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.
Regarding the first matter, in Rushing
willingly into Iraq, one of my first posts when I commenced blogging on Australian Observer back in
February 2009, I wrote:
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.
