Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the resolution but not all of that which was said by the Prime Minister. On 11 September 2001, the world changed. It changed irrevocably for many people throughout the world and for none more so than the citizens of the United States of America when 3,000 civilians, innocent people, were murdered in a terrorist attack on New York and Washington. In response to that, only a matter of days later, when our then Prime Minister, John Howard, was in Washington, the ANZUS treaty was invoked. It is a matter of record that not so long after that the United States, Australia and other countries went into Afghanistan to remove the Taliban from power.

The heinous events of 11 September 2001 divided the lives of many Americans into two halves: that which had been lived prior to September 11 and everything that would come after. What then happened was that the United States realised that September 11 was the escalatory event of more than a decade of increasing terrorist attacks throughout the world principally but not only against America interests, from the attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993 to the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the attack on the USS Cole, the Marriott Hotel bombing, the Russian parade ground bombing and many other incidents. By September 11, clearly that was enough.

The United States and its allies, then looking out throughout the world for where future terrorist attacks might subsequently come, looked no further than Iraq. The decision was made by the United States and the United Kingdom—both of which asked Australia to consider participation—to remove Saddam Hussein from power. It is a matter of fact that Saddam Hussein had been in breach of 17 United Nations Security Council resolutions at that time. It was known that he did have weapons of mass destruction but that he was playing cat and mouse with the weapons inspectors and the question was whether he still had them. In fact, there were many who argued that in fact he did still have them.

Our now Prime Minister, then the opposition foreign affairs spokesman, said on 9 September 2002:

I’ve said repeatedly that there is a significant threat of weapons of mass destruction from Iraq.

Only three weeks later to the State Zionist Council annual assembly on 15 October 2002, he further said:

Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction ... That is a matter of empirical fact. If you don’t believe the intelligence assessments, you simply read the most recent bulletin from the Federation of American Scientists, which list Iraq among a number of states in possession of chemical ... biological weapons and with the capacity to develop a nuclear program.

It is further a matter of fact that under Saddam Hussein over a 15-year period an average of 70,000 people were tortured, murdered and killed, including in two wars. Five thousand Kurds lost their lives in 1988 in the gassing at Halabja. Many of us would remember the photograph of the father in rigor mortis with his baby in swaddling clothes, one of the 5,000 victims that day. We also remember the attempted genocide of the Arabs in the southern marshes and arguably the greatest act of human environmental vandalism in the draining of those marshes.

All of that meant that by the early part of this decade the decision was taken that the world would indeed be a safer place without Saddam Hussein in government brutally controlling his people and that, in a post-September 11 world, the risk could not be taken that he still had weapons of mass destruction. It is equally a matter of fact that, following the removal of Saddam Hussein from office, large collections and storage of weapons of mass destruction were not found, but there have been, according to US authorities, 260 mass graves found with as many as 300,000 dead Iraqis within them.

It is easy to look back in hindsight on what has happened since the removal of Saddam Hussein. In that first year, there was the ‘deBaathification’ of the Iraqi public service, the dismantling of the Iraqi army, the provision of basic Iraqi services, principally from Western contractors—US ones in particular. Those and other things, in hindsight, would be done differently.

But none of us who live in a relatively comfortable and peaceful part of the world, who too often take for granted the things most important to us in our lives—including our freedoms, Australian citizenship and a passport—should ever forget that 12 million Iraqis risked their lives to vote and elect their own government. Since 2003, Iraqis have been the subject of terrorist attacks, and Americans and other allies have given their lives in the name of Iraqi freedom, Iraqi democracy and the values that we in Australia hold dear and for which we stand.

Our generation must understand that we are facing a resurgent totalitarianism throughout the world in the form of Islamic extremism. We are facing people that are not only virulently anti-American but committed to building a violent political utopia which denies fundamental political and religious freedoms and which has an attitude to the treatment of women which is incompatible with a civil society, much less a peaceful world. We are dealing with people who see education and the liberating power it brings to those who are oppressed as things which should be fundamentally opposed. Not only are these extremists throughout the Middle East, and not only have they done everything they possibly can to oppose Iraqi democracy and peace, but they go through North Africa, through almost all of Europe and down into South-East Asia, in our part of the world. We have responsibilities in this case to the Iraqi people, to their democratically elected government, to the nations in the region surrounding Iraq, to our key ally the United States of America, and to stand up for our fundamental values and see the job through for the Iraqi people.

I remind those who have argued for and at times sought to make political capital from withdrawal of troops from Iraq that al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s No. 2, when he wrote in July 2005 to Abu al-Zarqawi, the now deceased but then head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, to set out al-Qaeda’s agenda for Iraq, said it was: firstly, to remove the United States forces from Iraq; secondly, to build an Islamic authority and take it to the level of a caliphate; thirdly—to use his words—to take the Islamic jihad to the secular states in the region; and, fourthly, to confront the state of Israel.

We are immensely proud of what Australian troops—members of the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal Australian Air Force and the Australian Army—have done and continue to do in Iraq on our behalf, in our name, under our flag and for our values in support of the Iraqi people and Australia’s strategic interests in the region and throughout the world.

As a matter of record it should be understood that the Overwatch Battle Group—originally the deployment of some 450 Australian troops in April 2005—was, paradoxically for some Australians, to protect Japanese engineers undertaking important civilian and military engineering projects in Al Muthanna province in central southern Iraq. As progress was made, we made the decision, at the request of the Iraqis and of US and British allies, that we would move to an overwatch posture that required us to increase the number of troops that we had deployed and change the composition to make it sufficiently robust, and that is why we opposed vehemently the notion of a phased withdrawal of combat troops, as argued by the government, then in opposition, in 2007.

Those men and women over four rotations of the battle group have performed superbly, as the Prime Minister said. We have suffered six casualties—six were wounded—and thankfully no men or women in our uniform have been killed doing overwatch operations, engaging the Iraqis locally, undertaking training of the Iraqi forces or providing security of the most robust nature should the Iraqis, whom we have been training, not be able to undertake the tasks of security themselves. The Australian Army training team has done a superb job based in Dhi Qar province, along with the operational Overwatch Battle Group in Tallil, overseeing operations in Dhi Qar and Al Muthanna and contributing to the training of what are now 33,000 Iraqi security forces that have been trained by the Australian Army.

The position of the Liberal and National parties, in government and in opposition, remains the same—that is, in all of our deployments we remain there until the job is done. That means that when the government in the country where we are deployed is confident that its own forces are able to provide for its own security then it is time for us to leave. That should always be subject to conditions on the ground. We made the decision last year, in looking to the future, that if the conditions were to be right on the ground in 2008, as they now are, then it would be appropriate to bring the battle group home but to replace it with a training capability which would of course include a force protection element. In other words, there is still much more training of the Iraqi security forces to be done, even though an enormous amount of progress has been made.

It is worth the House and Australians remembering that progress has been made in Iraq because of the leadership of the US President and his key military advisers late in 2006, making the decision for a surge of US military forces. There was significant criticism of that decision here in Australia, both in the political arena and in the commentariat. To put an additional 30,000 American troops into Iraq, into Baghdad, to take it to 20 brigade combat teams was a significant step on the part of the US President but one considered necessary to bring improvement to the security situation in Baghdad and in Iraq generally.

As a result of that, the leadership of Nouri al-Maliki and the democratically elected government of Iraq, the improvement of the provision of services and the efforts of countries like Australia and the United Kingdom and other nations in areas of Iraq outside of Baghdad, significant progress has been made. So, in al-Anbar province—which had been the home of al-Qaeda in Iraq—where in October 2006 we had 3,200 terrorist events, we now have in the order of 100 a month. We have had whole days with no terrorist incidents at all. Ramadi, Fallujah and many other areas of Iraq are areas where once an Abrams tank would have been required to go through them but where now instead there is much more order, good governance, peace and cooperation.

Australians, when they see their soldiers come back from Tallil in central southern Iraq, can be proud in the knowledge that not only have they done the job that they were asked to do but, by doing what they have in southern Iraq, they have contributed significantly to the effort which has allowed the Americans, particularly militarily in Baghdad, to do the heavy lifting which has brought significant progress in Iraq.

The battle group, which is the fourth of those that was deployed to Iraq, has engaged in many things, but we are very proud of the fact that they built the bridge at Samawah. They have assisted with veterinary clinics, ambulance facilities, electricity, roads and the refurbishment of schools and hospitals. For all of these things, as one soldier said to me at one stage during one of my visits as then Minister for Defence:

The Iraqi people seem to appreciate greatly what we are doing for them.

I might also say to Australians, who were led to believe last year that, if there were to be a change of government, Australian troops would leave Iraq, that the battle group is leaving and, were it up to us, we would be replacing it with a suitably equipped training facility for central southern Iraq, because we believe that the job still remains to be done. There remain about 1,000 Defence Force personnel across the theatre of Iraq. We have the P3 Orions, which provide essential surveillance activity, particularly over the gulf, and the frigate, which is in the gulf, as part of a task force of 10 coalition ships protecting two vital Iraqi oil terminals. We have got the security detachment in Baghdad, comprising 110 troops. We also have our C130 Hercules, which do an absolutely extraordinary job transferring equipment and our people throughout the operational theatre. We have a logistics operation. We have a joint headquarters task force. We are in the multinational forces task force. In all, we will still have about 1,000 of our men and women across the theatre of Iraq, and we are immensely proud of them.

It also ought to be remembered that Michael Hayden, the Director of the CIA, only last week pointed out that, as a result of all this, we are now close to the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. There would have been very few—particularly very few on the government benches—who only six or 12 months ago would have even hoped that that would be the case. Thank God we have made progress. Further to that, the Simon Fraser University in Canada has documented that deaths from terrorist acts since 2001 outside of Iraq have declined 40 per cent. There are three principal reasons why we have made considerable progress globally against terrorism. The first is the battle in Afghanistan, to which we are strongly committed and should remain so for the foreseeable future. The second is that the Sunni insurgents, and in particular al-Qaeda, have attacked both Shiite and Sunni targets in Iraq and throughout the world, and the Muslim world is starting to stand up to this. The third reason is the surge in Baghdad, and the courage and determination of not only the United States but also the United Kingdom and Australia to stand by the Iraqis and to make sure that we were able to see that terrorism would not be able to take root in Iraq and that al-Qaeda would not be able to run operations within Iraq, in the region, or indeed throughout the world.

It is often said by Australians who are well-meaning that we have been lucky, that our soldiers have been lucky—and indeed there has been luck involved in this. But the reason we have not sustained the casualties of some of our allies—although there are a number—is principally because of the outstanding leadership of the men and women who lead at all levels in the Australian Defence Force. It is, secondly, the judicious planning, both militarily and at a government level, for the operations we have undertaken. Thirdly, it is the level of equipment and the nature of equipment provided to our troops, which I consider to be better than any of our allies. It is, fourthly, the training which is undertaken by Australian Defence Force personnel. Fifthly, there is something about the Australian character. In my experience, even 20-year-old privates see themselves not only as soldiers but as educators, diplomats, aid workers and teachers. If every Australian could only see them whether in Iraq or in other parts of the world they would be even more proud of them than they already are.

In concluding, I understand that there will be some sort of tickertape parade to welcome home the soldiers from Iraq. That is something which is to be supported. But I also remind the government that, yes, there have been 3,700 Australian Defence Force personnel that have served in these four Overwatch Battle Group rotations, but every Australian Defence Force person, man and woman, from each of the three services, whether they have served on a frigate, whether they have worked in dust storms in 55 degree heat trying to keep a C130 in the air, whether they have been part of a security detachment, whether they have been a military lawyer working in Baghdad—all of those men and women, whatever the task they have undertaken—should be equally recognised for the job that they have done, in our name, in our uniform, under our flag. We have made enormous progress in Iraq. There is still quite some way to go and, from our perspective, we think the job must be seen through.

See this speech in context