Robert McClelland (Barton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The approach of both the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Downer in question time today was to warn against a ‘precipitate withdrawal of troops from Iraq’. But no-one is recommending that. Even Senator Barack Obama, who was personally attacked by the Prime Minister over the weekend, did not. Senator Obama makes it clear that his proposed plan for a phased withdrawal of troops could be temporarily suspended if circumstances required. His plan also provides for a residual United States presence in Iraq to provide training and to pursue international terrorists.

The proposal for a phased withdrawal of American forces is entirely consistent with the Iraq Study Group recommendations. These were not referred to by either the Prime Minister or the foreign minister. The ISG report noted:

… an open-ended commitment of American forces would not provide the Iraqi government the incentive it needs to take the political actions that give Iraq the best chance of quelling sectarian violence.

The report therefore recommended, in recommendation 40:

The United States should not make an open-ended commitment to keep large numbers of American troops deployed in Iraq.

Again, in recommendation 41, the report said:

The United States must make it clear to the Iraqi government that the United States could carry out its plans, including planned redeployments, even if Iraq does not implement its planned changes. America’s other security needs and the future of our military cannot be made hostage to the actions or inactions of the Iraqi government.

In direct defiance of those recommendations, Mr Howard said ‘it was unwise to be nominating benchmarks’ in respect of ending the presence of allied troops in Iraq.

The bottom line is that the war in Iraq has made us less safe because it is actually attracting and motivating our terrorist enemies around the globe. As Lawrence Korb, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, has noted:

The extended US presence in Iraq has fostered new alliances between secular nationalists and Islamist extremists who are traditionally opposed to each other but who have found common cause in their opposition to the American occupation of a Muslim-majority country.

Published intelligence advice has confirmed that the presence of foreign troops in Iraq has served as a catalyst, a lightning rod, to the recruitment of extremists by fundamentalist Islamic organisations around the world.

As a result of being able to rely on the security blanket provided by allied troops, the al-Maliki administration in Iraq has tolerated if not actually sponsored some of the worst acts of sectarian violence that have occurred there. That was confirmed in a report of 8 November last year by White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to which I referred in the House earlier in the week.

Clearly, as long as Iraqi leaders feel that foreign troops will remain in large numbers in Iraq, they will have no incentive to make the necessary compromises to resolve the underlying political, religious and sectarian tensions that are giving rise to the worst acts of violence that we see there. Clearly, the time has come to set a limit on our involvement in the war in Iraq in order to send an important message to the al-Maliki government: take charge or lose power.

Effectively, the strategy being adopted by the Howard government is to make the safety of the young Australian men and women of our troops serving in Iraq hostage to the action or inaction of the al-Maliki government in Iraq, a government which has been described as being at best inept, if not corrupt, with sections clearly implicated in intelligence reports as actually fomenting the violence in Iraq. It is quite immoral and, worse that that, irrational and completely contrary to our national interests to give an unconditional, open-ended commitment to such a regime.