We were told the invasion of Iraq was necessary because of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. “If Iraq had genuinely disarmed, I couldn’t justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime” – John Howard, 14 March 2003. How can we trust future justifications for war in the light of what we now know? (Tina Jackson)

Aden Ridgeway; Kerry Nettle; Kevin Rudd; Tina Jackson

Marise Payne: Shelley, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. I’m pleased to be here tonight representing my colleague Brendan Nelson who asked me if I’d come along for him. It’s a certain irony on my part, me being here on behalf of the government, and whilst I’m not expecting to get an enthusiastic reception, I hope I can at least have a fair hearing.

I want to put this particular quote in context to start with. Michelle Grattan asked the Prime Minister in a Q and A session at the Press Club in March last year: “If as you advocate, countries in the Security Council got behind the resolution and a miracle happened and Iraq said yes it would say the game was up and disarmed, but Saddam Hussein was still there, would this be enough for peace given the strong case you’ve made today for regime change in the name of the Iraqi people?”. The Prime Minister’s full response was: “Well I would have to accept that if Iraq had genuinely disarmed I couldn’t justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I’ve never advocated that. Much in all as I despise the regime, but what I was really trying to say today, and perhaps it has had some effect, is that I get a bit tired of humanitarian argument all being on the one side. It’s about time that the humanitarian argument was put into a better balance and people understand what a monstrous regime we’re dealing with.”

What I wanted to talk about briefly was three points in relation to this question. First of all, that you can’t in fact ignore the humanitarian argument, you can’t ignore the travesties and human rights obscenities of the Saddam Hussein Iraqi regime. And you might think that it’s headline grabbing, if you like, to reiterate those, but it is important when you’re talking about a regime which routinely, as a penalty for slander against the p resident’s family, would remove peoples’ tongues, crush the feet of children to extract confessions from their parents, who in fact legislated unrestricted honour killings of women, who subjected detainees to mock executions, who suspended them from ceilings by their hands with their hands tied behind their backs, and so the list goes on. So I would have argued in the first place that any regime that imposes its will through torture, is in fact, illegitimate.

But let’s go back to February 2003, a month before the quote, when the Australian federal parliament debated at length the prospect of military intervention. Only days before that the head of the UN weapons inspection body for Iraq, Hans Blix, said: “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.”

We all know that they routinely and categorically ignored UN resolutions for over 12 years, we know about their support for training and supporting regional terrorist groups and their relationships with those organisations. On the basis of the intelligence available, at the time, the British Joint Intelligence Committee has judged that Iraq had a usable chemical and biological weapons capability which included the recent production of chemical and biological agents. The director of US Central Intelligence reached similar conclusions, and I have of course greater detail on that.

The world wanted to know what had happened to Iraq’s pre-1998 weapons and material, when they claimed to destroy them the world sort proof, and proof was not provided. And there is a list of an extraordinary amount of chemical, biological, radiological weapons that Iraq possessed at that time which were never, and still have not been, accounted for.

Take for example their program for developing offensive biological weapons, four years of enquiries and searches, weapons inspectors didn’t even know of its existence until Hussein Kamal, Saddam’s son-in-law, actually defected [in 1995]. Those sorts of issues are still in many cases outstanding. So if you look at the intelligence that was available at the time, and our actions weren’t based only on British and American intelligence, because intelligence can only tell you so much, can only illuminate the situation. We relied also heavily on our assessment of his record in forming a judgment as to whether military intervention was necessary.

So on the humanitarian basis, on the intelligence basis, and on the WMD basis, that is, what was never accounted for, the decision was made to intervene, and ultimately, where do we now find ourselves? We find ourselves with a more difficult reconstruction than was envisaged. I absolutely acknowledge that, it would be ridiculous not to do so, but we have eliminated Iraq’s WMD and related activities. We have ended their sponsorship of terrorism in the Middle East. We have encouraged a country like Libya to abandon their weapons of mass destruction and other states of concern have considered their activities, and we have given them some hope of a democratic future, and I think that it is important to contemplate all of those things as we consider these issues tonight.

Shelley Reys: Thank you, Marise. If I could ask the audience to please give some respect to our speakers tonight. I'm not asking you not to respond, because I think that is what this forum is indeed about, but please give them the opportunity to at least finish their statements. Thank you. Now, on to Aden, and if I can ask our speakers to try and limit their responses to two or three minutes, and I know that's hard for politicians to do, but I am going to ask you to try and do it. Thank you.

Aden Ridgeway: Well I think the first thing that has to be said is that it’s absolutely appalling that we ever went to war in the first place. Because it seems to me that … I think hindsight is always a bitter pill to swallow, and this government hasn’t learnt the art of swallowing the injustice of what it’s done, particularly in relation to the whole notion of truth and that is about having the moral authority to make a decision - certainly in this particular case we’re talking about a government that relied upon the intelligence, most of all from the United Kingdom and United States, least of all upon our own agencies, and if you look at what has been spoken about lately, just about every second intelligence agency in this country is calling for a royal commission and we’ve still got this falling on deaf ears.

Now it seems to me that the Howard government were the first government to go to war in this country without any reference to the parliament or to the people. And I think that whilst we can’t do much about what has been done, we can still keep our eye on the future about avoiding these travesties ever occurring again and playing out, I think, male ego upon other countries and dominating ourselves, not just in other parts of the world, but in this region.

I think we need to keep in mind that the government already made the decision to go to war before the parliamentary debate ever begun. By the time that the debate got to the Senate, bombs were already being dropped on Baghdad. That’s how real it was from the government’s perspective about being able to listen to the debate that took place in the parliament, let alone listening to the hundreds of thousands of people that marched in this country and right across the globe. I think in many respects from a Democrat’s perspective, we had introduced back in 1981 the need for ratification and debate for decisions about going to war. It does need to occur. We’ve reintroduced that bill. I would hope that either the government that’s there or the government-in-waiting makes a commitment to make sure that the parliament and the people are represented in the process and that debate does occur.

I think the other thing that does need to be kept in mind is the unfortunate precedent of pre-emptive strike, now being put into the thought of international law, or rules being redefined and rewritten to suit certain circumstances. And unless we have some surety in the parliament in dealing with those issues you can bet your life that some governments at some time in the future will be tempted to make exactly the same decision again.

The most recent white paper that spoke about Australia’s defence made it very clear that Australia now sees itself in a very different light as it relates to foreign policy and more particularly in relation to our part of the world, this region. And I think if anything, we ought to be sending encouraging messages to our neighbours, not threatening ones. We ought not be introducing, I think, neo-colonialist views in the 21st century that seeks to dominate and put ourselves in a position where, quite frankly, we do end up becoming the deputized guards of the United States' president to follow their will. It is possible to have criticism of the way that the United States dealt with this and I do have to say and I have no difficulties - I hope there’s two things that happen this year: one is that George W Bush does get kicked out of the White House - I think he’s been the most incompetent US President I’ve ever seen; and the second is that we have change of government in this country.

The last thing I want to say is that I think that we do need to keep our eye on the future and quite frankly it does come down to making su re that the parliament does deliver on that. I’d be asking Kevin Rudd as the foreign minister-in-waiting perhaps to commit the Latham government to looking at making sure that the parliament is involved in this process because people inevitably will only vote one way or the other. There are some guarantees, but it’s not enough; because I think in this country when you look at the polls people are apathetic and people aren’t passionate enough about these issues, and we ought to be asking these guys to change the rules and make sure that all of us are involved in this debate.

Kerry Nettle: I had thought in answer to the question of: “how do we trust further justifications for war in the light of what we know now?”, my answer should be, we can’t, and I don’t think we should continue to naively trust arguments that are put forward for justifying a war when a decision has already been made to go to war. And I think that we need to continue to be aware of those sorts of arguments in a different context being put forward, and that relates to the situation that is in Iraq right now.

The Greens have been saying for a long time now that we think the best job that Australian troops can be doing in Iraq is to be removing themselves from a US led military occupation of Iraq. And we need to do that because we can see the way in which the military occupation is fueling violence in Iraq from people, as any occupied people would be when the military are there and having control of the decisions in their daily lives about where they can move around and what they can do and where they can go to. And I suppose I’ve been reading a lot about the stories from those people on the ground, from the people in Falluja, who after the bridge was shut across the River Euphrates, weren’t able to access their hospital which was on the other side of the bridge, people whose lives are being impacted on, in that way. And I get frustrated when I hear discussions about government’s humanitarian argument for going into Iraq to support the Iraqi people because when I see the horrendous photos that we’ve all seen over the last few days about the way in which Iraqis have been treated in prisons, I think, it makes me even more frustrated to hear government talking about arguments of humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people when we see those sorts of pictures.

So I think the message for us is to be careful of messages, to be careful of messages for example, coming from our government, the United States and the UK at the moment, to say if our troops leave there will be civil war. I think they’re messages that are being strongly put forward by governments, as they always are, where a country's occupied, the occupying forces will say, if we leave there will be chaos. Well it is chaos, because of the military occupation. We need to remove that. And we need to give to the Iraqi peoples their opportunity to make the decisions about the control of their country and of their democracy through free and fair elections, and of their economy as well. So I think they’re the things that we really need to be doing – is handing over those decisions about the economy, the democracy and the military of Iraq over to the Iraqi people.

Kevin Rudd: Thanks Kerry. We have a slightly old fashioned view of the question of when you go to war, and that is an old fashioned view that international law is important. And we don’t say that just for some sort of left wing nostalgiac view of the world, it’s because if you look at what the world community did after the Second World War, they decided that what had preceded it was an abomination, where it had become the norm of international behaviour for the previous half century that when states got upset with other states they invaded those states. And we saw the carnage which that resulted in, in the war to end all wars, and the war which succeeded that war, and so the international community met in San Francisco and they came up with the UN Charter 1945. We created the United Nations organisation and through the fabric of international law constructed on the basis of the UN Charter, we came up with the grounds upon which lawful international conflict could occur, and there are three.

The first is if the UN Security Council agrees that the actions by a particular state represent a threat to peace and security of the international order, that is the so called Article 42 basis for going to war, UN Security Council agrees. The second is Article 51, which is the right to legitimate self-defence: you’re attacked; you can defend yourself, Article 51. The third is the emerging doctrine in more recent times of international humanitarian intervention, which rests on Article 24 in the Charter. It’s less clear cut than either Article 42 or Article 51, but it basically says to the international community, if you see Rwandas happening, you should do something about it there and then, not three, five, seven, twelve, fifteen years later, and that has spawned a whole lot of work, particularly by the International Commission on Humanitarian Intervention in States chaired by Gareth Evans and others. They are the three bases upon which you can engage in lawful international conflict.

Now if we apply that to Iraq, what happened? The basis upon which we argue this is what was laid on the table of the parliament by John Howard as his formal international legal basis for going to war. He did not seek to invoke Article 51, which was the right to self-defence, because neither ourselves nor the United States, the United Kingdom, the three invading powers, were threatened directly with attack by the government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein. So John Howard did not try to invoke Article 51. He did not try to invoke, and this is a very important point, given that Marise has raised it, he did not try to invoke at all, the international humanitarian intervention argument. If you read the text of the legal opinion he tabled in the House of Representatives, it does not contain a single reference to that at all. So when you hear the Prime Minister say post facto, we sent you abroad to liberate an oppressed people, that is a completely a post facto invention by the Prime Minister when measured against what he laid on the table of parliament.

Which leaves you with the third and only remaining grounds upon which the Prime Minister could have argued a case for going to war, which is Article 42, the UN Security Council so mandated it. The only problem the Prime Minister ran into, was that it didn’t. If you remember the history of those events in the latter part of 2002, and early 2003, the UN Security Council met in repeated emergency session, and there was no support by the permanent members or a majority of the combined Council of fifteen members, for a military action against Iraq. So instead the Prime Minister resorted to the rhetorical device of simply saying this: out there we know that Iraq possesses stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons which represent of themselves a threat because they could be passed to terrorists.

That was the argument he advanced at the rhetorical political level to the Australian people, and we now know 13 months later that there has been a conspicuous lack of success in identifying said stockpiles of either a) chemical weapons or b) biological weapons. But that was the basis upon which John Howard sought to take the country to war. Therefore when I say we have an old fashioned view of these things, we sat back and looked at the debate unfold, we could not find any single argument of principle in international law as advanced by the Howard government that would justify that war, which is why we opposed it. We opposed it as a matter of principle, we don’t apologise for that decision now, and we won’t be apologising for it in the future either.

Two or three quick points in conclusion. Marise referred to the report by Hans Blix, the Chief UN Weapons Inspector, at the time when the Security Council was meeting in repeated emergency session. And she’s right; Hans Blix said the government of Iraq had not done enough to comply with the requirements of the Council in terms of a full and complete declaration as related to its weapons of mass destruction, activities and/or programs. Hans Blix also said in those reports, however, that the failure of Iraq to do that did not of itself constitute proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

You need to read Blix’s report very carefully, and Blix returns to this point repeatedly, in his subsequent commentary on the war. On subsequent commentary on the war, could I just add this, David Kay, Chief US, not UN weapons inspector, at least until recently, in his exit statement said that his considered view now having looked at evidence on the ground in Iraq for more than a year, is that in all probability no such stockpiles existed at the time when the allies went to war in March 2003. That’s not a UN peacenik speaking, that’s a leading US hawk speaking, appointed by the Bush administration to go and investigate these matters on the ground with all the books open, all the sites accessible, as nine to ten months into his investigation (he) arrives at that conclusion.

And finally this, Marise also quoted the Joint Intelligence Committee of the United Kingdom, as providing justification for going to war. The Joint Intelligence Committee of the United Kingdom which brings together the various arms of the UK intelligence community and into a synthesized assessment. In November of 2002, in advice to the British Government at the time said, that if you go about attacking Iraq, it was likely to increase the terrorist threat, not reduce it, and furthermore it said it would increase the likelihood of any WMD which existed in Iraq’s possession being passed to terrorists. That document was passed to the Howard government prior to us going to war here, in March of 2003. Mr Howard neglected to pass that part of the JIC’s information onto the Australian people. I wonder why?

And to conclude where the question leads us, what about the future? Four elements to it. You need to have an independent intelligence service, not one which believes that there are politically predetermined answers which it’s required to deliver to this government, or any government for that matter. In Canberra at present, there is a culture of policy driven analysis which has taken over the intelligence bureaucracy and it’s bad, it’s bad for whichever government occupies the Treasury benches in the future.

Secondly, robust independent policy advice. There was a good commentary on this today, I think, in the Australian Financial Review by Geoff Barker, who commented on what advice was provided by policy agencies of the Australian government: Defence, Foreign Affairs and others, ranging through the questions and the implications of a decision to go to war, the implications about the overall impact on the terrorist threat to Australia as a consequence of going to war, or more broadly, what would happen in terms of maintenance of the peace once the war was concluded in Iraq, and in terms of bringing about a democratic culture.

And finally, a final element in terms of answer to that question is - transparent political leadership in this country which actually says to people, that levels to people: "this is the information we have, it is imperfect, it is inconclusive, we have taken this decision based on it" - rather than delivering this pat line to the Australian people that we are going to war because we have incontrovertible evidence that there are stockpiles of completed chemical and biological weapons and if we don’t remove them tomorrow, western civilization will collapse by lunchtime. That was as much nonsense then, as it is now.

Shelley Reys: Thank you, Kevin, and thank you, speakers. I can see I'm going to have to be a more ruthless chairperson in relation to time, so, speakers, if you don't mind keeping your responses down to three minutes: at the two minute mark I'll give you an indication, and you'll know that you have another minute, otherwise we'll be here till midnight.

Tina Jackson: Thanks Shelley, and thank you very much to the four speakers. If I could just encapsulate: Marise emphasised the humanitarian argument and that we went to war on the basis of intelligence at the time that there weapons of mass destruction were not accounted for. Aden again emphasised the intelligence issues and the fact that other countries are calling for royal commissions, and that the decision had already been taken to go to war, and posed the suggestion that parliament needs to be involved in the debate in future. Kerry pointed out that we can’t trust in the future the arguments put to us on the basis of what’s happened this time, and emphasized the need to hand rights back to the people. Kevin spoke to us about international law and the Opposition’s opposition to the war and some suggestions for how we might be able to trust future justifications, and they are: an independent intelligence service, robust independent policy advice and more transparent political leadership.

I’d just like to underline the issue of the intelligence that we’ve been given and the threat, the dangerous flaw that all of this has raised about our process of democracy. And that is that the government chose to receive the advice it wanted, and it’s been able to hide behind the excuse about the advice it had about weapons of mass destruction. To me this is one of the most tragic ‘dog ate my homework’ excuses that we’ve heard in a long time.

As Kevin pointed out, 13 months after the preemptive war in Iraq, there are no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and if Hans Blix and his team had been given a bit more time then perhaps, then maybe, the deaths of a hundred thousand people could have been avoided. And we now know that the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was skewed to ensure that the government only received the advice that it wanted, and that alternative advice wasn’t getting through. There were whistle blowers, and they were pilloried. The hundreds of thousands who marched against a preemptive war were ignored. And indeed after the event, it’s hard to believe that the intelligence statements that we were hearing, that there was no shadow of a doubt that there were weapons of mass destruction, it’s very hard to believe that they were one hundred per cent inaccurate.

Now the government’s able to say: “Well, we acted on the information that we were given”. I think this is a significant flaw in our democracy; politicians shouldn’t be able to get away with saying that we can only rely on advice that the public servants give us. We must have better accountability than this, we need a mechanism to ensure that governments are held accountable for not receiving the full range of information, and we also need mechanisms to ensure that the opposition is a party to the full range of advice, because unless it is, it can’t act properly as an opposition, and it c an’t hold the government accountable as it should be able to.

My final point is that democracy won’t work for as long as governments can hide behind the facade of acting only on the advice that they get. We might be able to trust future justifications for war – might - if we knew that there were systems in place to ensure that the government was indeed taking and hearing the full range of advice, and that the opposition was party to this as well. At the end of the day the ultimate accountability is at the ballot box, as has been pointed out, but as well as this, there needs to be more timely mechanisms to make a government accountable and ‘we can only act on what were are told’ seems to me not an excuse that we can accept. Governments should not be able to escape responsibility, and we must have mechanisms to ensure that this never happens again.

© NSPD 2004. Last modified 16/05/04.