Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Clearly opposition members feel for those in our armed forces—and their families—who, following government instructions, are in Iraq. However, more importantly at this stage it allows us to debate the reasons for the intervention and the successes of it. On 22 June the Leader of the Opposition stated:

We should never have gone to Iraq in the first place, and we should not be there now.

This followed a comment two days earlier when he stated:

... the Japanese are now going and the Australians should go as well.

The situation is that the intervention in and the occupation of Iraq have clearly undermined US credibility around the world. I refer first to a survey by the reputable US Pew research centre, which looked at the view of the United States around the world. It compared 1999 to the current phase and it showed a similar trend internationally. In France, US popularity was down from 62 to 39 per cent; in Germany, 78 to 37 per cent; and in Spain, despite the Madrid bombings, 50 to 23 per cent. Of course, in the Islamic world the picture is even worse. In traditionally pro-American Turkey in that period there was a drop from 52 to 12 per cent. In the Guardian Weekly of 23 to 29 July, the journalist Ewen MacAskill quoted the Pew research centre as saying:

“Despite growing concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the US presence in Iraq is cited at least as often as Iran—and in many cases much more often—as a danger to world peace.”

As we witness the murder of 1,000 Lebanese in the last week, the forced relocation of a quarter of the population, a situation where 400 Lebanese civilians have lost limbs and where one-third of the dead are under the age of 12, we see the enhanced power of Hezbollah and the increased support in the Western world for it because of US and Israeli policy in Lebanon and also because of the realities of what is happening in Iraq. What we have seen in Iraq is enhanced power for Iran and its agents and operatives.

We might have greeted some parts of the outcome in Iraq. I for one am fully appreciative of the degree of self-government given to the Kurdish people. However, on balance, we must question what the strategic outcomes of this have been. In the last week or two we have seen Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a person who is part of the democratic regime in the country, not only condemning the United States—and in this case they might have done the right thing—for hitting Baghdad militia centres, where there was punishment and torture in evidence, obviously Shia centres, but saying that it angered and pained him. That is the prime minister of a pro-US administration who has also been equally vocal about the situation in Lebanon.

We have seen a quiescent government in this country. I was recently directed to comments by a person who is not known to be a strong opponent of the United States, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, when she was asked to give support for the US invasion of Grenada. I refer to an article by Jonathon Steele on 13 October 2003. I wish that the administrations of the United Kingdom and Australia had shown the same strength that she showed. It was said of that invasion:

A furious British prime minister did not hesitate to tell the United States president he was wrong. In spite of her love-in with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher saw through the threadbare threat assessments which the US put up to justify the war. “I am totally and utterly against communism and terrorism,” she thundered in a BBC interview. “But if you are going to pronounce a new law that wherever communism reigns against the will of their people, the United States shall enter—then we are going to have really terrible wars in the world.”

In her autobiography, she later described how Reagan rang to get her views a few hours before the invasion. It would be seen, she told him, “as intervention by a western country in the internal affairs of a small independent nation, however unattractive its regime”. No self-delusions about liberation. Unlike Blair, Thatcher knew it would be occupation.

She explained that Grenada had not suddenly changed “from a democratic island paradise into a Soviet surrogate overnight in October 1983”. Its socialist regime had taken over four years earlier. The Iraq analogy arises again. What made Saddam Hussein’s Iraq more of a “threat” in March 2003 than it had been during the years of containment?

“The new ‘hemispheric’ strategy which President Reagan’s administration was pursuing in our view led the US to exaggerate the threat which a Marxist Grenada posed,” Thatcher wrote. Brave words, especially after Reagan had helped her during the Falklands war 18 months earlier. Reagan spurned the advice and ordered the invasion to go ahead. “I felt dismayed and let down. At best, the British government had been made to look impotent, at worst we looked deceitful,” Thatcher commented.

As I say, it is unfortunate that the leadership of this country and that of the United Kingdom have not been as prescient and inquiring as she was at that time. It is interesting to note, when we go back in history, the movement of justifications. It was about weapons of mass destruction. It was about the fact that there were stockpiles of weapons. I look at an article by Robert Fisk, a well-known commentator who in the last few weeks has been critical of both Hezbollah and Israel. He commented of the current US representative at the UN:

Mr Bolton, who once ludicrously claimed that Cuba had a biological weapons programme, accused Syria of maintaining a stockpile of sarin and of working on VX and biological weapons.

Fisk wrote of Congressman Eliot Engel, who at that time said that the Iraqis had suddenly put WMD on trains to Syria:

He went on insisting Iraq had transferred its non-existent WMD to Syria by rail—before being shown a map that proved the only railway line from Iraq to Syria passed through Turkey.

In that article, Robert Fisk also commented about the performance of Prime Minister Blair. Fisk wrote that Blair had commented:

... we “should wait until the 1,400 US, British and Australian investigators sent in to search for Iraq’s weapons had finished work”.

Fisk went on:

But why, for heaven’s sake, couldn’t he have been patient enough to let the extremely competent UN inspectors finish their work before his illegal invasion?

As we know, having gone in under the guise of weapons of mass destruction, sometime later it was about democracy around the world. I think we all know, if we look around various regimes on this earth, that there are many other candidates who could be overthrown for lack of democracy. Based on the information of the internationally renowned fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, a US informant, the claims of an Iraqi nuclear capacity—the reasons for our supposed intervention—have been totally destroyed.

It is quite interesting. In later exploration of these issues, it was proven that the original documents that the US utilised, which were supposedly Iraqi government nuclear documents, were actually translations from Farsi, the language of Iran, rather than from Arabic, the language of Iraq. So fraudulent documents were utilised by people to persuade the US administration. And quite frankly they did not need much persuasion.

If we look at the Security Council resolution, it was deliberately framed so that it would be difficult for Iraq to respond adequately. And, at that time, it was said of Vice President Dick Cheney that he had ‘taken up the most belligerent position, insisting to the President that any omission—no matter how minor—will constitute a material breach’. The Iraqis had been told that they had to supply information not only on the direct nuclear aspect but on all of their chemical programs—that was the direction of resolution 1441. Once they did that, we had complaints from pro-US journalists that the material was too detailed and was a deliberate delaying tactic by the Iraqi administration. That resolution said:

... false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq’s obligations ...

What we had there was a UN resolution, pushed by the United States, which essentially aimed to make sure that any minor technicalities could be used as grounds for US intervention. The Economist at that time pointed out that the US refusal to hand over their information with regard to nuclear capacity was:

… violating Paragraph 10 of Resolution 1441, which requests all countries to hand over ‘any information related prohibited programmes’…

In summary, we have a situation where Iran’s power in the region has been significantly enhanced. We have a situation where people known to me in my electorate in the Lebanese population, of a variety of religious denominations, weeks ago would not have had much good to say about Hezbollah. These days, in the aftermath of Israeli activity in Lebanon in recent weeks, they see them as the only resistance to Iraq. The first step down that road was giving Iraq credibility as resisting the United States after the invasion. This country is also seeing daily things like this. We saw it on television last night: the massacre of a girl, after she was raped, and her family and then an attempt to cover it up. This is not an abstract, occasional, spasmodic activity; it is a daily reality. We can cite three US troops charged with murder—they shot three Iraqi prisoners—and threatening to kill a fellow soldier if he spoke of it. We have incidents like this going on daily. The renowned journalist Gary Younge said in the Guardian on 30 June:

To treat even these few incidents as isolated chapters is to miss the broader, enduring narrative. For these are not the unfathomable off-shoots of this war but the entirely foreseeable corollaries of it. This is what occupation is; this is what occupation does. There is nothing specifically American about it. Any nation that occupies another by force will meet resistance. For that resistance to be effective, it must have deep roots in local communities where opposition to the occupation is widespread.

There is widespread opposition, and we have a situation now where the administration is clearly lacking any control. We have militia, we have police forces, we have parts of the Iraqi army that are essentially controlled by Shiite religious groups. We have a government authority that has no power in the country. We have daily sectarian murders on both sides of the divide. And I have people coming into my electorate office every week—whether they be Chaldeans or Armenians—who are being forced out of their homes at the moment because this government is powerless. The so-called intervention for democracy and to protect minorities is shattered. At the same time, America has lost credibility in the region and enhanced the power of Iran. This government, unfortunately, was a very willing and keen combatant.

The attempt by al-Qaeda and Sunni forces to instigate sectarian violence and hostility in the country has been successful. We also know that Iran has been a major ingredient in this. One of the reasons why a leading female journalist was murdered there was that, after the destruction of the major Shiite temple at Samarah, she filmed Iranian agents being detained by Iraqi interior ministry officials and police and then the Iraqi interior minister forcing their release. Essentially what we had there were Iranian operatives trying to provoke sectarian disputes in the country by seeking to blame Sunnis for an attack on a Shiite religious symbol.

I certainly agree with the opposition leader and his conclusion that in the first place this was not a credible policy position, unlike in Afghanistan, where large Taliban activity is operating from outside the borders in Pakistan et cetera and it is clearly against public opinion. We see in this country a contrast where that resistance is essentially supported by the people and where another part of the population is so terrified of a Shiite theocratic state that they are also in armed resistance to the Americans. The situation there, as I say—and this has been made amply clear by a variety of opposition members—is that Australian forces are in enhanced danger at the moment as this situation breaks apart. One by one we have seen the other willing combatants, the other cheer chasers in Europe—and in some cases they are not cheer chasers; they were actually pressured into it by the United States—abandon ship and basically decide that there is nothing to be gained both for their national self-interest and in the interest of trying to get a peaceful outcome there.

Finally, getting back to Lebanon for a minute, I would like to indicate the manner in which I deplore the comments of Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni in the last 24 hours. When Fouad Siniora, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, understandably cried at the murder of 1,000 Lebanese, she advised him to wipe away his tears. That is a bad indication for the world of the Israeli attitude in these matters. As shown in Iraq, there is a lack of strategic thinking. I refer finally to ex-President Carter’s words overnight that unless Israel is prepared to negotiate a land settlement of this matter the situation will not be solved.

Debate (on motion by Mr Neville) adjourned.

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