Saturday 11 April 2009
by: Stephen de Tarczynski | Visit article original @ Inter Press Service
Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. (Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones / Sidney Morning Herald)
Melbourne - The U.K. government's recent announcement that it will conduct an inquiry into Britain's involvement in Iraq has led to calls here for Australia to review its own participation in the controversial war.
Britain's foreign secretary David Miliband said in late March that the government would undertake a "comprehensive" inquiry into Britain's decision to join the 2003 United States-led invasion of the Middle Eastern nation.
The review will be carried out after July, by which time the majority of British troops will have been withdrawn from Iraq.
"We're very pleased that the British government has taken this decision and we would support the same thing happening in Australia," says Sue Wareham, president of Australia's Medical Association for Prevention of War (MAPW), a professional not-for-profit organisation which works for the promotion of peace and disarmament.
Wareham told IPS that part of the legacy of the Iraq war is "that it has undermined international law and the role it plays in settling disputes between countries."
She says that clarification is required regarding the extent to which the leaders of the U.K. - along with those of the U.S. and Australia - "were acting outside the law" at the time of the invasion.
Although the level of Australian troop involvement in the initial attacks was dwarfed by the numbers of British and U.S. forces taking part - around 2,000 Australian personnel on land, at sea and in the air were directly involved - Australia was one of only four nations to commit troops to the opening forays.
More than six years later around 145 Australian troops remain in Iraq, most of whom are involved in the defence of the Australian embassy in Baghdad. The nation's combat troops were withdrawn last year by the current Kevin Rudd- led government, which came to power in 2007.
Those who have maintained a steadfast opposition to Australia's participation in Iraq say it is time for the decision-makers to be held accountable for their actions.
The person ultimately responsible for Australia's involvement in Iraq, John Howard - Australia's prime minister between 1996 and 2007 - was a vociferous supporter of then-U.S. President George W. Bush's so-called "coalition of the willing."
Howard committed his nation's forces despite popular resistance to the government's war-footing, with a number of large-scale anti-war protests taking place across Australia in the lead-up to the war.
In an address to the nation the day after the initial attack, Howard - famously dubbed "a man of steel" by Bush several months after the invasion - told the Australian people that the "Australian government knows that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons."
But, while the much-publicised failure of the Iraq Survey Group to find any "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) in Iraq diluted the pre-invasion justifications for war put forward by Bush, Howard and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair - in addition to the now-discredited rationale regarding the alleged support provided to "terrorists" by the regime of Saddam Hussein - Wareham says that the "tragedy" of the decision to go to war is that the destabilisation of Iraq, the flow of refugees to neighbouring countries, and the massive loss of life were all predicted prior to the conflict.
The Iraq Body Count website says that about 100,000 Iraq civilians have died so far, while in January last year, Opinion Research Business, a U.K. based market research company, estimated that in excess of one million Iraqis had been killed.
Andrew Wilkie, who came to prominence in Australia when he resigned in protest from the Office of National Assessments (ONA) just days before the war began, says that Britain's planned inquiry should act as a catalyst for others to undertake investigations of their own. The ONA provides political, strategic and economic assessments to senior Cabinet member and is directly accountable to the prime minister.
"I think it's a very important reminder for both the U.S. and Australia to review their involvement," says Wilkie, currently campaigning as an independent for a seat in Tasmania's state parliament.
Although all the U.S., U.K and Australia have previously conducted inquiries into aspects of their respective involvements in Iraq, these investigations were criticised for not attributing culpability to the governments of the day.
Among the reviews carried out was a 2004 report in Britain which was very critical of the intelligence gathered and provided to the government. A 2005 report by a Bush administration-established commission into the U.S. intelligence community slammed its pre-war information assessments.
Similarly, the 2004 inquiry into Australia's intelligence agencies by former diplomat Philip Flood found that the ONA and the Defence Intelligence Organisation "failed to judge accurately the extent and nature of Iraq's WMD programmes."
While Howard stated that "Flood's report firmly rejected any suggestion of political interference in the intelligence community," Wilkie argues that the UK's upcoming inquiry, as well as any future inquiry in Australia, needs wide- ranging powers.
The inquisitor should be "given the broadest terms of reference to look at all aspects of the war and to pursue lines of inquiry in any direction he or she chooses to go," opines the former whistleblower.
Although he says that a thorough inquiry in Australia is required, Wilkie believes that "there is next to no chance" of such a review being established by the current government.
He told IPS that Rudd, a one-time foreign affairs spokesman during the now- governing Australian Labour Party's (ALP) time in opposition, "was very good on the Iraq issue."
Following the release of Flood's report five years ago, which concluded that the supplied "intelligence was thin, ambiguous and incomplete," Rudd questioned why Howard took Australia to war on such evidence.
For Wilkie, Rudd's apparent disinterest now in establishing another inquiry is "disappointing."
"I think he did a very good job of challenging the government [when in opposition] but he seems to have dropped the ball now and moved on," says Wilkie.
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