Iraq War Inquiry Group: Committee Members

In Iraq War Inquiry Group I gave some background on the establishment of the Group and its objectives.

We are now in a position to announce the members of the committee which has been established to manage the affairs of the Group. The members are:

President:                       Mr Paul Barratt AO

Former Secretary, Department of Defence and former Deputy Secretary, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Vice-President:          Mr Garry Woodard

Honorary Senior Fellow lecturing at the University of Melbourne and a former ambassador to Burma, China and Malaysia, national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of Asian Alternatives: Australia’s Vietnam decision and lessons on going to war (2005) and Now We Know about Going to War in Iraq (2007).

Treasurer:                       Mr Andrew Farran

Former Australian diplomat, senior law academic, and business strategist. Company director and grazier.

Secretary:                       Dr Sue Wareham

Vice-President of the Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia) and a member of the management committee in Australia of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Committee Member: Professor Richard Tanter

Senior Research Associate, Nautilus Institute, and Professor in the School of Political and Social Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Committee Member: Ms Pera Wells

Former Australian diplomat and Secretary-General of the World Federation of United Nations Associations (2006 - 9), when Hans Blix was President; Vice-president of the Australian Council for Human Rights Education and Australian Representative on the steering committee for the Global Interdependence Movement.

For regular updates on IWIG and to express your support for our campaign, please visit www.facebook.com/IraqWarInquiryGroup.

Iraq War Inquiry Group

On 16 August 2012 an informal grouping of people describing ourselves as the Iraq War Inquiry Group (IWIG) met in a Committee Room in Parliament House to launch a document entitled Why Did We Go to War in Iraq: a call for an Australian inquiry.

Our host for the event was the Member for Fremantle, Ms Melissa Parke MP (ALP), and the document was launched by former Prime Minister the Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser AC CH.

Other members of the panel at the launch were:

-  Senator Scott Ludlam (Greens, WA).

-  Mr Andrew Wilkie MP (Ind), the Member for Denison.

-  GEN (Retd.) Peter Gration AC OBE, former Chief of the Defence Force.

-  Mr Paul Barratt AO, former Secretary, Department of Defence and former Deputy Secretary, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

-   Dr Sue Wareham OAM, Vice-President, Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia).

-   Professor Ramesh Thakur, Director, Centre for Nuclear Nonproliferation & Disarmament, ANU Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy.

-  Dr Alison Broinowski, former diplomat; Visiting Fellow, Department of Asian Studies, ANU; Honorary Research Fellow, University of Wollongong.

-  Adjunct Professor Richard Broinowski, Media and Communications, University of Sydney; former diplomat.

-  Mr Rod Barton former Director of Intelligence (Science and Technology), Defence Intelligence Organisation; former UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq

Since the launch we have applied to become an incorporated association, as a more effective vehicle for raising funds and conducting a campaign, and elected a committee to lead and manage our affairs.

The objectives of our association are:

1 To campaign for an inquiry into the steps which led to Australia participating in the invasion of Iraq, for the purposes of identifying the lessons to be learned and of developing better procedures for the future.

2  To promote public awareness of the procedures required by current law for the deployment of the Australian Defence Force into international armed conflicts, and of the risks involved in the current arrangements.

3  To campaign for the involvement of the Commonwealth Parliament in any future deployment of the Australian Defence Force into international armed conflict.

There are many unanswered questions in relation to Australia’s decision to go to war. They include:

-  What was the Government’s decision-making process and timing that led to our participation in the invasion?

-  What were the objectives, and how was success to be defined?

-  How did the Government reconcile conflicting intelligence assessments?

-  How did the Government attempt to satisfy itself of the legality of the invasion?

-  Which of the many NGO predictions of widespread and severe human suffering, including by children, did the Government consider? If none, why?

-  To what extent were the statements made to the Parliament and the public consistent with all the available relevant assessments.

To assist our supporters to find out more about the issues involved in our deployment to Iraq, and the processes by which we decide to put members of the Australian Defence Force in harm’s way, and to enable them to keep track of and support our campaign, we have established a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/IraqWarInquiryGroup . Please visit the site and express your support for the campaign by clicking on the Like button.

Juan Cole on Mitt Romney

On 2 October 2012 US Middle East expert Juan Cole published a piece on his Informed Comment blog entitled Top Ten Things Mitt Romney Gets Wrong About US Middle East Policy. As Mitt Romney may well become the President of the United States in three months’ time, what he gets wrong about Middle East policy is important to all of us.

Cole starts by noting that Romney had published an op-ed the previous day criticising President Obama’s Middle East policies, but that op-ed, apart from urging ‘strength’, offered no concrete alternative.

And, he completely misunderstands the history of the US role in the region, which causes him to misunderstand its present dilemmas.

Cole then goes on to list the ‘ten top things Mitt Romney gets wrong’ in delicious detail, the first five of which fly in the face of Romney’s foundation proposition that the US got to where it is today in the Middle East by ‘promoting human rights, free markets and the rule of law”. The others reveal a flawed understanding of more contemporary events.

He concludes:

Romney’s understanding of the challenges for the US in the Middle East is backwards, and so are his vague prescriptions. Military might, which you trumpet as the solution, is useless in the face of popular movements, Mr. Romney, and the US army could have done nothing to keep Mubarak in power or to keep the Muslim Brotherhood from winning elections. An even more fawning policy toward the Israeli Right Wing is not going to solve any of our problems in the Middle East, but rather will exacerbate them as Apartheid becomes more severe. And we’re already on a war footing with Iran, and any increase in tensions is very dangerous unless it has a clear and achievable policy objective (dissuading Iran from nuclear enrichment is not achievable).

As a new generation democratizes and public opinion becomes important, US public diplomacy and reaching out to young people becomes crucial. Seeking a modus vivendi with ascendant political Islam is now pivotal, because the US has fewer and fewer puppets under its thumb. Are you good at public diplomacy toward the Muslim world, Mr. Romney?

This is a great read, and an important one. Read it in full here.

A little more on Jock McDiarmid

My search continues for information about SAS warrior Jock McDiarmid, School Sergeant at The Armidale School for part of my time there, and I am grateful to old classmate John Swain who recently sent me a link to a piece on the National Library’s Trove website containing a scan of a Hobart Mercury item for 14 March 1952, reporting on the presentation of his Croix de Guerre by the French Consul-General in Sydney.

The item has a photo of Jock in uniform and reads:

Sgt James McDiarmid, who on Wednesday in Sydney received the Croix de Guerre from French Consul-General Strauss.  Sgt. McDiarmid, a member of the 13th National Service Battalion, Ingleburn NSW, won the decoration on August 14, 1944, as a member of the Special Air Service of the British Airborne Division.  With another paratrooper he cleaned up a troublesome German machine-gun post behind enemy lines in France.

Access the Trove item here.

Earlier in the year John sent me a link to a Polish webpage describing the birth of the SAS; there is a photo of Jock on operations in the Netherlands at the foot of the page (right hand photo, Jock standing alongside a jeep). Access this webpage here.

For earlier posts on Jock, who died in 2009, see Vale Jock McDiarmid, MM, C de G, Jock McDiarmid, MM C de G, Jock McDiarmid’s MM commendation and On the trail of Jock McDiarmid.

Iraq: Alarming rise in birth defects

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.

Click here to read the full article.

Sydney Opera House under construction, January 1967

Austin College 40th Anniversary

Austin College at the University of New England is having its 40th anniversary celebrations this weekend.

This certainly brings home the passing of the years. When I lived in Handel Street in the 1950s to mid-1960s, in the red-roofed house with the pine trees out the front in the photo below, there were no buildings on the north side of the street, except for a house on the corner of Elm Avenue – the university leased the land to a local dairy farmer. When I left Armidale in 1966 there was no Austin College, although I well remember Robbie Austin as a prominent local medico and a long-standing member of the University Council. Even Earle Page College was still just the aggregation of the residents of the "Top Huts" near Booloominbah and the various houses that the university leased in the town.

The land in the foreground has long been completely built up - Duval College (before I left), Earle Page, St Albert's, Drummond & Smith and Austin Colleges all being located along there. That's progress, but I rather liked it the way it was when I was a small boy and there was nothing between me and Dumaresq Creek but a barbed wire fence and a few dairy cows.