the risks – to the fight against Ebola, what an effect that might have had.
To be sure, West Africa is a long way from Australia. But so is Ukraine. The task of containing the Ebola outbreak grows tougher by the day – but no tougher than the task of destroying ISIL; and at least the attempt will save lives, not take them.
Above all, such an initiative might have shamed those nations who are closer, and richer, into doing what they should be doing already. How about it, Mr Abbott? You seem to want us to "punch above our weight" on the global stage. Well, here is your chance.
The heroic volunteers of MSF – and the hard-pressed health workers of impoverished West African nations – should not have to carry this burden alone.
Read more:
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/eb...-conflicts-20140909-10e7ee.html#ixzz3Cubh1Auy
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
