John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has now been over four years since our Prime Minister took our nation to war in Iraq on the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. When it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction and that the governments of the coalition of the willing knew that before the invasion, the story changed. The architects of the invasion began to claim that their motivation had been the wellbeing of the Iraqi people and the goal of the invasion had been to make Iraq a better place in which to live. Four years after the invasion, this claim too has proved hollow. The armies of the coalition of the willing dismantled the Iraqi state with blinding speed. Then the governments of the coalition of the willing speedily turned a blind eye to the consequences of that dismantling. Mr Howard and Mr Downer have a glib and easy answer when confronted with the violence, the breakdown in civil society, the collapse of infrastructure and the shortfall in basic food and water services. They point to Saddam Hussein. ‘At least,’ they say, ‘Saddam Hussein is gone.’

Are our expectations of ourselves so low that the most we ask is not to be the butcher of Baghdad? Undeniably, the occupying forces deposed Saddam Hussein: he was tried, convicted and put to death. But it is also undeniable that the promise of a better life for the citizens of Iraq in a post-Saddam Hussein nation is a promise that has been utterly broken. We promised to improve their nation. Instead we reduced it to rubble. We promised to make their lives better. Instead we shattered them.

It is increasingly clear that this is not an honourable failure. It is not the result of passionate commitment and careful planning defeated by unsurmountable circumstances. Australia, America, Britain and the other nations of the coalition of the willing have failed in Iraq through negligence, recklessness, deliberate ignorance and wilful blindness. There was a plan for war; there was no plan for peace.

As disaster unfolds in Iraq the only answer the coalition of the willing has is to turn a blind eye to the consequences, to turn a blind eye to the dead, the injured, the bereaved and the maimed and to turn their backs on the people of Iraq. It is a failure of courage, this refusal to face the consequences of our invasion. But it is more than merely a moral failure; it is a catastrophic and continuing policy failure. The Iraqi people will be trapped in this nightmare of our making as long as our governments refuse to awake from their fool’s paradise. The inability of Mr Howard and Mr Downer to face their responsibility for failure in Iraq has left a blind spot at the heart of our foreign policy. The news from Iraq that we see on our televisions or read in our newspapers—news of bombs and shootings, murders, assassinations, lawlessness and desperation—is news from this blind spot, news that the Howard government is trying desperately not to hear.

It has been nearly a year since Mr Howard made his last ministerial statement on Iraq, on 22 June 2006. In that speech, he said, with great understatement:

Clearly the security situation in Iraq continues to be dangerous ...

Since Mr Howard made that speech, in the 358 days in which he has not seen fit to face the Australian parliament and report on the situation in Iraq, more than 25,000 Iraqi non-combatant men, women and children have been reported to have died in the rising violence that is consuming their nation. I say ‘more than 25,000’ because 25,208 is the number of Iraqi civilian deaths reported in two different reputable online English-language media sources and tallied by the internet project ‘Iraq Body Count’. This does not include, therefore, those whose deaths were not newsworthy. The data gathered by these passive methods are rarely complete even in stable societies; in the war zones they are even more partial. Studies comparing media reports with census and population based analysis have shown that passive reporting covers at most 20 per cent of the real casualty rate. Figures can be as low as five per cent. The total count tallied on the Iraq Body Count website is 71,328 civilian deaths between the beginning of the war and May this year.

In October last year the Lancet published an article entitled ‘Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey’. The study, which surveyed 1,849 Iraqi households comprising 12,801 people across the country selected to be representative, found that, in the 12 months leading to June 2006, 165 people had died—165 people from 12,801 in total. If those figures are representative—and they were compiled using methodology that is standard in all epidemiological tests used for medical research and public policy—there were more than 324,540 civilian deaths from violence between June 2005 and June 2006, and 601,000 since the invasion.

But, for the record, I note the criticism by US, UK and Iraqi authorities of the Lancet figures and methodology. The US Department of Defense have released Iraqi casualty data from the Multi-National Corps-Iraq, MNC-I, significant activities database covering just one year. This data estimated the civilian casualty rate at 117 deaths per day between May 2005 and June 2006 on the basis of deaths that occurred in events to which the coalition responded. So this includes only those deaths that in some way involved occupying forces. Reported civilian deaths have increased 78 per cent between March 2006 and March 2007. Forty-four per cent of the total reported civilian deaths after the ‘shock and awe’ phase of the initial invasion have occurred in this most recent year. Given that both the Lancet study’s epidemiological approach and the US Department of Defense figures show correlating increases, we have every reason to believe that the countless tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children killed in the past 12 months has reached a horrific number. In Baghdad, where 64 per cent of the deaths reported to March 2007 have occurred, one in 160 of the 6.5 million population in the city have been killed. In the past 12 months, there has been an average of 74 reported deaths a day. Remember, these may be no more than 20 per cent of the real casualties. Remember, too, that those figures do not include the injured.

The governments of the invading forces justify turning a blind eye to these casualties and mortalities because the figures are based on reports, surveys, estimates and extrapolations. Having overseen the destruction of the civil infrastructure that could provide a precise census of deaths, the coalition of the willing ignore all deaths because the count is not exact. Having refused to keep records of civilians killed, the coalition of the willing use the lack of those records to discredit the work of non-government bodies to hold them to account. It is a typical strategy of the Howard government: to refuse to be informed and then to plead ignorance as a defence. We saw it with ‘children overboard’, we saw it with AWB and we are seeing it with civilian casualties in Iraq. The sickening truth is that the Howard government and the Bush administration have no interest in counting the cost of the war for Iraqi civilians, have no interest in counting the dead and maimed, because for them these people simply do not count. The need to know how many Iraqis have died—needlessly, senselessly, violently—as a result of the 2003 invasion is not only a matter of keeping a true record of the invasion and its consequences but also an urgent, ongoing question.

Every source indicates that the number of civilian casualties is rising year after year. The first year saw 10,870 reported civilian deaths and 90,150 indicated by the Lancet survey. The second year saw 11,312 reported deaths, while the Lancet study found survey respondents reported twice as many deaths in their households that year. The third year saw a reported 14,910 deaths—a rise of 32 per cent on the previous year—and 330,550 indicated by the Lancet survey, a rise of 83 per cent. The fourth year, not covered by the Lancet survey, saw 26,540 reported deaths, a rise of 78 per cent on the previous year, and a rise of more than 144 per cent on the first year. The longer this ill-conceived adventure continues, the higher the cost in innocent civilian lives, which is rising at an ever faster rate. The coalition of the willing have no grasp on this reality because they refuse to face their own failures: failure to plan and failure to foresee. As long as they refuse to see the cost they are imposing on the Iraqi people and as long as they refuse to look at the consequences of their actions and policies, their decisions will continue to be fatally flawed.

These figures—in the tens of thousands, in the hundreds of thousands—are mind-boggling. They are barely conceivable figures. But we must not make the mistake of believing, because we want to believe, that numbers this horrific must be inaccurate. We must remember that for the people of Iraq these numbers are not abstract and difficult to grasp; they are very real. They are toddlers who will never again run to their mother’s arms; they are mothers who will never again tuck their sons in at bedtime; they are the bicycle in the yard of a brother that will never again ride; and they are the book half read that a grandmother will never finish. Every one of those lives ended violently, too soon. Every one of them is a grief that will never really heal for many more. These families do not need to hear numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands to be horrified at the cost of America’s Iraq adventure; they need only look at the empty chair at the table to be reminded of the consequences that Mr Howard and President Bush refuse to see. For every person killed, history tells us there are people injured. The generally accepted ratio is two serious injuries for every death. There are more than half a million families bereaved; more than a million families with a seriously injured mother or perhaps father or child. What has been done to the people of Iraq is tragic. The fact that this tragedy continues at an ever-escalating pace, because its architects lack the courage to face the consequences of their decisions, is more than tragic; it is obscene.