Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Hansard source

When it comes to cutting and running, our Alex is in a league of his own. If we look at the data, as of 7 August 2006 we find that there are five Iraqi army divisions, 25 brigades, 85 battalions and two national police battalions. The breakdown for the forces is: police, 123,500—trained; total of other police units, 176,000; army, 129,700; total armed forces, including the other two, 131,600; and—as of this document I have here from the United States State Department—the total number of trained and equipped Iraqi security forces is 307,800, as of 11 October 2006. The opposition is up to date!

My question to the foreign minister is this: how many do we need? Where do they need to be deployed? How many need to be trained? I have given you the up-to-date numbers. Two provinces have now been handed over and there are 16 to go. Is the number of provinces going to be eight or nine? Just give us a ballpark figure, and give us one for the total number of troops. Or, Foreign Minister, are you saying to the parliament that is all too hard, because the pollsters have said to you, ‘Whatever you do, don’t articulate a strategy. Stick to the slogan’? That is what this mob is all about.

Plank No. 2 of the unfolding new Howard government strategy on Iraq is this—and this is a really interesting one: should Iraq remain a unified state? Pardon me if I have missed something here, but I have been following this debate over the years and I thought that we were on about keeping Iraq together. I actually thought that that was the general view. I must have missed something because what we now have from our fearless Prime Minister is a view that that is now something that will be largely up to the Iraqi people. It might not turn out that way. The strategic shift in this Prime Minister’s statement today cannot be underestimated in its importance. From the dispatch box today, he said, ‘It may turn out to be a split state.’ That has never before been said by this mob. They also said further, ‘That would be acceptable to them.’

Now, suddenly, plank No. 2 of the unfolding new mystery tour—otherwise called ‘the Howard government strategy on Iraq’—is that we will have an Iraqi state which is potentially divided into two or three or half-a-dozen or whatever. Again, Foreign Minister, could you let us know from the despatch box whether the government believes that the Iraqi state should be unified or split prior to the withdrawal of Australian troops. That is, I think, a pretty basic question for the future strategy in Iraq.

Here is question No. 3. I think this is a good one too, because we have the lion of democracy, the champion of democracy, about to take to the dispatch box. How many times have we sat here in this chamber while we have been savaged by the dead sheep opposite on the whole question of this unfolding avalanche of democracy—this domino theory of democracy—that once we democratised Iraq everything else that was a nondemocracy in the Middle East and the Arab world would roll over like ninepins—bing, bing, bing, bing, bing? That was how it was going to work. Do you remember all those speeches?

It has not gone entirely to plan. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have been a bit of a problem in that script. There have also been a few problems in Lebanon of late—but let us not complicate it. There have not been huge advances in democracy in some of the other authoritarian states in the Middle East—not that I have seen, but I am sure the foreign minister will tell us if there have been some. But now the last domino falls, which was the first domino. They no longer believe that it is an absolute precondition that we have a democracy in Iraq either, because if you listened to our fearless Prime Minister today—the captain of political purity; he who never reads the market research—he said, ‘Democracy has a reasonable chance if that is the wish of the Iraqi people.’ This is the first statement from this mob, otherwise called the government, where they say that they could themselves leave Iraq if in fact it devolves into a nondemocracy—an authoritarian state perhaps, maybe run by a strongman, maybe a moustachioed strongman. Who knows how it could turn out? But we have here for the first time in this government’s consistent approach to its Iraq policy the possibility that Saddam II could be back on the road.

Plank No. 1 falls, plank No. 2 falls, plank No. 3 collapses in a heap, and the champion of democracy opposite here said to us all in this parliament:

A democratic Iraq will be part of the solution to an expanding democratic process in the Middle East.

You reek of hypocrisy, Foreign Minister, on this question. This government stands condemned, it stands censured, for taking this country into a war in Iraq which has not improved our national security circumstances but worsened them—a war in Iraq which has left 50,000 Iraqi civilians dead and almost 3,000 American troops dead. According to the Lancet, up to 600,000 Iraqi civilians lie dead. Foreign Minister, as your last challenge today when you answer this censure, how about this: what is the government’s figure on the number of Iraqis who now lie dead as a consequence of your policy? (Time expired)

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