As the people in the Gulf countries are now learning, having a great and powerful friend on bases across your territory and in your waters does not guarantee safety. Indeed it may make you a target.

It’s a lesson worth heeding. Australia has long been host to the crucial US communications facility at Pine Gap but is now spending billions to integrate its territory into the American war machine – most notably HMAS Stirling near Perth, which will be home to four US nuclear submarines and up to 1,000 American troops. Darwin has become a hub for tens of thousands of American troops on forward deployment.

At the beginning of the week the Iranian president issued a rare personal apology to neighbouring countries for the devastation and deaths they had endured in the first week of the war. He suggested that troops who had lost their commanders were firing at will, without authority, in a passionate attempt to defend their homeland.

Shortly afterwards his office issued a clarification. That did not mean that foreign bases in the Gulf States were off-limits to the Iranian military.

The US has about 750 bases around the world, 19 across the Middle East, home to tens of thousands of troops, so there are plenty for Iran to chose from. Already the largest base in Bahrain, and others in the UAE and Kuwait, have been bombed.

The Iranians signalled that this would be their likely response after Operation Midnight Hammer last June, which the US president proudly declared had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity. The Iranians retaliated by sending a warning and then hitting the US base in Qatar.

This is what happens in war – military assets become crucial targets.

But civilians are also killed – like the Iranian schoolgirls in Minab who were killed in a deadly missile strike, a result of an American targeting mistake, an inquiry has now confirmed. They met a fate similar to the hundreds of Catholic schoolchildren in Copenhagen towards the end of the second world war, who died when allies mistakenly bombed their school – a “mistake” now graphically portrayed in The Bombardment on Netflix.

When Darwin was attacked by 188 Japanese aircraft in February 1942, four days after Singapore fell and just two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it was the American ships, and the harbour itself, that were the target.

Likewise, when the Japanese subs made their way into Sydney Harbour on the last night of May that same year, it was the USS Chicago moored at Garden Island that was in their sights, although it was HMAS Kuttabul that was destroyed by the misfired torpedo.

More than 250 people died in the two attacks.

There is no such thing as a perfectly planned and executed war, although the current US-Israel assault on Iran may set a new (low) benchmark.

One thing that is certain is that war easily escalates.

Usually Australia feels comfortably removed from these big conflagrations, even when the government sends some military support. Our instinct, as was demonstrated during the Covid years, is to pull up the drawbridge, close the borders and let it play out far away.

But in the globally interconnected world, that is easier said than done. This week saw two diametrically opposed approaches: one generous, the other punitive.

Home affairs minister Tony Burke, as if a character in a British spy drama, stayed up all night to secure asylum for some of the Iranian women’s football team. Burke spoke excitedly about safe houses and moving the women urgently once their location had been revealed to the Iranian embassy.

Then, flush with victory, he returned to parliament to cancel the temporary visas of about 19,000 people from Israel, Lebanon and Iran, who had been approved to travel to Australia but were now deemed a risk of overstaying.

Heaven forbid, people whose homes and cities are being bombed might not want to return after a two-week holiday.

That’s what happens in wars. People who can, get out. And nations that can, find ways to accommodate them – as we have done with Ukrainians, Syrians, Bosnians and others.

For years Australia’s immigration and refugee system has been punishing people who felt they had no option but to flee their homeland. Now that war has begun, millions of people have been displaced and the hypocrisy is all too clear: some are viewed as more deserving of asylum than others.

But the longer history is also instructive. In the 1930s, Australia made it clear that many of those wanting to flee Nazi Germany were not welcome here.

After war was declared, a group of 2,500 German and Austrian men, mostly Jewish anti-fascists, who had fled to Britain, found they were deemed enemy aliens. The British government shipped them to Australia where they were interned in prisoner-of-war camps for two years.

When these “Dunera boys” were released many joined the Australian army. After the war, 900 remained and built successful and influential lives here, changing Australian society for the better.

The 11,000 Israelis, 1,000 Lebanese and 7,000 Iranians who were granted visas that can now be repealed might well have done the same. In war you don’t always get to choose your friends.

Julianne Schultz is the author of The Idea of Australia

Julianne Schultz is the author of The Idea of Australia

Australian immigration and asylum

Iran women's football team

© The Guardian