Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

You could add to that the Dutch—in fact, most of the 60 nations that were at one time or another in Iraq have moved out. None of them moved out with catcalls from the Prime Minister about weakening the Western alliance, collapsing the struggle against international terrorism or whatever. When the Italians moved out 3,200 troops, the Prime Minister’s position on it at that time was that that was a matter of no moment.

The point about the Prime Minister’s activity in recent times is this: he put our troops back in. People have tended to forget that. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Prime Minister withdrew Australian forces; in the aftermath of the last election, without notice to the Australian people, he put the Australian forces back in. So let us have none of this rubbish about consistency in the Prime Minister’s position. All there has been is consistency in political calculation. That is all there has been from this Prime Minister.

Everybody in the world knows—the United States administration knows—that the coalition’s strategy in Iraq has failed. Everybody in this country knows that the writers of this failed strategic policy are the Prime Minister and the foreign minister. Even the Prime Minister and the foreign minister now base their arguments on this preamble: whatever you might think about whether or not it was a good idea to start this war, whatever you might think about the way in which we conducted it and the things we decided to do in the aftermath—and you could quite legitimately, they go on in parentheses to say, regard that as mistaken—we are right now.

Why in logic ought there to be the view prevail that those who failed in strategic judgement in the first instance so dramatically have somehow dramatically got it right now? Why should anybody operate on that assumption? No-one should operate on that assumption. But it seems to be the position of this Prime Minister that, unless and until there is a U-turn from the United States—and there certainly looks like there is some sort of turn coming—the only thing this Prime Minister can do, in the middle of the deep hole he finds himself—or in which, more particularly, he has placed Australian armed forces—is to keep digging. It is not a bad idea to dig in, Mr Prime Minister, but not when they have got your hole vectored, not when they know exactly where you are. That is exactly what those who wish us the worst know and understand.

Whatever the politicians are saying about this—and all politicians have to protect their skins in these particular eventualities and these horrible circumstances—the military men are different. Every single American general who either has direct responsibility now or had responsibility at some point in time says this: the current strategy will not work. They marched before the US Senate Committee on Armed Services only about two or three weeks ago and said precisely that: the current strategy will not work. That is what all the American generals who have a view, who are or have been directly responsible for the affairs of this region, are saying. Some of them have different solutions. Some say, ‘If you’re going to persist there, do it with another 200,000.’

The last time we saw advice like that, of course, was from General William Westmoreland after the Tet offensive in 1968. When a substantial political victory was won by the Viet Cong, he went to the President of the United States and said, ‘I’ll do it all right with another 200,000 troops.’ There is a certain resonance in that 200,000 figure. It would not be readily possible for the United States to put another 200,000 troops in; that is all there is to it.

That is the American view, and then there is the British view—and these are the two major participants in the coalition of the willing, those with serious forces in the area. From the British, of course, we have the view, as I read out in question time, of General Sir Richard Dannatt. He did qualify it subsequently; he could do nothing else. Quite frankly, if General Dannatt had persisted in the view he had he would have had no option but to resign. So he did in fact somewhat modify his point on the timing of British withdrawal, nothing else. He modified nothing in his comments except the timing of British withdrawal. But what he did say, and he said it at length, was that the British should:

… get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems.

Because we are there, bad things happen. It exacerbates the problem. The second thing he said was:

I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing around the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them.

So his overall judgement about the situation in Iraq was that every policy feature of the Western alliance aided our enemies and discomfited our friends. He went further; he had a lot to say about Afghanistan. And I might say, he had things to say about Afghanistan which are identical to what the Labor Party has been saying for a considerable period of time—that failure in Afghanistan is almost entirely a product of wrong strategy in Iraq. He had that to say about it. What Dannatt thinks and what most of those who sit down and analyse these affairs think is: whatever else you do, you have to get yourself out of there; you have to get yourself unhooked.

What we need—from this country’s point of view, and I think we need it across the alliance too—is a new strategy. We need the strategy that Labor are advocating. John Howard wants to know what I would do if I were Prime Minister. Well, I will tell him. I would have the courage to tell my American friends that we are bringing our troops out of Iraq. I would have the compassion to help the Iraqi people with aid and training, which is what they need most. I would have the common sense to put our troops in the region and our resources into practical measures. I would be the ally that the United States needs, not the ally that the current administration wants. That is what I would do.

It is very clear that, at the top level, our ally is now changing its position. Our ally is now, according to its leader, going to a change of strategy. What Mr Bush has said is not insignificant. He said:

If the plan is now not working, the plan that’s in place isn’t working, America needs to adjust, I completely agree.

They are preparing to shift ground. Not necessarily included in that shift will be the need for Iraq to be a functioning democracy and a unified entity. Included in that shift in ground will be a judgement about security inside Iraq that falls well short of an assumption that there is no trouble in the streets, that there are no bombs exploding. They will change. They will change—but they will change without any help from us—because they understand that the troop presence is making things worse.

Firstly, coalition troops in Iraq are a magnet for jihadists from around the world who are destabilising Iraq. It might be said, however, that they are no longer the principal source of massive instability, murder and mayhem in Iraq. They are one source but not the principal source. The principal source is now a massive religious dispute between the Shiite and Sunni communities as they jockey for advantage. Nevertheless, the jihadists are there, getting the training they want and getting the experience they want. So when they ultimately leave Iraq they will leave with the sorts of skills possessed by the jihadists who left Afghanistan and gave us 9-11 and subsequent terrorist attacks. They are being trained, they are being skilled up, by the continuation of our capacity to attract them into Iraq. You have to start using your noggin in this particular exercise, at least on some occasions, and start to think through things seriously.

Secondly, the coalition leadership in Iraq is a security blanket for the Iraqi civilian leadership that allows them not to solve their own problems. They do know that when there is a bit of trouble in a district and you ring up a battalion of US soldiers, you can keep it quiet while those US soldiers are in the district. So if you have not been able to arrange the appropriate agreement, settlement or whatever between local Sunni and Shiite forces—if the ethnic cleansing process has got to a point where you cannot calm it down—rather than sit down and negotiate an outcome you invite the coalition forces in and then for a period of time there is quiet in that area. But the quiet ceases once the American forces are withdrawn.

It means that the impetus for the Sunni and Shia leadership in the government in Iraq to get the political settlement that only they can provide is dissipated, foreshortened by the ease with which you can solve the immediate problem with an immediate fix from the United States armed forces that are present. It has to be said: when they are fighting Sunnis or Shias what they are not doing is struggling with global terrorism—they are not doing that.

Keeping the peace in the Shiite districts of Baghdad and protecting the Sunni districts of Baghdad have got absolutely nothing to do with the global jihadist struggle—nothing whatsoever. We have been dragged into a fight that has sucked the oxygen out of us at the very time when we needed to be at our most clever and most effective in understanding what it is that we needed to do. Because all of those who are involved with us are in some way or other, I am afraid to say, tainted with this confessional dispute, this religious dispute between the various forces. Hardly any secular candidates won seats in those elections; they were all won by those with associations with tribal groups and religious fundamentalist groups and most of them with militias on the Shia side that at one point in time or other had been funded by the Iranian government. Why do you think James Baker is talking about incorporating the governments of Syria and Iran in some sort of settlement to cover a withdrawal of American forces? He is doing that, of course, because they are influential in this regard. That is what they have let themselves into.

The Iraqi people do need our support. They need our political support, and we will give it. They need our economic support, and we will give it. They need humanitarian support, and we will give it. They need training support, and we will give it. They do not need a foreign troop presence that is making things worse and to which they object—they do not need that. That is why we will bring our troops back home. They can fight the war on terror in our region. My advice to this Prime Minister is: stop digging. Like your colleagues, change strategy; change it for the better. Get a better basis for your relationship with Iraq than the one you have now. Get a better basis for the struggle in the war on terror than the one that you are fighting at this moment.

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