Howard's War - a continuation of politics by other means

For the discerning reader the Palazzo Report, the classified internal report on how we got into Iraq and how we fared, prepared by Army Historian Dr Albert Palazzo and now released in redacted form, is a remarkable document. Although heavily redacted in places, it offers a rich store of information about how the Howard Government conducted itself in the lead up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Government’s intent, and the state of the Army it sent to war.

Having been prepared for internal consumption by a professional researcher with access to the key players and to classified documents, it is a very difficult document to dismiss as a source. It deserves to be taken seriously, very seriously indeed.

What the document shows is that John Howard’s decision to involve us in the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003 had very little to do with any threat to Australia’s national security, and had as its prime intent the winning of plaudits from the Americans.

There was no strategy, no end-state that the Australian Government wished the ADF to achieve – it was all about “being there”. In Dr Palazzo’s words, “From a political policy angle Australia’s participation was an alliance issue, not a military one”, and later, “From the Howard Government’s perspective … the war’s effect on the domestic political situation took precedence over the country’s international relationship with the United States”.

This shaped the Government’s attitude to the composition of the force, the assets it was prepared to release, the amount of money it was prepared to spend, and the extent to which it was prepared to risk incurring casualties.

The fact that the whole exercise was contoured around the political interests of the Howard Government meant that the preparations were conducted in extraordinary secrecy – presumably because the Government wanted to keep its political options open until the last moment. In pursuing its essentially domestic political intent the Government dealt less than honestly not only with the Australian public and the Parliament, but also with our American allies.

Right up to the eve of the invasion the Government maintained not only to the Australian public but to the Americans that the Government was not yet committed to join in the invasion – palpable nonsense because we had a significant contingent participating in the detailed planning at Central Command (CENTCOM) Headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Nevertheless, the Americans had to conduct themselves throughout on the basis of the fiction that we had yet to make a decision.

The politics of the situation meant we were unhelpful to the Americans in more substantive ways. One of the force elements that the ADF planners examined in the greatest depth was a reconnaissance battle group, apparently because it was one of the ADF assets that senior US officers and CENTCOM planners consistently expressed a keen interest in. US planners had identified a capability gap in their force structure – the security of the western flank of the 1^st Marine Division during its drive on Baghdad – and they looked to the Australian Army to remedy the problem. This was a task for which our light cavalry had been designed, and Army Headquarters pushed for the deployment of an ASLAV-based contingent. This would have involved the deployment of about 2000 personnel.

CDF Cosgrove had formed the view, however, that in order to receive the Government’s assent the deployed establishment the unit’s establishment would have to be of the order of 600 soldiers. At this size the AHQ planners had concerns over the unit’s ability to protect itself, and we made our excuses to the Americans. We played hard ball on that, making it clear that if the Americans wanted the cavalry unit it would have to be the subject of a formal request from President Bush to Prime Minister Howard. We declined other requests that we could have fulfilled.

On the size of what we ultimately contributed to this exercise in saving humanity from Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD, Dr Palazzo commented:

In the end, due to the political requirements of the Bush Administration, it probably did not matter what Australia brought to the table, which allowed Howard to offer only niche capabilities and to take steps to minimise the risk to the personnel the ADF did send to the [Middle East Area of Operations]. There were some consequences in the Australian attitude, however. Some US officers began to make the derisive comment that the ADF’s commitment was ‘a series of headquarters’.

Perhaps the greatest deceit was the way the Government misrepresented to the people and the Parliament the reasons for the deployment. In announcing Australia’s commitment to the war Howard highlighted Iraq’s WMD and the likelihood that these weapons would make their way into the hands of international terrorists, but did not commit to the objective of regime change. He knew, however, from a very early stage (I suspect as early as 1998 when Dick Cheney visited Canberra) that the Bush Administration was committed to the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, he committed such a small Australian force that it had necessarily to be integrated into the US force, with regime change a fundamental objective. As Palazzo put it:

Once the war began, ADF forces who engaged Iraqi forces did so under US operational command and by default in support of their ally’s desire to overthrow Saddam, no matter the sophistry of the more limited Australian intent.

Two key conclusions stand out from Dr Pallazo’s report. First, it strengthens the case for an independent inquiry, along the lines of the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry, into how we came to be involved in the invasion of Iraq. There is enough in the report to demonstrate that there were all sorts of goings on of which the Australian public should be made aware, but not enough to write the definitive history from which we can draw and benefit from the lessons to be learned.

Second, that we cannot afford to have Executive Government (Cabinet) play such games with us in the future. Going to war is a serious business, and we must reform the way we make our decisions so that our elected representatives in the Parliament are fully involved and fully accountable.

Note: This piece was first posted on the blog Pearls and Irritations on 10 March 2017 – view original here.

The case for an Iraq War inquiry in Australia

In May this year I had an article with the above title published in the journal Global Peace, Change and Security (formerly Pacifica), Volume 26, Issue 3, 2014. It was posted by Taylor and Francis Online on 27 May 2014 (see here). For a while it was available for free download but accessing it now requires the payment of $US 39.

This is the abstract:

This article examines the background to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq with a view to identifying when and by what process Australia committed itself to the invasion. It provides evidence and assessments from a variety of sources that the Australian Government was effectively committed long before it announced a decision on 18 March 2003, the eve of the invasion. Many questions about the decision making process remain; in the absence of a properly constituted inquiry there is little solid evidence that the Government considered the matter of entering into armed hostilities with the diligence that the Australian public might expect. It is the thesis of this paper that one of the key lessons from the Iraq War is that the current system of decision making in relation to the deployment of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) into international armed conflict contains insufficient checks and balances, and needs to be changed.

View full text ($US 39 fee)

Download full text ($US39 fee)

David Kilcullen and the US habit of going to war

The following is an extract of a conversation between ABC presenter Kerry O’Brien and Australian military strategist David Kilcullen, broadcast on the ABC program Four Corners, on the evening of Monday 25 March. Like the Campaign for an Iraq War Inquiry, Kilcullen thinks we should think very carefully before we follow the US into a new war:

KERRY O'BRIEN: Just listening to you talk then about Karzai's - the position that Karzai was put in essentially by Western forces, had just another eerie echo to me of Vietnam - almost an exact replica of Vietnam despite the fact that so many people in justifying going into Afghanistan said there was no parallel.

Do you see that parallel today?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Yeah, I actually testified in front of the US Senate about five years ago and said that we have to be very careful to ensure that President Karzai doesn't turn into President Diem. Diem was the first president of independent South Vietnam, who remained in power the first period of the international intervention in Vietnam.

And in fact, the Kennedy administration connived at a coup that lead to his overthrow and assassination, and a lot of people were, I guess, disappointed to see how much worse it got after he was no longer in power.

Although there are some strong similarities with - you know, between all different kinds of counter-insurgency engagements like this one, one of the big differences here is, in Vietnam there were about five international partners who played a big role in the conflict. Here we've got 50 countries engaged, and the United Nations very heavily engaged, and a lot of other organisations all pulling together to try to make the environment better than it was in 2001.

One of the big lessons that I would take from this whole series of events is if there's a possible alternative to getting into a counter-insurgency fight, you should avoid it. I mean, the most important lesson of counter-insurgency is - don't do it.

And I think both Vietnam and Afghanistan, and even more so Iraq, underline that important lesson.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well of course the lessons don't seem to have been learned in the past, you can only hope that they may be learned in the future but I'm not quite sure what the basis is for that.

DAVID KILCULLEN: Well I don't think there is a basis for it. In fact, it's quite interesting that you mention that. If you look at American military history in particular, and you take - you start the clock running around the Mexican War in 1846, there's a very consistent pattern in US military history of the US getting into a large or long counter-insurgency or stabilisation operation about once every 20 to 30 years for that whole period since the middle of the 19th Century - not just Vietnam but a whole bunch of stuff that happened in the Caribbean, the Philippines, the frontier.

There's this very consistent pattern of about once a generation they get into a conflict like Vietnam. Last year President Obama issued directives to the Defence Department to say 'We're going to get out of the business of doing large scale counter-insurgency and stabilisation operations'.

By my count, he's about the seventh president to make that precise statement, and it seems that this pattern of continuous engagement in counter-insurgency, presidential preferences have absolutely no detectable effect on that pattern.

So I think there's something that's deeply hidden in the way that the United States relates to the rest of the world that tends to lead Americans and their Western allies into these kinds of operations on a regular basis.

I don't think it's going to go away and it would be great if Afghanistan were the basis for people sitting up and thinking 'Hey, we should think very carefully before we do this again', but I'm afraid the historical pattern suggests that that's just not the case.

See full transcript on the ABC website here.

Bernard Keane on the financial blocking of WikiLeaks

The Wednesday edition of online newsletter Crikey included a good piece by Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane on the inconsistent standards applied by Visa and Mastercard, whose joint financial blockade of the organisation has starved it of about 80% of its funds.

Keane writes that in doing so these financial giants are partly relying on the Australian government’s discredited claims about the illegality of WikiLeaks’ publication of diplomatic cables.

The fact that no prosecution has been mounted anywhere against WikiLeaks’ publication or sourcing the cables doesn’t bother them: Visa Europe’s position is that the blockade will be lifted when it is “finally determined” that WikiLeaks is not acting illegally – a stance which relies on proving a negative.

Keane goes on:

Mastercard and Visa have also failed to apply the test of whether an organisation has been “finally determined” to have not acted illegally in other circumstances. Rupert Murdoch’s News International has already admitted in court to the crimes of phone hacking and computer hacking and its current and former staff are facing charges of bribery, with claims that complicity in those crimes goes into senior management levels; News Corporation itself is also under investigation in the US for bribery of foreign officials.

By this logic, both News International and News Corporation itself should have been blockaded by Visa and Mastercard long ago, and remain blockaded until the resolution of all pending investigations and court actions arising from their activities.

The Government does not come out of it well:

The government has been repeatedly invited to withdraw its description of WikiLeaks’s activities as illegal and has so far declined to do so.

This is consistent with its standard positions of never admitting an error, never offending the United States, and always doing as little as possible to assist Australians it does not happen to like, including (especially) Julian Assange himself.

Read Bernard Keane’s piece in full here.

 

And in case you think the strangulation of WikiLeaks doesn’t matter, or the Government’s behaviour  in relation to WikiLeaks and Assange is up to scratch, have a look at Seven key things we have learned from WikiLeaks, Do WikiLeaks cables put informants’ lives at risk?, Guardian columnist on the responses to WikiLeaks, The lawless Wild West attacks WikiLeaks, Secrecy, national security and the internet, Julia Gillard on WikiLeaks, What do the WikiLeaks Cables reveal about our leaders?, The dark side of WikiLeaks, Greg Mitchell’s list of WikiLeaks revelations and  The Guantánamo Wikileaks.

Andrew Farran responds to Dick Woolcott

On Monday 12 March The Age published a piece by Michelle Grattan (see here) which drew on a comments made by former Secretary to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Dick Woolcott in a submission to the white paper being prepared by former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry on Australia in the Asian Century.

Grattan quotes Woolcott as saying that the 60-year-old ANZUS Treaty is “somewhat out of date” and that Australia must not be seen to support policies that “contain” China.

Other comments attributed to Woolcott by Grattan caused my friend and colleague former diplomat and defence official Andrew Farran to submit a letter to the editor of The Age, commenting that Woolcott had overstated his case. The letter was never published, but it deserves an airing, and so I reproduce it below, as submitted:

Dick, you overstate your case!

In The Age newspaper recently veteran diplomat Richard (Dick) Woolcott asserted that the ANZUS Treaty was “somewhat out of date” and that Australia had been led into three unsuccessful wars - Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan - in support of policy decisions taken by US Administrations (“How a US ally can be friends with China”, The Age, 12/3).

He was stating this in the context that there was a need for “a more appropriate and up-to-date balance in our relations with the US and China”.

Far from being led into those interventions the record would show that they were actively sought by the Australian governments at the time, in their quest to stay on-side and keep America involved in and committed to this region. Moreover Afghanistan was a UN/internationally sanctioned response to the 9/11 atrocity (at least to the point of neutralising al-Qaeda's base there).

Mr Woolcott was not correct either in stating that “the only occasion on which we sought American support under ANZUS, during Indonesia’s confrontation with Malaysia in 1964, the US declined”. The fact was that the US did give Australia a guarantee of support if Australian troops got into trouble in Borneo with Sukarno's Indonesia. Australian politicians regarded it as significant given that the situation did not involve a communist power and the treaty refers only to an obligation to ‘consult’. The military wanted boots on the ground and were disappointed that this was excluded from President Kennedy's letter of commitment, but within a couple of years events in Vietnam showed that Kennedy was doing us a favour.

The US has also provided important cover to our forces (logistics and intelligence) for peacekeeping operations, such as in East Timor, and can be expected to do so in any future operations in the South Pacific.

Mr Woolcott also cautioned against offending regional sensitivities, but mistook the recent live cattle fiasco with Indonesia as indicative of Australian shortcomings rather than a consequence of a dysfunctional situation within the current government . 

Andrew Farran

Malcolm Fraser on our cluster munitions legislation

Cluster munitions are bombs with an outer casing that breaks open in mid-air, scattering smaller “bomblets” over a wide area, with a radius of up to a kilometre.  Many of these bomblets fail to explode on impact, leaving a hazard to civilian populations, and especially to children, for decades after the cessation of conflict.

Laos is a case in point: 35 years after the end of the war, unexploded sub-munitions, estimated by the International Red Cross to number between nine and 27 million, continue to kill and maim Laotian civilians, about one third of them children.

Australia has signed the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, and legislation ratifying our adherence to the Convention will be considered by the Senate in the forthcoming session of Federal Parliament. Our United States ally is conspicuous by not being numbered amongst the more than 100 countries that have signed the Convention, which creates an issue for the Australian Government in striking a balance in the legislation between our commitment to eliminating these inhumane and indiscriminate weapons, and the ways in which we cooperate with a major ally that continues to use them.

In an op-ed piece, Lame stance on cluster bombs, in the 16 March 2011 edition of The Australian, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, whose commitment to the US alliance can hardly be questioned, presents a number of reasons for concluding that we lean much too far in the direction of accommodating the US on this matter. Rather than seeking to convince the US that it is in its own best interest to rid itself of these weapons, “the government is highlighting its willingness to do whatever it takes to be a compliant partner of the US, even when that means undermining the spirit and intention of a convention that we helped bring into being”.

Fraser concludes:

Rather than bending over backwards to accommodate the US, if Australia maintained the humanitarian commitment it displayed in signing this convention and actively worked to convince all our allies to cease using cluster munitions, we could surely make a significant contribution towards a better world.

Read Malcolm Fraser’s opinion piece in full here.

What do the WikiLeaks Cables reveal about our leaders?

The leaking of 250,000 United States State Department cables to the WIkiLeaks organisation has generated an enormous amount of excitement about the fact of the leaks (how is this possible?), the content of the cables (did he/she/they really say that?), and the motives of people like Julian Assange, with some overheated commentary from the left (Assange is a champion of free speech) and from US conservatives (Assange is determined to destroy the United States and should be treated as an unlawful enemy combatant).

The excitement will die down over time, although with only a tiny fragment of the total amount of leaked material having seen the light of day, we can expect this to take a while.

While the content of many of the individual cables is interesting, the leadership behaviours that the release has provoked, and that are revealed in the 200 or so cables we have seen so far, are more important to any assessment of the overall impact on our society.

Three behaviour patterns are of principal concern. First, incidents such as this bring out the authoritarian instincts of our political leaders and lead them to indulge in such gross hyperbole that they misrepresent the situation to the Australian public.

The Prime Minister rushed to judgement, declaring Assange’s behaviour to be both “grossly irresponsible” and “illegal”, sentiments echoed by Attorney-General Robert McClelland. They then established a task force to identify what if any laws Assange might have broken.  Embarrassingly for the Government, it took the Australian Federal Police only days to conclude that Assange had broken no Australian laws.

Attorney-General McClelland also claimed that the publication of the cables would put lives at risk, an echo of US commentary.  If lives are indeed put at risk by the release, the primary responsibility would lie with the originator of the cable, because it would be an act of lunacy to name someone who was giving information at risk of life and limb in a cable that was destined to be posted on a diplomatic network to which about 3 million people have access. I have seen nothing in the cables I have read that would cause people named therein anything more than embarrassment.

More disturbingly, the cables reveal that behind closed doors our political leaders deal incautiously with representatives of the United States and Israel. They seem to forget that they are dealing with the representatives of a foreign country, in a game that is definitely reserved for grown-ups, the world of navigating our country through the shoals of major international events.  They make such forthright and absolute declarations of support that they give hostages to fortune, leaving themselves little room to negotiate on issues arising in the future on the basis of a hard-nosed assessment of where Australia’s national interest lies – indeed at times they give the impression they would struggle to see the difference between Australia’s national interests and those of the United States or Israel.

Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd are at pains to impress on the US Ambassador how rock-solid on the ANZUS Alliance they are, Beazley so much so that he assures the Ambassador that Labor would support Australia’s military contributions in Afghanistan until Hell freezes over, and that in the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the U.S.

We know from the cables that in 2008 Kevin Rudd went out of his way to express his strong support for Israel and his appreciation of its security concerns.  Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem told the Americans that  Rudd was "deeply worried" that Iran's intransigence means that the window for a diplomatic solution is closing and that Israel may feel forced to use "non-diplomatic" means.  This reads to me like a signal from Rudd that Australia would be very understanding if Israel felt “forced” to do something as undiplomatic as carry out a pre-emptive military strike against Iran. There has been a price to pay for Rudd’s pro-Israeli stance – retaliatory steps by the Iranians have made it more difficult for the Australian Embassy in Tehran to do its job effectively, which doesn’t seem to me to serve anyone’s interests.

Julia Gillard too went out of her way to establish a relationship with the Israeli Ambassador and asked him to arrange an early opportunity for her to visit.  When the Israelis invaded Gaza, they were pleasantly surprised to find that Acting Prime Minister Gillard was much more supportive than they had expected, and just plain surprised to find that Foreign Minister Stephen Smith was on holiday and did not want to get involved.

The “Israel right or wrong” attitude of both Rudd and Gillard is quite over the top, at variance with our traditional stance of at least claiming even-handedness, and at variance with our national interests. I would define these to include the establishment of a lasting peace in the Middle East, which necessarily includes a decent outcome for the Palestinian people, and the establishment and maintenance of constructive relations with all countries of the region including Iran. I do not see how we can contribute to those outcomes if we are seen by all including Israel as a country Israel can afford to take for granted. Why would we want to tell any country that it can count on our support no matter how it behaves – so much so in Israel’s case that we are seen as a valuable part of its global PR battle?

The effect of these conversations behind closed doors is that the United States and Israel can go about their affairs confident that Australia will never press them on any issue, and on most occasions will even refrain from critical comment. Why would any country put itself in this situation, even with its friends?

Most serious of all, it is now clear that our national leaders use the shelter of national security classification to conceal from the public their real assessments and motives, and the advice they are receiving from their intelligence agencies. Such behaviour is unconscionable. There are many valid national security grounds for Governments withholding information from us, but they are not entitled to deceive us, not is it in their interests to do so.

Several examples have come to light.  It is reassuring to know that our top level intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments, which reports directly to the Prime Minister, has a sober and balanced view of the threat from Al- Qa’ida and of Iran, two subjects on which our Government has much to say.  In November 2008 Director General Peter Varghese told the Americans that al-Qa’ida “ultimately has failed to achieve the strategic leadership role it sought within the Islamic world”. On Iran, he said that ONA viewed Tehran's nuclear program within the paradigm of "the laws of deterrence," and that "It's a mistake to think of Iran as a 'Rogue State'." 

These sober assessments are at variance, however, with the explanations the Government gives us for our presence in Afghanistan (we have to prevent it from becoming a haven for terrorists) with its alarmist comments about Iran, which simply echo commentary coming out of Israel, and with Kevin Rudd’s comments to the Israeli Ambassador noted above.  Governments are of course entitled to reject the advice they get from their advisers, but there is nothing sensitive about the comments by Director General ONA noted above, and on a matter of this importance it would be desirable to disclose to us what the overall assessment of our national assessments agency is and why the Government itself sees things differently.

Perhaps the most serious case of deception relates to the prospects for the war in Afghanistan. The stock line from Western Governments is that they are optimistic, things are going well, perhaps not quite as well as we would like, but we are making progress.  What we find from WikiLeaks is that the real assessment – no doubt shared by all our NATO allies – is quite different. In October 2008 Kevin Rudd told visiting US Congressmen that the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan, a pessimism which was evident in a December 2009 cable reporting the views of Australia’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, former Defence Secretary Ric Smith, who referred to the “train wreck” the Australian Federal Police have to deal with in working with the Afghan National Police.

This gap between the public statements and the Government’s real views is outrageous.  The situation it suggests is that all Western Governments involved know the outlook in Afghanistan is very bleak, but none is prepared to confess this to their public.

Contrast this with the way Winston Churchill took the British people into his confidence during the days when his country was in dire peril. When he addressed the House of Commons upon becoming Prime Minister in May 1940, Churchill did not gild the lily – he promised the British people nothing but blood, toil, tears and sweat.  When Britain faced the prospect of invasion, he held out the thoroughly unattractive prospect of the British people fighting the invading Germans on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills.

In his speech at the Mansion House in November 1942, after the mighty victory over the Afrika Korps in the Second Battle of Alamein, he said that the occasion was not the end, it was not even the beginning of the end, but it was perhaps the end of the beginning.

In all these dire circumstances Churchill was straight with the British people. He rightly withheld from them a  vast array of military and other secrets, but in asking them to shoulder the burden of facing Hitler all but alone, he did not leave them in any doubt about how difficult it would be or what price they would be called upon to pay.

On Afghanistan our political leaders should be dealing with the Australian people in a similarly forthright way, telling us why we are there, why it is important, and what we need to do to succeed. We are a mature and sensible people. If the Government can convince us of what the task is (something that remains a mystery) and why it is important, we will rise to what is needed to succeed, and the Government can proceed confident that it has the backing of the majority of Australians. If it cannot convince us of the importance of the task, or even define it coherently, then maybe we shouldn’t be there.

What the WikiLeaks cables are progressively revealing is patterns of behaviour on the part of our political leaders that involve very substantial breaches of trust. This is a matter of the highest importance.  Democracy both depends upon trust, and thrives upon it, as many great examples of democratic societies rising to the occasion in difficult circumstances demonstrate. It is to be hoped that, whatever other consequences the leaks might have, they result in a closer alignment between what our political leaders say to other governments in private and what they say and disclose to us.

Note: This item was first published on Inside Story on 23 December 2010 – access it here.