Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to frame my remarks around the successful transition of Australian forces out of Al Muthanna province in the form of an appeal from very far away to the ranking ayatollah in Iraq, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, to consider the grave situation of his country from the point of view of the Australian parliament that wishes the people of Iraq no ill. The Prime Minister, in an optimistic assessment of the situation in Iraq on 22 June 2006, gave a description of the role that we, this country, played in the successful transition to the Iraqi security forces in the southern province of Al Muthanna.

The problem is that anyone who objectively views the situation in Iraq at the moment must be filled with foreboding. Much rests on what Ayatollah Sistani will do, as it did at the beginning of the Iraq conflict. Ayatollah Sistani represents that stream of Iraqi Arab Shiism that is distinct from the brand of Shiism practised in Iran. It is a very important and practical distinction, which people need to understand. The form of Shiism that Sistani represents says that the mosque should be kept in the mosque and that the role of ayatollahs should be spiritual and that holy men like himself are not to be involved in the sometimes sordid, temporal world of politics. This is unlike the guidance council in Iran and unlike the disgraceful antidemocratic decision by the Iranian spiritual rulers in the Supreme Guidance Council to exclude more than 1,000 parliamentarians who wished to stand at the last Iranian election, including many people who were sitting parliamentarians—they were excluded by the mullahs in Iran.

This has great relevance to what is happening in Iraq, great relevance to the issue of proliferation of nuclear weapons, which was talked about so eloquently by the member for Batman, and great relevance to the situation in Lebanon at the moment, for anyone who looks at the spectre of Iran at the moment—in Iraq, in Lebanon—and the issue of nuclear proliferation must be filled with foreboding, as I am. Ayatollah Khamenei, who is the successor to Ayatollah Khomeini as the real leader in Iran, recently talked of the possibility that his country could engage in a nuclear war, the aim of which would be that he and Iran would wipe out his adversary country, a member of the United Nations. Iran, the misleading mullah argues, in sustaining a second strike from that country, that is a nuclear response from Israel, would be able to sustain millions of casualties but would survive. These are the words of madness of a monster, and that they are actually being said by a major country in the international community must concern us all.

As the member for Batman said, we have to be very alive to these issues of nuclear proliferation because of the statements of the Iranian regime. Ayatollah Sistani’s role is extremely important in Iraq, because he alone and the moderate Iraqi Shiites alone are the people, the majority, who can stand against other elements in Iraq that are like the forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon, agents of the Iranian regime. Let us not shillyshally about it—I am talking in particular about Muqtada al-Sadr. Recently in testimony before the US congress, the commander of US Central Command, General Abizaid, canvassed the possibility that Baghdad might actually fall to Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army—his murderous militia funded and organised by the Iranian regime, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the SS of the Iranian regime. US commander in Iraq, General Casey, now says the drawdown of US troops will be delayed further.

If one had the best intentions with Iraq, if one believed in the war in Iraq and if one took American and Australian intentions at their face value, the prospect that Iraq would fall to the Iranian regime is a frightening prospect. Now it is clear it is an Iranian regime led by this fanatic constellation, led by President Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Guidance Council—a regime which has initiated all of these bloodcurdling incantations about nuclear exchanges. No-one would have supported the war in Iraq if that were the end game, if that were the prospect that we all knew we faced. Of course, many people, including the Leader of the Opposition, feared just that—that Iraq would become virtually a vassal state of Iran, a petrol funded Shia superstate of a very extreme formulation.

That is why the fear of Muqtada al-Sadr and his activities on behalf of the Iranian regime in Iraq have led the American government to say two things recently. I saw General Casey, the head of the US forces in Iraq, give two pieces of testimony. One, there will be now an extra 5,000 American troops deployed into Baghdad to stop the sectarian killings between the Sunni extremists led by Zarqawi and Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, because the sectarian warfare is getting worse and worse. But of course the thing that Zarqawi and the Sunni fanatics did not consider when they initiated this sectarian bloodbath was the fact that the Shia are the vast majority in Iraq. Their ability to have their way in elections and in the parliament has been seen. It is very worrying that the murderous Mahdi Army, apparently controlled by Iranian agents, are also in control of the Iraqi interior ministry. The interior ministry troops have been held responsible by the US forces themselves, their US ally, for vicious sectarian murders of many innocents, many civilians, in the streets of Baghdad. What a catastrophic situation we have in Iraq’s capital now.

It is only the people of Iraq who can prevent this descent into further civil war, into a worsening sectarian bloodbath. It is only the people of Iraq who can stop the ultimate victory by a regime, Iran, that is rejected by the theology of moderate Iraqi Shiism that says the mosque should stay out of politics and not be practised as it is in Iran, where you have the mullahs monopolising these huge export Bonyad foundations, enormous corruption and the whole country being put, as it was in the 1930s in another place in Central Europe, on a war footing. Are any of the benefits of the vast expenditure that Iran is getting now from oil production being enjoyed by the ordinary Iranian? No, it is being focused on war, on military expenditure—focused on building up nuclear weapons and on providing weaponry to its allies and agents all around the world in order to divert world attention from their ultimate atomic nightmare.

The current extremist government in Iran make no secret of their crazed strategy. The President of Iran, at the Islamic conference in Kuala Lumpur last Friday, made the most frightening comments calling for the elimination of Israel—and this coming from a country that will soon acquire nuclear technology which will be able to be developed soon after that into nuclear weapons. That is why the decision on 31 August of the United Nations Security Council to enforce the requirements of the Security Council that Iran desist from its involvement in the proliferation of nuclear weapons, from the acquisition of nuclear weapons from its atomic program, must be supported. That is why every person who is opposed to nuclear proliferation will hope that China and Russia will not put their short-term energy interests with Iran above the interests of the world in stopping this monstrous regime, which constantly talks about eliminating countries with atomic weapons, from acquiring those very weapons.

As an aside, I am reminded that I was recently in Puckapunyal with the Minister for Defence to see a live fire exercise of the ADF. Standing on the back of one of the ASLAVs was one of our young corporals in the Australian Army. He remarked on what good kit they have and how he had survived sitting in the back of this Australian armoured vehicle, the ASLAV, that had had a black BMW packed with explosives driven into the back of it. He expressed his gratitude that our Australian equipment was better than the American humvees, which in similar circumstances would have seen him killed. Everyone wishes Australian troops who have been in Al Muthanna and other provinces well, but I am afraid our presence there, or elsewhere, will not be crucial to the outcome of any democratic future for Iraq. Indeed, our success in Al Muthanna province has an eerie similarity to our success in Phuc Tuy Province in South Vietnam. Here the Australian troops again entirely cleared the province of NVA and Vietcong, but in the long run of history it was just a little blip in events in Vietnam. Saigon ultimately fell to the North Vietnamese Army some years later after Australia and the United States had withdrawn. If moderate Shias are not able to stand up to extremists, armed, funded and organised by Iran, Australia’s presence will ultimately have little effect on the future democratic prospects of Iraq.

There has been some very good analysis made by some of the most unlikely commentators. I want to just take a couple of them. One of them is Professor Fred Halliday. Even he said:

... those in charge in Teheran, especially after 2005, are themselves seeking to raise the tone of strategic and ideological confrontation and retain a set of revolutionary illusions about domestic and foreign policy that may cost the Iranian people dear. The omens are not that good.

This is in Chaillot paper No. 89, May 2006, produced by the European Union’s international strategic studies centre. Professor Halliday is a well-known critic of US foreign policy. So, if he is concerned about the regime in Teheran, those concerns should be very widely shared around the world.

I will conclude as I began: the whole future of Iraq is important for the rest of the world. Only the Iraqis can save themselves. Ayatollah Sistani is crucial to Iraq not becoming a mere satellite of Iran. What is being played out there is not simply even the endgame of the American, Australian and British intervention in that country. It is not even just the democratisation of Iraq that is at stake. What is at stake is the peace of the world, because if the Iranian surrogates are able to succeed in subduing Iraq they will have added another chess piece to the great game that I believe the current evil regime in Iran is fostering across the Shiite crescent from Beirut to the Saudi oilfields where the Shia are the majority.

We have seen what Ahmadinejad’s surrogates are doing in Lebanon by providing for—and, indeed, in my view, initiating—this current conflict. The Hezbollah kidnapping and missile barrage began immediately after Larijani, the Iranian foreign minister, had been told by Javier Solana, ‘The European Union will support the imposition of economic sanctions against Iran if you do not comply with the non-proliferation requests of the UN Security Council.’ Larijani, the Iranian foreign spokesman, flew to Beirut and immediately Hezbollah, which is an Iranian front organisation, started shooting off the 13,000 missiles provided to them by the Iranian regime. I wish the Australian troops there well, but this is a much bigger game than is just happening in Iraq. (Time expired)

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