Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Professor Trood. It is dealing with some of the most autocratic and antidemocratic regimes in the world. One of the other reasons for our support of the actions in Iraq is associated with an understandable reaction to terror. But is the world safer? Senator Bob Brown said today that young women are ringing up radio stations in Sydney, concerned that they cannot travel on buses. Is the world safer from terrorism now? Has what has happened ended terrorism? Do we have a situation now where most of the Muslim world thinks that America and its allies are not to be trusted or, in fact, where it despises them? Are we not in a situation now where all those belonging to Western nations are slowly seeing their civil liberties eroding as a result of this conflict with terrorism? Haven’t we also seen that religion is being used now as a vehicle in ethnic struggles in Russia, China and India?

This is the result of what is going on in Iraq at the moment, and we rightly demand of the government and of our ally the United States to know what exit strategy there is. As a result of the money that is being poured into trying to prop up this regime in Iraq—they still have poverty of enormous proportions in that country—how long do you reckon it will be before the American people say to their own government that this is no longer tolerable? Maybe it will be at the next election. When do you reckon they might work out that it is more important to, say, raise test scores in Washington DC or in any other part of the United States, because of the money being diverted to actions being carried out internationally that should be carried out domestically?

I think the situation that we are being confronted with is frightening because it may mean that one of the leading democratic powers in the world, the United States, will go back into the isolationism it went into after World War I. Do we really want to see that country no longer engaging in the world? There are plenty of instances where our great ally has done the right thing—where it has used military force against the interests of other people to ensure that there were humanitarian outcomes. I think merely of what it did in Kosovo, when Dutch peacekeepers looked on while Serbs massacred ethnic Albanians. The Americans went in there and bombed them. That made the Serbs stand up, listen and stop what they were doing. The Americans are in difficulty here and it is our difficulty as well—because if we let them withdraw from their international engagements, we as a nation will suffer, as will all democratic countries in the world.

Senator Payne finished on a quote and I would like to finish on one as well. Francis Fukuyama, who wrote an article entitled ‘The Neoconservative Moment’, said:

The poorly executed nation-building strategy in Iraq will poison the well for future such exercises, undercutting domestic political support for a generous and visionary internationalism, just as Vietnam did.

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