Last night, John Howard was confronted face-to-face with the question that has been 10 years coming: why did you take us to war in Iraq on a false premise, with no proof?
His answer — that he “had the most responsibility” for Australia going to war, and that some “key assessments” from intelligence agencies were “wrong” — will likely do little to alleviate people’s concerns about the decision. But it’s nevertheless important the question was asked to him.
Sydney’s Lowy Institute scored a coup last night when it hosted Howard’s speech marking 10 years since the war began. Such was the intense interest in the speech, widely thought to be the first time the former PM had publicly spoken about the Iraq War in recent times, that the venue had to be changed to increase security. Faced with the prospect of a huge protest, Lowy head Dr Michael Fullilove switched it at the last minute from Lowy’s Bligh Street headquarters to the Hotel Intercontinental, so Howard could enter and leave via the car park.
However, about 120 protesters did stand under the window of the room on Macquarie Street and kept up a kind of Greek chorus of chants until the police moved them on, mid-way through the speech. Inside the room, several beefy-looking men with ear pieces scanned the crowd for signs of trouble — adding to an expectation that we were about to hear something exciting, which was sadly unrealised.
In 2003, the Australian government took us to war in Iraq because Us president George W. Bush, enraged and emasculated by 9/11, wanted it. Last night’s speech was a myriad excuses for this act, widely believed to be Australia’s most catastrophic foreign policy error since entering the Vietnam War.
Howard didn’t concede any of this in the speech, although he did face a few hard questions, none of which he fully answered.
Academic and writer Alison Broinowski stood up to remind the former PM that “you told Parliament several times before Iraq that your government would not breach international law … However, in defiance of the UN Security Council and with no proof of weapons of mass destruction … you decided to invade Iraq. So who is responsible for Iraq, if not you?”
Howard conceded that “I, as the ultimate head of the government, had the most responsibility” for that. However, he then went on to say that the issue had been debated by the National Security Committee and the full cabinet, where it was “endorsed by every single member”.
There’s one problem with this argument, however — does anyone seriously believe that Alexander Downer, Robert Hill and Peter Costello were ever going to stand up to Howard on anything? This is a group of people whose combined force of personality couldn’t even match Janette!
Financial Times Asia editor David Pilling asked Howard, given the arguments in 2003 that Iraq was a rogue state with nuclear weapons, “shouldn’t the US today be invading Iran and North Korea?”
However, the 73-year-old dodged the issue, saying the “final whistle had not yet been blown on Iran” and that “no country can exert greater influence on North Korea than China … which has, so far, refused to intervene.”
In the speech, the former PM emphatically rejected that Australia had gone to war on a lie:
“After the fall of Saddam, and when it became apparent that stockpiles of WMDs had not been found in Iraq, it was all too easy for certain people, who only months earlier has said Iraq had the weapons, to begin claiming that Australia had gone to war based on a lie. That claim merits the most emphatic rejection. Not only does it impugn the integrity of the decision-making process at the highest level but also the professionalism and integrity of intelligence agencies here and elsewhere. Some of their key assessments proved to be wrong, but that is a world away from those assessments being the product of deceit and/or political manipulation.”
We did get to hear him say, “when I left public office, or rather, when public office left me,” which shows a rare talent for self-deprecation. But, going in, I had had a fantasy we were about to hear a version of that famous mea culpa produced by former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara, who eventually regretted his support for the Vietnam War.
In his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, McNamara said he and his senior colleagues were “wrong, terribly wrong” to pursue the war as they did. He acknowledged that he kept the war going long after he realised it was futile because he lacked the courage or the ability to turn president Lyndon Johnson around. In his 2003 book The Fog of War McNamara said: “War is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend … our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.”
Wouldn’t it have been truly satisfying to have heard Howard admit, even in a small way, that he had been wrong?
As I recall, Andrew Wilkie, then an unknown employee of the Office of National Assessments (ONA), spoke out strongly on the subject, saying there was insufficient evidence to justify attacking Iraq. He wasn’t making mischief politically, he sacrificed his career by standing firm for truth.
Australian weapons inspectors Richard Butler, Rod Barton and John Gee were unconvinced there were WMD. Chief UN Inspector, Hans Blix, called for additional time to find evidence at the end of February 2003. The following month the invasion began – against the wishes of the UN. Our prime minister, JWHoward, defied the UN – and, it appears, stands proud of himself today, free of regret.
I’m sure he knows that he went to war on a wrong premise and I’m certain that he knew that even at the time. But ever the politician, he’d never admit that. He can proclaim that the belief that Iraq had WMDs was “nearly universal”, 10 years is not such a long time and I remember well that back then few people believed Howard/Blair/Bush. Pretty much anyone I know considered WMDs as nothing but a pretense.
Margot, this is only part of the story. We know for example that an attack on Iraq was on the agenda of the first Cabinet meeting of Bush the Lesser in January 2001, eight months before 9/11. We know that a neo-con cabal had drawn up plans for an attack even before Bush was “elected”. We know about Cheney’s oil group. We know about how Feith was charged with stove piping fake intelligence to the media. We know about the fake Niger uranium papers. We know about the phone defector “Curveball” and others of his ilk. We know how debriefings of genuine Iraqi defectors were censored to hide the fact that Saddam had destroyed his WMD years before 2003. And we know that the “intelligence was being made to fit the policy”.
The is much else but t would take an article to set out even a brief summary.
Other countries, including the Dutch (who reported two years ago) and the British (likely to report in 2014) set up public inquiries to establish how we made such a monumental error. Why not Australia? I suggest it is because they fear the truth.
Two questions remain. Why is it the mainstream media still persist in lying and/or excusing what we did as “faulty intelligence” when it was nothing of the kind. Secondly, why aren’t Howard and his sorry crew in the dock in The Hague?
I doubt if there was anything clear cut in Howard’s understanding of the evidence for the existence of WMDs. And it isn’t really valid to dismiss Rudd’s (and Simon Crean’s) expression of confidence that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. After all Rudd was a confident experienced foreign policy professional with good contacts. He wasn’t depending on Howard’s sources.
Personally, as well as expressing grave doubts about US policy and performance (not conclusive for Australian decisions of course) I thought that the one person who most wanted everyone to believe he had WMDs ready to go was Saddam Hussein himself. Iranians. Saudis, the West (though less so), his own generals even. That supported one argument against being outraged at the supposed illegality of the war. After all Saddam was asking for it. A pity about his people, but that is true of all wars against dictators and tyrants.
I was in the public protest in Sydney in 2003, which was the largest protest I have ever witnessed. Hyde Parke was full and St James railway station closed. It remains a bitter memory that such a large protest could be so utterly ignored by the government of the day, and calls into question the usefulness of any peaceful, public protest.
Margot got it absolutely right. The lie was never about WMD’s. It was about whether Australia would join in (“We haven’t decided yet.”), and why. We joined in to support the American defense alliance. There is a valid argument to be made that this is or was in Australia’s interest. A debate on that would have been an honest debate and would have demonstrated some level of integrity. Instead we got the lies and spin.
The actions of the Howard government most certainly did “impugn the integrity of the decision making process at the highest levels” and also “the professionalism and integrity of intelligence agencies here and elsewhere”. We, the broader public, knew it then and history has confirmed that judgement.