Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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)

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I follow on from the remarks of my colleague the member for Melbourne Ports. I rise to speak on the prime ministerial statement on Iraq as one of the ‘mob’, which was the expression used by the Prime Minister to describe the hundreds of thousands of Australians who marched against Australia’s involvement in the war in Iraq. I rise to say, as a proud member of that ‘mob’, as it was described by the Prime Minister, that the mob was right.

The Prime Minister made a ministerial statement to parliament about the relocation of Australian forces within Iraq—a war that has now cost at least $1.3 billion—but in so doing the Prime Minister failed to acknowledge or mention any of the features of this conflict that are of great concern to ordinary Australians, particularly those who marched in the streets. Nor did the Prime Minister admit that the primary foreign policy goal, other than the unconditional backing of every policy posture of the Bush administration, has really been to avoid putting any troops on the front line—if there is such a thing, in the terrible war that Iraq has become. Like all members in the House, we wish only for the safety of our men and women in service overseas. But the clear fact is that the strategic ambition of the Howard government has been, having committed Australian troops to this conflict, to try at the least to keep them out of harm’s way. That is understandable. But, as a strategic approach to an intervention of this kind, it is not acceptable.

The prime ministerial statement was short on reflection and rather incomplete about the likely prospects of our troops, now that the Japanese construction forces and engineers have gone. As members would know, it was short on reflection on what the war in Iraq has actually meant to the international legal framework for the conduct of conflict. As members would know, the international rules and norms covering war were strengthened and codified after the two so-named ‘great wars’ of the 20th century, the first and second world wars. These codes and principles were laid out in the Geneva convention and in various other international instruments. They were underpinned by core religious and philosophical tenets that had evolved over time. They included at their heart the principle of a just war. These were the rules, and the rule of a just war in particular provided a framework within which it was fervently hoped that armed conflict could be managed and that the highest priority would be given to the interests of the civilian population—the young, the innocent, the infirm. Additionally, the issue of proportionality was seen as being a guiding principle in the conduct of wars.

It is the case that, with each war, the number of civilian casualties continues to rise. This is partly a product of the nature of wars themselves and partly a product of the way in which wars are entered into and the technologies that are used. The figure was around five per cent in World War I and stood at nearly 90 per cent by the time the Vietnam conflict was concluded. I think the House must ask the question: once the figure gets close to 100 per cent, where do we turn?

Additionally, there had to be very good reasons for leaders to commit young men and now young women to the battlefield and to the awfulness of war. Primary of those was to defend the national interest and to exercise the right as a sovereign state to defend the state against unprovoked attack—that is, the right of self-defence—and it is enshrined in international law. It is on the basis of the right of self-defence and the exercise of a just war that all other normative rules, regulations and principles that govern the conduct of armed conflict between nations rest. It is a great tragedy that those rules have been made tattered and frayed by the conduct of the Howard government as it entered the war in Iraq as part of the coalition of the willing.

The actions of the allied nations in World War II were entirely justified for the same reason that the US invasion, strongly encouraged and supported by the Howard government, is without justification. This Iraq war is an illegal war. Those who still support the war, apart from presiding over a terrible mess, are party to the original wrongful act of acceding to war, notwithstanding the terrible nature of the Hussein regime, without an accepted legally justifiable reason.

The Prime Minister’s ministerial statement on the current status of the Iraq war we are debating here did not, of course, address any of these issues. It did not go to the heart of why this war is opposed by the Labor Party and by millions of Australians. But, in addressing the role played by our troops there, as the Prime Minister did, numerous questions are still hanging. Amongst them is: was the normative framework of international law served by our entering into an armed conflict in Iraq? The answer must be no. Indeed, the notion of a pre-emptive strike—a policy that the Prime Minister seems to have embraced—actively destabilises not only the international legal framework that surrounds the conduct of war but, additionally, the geostrategic stability of parts of the world that experience unrest, particularly the Middle East. It is no accident that much of the rhetoric that flies around the Middle East in terms of conflict, claim and counterclaim rests in part on an insecurity that attaches to the notion of a pre-emptive strike.

The next question that the Prime Minister should have addressed was: was Australia’s national interest served by committing the nation to war? Again, I say the answer is no. The head of the Australian Federal Police made it crystal clear early on in the war’s carriage that, as a consequence of the government’s decision to enter the war in Iraq, Australians and Australia were more exposed to the risk of terrorism than otherwise would have been the case. The Prime Minister and the foreign minister shouted him down, but it was too late. An honest public servant had belled the cat.

The national interest, too, is affected by the significant burden that is placed on the Australian defence forces by war. This is a constant concern raised by military analysts, and it is doubtless on the minds of senior defence personnel as well. The Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Houston, said in evidence to a Senate committee earlier this year—I think in February—that the general feeling was that Australian troops should be there as long as the Japanese engineers required protection and that by the middle of the year they should be out.

Our reasons for being in this war constantly change and they are still changing, and that is one of the great flaws in the government’s participation in the coalition of the willing. Now the minister, I understand, says that the troops should be out by Christmas. Do we recall the pillorying from the media and from the government that came when a former Leader of the Opposition made that same observation? The Minister for Defence clearly feels that it is okay to raise the ‘out by Christmas’ flag yet again, and I do hope the troops are out by Christmas. But, as Air Chief Marshal Houston and other senior military officers know, there is a national interest that attaches to having troops committed in Iraq—that is, our defence capacities, given the other engagements in Afghanistan and in the region, are simply stretched to the limit. For those of us who have defence facilities and institutions in our electorates—as I do in Kingsford Smith—it is no poor reflection on officers at both senior and serving levels that they are only too well aware of the very great pressure and very great levels of responsibility that have been placed on them by the government by this commitment.

Was the original claim of removing weapons of mass destruction sufficient reason for invading Iraq? That was the reason that was given. Again the answer is no. In fact, it was a deliberate falsehood and the Prime Minister knew it and he repeated it subsequent to knowing it, and yet that was the reason championed to the Australian public—a reason without any foundation or fact whatsoever. It is the worst of leaderships to allow a country to enter a war on the back of a falsehood or a lie, and it will be acknowledged and recognised as that as the history of our involvement in this war is written.

Was the removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein—in fact, this was one of the original reasons as well—reason enough to enter into war? The difficulty with this reason was that initially the question of Saddam Hussein’s regime was not seen as instrumental to the conduct of the war. In fact, Prime Minister Blair made it very clear that it was not about regime change at all; it was simply about weapons of mass destruction. But very quickly it became one of regime change. The key here is that, other than voices being raised within countries like Australia and the US about the conduct of their leaders as they enter into war, it is the voices that are universally raised outside in other countries and communities who witness the actions and the words of our leaders and make judgements accordingly.

Was the revised aim of addressing and hopefully defeating fundamentalist terrorism achieved by going into war in Iraq? Again, the answer is no. In fact, the Iraq adventure has had the opposite effect. Iraq has become a lightning rod for the disaffected, a breeding ground for terrorism and a place of terrible suffering. Was the war then justifiable as policy by any other means, to paraphrase Clausewitz, I think? Again, no. The invasion of Iraq remains a dismal failure, but the Prime Minister did not admit this in his statement to the House. Conservative commentators like Francis Fukuyama are scathing of the US conduct in the war. Owen Harries has called the war ‘a misbegotten adventure, wrongly conceived as well as incompetently implemented’. And yet the Prime Minister’s statement made no allowance for that.

Labor believes the Australian troops should be withdrawn now the Japanese reconstruction force has departed, but instead the prime ministerial statement indicated that the troops may be called on by the Iraqi government to provide backup. But that raises serious questions again about whether Australian troops will be used in some kind of call-up capacity—something which has attached to it another set of risks, difficulties and problems.

It is nothing short of a miracle that Australian loss of life has been so few and it is due entirely to the high levels of professionalism and service of the ADF. It is also a fact that the lives of the innocent lost in bombing raids in Iraq are not officially counted. But that fact should repulse any civilised person or country reflecting on this war. It is a fact that Australia provided cover for the sale of wheat to Saddam Hussein’s regime while prosecuting war against Iraq and that the government clasps its hands to its chest and proclaims its fealty to the nation and the sacrifice of young lives whilst at the same time acquiescing to trade with those that you are meant to be engaging in war with—an act of monstrous hypocrisy.

It is a fact that President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had no exit strategy and no articulated rationale for the conduct of this misadventure, and it is a fact that the Howard government, constantly hiding behind the cloak of patriotism, has been with them all the way. It has not exercised the necessary serious correspondence, discussion and serious judgement on these issues with a senior alliance partner that it should have done. It has simply been with them all the way. Notwithstanding the intimate access that Foreign Minister Downer has to senior members of the Bush administration, he has not been paying attention to the commentary of those who watch these matters closely nor of the people who watch with shock and say that this is a war that never should have been entered into.

In conclusion, let me say that there are other aspects of our involvement in the war against Iraq that need to be referred to briefly. They include the illegal renditions of terrorist suspects, the drumbeat from the American Attorney-General that the Geneva convention should not impede the US in its campaign on terrorism, and the fate of Australian citizen David Hicks, who has been abandoned by this government. All of these matters, and many others, flow outwards from the conduct of this government in a war that was illegal and that would not serve any of its avowed aims.

The access to power and the strong ideology that the Howard government has experienced in its relationships with the United States regrettably have taken us to a place that we should never have been in. They have taken us to the war in Iraq. Australians and Australian troops will be well served if we are out of there as soon as possible.

Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister’s statement on the Australian Defence Force commitment in southern Iraq sets out the arrangements for the Australian Defence Force personnel’s completion of the task that they had been set by the government in Al Muthanna province and also sets out the redeployment of Australian troops to Dhi Qar province, to be based at the coalition air base at Tallil and to be involved in the operational overwatch in south-east Iraq.

Yet again, the ADF personnel that have been involved in Al Muthanna province have shown their professionalism in setting out and completing the tasks given to them by government. The people involved have our gratitude and I wish success in the safe completion of the task they have been given to all the forces that are redeployed to south-east Iraq for involvement in this operational overwatch.

This is an opportunity for us to reflect upon Australia’s regrettable involvement in the Iraqi conflict. It was wrong from the outset and it is wrong now. In saying that, the opposition is not saying that the people that are being tasked to carry out the decisions of government should be criticised. It is very much the decision makers of executive government who need to be taken to task for their involvement as a so-called coalition of the willing in the disaster that has become the conflict in Iraq.

The Prime Minister’s statement was very disappointing in that it lacked balance in the section on what is actually happening in Iraq at the moment. The Prime Minister indicated that he believed, on the basis of the energy production figures, the rehabilitation of schools, the training of teachers and other indicators, that things were resolving in a positive manner. But he did what ministers of the Howard government do on all occasions—fail to talk about the negative side. We do not hear a discussion about the horrendous civilian losses that have occurred over the five years.

A website regrettably called ‘Iraq body count’ today gives an estimate of between 40,000 and 44,500 civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq. If we go to other sites that have taken the time to collate these regrettable statistics about fatalities in Iraq, we see that, as of 6 August, military fatalities for the Iraq coalition totalled some 2,822. To get this into perspective, this site averages out the number of fatalities for the days of the conflict. Up to 6 August there had been 1,237 days. That makes 2.2 fatalities a day. In the first six days of this month of August, there were 15. That makes 1.88. This is not something that is waning. The figures indicate that this is not a picnic. There have been 2,592 casualties from the US defence force—what might be considered one of the most well equipped defence forces the globe can produce.

When we see this horrific loss—40,000 civilian casualties and nearly 3,000 military casualties—we have to ask why we do not have a fuller discussion of the issues surrounding the Iraq conflict. Today we see members of the opposition taking the opportunity that has been given through the Prime Minister being embarrassed into making a ministerial statement when he has redeployed troops in Iraq, but we see only opposition members taking the opportunity. I do not think that the member for Melbourne Ports and the member for Kingsford Smith would mind me characterising them as being in the broad church, under the umbrella that is the Australian Labor Party, coming from different directions about matters to do with foreign policy and our engagement in world affairs. But, as the Main Committee can see from their contributions, there is one thing that the opposition is united on—that this was a conflict that we should not have involved ourselves in and that this is a conflict that we should get out of.

That gets us to a consideration of what we believe to be the alternative. The member for Melbourne Ports, with his particular interest in matters to do with the Middle East, talked about a number of political leaders in the region, especially in Iran—political leaders who have a dual role as religious leaders. His expose indicates the complexity of these matters. I am not standing here in the Main Committee suggesting that this is something that is easy. These are complex matters. But Australia should understand that, if it is to have a role in these affairs, it should be strategic about that commitment. The Australian Labor Party have indicated—it has been clearly enunciated by the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley—that, if we believe that we can have some successful involvement in improving not only aspects of the Middle East and the surrounding region but also global affairs, our involvement in Afghanistan and our pursuit of terrorist organisations that have found their home in that country are the best way that we can use our resources.

As I said from the outset, one of the things that we do know is that the Australian defence forces can stand proud and tall about their professionalism and their effectiveness. That goes not only to the way that they carry out their duties in a military sense but also to their understanding of the environment—I include the cultural environment—where they engage and the fact that they do not go in as some superior force that is going to ram an outcome down on the people whom they are involved in protecting. That is unlike an impression I get as to the cultural context that other military forces, ones that we have a coalition with, think that they can go about their business with. But that perhaps is a debate for another day.

In the debate on the Australia-Japan legislation just before this present debate about the prime ministerial statement, in conclusion the foreign minister of course came in here and had the cheap shot that foreign policy within the Australian Labor Party has some leftist view that is anti-American. I think that he should be careful and that he should perhaps not only listen to the administration and what comes out of the west wing of the White House but also go up to Capitol Hill and listen to the views put by the US congress. What he has to understand is that, whilst the Howard government has fallen into line with the Bush administration, there are plenty of dissenting voices in the American political scene which are very akin to the Australian Labor Party’s position. To deny that that is happening is to misconstrue the successful relationship that Australia has had with the United States. The assumption that an administration that happens to be in power at the moment is the only singular unitary view of the United States is a great fallacy, and any Australian government that comes to that conclusion is not acting in Australia’s best interests.

I stand with many in the United States congress who say: ‘Why is the United States involved in Iraq? What is the exit strategy? What is the endplay? What is the conclusion?’ We have Condoleezza Rice touring around the world. She does not express where they think the goal is. Donald Rumsfeld says everything is peachy because there are 36,000 teachers being trained in Iraq. Of course that is a positive thing. But when the United States defence forces continue to lose something like two soldiers a day dying in action, when 40,000 civilians have lost their lives in Iraq and it continues, certainly there is a need to come to some greater conclusion.

So the opportunity that arose at the time that these troops were redeployed, at the time when the Japanese had decided that they could move on, has now been missed by the Australian government to decide that we could move on. Having lost that opportunity, perhaps the Australian government has to reassess what it is they believe they are actually doing in Iraq. Is there an end strategy? Is there an outcome that will satisfy the Howard government?

The Prime Minister quoted Tony Blair’s speech in the House earlier. I think it was this year or late last year. I have said, and gone on the record on a number of occasions saying this, that I would have proudly been in the minority of the British Labour caucus against Britain’s involvement in Iraq. But I have to say that I think that at least Tony Blair makes a greater effort and gives a better analysis to justify his reasons for being in Iraq than the present leadership of the Australian government does. Blair said:

Here are Iraqi ... Muslims saying clearly: democracy is as much our right as yours ... This struggle is our struggle.

We agree. What we really need to decide is: is the involvement of Australia and other coalition forces in Iraq a positive or a negative for the Iraqis to actually self-determine the way forward for themselves? There are plenty of people that say that the coalition forces are a distraction that causes the type of tumult that we see and does not allow for a peaceful settlement to the situation in Iraq. Blair went on when speaking to the House of Reps to say, ‘This is a time for the courage to see it through.’ See it through to where? Where is the end point? Have we really decided what the concluding moment of this conflict is?

Earlier on, as a critique of our involvement in Iraq, the Australian opposition—through its spokespersons, the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Griffith as the shadow foreign minister—questioned whether there was a risk with the continuing involvement of the coalition of a fully fledged civil war between the Shia and the Sunni. The Australian Labor Party has been on record as posing that question as something that we need to analyse for our continuing involvement. And what do we see? We see the retiring British ambassador to Iraq raising a similar question, having come to a conclusion that yes, it is. It is time that the Australian government understood that it got us into Iraq for spurious reasons and should now decide how it is going to get us out. We believe that we are best placed if we go now. At the conclusion of this speech, I simply say to those in the Australian defence forces serving on behalf of their nation that I wish them well in their endeavours. (Time expired)

Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Link to 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.