Freelance journalist and peace activist – and fellow member
of the Campaign for an Iraq War
Inquiry – Donna Mulhearn writes in Eureka
Street that Iraq needs a local solution, not another Western intervention.
She writes of the peaceful protests led by Sunni tribal elders from Anbar Province,
and how these protests produced a violent response from the Maliki-led
Government. In her view it is Iraq's Sunni tribes and militias — who hold
little in common with ISIS and reject its extreme ideology — who could withhold
the Islamists' march to Baghdad, should they have the motivation to do so.
Iraq needs a local political solution, she says, not another
foreign military intervention, and there can be no moving forward until the
mistakes of the past are acknowledged and addressed. This requires political
work not just by Iraqi leaders, but by the nations of the 'Coalition of the
Willing', who were too quick to jump into the invasion and occupation, and too
slow to respond constructively to its disastrous legacy.
In today’s online edition of The Guardian, Australian journalist John Pilger surveys the mess
that is contemporary Iraq, under the headlines
We've moved on from the Iraq war
– but Iraqis don't have that choice
Like characters from The Great Gatsby, Britain and the
US
have arrogantly turned their backs and left a country
in ruins
After surveying the horrendous spike in cancer cases and
birth defects which local doctors and World Health Organisation researchers attribute
to the use by US and UK forces of over 300 tonnes of depleted uranium (a metal
which is highly toxic aside from its radioactivity), he writes:
Iraq is no longer news. Last
week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder
of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their
emblem might be a lavish new movie of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, "smashed up things and
creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and
let other people clean up the mess".
This item from The
Independent makes shocking reading.
It summarises the
findings of a new study which reports a "staggering rise" in birth
defects among Iraqi children conceived in the aftermath of the war.
There is
"compelling evidence" to link the increased numbers of defects and
miscarriages to military assaults, says Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, one of the
lead authors of the report and an environmental toxicologist at the University
of Michigan's School of Public Health. Similar defects have been found among
children born in Basra after British troops invaded, according to the new
research.
The study found
that in Fallujah, more than half of all babies surveyed were born with a birth
defect between 2007 and 2010. Before the siege, this figure was more like one
in 10. Prior to the turn of the millennium, fewer than 2 per cent of babies
were born with a defect. More than 45 per cent of all pregnancies surveyed
ended in miscarriage in the two years after 2004, up from only 10 per cent
before the bombing. Between 2007 and 2010, one in six of all pregnancies ended
in miscarriage.
On Thursday 16 August 2012 I attended the launch, in a
Committee Room in Parliament House, Canberra, of a campaign by the Iraq War
Inquiry Group (IWIG), of which I am a member, for an inquiry into how Australia
came to participate in the invasion of Iraq.
The meeting was hosted by the courageous Mellisa Parke, ALP
Member for Fremantle, Senator Scott Ludlam (Greens, WA) and and the Member for
Denison, Andrew Wilkie MP (Independent), who readers will recall resigned his post
in the Office of National Assessements shortly before the invasion on the
grounds of what he saw as the misuse of intelligence reporting by the
Government.
The launch of an issues paper prepared by IWIG members,
which can be found at our website www.iraqwarinquiry.org.au,
was undertaken by former Prime Minister the Right Honourable Malcolm Fraser AC CH.
An extract from an SBS Radio feature piece on the campaign, containing some of
Mr Fraser’s remarks at the launch, and from a prior telephone interview with
me, can be downloaded from here.
An extract from an interview with Senator Ludlam can be downloaded from here.
For me there are two sets of issues to be addressed by any
inquiry: issues specific to the circumstances of the lead-up to the invasion
and the decision to commit; and an analysis of the lessons to be learned from
that process to ensure we put in place a more robust process for making that
most important of decisions – whether or not to send the Australian Defence
Force to war or to involve it in warlike activity.
As most of us celebrate the setting of a deadline for the withdrawal of
American troops from Iraq, we should not allow ourselves to be distracted from
the important question of how we all came to be involved in this mess in the
first place. The most important questions here revolve not around the questions
relating to whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did or did not have weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), but whether our governments were completely open with us
about what they knew and when, at what stage various decisions were taken and
commitments given, when we became irreversibly committed to the invasion of
another country, and whether this was all some kind of ghastly “intelligence
failure”.
We now know more even than we did when Garry Woodard wrote the
2007 analysis to which I provided a link in the above post, but the questions
remain: questions about the legality of the war, about the misuse of
intelligence and unresolved conflicts in the intelligence reporting and
analysis, questions about how the decision was made and when, and serious
questions about how honestly the Australian Government dealt with the
Australian public and the Parliament it had elected.
Specific questions the Iraq War Inquiry Group would like to
see addressed by a suitably authorised and empowered inquiry include:
Intelligence
According to the intelligence
inquiries in Australia that followed the 2003 Iraq war, views diverged between
ONA and DIO concerning the nature of the evidence for the possession by Iraq of
WMD. We need to know:
• What was the Australian intelligence
advice given to the government in the lead-up to the war and how was the
divergence of views between the two assessment agencies reconciled?
• Was
the intelligence advice challenged at the time by any members of the
government, and if so by whom?
• What was the nature of the challenges, what
was the response by the assessment agencies and how were doubts resolved?
• Was the intelligence given to the
government restricted to advice on the possession by Iraq of WMD, or was wider
advice also provided on whether Iraq posed an actual threat? If there was a
threat assessment, what did it say?
• Philip Flood, who conducted a post-war
inquiry into Australian intelligence, described the evidence on Iraq’s WMD as
‘thin, ambiguous, and incomplete’. How does Mr Howard reconcile this with his
presentation to parliament on 4 February 2003?
Humanitarian issues
• Were any UN, NGO or other reports of the
effects of the 1991 Gulf War, the economic sanctions and the likely effects of
a further war considered in the government’s decision to go to war in 2003? If
not, why not? If so, which reports, and how much weight was given to them?
• What degree of civilian suffering did the
government expect from the war, and what level of suffering was considered
acceptable? Did the government request estimates of civilian casualties?
• Were any contingency plans made by the
government to help reduce and deal with the predicted enormous humanitarian
effects of the war?
Legal issues
• Were the Australian
lawyers drafting the government’s advice in contact with those drafting advice
for the British and American governments, and which Australian ministers or
ministerial staff were informed? What other legal advice did the government
seek? What legal advice was provided to the governor-general?
• Why did the
Australian government change its acceptance of the compulsory jurisdiction of
the International Court of Justice when it did? Was its response in parliament
on the war misleading?
• Why did the prime
minister fail to bring the decision to go to war to the Federal Executive
Council as he had told the governor-general he would?
On the question of how to provide for a more robust process
of decision making, the current system, under which it is the right of the
Executive, rather than the Parliament, to decide to send troops to war is in
the Australian constitutional context a legacy of the Royal Prerogative, which
in turn has its roots in the pre-democratic notion that the power to make war
is an attribute of the sovereign rather than of the people.In the globalised world of the 21st century,
and in any society founded on the belief that power flows from the people to
the state rather than from the state to the people, it is both an anachronism
and an anomaly.
By having the power to decide in the hands of too few people
it also leaves the Australian community exposed to serious risks, due to the
fact that in practice the Prime Minister him/herself, with or without the
advice and consent of his/her colleagues and their departmental advisers, can
commit Australian forces to war or warlike operations in circumstances short of
a direct attack on Australia’s homeland. These risks include misleading,
overstated or over-certain claims to the Australian Parliament and people,
patently absurd claims of self defence against a real and imminent threat to
Australia, a lack of clarity as to what the mission is and what success would
look like, and vexed questions of UN authority, a source of legitimacy with
which Australian people are comfortable, and of legality in relation both to
customary international law and to the provisions of the Charter of the United
Nations.
I think that the solution to this, one which I hope would
emerge from any inquiry into how we came to be involved in the Iraq War, is to
transfer the decision making power from the Executive to the Parliament.
On 13 February 2008 Senator Ludlam introduced a Private
Members’ Bill to limit the prerogative power of the Executive to commit
Australian forces to overseas service without the consent of the Parliament.
The provisions of the Bill are outlined in War
Powers Bill.
My colleagues Andrew Farran, Garry Woodard and I made a joint
submission in support of Senator Ludlam’s Bill, which I can no longer find on
the Parliament House website. The contents of our submission will have to be
the subject of a later post.
Unfortunately the major parties gave Senator Ludlam’s Bill
short shrift, a matter I dealt with in some detail in War
Powers Bill crushed by major parties. Perhaps a careful look at how we
committed to the invasion of Iraq will encourage them to take the matter more
seriously, but I fear that both the major parties are much too comfortable with
the current arrangements.
At last someone in a position to know has told the Chilcot Inquiry in the United Kingdom something we all already knew: that the Blair Government’s so-called “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction was cooked up to make the case for war – a flagrant misuse of intelligence processes.
An article published in The Guardian on Thursday 12 May (Iraq document drawn up to make the case for war – intelligence officer by Richard Norton-Taylor) begins:
A top military intelligence official has said the discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programme was drawn up "to make the case for war", flatly contradicting persistent claims to the contrary by the Blair government, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister's chief spin doctor.
In hitherto secret evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Major General Michael Laurie said: "We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care."
His evidence is devastating, as it is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the then government's claims about the dossier – and, perhaps more significantly, what Tony Blair and Campbell said when it was released seven months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Laurie, who was director general in the Defence Intelligence Staff, responsible for commanding and delivering raw and analysed intelligence, said: "I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war; I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given."
He continued: "Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was not 'to make a case for war'. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used."
The article concludes that:
Laurie's memo raises questions about the role of Sir John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who later became head of MI6.
Indeed it does. When I first heard that Sir John Scarlett was in the habit of meeting Campbell regularly over lunch I wondered to myself under what circumstances the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee could possibly have a valid reason for ever meeting the Prime Minister’s spin doctor, even on a single occasion.
US blogger Greg Mitchell, who has been following the WikiLeaks story very closely (blogging developments in real time since the beginning) has recently posted on Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com) a list of the major revelations that have come from the cables released so far.
It’s quite a list, and should dispose once and for all with the claim that there is “nothing new” in the WikiLeaks cables.
Among my favourites in Mitchell’s list is the fact that in 2009 the UK promised to protect US interests in the official Chilcot inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the start of the Iraq invasion – just in case you thought that this would be a no holds barred quest for the truth.
Another is the fact that Israel wanted to bring Gaza to the brink of economic collapse – just in case you thought that Israel wasn’t into collective punishment of the hapless citizens of Gaza.
A somewhat surprising revelation is the fact that Iraqi government officials see Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling state.
The fact that Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda is one “revelation” that genuinely does come under the rubric “nothing new”.
There should be literary prizes for putting the boot into targets who deserve it. Christopher Hitchens tipped a wonderful bucket over Henry Kissinger recently (see Hitchens on Kissinger).
In his The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2008, Andrew J. Bacevich has this to say about Douglas Feith, who from 2001 to 2005 served as the Under-Secretary of Defence for Policy, the third-ranking position in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon:
Trained as a lawyer, Feith possessed the temperament of an ideologue. He specialized in enforcing preconceived notions. Rumsfeld felt certain, for example, that Saddam Hussein had links to the 9/11 hijackers. He was also convinced that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction hidden away. Feith’s job was to confirm what his boss already knew. Toward that end, he devoted personal attention to the Office of Special Plans (OSP), which duly told Rumsfeld what he wanted to hear. OSP’s analysis turned out to be completely wrong, but Feith had accomplished his purpose – and his boss’s.
As the countdown toward the invasion proceeded, Rumsfeld didn’t want anyone outside of his own shop mucking around with the war planning. The defence secretary found especially irritating concerns expressed by the State Department and some military officers that occupying Iraq might pose some challenges. He counted on Feith to shut out the meddlers and to base Pahse IV planning on best-case assumptions. Once again, Feith delivered. Small wonder that Rumsfeld described his subordinate as “a rare talent”. Rumsfeld had every reason to be satisfied.
Yet Rumsfeld’s assessment seems unlikely to stand. Whatever Feith may achieve during the remainder of his life and whatever epitaph he chooses for inscription on his gravestone, history will remember him as “the stupidest fucking guy on the planet.”
The source of that judgement, which is likely to remain definitive, is General Tommy Franks.
In John Howard’s recent address to the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation he deployed his classic tactic for attacking his critics – set up a straw man (words they did not say) and then attack that, rather than address their real arguments.
He said, inter alia:
There is a tendency to see a response to terrorism in terms of placating alternative philosophies in the hope they will accommodate you and abandon aggressive designs on your society…
For the record, my response to his response to terrorism had nothing to do with that, nothing to do with that at all.
My response to his response to terrorism is that terrorist acts, no matter how egregious, do not warrant:
(i) Joining us in a war with no clear purpose (Afghanistan);
(ii) Involving us in a war (Iraq) that was illegal, was against a country that had nothing to do with the outrage complained of (the attack on the World Trade Centre), and was just plain dumb;
(iii) Compromising our civil liberties and the rule of law in this country; or
(iv) Converting ASIO overnight from a security intelligence organisation to a secret police force with draconian powers and minimal training for its new role.
Any time Mr Howard would like to address those issues I would be interested to hear his views .
Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War is the title of a book by Robert Jervis, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Affairs at Columbia University, published by Cornell University Press, 2010.
It examines in detail two major intelligence failures: the inability of CIA and the wider intelligence community to understand the turmoil in Iran leading up to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, and the misjudgement of Iraq’s programs of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the period preceding the 2003 war.
Jervis had had a twelve month assignment as a scholar in residence with the CIA in 1977, and in November 1978, when the CIA realised that the Shah was in much more trouble than the intelligence community had appreciated, he was invited to return and appraise the intelligence effort – in particular, to examine the quality of the work in the light of the information that the analysts had available. The first part of the book is largely a version of his report, with necessary deletions (“redactions”) which he assures us do not change the story, and with contemporary commentary.
Then follows his analysis of the extent to which there was intelligence failure in relation to Iraqi WMD, and why it happened.
In his final chapter Jervis discusses broader issues of the contested relationship between policymakers and intelligence, in relation to which he makes the insightful comment that:
...despite the fact that decision makers always say they want better intelligence, for good political and psychological reasons often they do not, which is part of the explanation for why intelligence reforms are rarely fully implemented.
He concludes with a discussion of various reforms, “both those that are overrated and those that involve greater training and greater infusion of social science and are worthy of more attention”.
This book is no light read, but it well repays the effort for anyone who has a serious interest in the craft of intelligence, and how it can best support policymaking.
There are three elements of the BBC interview given by the loathsome Tony Blair on 1 September, following the launch of his memoirs, and associated press reporting, which caught my attention:
(1) He did not foresee the “nightmare” that would unfold following the invasion. As the report in The Guardian, 31 August 2010, put it (see here):
"I can't regret the decision to go to war," he writes in A Journey. But he adds: "I can say that never did I guess the nightmare that unfolded, and that too is part of the responsibility. The truth is we did not anticipate the role of al-Qaida or Iran. Whether we should have is another matter; and if we had anticipated, what we would have done about it is another matter again."
(2) He regretted the loss of life but was unrepentant about the invasion – he still believes it was the right thing to do, in spite of the massive loss of life.
(3) He opined that it is “unacceptable” for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and we (the West) should be prepared to confront Iran militarily if need be to prevent this.
My reactions to this:
(1) For Tony Blair to fail to envision, let alone “guess”, the nightmare that would unfold following the invasion of a middle-income country over half the size of New South Wales, with its well-known religious and communal problems, a country already suffering the consequences of over a decade of sanctions, is an extraordinary failure of imagination and judgement on his part.
(2) Aside from that, to the extent that the claim could be taken at face value, it indicates that Blair either had the wrong advisers or, more likely, he wasn’t listening to them. When it comes to matters of war and peace, Prime Ministers are not supposed to “guess”, nor are they required to.
(3) I wouldn’t take the claim (or anything else that Blair says) at face value. I think that the issue here is that he was a fully paid up subscriber to the Paul Wolfowitz view that the invasion was going to be “a cakewalk”, and the Donald Rumsfeld view that “we don’t do nation-building”. One of the many things for which Tony Blair must take full responsibility is the fact that he plunged the United Kingdom into an illegal war for which there was no planning for the occupation phase.
(4) While nominally accepting responsibility Tony Blair also attempts to duck it by blaming the post-invasion chaos on al-Qaeda and Iran. It was much more about spontaneous internal chaos due to an abject failure to plan for the basics of internal security when the invaders became an occupation force with all the responsibilities under international law that that entails. What did he expect? Did he think it would be like the liberation of Paris in 1944, with the girls throwing flowers onto the tanks? And did he really think that al-Qaeda and Iran would fail to respond to the fact that their enemy had taken up residence, and in so doing made a target of itself?
(4) Tony Blair’s protestations that he had no idea of the aftermath should be read against the comments of Paul R. Pillar, who served as the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and is now Director of Graduate Studies in the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University. Writing in the March/April edition of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, Professor Pillar says:
In the wake of the Iraq war, it has become clear that official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicised.
Pillar went on to say:
If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war – or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions of recent decades.
So Pillar was warning to prepare for a messy aftermath, but Tony Blair could not “guess” that this state of affairs might occur.
(5) Blair’s concern for the casualties of the war is couched in extraordinarily (but characteristically) narcissistic terms. As reported by The Guardian in the article cited above:
Blair writes of his anguish about how families of the fallen may not understand his pain at the loss of so many lives. "Do they really suppose I don't care, don't feel, don't regret with every fibre of my being the loss of those who died," Blair writes as he pays tributes to coalition soldiers and Iraqis who lost their lives.
Blair’s description of his “anguish” seems over the top to me, and is classic politician speak, of a piece with “this is the toughest decision I ever had to make” etc. – easy to say after the event, but it does not prevent them from insouciantly putting people in harm’s way.
I also have the impression that Blair is much more “anguished” about the British fallen than he is about the dead Iraqi civilians, more than 100,000 of whom suffered violent deaths as a direct consequence of the invasion and its aftermath (see Iraq Body Count here). Valuable as it is as an indicator of the awful consequences of the war, that number is only a partial count of those whose deaths are reasonably attributable to the invasion. It takes no account of people who perished as a result of infrastructure and service failures: drinking contaminated water, living with raw sewage in the streets, lack of electricity, gas and water, dying of preventable or curable diseases because of breakdowns in the medical and hospital systems etc.
(6) I have no wish to see a nuclear armed Iran, but who the hell is Tony Blair to be prescribing what defence measures taken by sovereign states are “acceptable”? The last time Tony Blair was proclaiming that the acquisition of (alleged) WMD was unacceptable was when he was lining the British people up for their wonderful adventure in Iraq, an adventure on which his great and glorious US ally has spent $US 700 million and counting installing a Shi’ite regime in Baghdad and enhancing the regional power and influence of that very same Iran whose nuclear program is “unacceptable”.
(7) Who is going to pay for this next great adventure upon which Tony Blair would have us embark? The United States is broke, and President Obama is (rightly) turning that country’s attention away from foreign adventures and towards domestic priorities like repairing the economy. France and Britain are so strapped for cash to spend on defence that they are talking to each other about pooling combat support assets like in-flight refuellers, and are certainly looking to spend less rather than more on defence. The same story can be found elsewhere in Continental Europe. I don’t think that a military confrontation with Iran (66 million people living in a country the size of Queensland) is on anyone’s agenda at the moment, even though in a subsequent post I shall describe some rather alarming ruminations about this coming out of Israel. Anyone who thinks such a confrontation (including a pre-emptive strike) is a good idea is, frankly, barking mad.
(8) As I recall it, when Tony Blair stepped down as Prime Minister of Great Britain he was going to bring his messianic attributes to bear on solving the Israeli-Palestinian question once and for all, as the Quartet’s Middle East Peace Envoy. Since then he has essentially been missing in action on that issue, although he still maintains a suite of offices atop the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem. This week, when Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas were meeting in Washington, under the watchful eyes of President Obama, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan, where was Tony? Why, out promoting his book, of course.
Fortunately, nobody listens to Tony Blair any more.
