BY KERRYN WILLIAMS
CANBERRA Harry Quick, an anti-war federal ALP MP from Tasmania, told a Socialist Alliance forum here on October 23 that he and several other federal ALP MPs are prepared to vote against Australian involvement in a war on Iraq, even if that meant defying the party's leadership.
Quick visited the Kuwait-Iraq border and witnessed the devastation in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War.
The meeting, attended by 30 people, also heard from former Israeli Avigail Abarbanel and Ben Halliday from the Socialist Alliance. Abarbanel argued that an attack on Iraq will not produce peace and security, but more suffering, more trauma, more anger at the US and more terrorism.
She called for war on Iraq to be opposed regardless of the position taken by the United Nations Security Council. Giving a seal of approval to a wrong action does not make it a right action, she said.
Halliday reaffirmed the Socialist Alliance's commitment to build a broad, mass anti-war movement, pointing to the 45,000-strong mobilisation against the war in Melbourne on October 14. The Greens' victory in the October 19 Cunningham by-election was also an illustration of the growing anti-war feeling in Australia.
From Green Left Weekly, October 30, 2002.
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