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.

Iraq: a war widow’s view

On Saturday 27 April The Canberra Times published an opinion piece by Kellie Merritt, an Iraq war widow, social worker and mother. Her husband Flight Lieutenant Paul Pardoel was an Australian navigator who served with the RAAF for 15 years, before transferring to the RAF in 2002. Paul was killed with nine other British service members when their Hercules was shot down in Iraq on January 30, 2005.

It is a powerful and thoughtful piece with some important reflections on the responsibilities of governments contemplating deploying their armed forces into international armed conflict.

What price humanitarian war?

Justification for war in Iraq was tenuous in 2003. A decade later it is even more so, writes war widow KELLIE MERRITT.

 

I did what I did. It's all on the public record and I feel very good about it … If I had to do it over again, I'd do it in a minute.

- Dick Cheney

If we hadn't removed Saddam from power just think, what would be happening if these Arab revolutions were continuing now … Think of the consequences of leaving that regime in power.

- Tony Blair

That was the thing about the Howard government: we stood for something. And one of the things we stood for was freedom.

- Alexander Downer

Perhaps it is a little unfair to quote out of context, but these quotes illuminate the thinking of three men who dodged and re-shaped the principles, rules and norms that limit and define the justifications for waging war. Although their reflections mark the 10-year anniversary of the war they began, their reasoning seems more elusive than ever.

The fluid narrative of justification, liberation and self-congratulation is so removed from the reasons they gave 10 years ago and so oblivious to the consequences 10 years on, that it trivialises war. They ask us to consider the case for war on a humanitarian platform, but on scaffolding underpinned by only half of the human story. They use the misery of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein as a framework but refuse to balance the platform by acknowledging the Iraqis' suffering during and after the war; the result is a precarious structure.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed. In 2006, one survey (The Lancet) estimated 654,965 deaths had resulted from the war; millions more have been injured. Close to 1.8 million Iraqis have fled their country since the war began.

Another 1.6 million make up the internally displaced. These ''humanitarian'' warriors view Iraq through such a narrow lens that the image portrayed is self-serving and deceptive. What about an authentic reflection on the reasons, both public and private, for the war and the human cost? Is it unfair to ask?

I watched, listened and read about the "shock and awe" campaign as it unfolded. I would do it in private, mostly at night while my three children were in bed. They missed their dad but they did not yet fear for his life. Paul had already been coming and going from Afghanistan. He was now in Iraq, a country he would ultimately not return alive from.

The experience of my husband serving in two distinct wars was about to become both a blur and a routine. On the home front, I buffered our children from unthinkable possibilities, while it seemed that our political leaders were doing their own form of buffering to all of us on the domestic and international fronts.

I was anxious, but my anxiety was tempered by my conscience - my home was not being bombed, my children were safe and my husband was a voluntary member of the military. Who was I to feel afraid or complain? Now, as a military war widow, a public conscience kicks in - what do I have to fear or complain about? The ceremonial acknowledgments of sacrifice and remembrance are not new to a war widow and not something to take for granted. However, I do wonder if I would sit more comfortably or graciously in these settings had Paul been killed in Afghanistan rather than Iraq?

Perhaps it is this discomfort that fuels my reflections on the Iraq war and the leaders who still do not seem to entertain any doubt about their decisions. I get that the military-political relationship is a central element of a functioning Western democracy. I know that the protection and promotion of democracy and effective use of the military falls to our elected politicians.

We have all seen governments call on their military to kill and be killed for political, ideological and moral reasons. The context of most wars is complex but the institutions and processes which transform disapproval into sanctions, sanctions into conflict and conflict into invasion seem all too malleable.

Even so, I still can't understand how the case for a unilateral pre-emptive war on Iraq was sustainable at the time, let alone with the benefit of hindsight. As ''meaningful'' factors - in the case of Iraq - such as, a UN Security Council resolution, continuing UN weapons inspections, evidence of al-Qaeda links to Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction fell by the wayside, a vacuum was created. That vacuum was filled by political rhetoric and an artificial notion of urgency - and so the war proceeded. If my powers of comprehension were tested by the reasons for going to war, the deeply flawed and chaotic post-invasion nation-building strategy didn't help.

As my children and I have been forced to restructure our lives without Paul, I have watched the restructured Iraq still in turmoil and its wounded people still mired in confusion and dispossession. Free of the Saddam regime's brutality, certainly - but not of their own making - and by no means free of further conflict, bloodshed and uncertainty.

That this debacle could be one of the catalysts for the re-election of Howard, Bush and Blair was exasperating. It illustrated to me how pervasive a non-critical view of war could become when a nation's electorate is not - by and large - affected by its ravages; I finally got that I was naive.

In 2004, I started to reflect - in the context of Iraq - on the fairness of the military-political relationship. I began to struggle with the concept and implications of military service, balanced with the toll it took on our young family. Was it worth it … worth Paul's life? I talked with Paul about resigning - which he did - the resignation process would take 12 months. Paul died - with nine of his military friends - on his last deployment to Iraq on January 30, 2005. That day marked the first ''free'' election day in Iraq, a day of liberation, or so the politicians said in their condolence letters.

Paul's Hercules was shot down over the Tigris River, somewhere between Baghdad and Balad. Clearly, the virtues of democracy delivered by an occupying force were not worth celebrating for the Sunni Iraqis who pulled the trigger.

If I had responded to the condolence letters sent by various politicians I would have thanked them for their letters. I would have said that my family honoured the expectations and obligations that are implicit between military families and their governments; that we put the needs of country and defence before our own.

I would have said that, in turn, governments owe a duty of care to military families that was undermined in the pursuit of a pre-emptive war. I would have asked them why they didn't reaffirm the reasons they gave to invade Iraq.

I would have said that while I shared their noble hope that Iraq would be free and liberated, their post-invasion nation-building strategy was palpably inconsistent with this commitment. I would have said that the condolence that Paul died bringing peace and freedom to the Iraqi people would have been reassuring if it wasn't so misleading, but that my pride in Paul was unshakable.

We need to learn about what happened in Iraq and the reasoning behind it, because the reflections of Cheney, Blair and Downer (and Howard's reflections during his address at Lowy Institute more recently) 10 years on suggest that they have forgotten. It is no longer appropriate for these men to continue to shape and dominate the political and rhetorical landscape - on Iraq - as they did 10 years ago.

Their thoughts and recollections - 10 years on - only seem like attempts to shape their jealously guarded historical legacies. I think we deserve better than that.

The decision to wage war requires a nation's attention, (not just from its political elite). It is time now for the Australian people and their government to hold a transparent and frank inquiry into the Iraq War and to give that inquiry the attention it deserves.

Perhaps my imaginary letter back to government would also have included my hope for such an inquiry to be held; my hope that this inquiry leads to Australians reconsidering their acquiescence in this tragic war and my hope that such an inquiry bears witness to the war's human cost and brings some small redemption for those killed and injured in Iraq.

For the original article as published in the online version of The Canberra Times see What price humanitarian war?

Before the invasion: what I said in March 2003

From the dwindling number of people who still think that the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was a good idea, there is beginning to emerge a self-justifying little spin line that the critics of the war are taking advantage of “20/20 hindsight”. Mainstream media outlets that are either lazy or happy to excuse their failings in relation to their own analysis and reportage are more than willing, as they have been for more than a decade, to facilitate this approach to exculpation.

So in the interests of getting my own position on the record (again), I reproduce below the notes from which I spoke in launching the anti-invasion video clip The Real Face of War, on 6 March 2003, 14 days before the commencement of the full-scale invasion was announced.

The Real Face of War

Ladies and gentlemen

Thank you for joining us for the official launch of The Real Face of War, a function which I am honoured to have been invited to perform.

The core message of The Real Face of War is that war is the wrong response to the current crisis, and before launching the piece I would like to say a few words in support of that proposition.  I want to comment on three issues:

-  The appropriateness of war as a response in the conduct of relations between states

-  The real face of war

-  The outcomes we are seeking and might expect from embarking on military operations against Iraq

War is a last resort

For a democratic nation proclaiming civilised values, war should always be a last resort.  In the plain English meaning of that phrase, one goes to war when there is no other choice.  Clearly there remain other sensible and less destructive choices for achieving the objective of containing Saddam Hussein, and many important member states of the UN advocate them.

We need to understand the gravity of what is at stake here.  We are talking about putting the sons and daughters of fellow Australian citizens in harm’s way, to contribute to an armed attack on another country.  As far as I am aware, it will be the first time we will have participated in an unprovoked invasion of another country.

To the extent that our justification for this relies upon the new doctrine of the “right” of pre-emptive attack, I would respond that this new doctrine is an extremely dangerous one that will ultimately be destabilising to world peace.

The real face of war

No matter how precise the weaponry, the overwhelming majority of the killed and injured will be innocent Iraqi civilians, the very people we now say we want to liberate from the tyrant who rules them.  It is not for us to decide that the deaths of some numbers of Iraqi people is an acceptable price to pay in order to improve the lot of the rest.

And the numbers will be huge.  Respectable estimates put the number of Iraqi civilians killed in the Gulf War at 150,000.  With the scale of opening bombardment that is being openly canvassed in the media, it is impossible to imagine that civilian casualties will be small.

We should also bear in mind when we go off to fight oppressive regimes that many of the people in uniform who are opposing us will be conscripts who would rather be somewhere else.

The objectives

One of the foundations of successful military operations is a clear objective – a very clear definition of the end state that the operations are designed to achieve.  Indeed, one of the stated reasons why the coalition allies did not go on to Baghdad in 1991 was the avoidance of “mission creep”.

We had a clear objective in Operation Pollard in 1998.  This was the operation in which we sent an SAS contingent and two B707 refuellers to the Gulf following Saddam’s expulsion of the previous weapons inspectorate – UNSCOM, led by Richard Butler.  When then Defence Minister Ian McLachlan put to the combined civilian and military leadership the question of what they would regard as a successful outcome, the response he received was unanimous and immediate:

-  Saddam Hussein does what we want him to do – lets the weapons inspectors back in

-  All of our personnel come safe home

-  Not a shot is fired in anger.

This is pretty much the way Operation Pollard turned out.  The clear objective enabled the mission to be accomplished.  Saddam Hussein did let the inspectors back in.  On 8 May we announced that our forces were being scaled down, and in June we withdrew our contingent completely.  This is what I would call a successful military operation; the most successful military operations are the ones you manage to avoid by skilful handling of the situation.

In the present crisis the objectives are most unclear, they seem to change from time to time, and four distinct possible objectives seem to be being conflated:

-  The war against terrorism

-  Elimination of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein

-  Resistance to radical Islam of the sort promoted by Osama bin Laden

-  Creation of a democratic society in Iraq, perhaps as the first step in democratising the Arab world.

We need to sort out which of these it is, because they are in fact distinct and conflicting objectives, and confusing them could make a bad situation worse.  For the record, I share the view of Professor Avishai Margalit, Schulman Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that the real enemy is Osama bin Laden, that fighting Saddam will greatly help this enemy rather than setting him back, and that accordingly, this is the wrong war.

To the extent that the motivation of the looming military campaign is to build a better Iraqi society, I would say that it is not up to any “coalition of the willing” to go around righting all the wrongs visited on unfortunate populations by oppressive regimes. If that is to be the new international agenda, then the Australian Defence Force and its more powerful allies will be very busy indeed.  In any event, I am very sceptical about the prospects of an occupying power imposing democracy at the point of a gun, and I don’t see the kind of commitment to post-war reconstruction that would make that a realistic prospect.

Once we cross the threshold from the threat to the actuality of armed force there is inevitably a loss of control of the situation, no matter how certain the final outcome might seem.  Backed into a corner, a dangerous and callous adversary like Saddam Hussein might well take actions that we would find extremely regrettable, including for example destroying the Iraqi oil fields, blowing up some of the dams on the Tigris and/or Euphrates, and using such chemical or biological capability as he might have.  Certainly he would not shrink from any of these steps out of regard for the impact on his own people.

I fear that the prevailing atmosphere is that Iraq faces armed attack no matter what it does.  This is counter-productive to any aim of coercing Saddam Hussein into peaceful compliance with the objectives of Security Council Resolution 1441.

So, without any illusions about Saddam Hussein, what he stands for, or what he is capable of, I say that war is not the appropriate response.  I think there are some very important lessons to be drawn about Saddam Hussein from the events of early 1998, and indeed from the entire twelve-year period since the Gulf War of 1991.  These are:

-  In pursuit of his own agenda Saddam Hussein will go right to the brink, and in that sense he is a risk taker.

-  Nevertheless, he is a calculating, rational and skilful operator who is all about regime survival, and hence exercises caution about the risks he takes.

The events since the Gulf War show quite clearly that while he will twist and turn and is completely untrustworthy, he is quite able to be deterred.

In fact my views are neatly summed up by a line of a poem read by Les Murray on Radio National on Tuesday:

The blow struck now will be weaker than the blow not struck.

Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for your attendance here this morning and now declare The Real Face of War officially launched.

Paul Barratt AO

Former Secretary, Department of Defence

6 March 2003

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.