I live in Australia so borders here are a signpost on the side of the road saying “Welcome to the Australian Capital Territory/Queensland/etc” to let you know that different state based road rules are in place. And there are some different laws in other areas too but the point is that you don’t need a passport, a visa or diplomatic plates on your car to traverse from one place to the next.

So the borders I’m really talking about are international borders and since Australia is one of a very few large nations to cover an entire island you need to fly or head out to sea to cross a national border. Here we put up with hearing a lot about “boat people”, “people smugglers” and our frankly insane and inhumane “offshore processing centres”. You also occasionally will hear about our “fishing grounds” and Navy vessels out protecting our fisheries from illegal overfishing. And of course oil and gas drilling shenanigans – especially with Timor Leste – a shameful episode in our country’s relations with a fledging nation that could use a bit of assistance to get onto their own feet – but that is a story for another day. But that is about it for border discussions – unless you watch those TV shows about people going through Customs at the airport. You hear about Border Force a lot there. Bizarre TV that is but that’s not what I wanted to get into right now.

We currently have a total mess happening in the Middle East which I covered, in some detail, a couple of posts back. And in there I mentioned Israel firing missiles at Syria, for effectively no repercussions at all.

Since then Israel have been doing the same to Lebanon, doing targeted assassinations of Hezbollah members. They have continued to launch into Syria as well, killing a highly ranked Iranian there. The US have launched missile strikes into Iraq, supposedly to stop “attacks on their troops” in Iraq. Iraq look to be very close to kicking those troops out now as a result. The latest of these types of cross-border attacks involves the UK and US bombing targets in Yemen allegedly belonging to the Houthi rebels who have been attacking merchant shipping as their way of showing support to the Palestinians. Supposedly targeting shipping going to and from Israel or owned by Israeli interests or something. It’s getting hard to keep up with the detail.

So, here are my long awaited questions/points to this whole post.

Question 1: How the actual fuck is it ok to attack Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, et al? Since when have sovereign borders ceased to mean anything? With effectively no repercussions.

Question 2: How do you think Volodymyr Zelenskyy feels about the UK and US happily popping military assets in to the Red Sea to launch some missiles into Yemen when they are utterly refusing to put a single troop into Ukraine to help them?

Firstly Q1. I believe it was in 2023 when a Chinese “weather” balloon was found to be crossing the continental United States. It caused an international furore and Joe Biden authorised it to be shot down. Yep, a balloon. We had some diplomatic sabre rattling about how it was in US airspace and how verily dare it be there. Who knows which conspiracy theory mission it was going to carry out but you cannot be in our airspace as we are the good ol U S of A and it just ain’t happening. Uh huh. Right. So where exactly is the territorial integrity of Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq respected? But, but, they are bad people and we need them gone. Oh I see. Unlike the bad people in North Korea. In Myanmar. In Somalia. In Ethiopia. On Wall Street. Or how about coming across the Ukrainian border from Russia.

Here’s my view on the might and power of the USA.

Analysis: Can it possibly fight back? It can? Shit, we’re not going there then.

What are Yemen going to do to the USA? Sweet. Fuck. All. After all they’ve been kind of busy having their own civil war of late being one of the biggest humanitarian crises on the planet for some years but that’s all right because the Saudis are going to fix that and they are the USA’s allies so we’ll just look away. But if the Saudis are doing so well in Yemen how are the Houthis actually managing to do pretty much anything against merchant shipping anyway? That I don’t know. I’ll just presume that is Iran’s influence and leave it at that. Oh hang on, could Iran get involved? Well the USA would looove that. They enjoyed kicking the snot out of Iraq, who they had armed themselves so they kind of knew what to expect. They also put Saddam Hussein in the top job too but they don’t want you to remember that bit. Well Iran are friends with one Vladimir Putin and he is the big bad bogeyman that scares the bejesus out of NATO so if Iran do more than say “WTF?” I suggest those UK and US naval vessels will be out of the area faster than you can “Perestroika”. The US will currently quite happily go after any target that has no possibility of fighting back. Which will make the whole Taiwan shit show get very interesting, very quickly if Xi goes in militarily.

Q2. Sick in the guts I expect. Sorry lad, as I’ve said before, you are on a whipping to nothing here and will be happily sacrificed by the political machine on Capitol Hill. And then they will blame each other for not helping enough while Russian borders grow. An utter fucking disgrace but it’s what I think will happen. I will be overjoyed to be wrong in that case.

So where to from here? A full Middle East war? Iran finally going after Israel? And where does that leave the Saudis, Qataris and other emirates who were beginning to see the financial (yes money again) advantages to dealing with Israel on a more cordial basis. And since the USA defends anything Israel do without any reservations, and they are allies of the Saudis in particular where does everyone stand? Arab vs Arab has never been a good thing. They have certainly gone at it previously when it was Sunni vs Shia but they’ve tended to stick together when it’s Arab vs non-Arab. There is a lot of historical tension and you can go back as far as you want to see that happening. Sunni vs Shia is nothing new and nor is Christian vs Muslim. The formation of Israel in that location after WWII utterly baffles me and the resident Bedouin and Palestinian population could hardly have appreciated being told you don’t own this land anymore – it belongs to these people instead. Would you meekly leave your land where you have lived for generations because some other arsehole persecuted a lot of people thousands of miles away? Incredible. And look at the shit storm it has created in the Middle East for almost the last 80 years.

I dunno where it ends. And I don’t have a clever closer to this article. In 13 days time it’s Australia Day or Invasion Day depending on your viewpoint. The indigenous people that were here before colonisation/invasion had borders for their own nations within this continent. And they had fights and arguments about those borders I’m sure. But their civilisation and culture lasted more than 40,000 years so they obviously sorted things out when necessary. Ours won’t last 40,000 years the way we carry on. That’s for certain.