Garry Woodard on Iraq

In my February 2009 post Rushing willingly into Iraq I provided a link to my colleague Garry Woodard’s 2007 essay on Iraq (Iraq: We Now Know), which I described as, and which remains, a remarkable example of what can be achieved by patient sifting through disparate open sources.

That link, to the Melbourne University Press website, is broken, but you can access the document at

Iraq: We Now Know.

Of course we know quite a lot more now than we did in 2007, and I understand that Garry is about to commence work on an update. I will post a link to that as soon as it is available.

In the meantime, the current version is well worth reading.

Iraq: Former official nails Howard

“The belief that Saddam had WMDs was near universal” said former Prime Minister John Howard when he addressed the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney on 9 April 2013.

He neglected to mention that, to the extent that this belief was widespread, it was the result of an enormous effort on the part of the George W. Bush Administration and Tony Blair’s Government in the UK to persuade the world that this was so.  Most of us are not in a position to make an independent assessment, and we assumed that we were hearing from reputable people.

He also neglected to mention that the belief was not shared by his own intelligence agencies, the intelligence professionals whose job it is to advise the government of the day, without fear or favour, on the best assessment they can make at the time on the basis of the information available to them.

In today’s edition of The Age and other Fairfax newspapers, Margaret Swieringa, who from 2002-07 was secretary to the Federal Parliamentary Intelligence Committee, nails this claim completely. Her account, in full, as published in  The Age under the headline and sub-head Howard ignored advice and went to war in Iraq: the government's justification for war was not supported by any of its own agencies' intelligence:

Former prime minister John Howard's justification this week on why we went to war against Iraq in 2003 obfuscates some issues.

I was the secretary to the Intelligence Committee from 2002 until 2007. It was then called the ASIO, ASIS and Defence Signals Directorate Committee, which drafted the report on the Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Howard refers to this committee in his speech justifying our involvement in the war.

The reason there was so much argument about the existence of weapons of mass destruction prior to the war in Iraq 10 years ago was that to go to war on any other pretext would have been a breach of international law. As Howard said at the time: ''I couldn't justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I've never advocated that. Central to the threat is Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons and its pursuit of nuclear capability.''

So the question is what the government knew or was told about that capability and whether it ''lied'' about the danger that Iraq posed.

At the time, Howard and his ministers asserted the threat to the world from Iraq's WMD was both great and immediate.

On February 4, 2003, Howard said Saddam Hussein had an ''arsenal'' and a ''stockpile'', and the ''illegal importation of proscribed goods has increased dramatically in the past few years … Iraq had a massive program for developing offensive biological weapons - one of the largest and most advanced in the world''.

On March 18, 2003, Alexander Downer told the House of Representatives that ''the strategy of containment [UN sanctions] simply has not worked and now poses an unacceptable risk''.

In his speeches at the time, Howard said: ''Iraq has a usable chemical and biological weapons capability which has included recent production of chemical and biological agents; Iraq continues to work on developing nuclear weapons. All key aspects - research and development, production and weaponisation - of Iraq's offensive biological weapons program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War in 1991.''

None of the government's arguments were supported by the intelligence presented to it by its own agencies. None of these arguments were true.

Howard this week quoted the findings of the parliamentary inquiry, but, as with the original claims about WMD, his quotation is selective to the point of being misleading.

What was the nature of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction provided to the government at the time? The parliamentary inquiry, Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, reported on the intelligence in detail. It gathered information from Australia's two analytical intelligence organisations - the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Office of National Assessment - from March 2001 until March 2003.

The inquiry found:

1. The scale of threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was less than it had been a decade earlier.

2. Under sanctions that prevailed at the time, Iraq's military capability remained limited and the country's infrastructure was still in decline.

3. The nuclear program was unlikely to be far advanced. Iraq was unlikely to have obtained fissile material.

4. Iraq had no ballistic missiles that could reach the US. Most if not all of the few SCUDS that were hidden away were likely to be in poor condition.

5. There was no known chemical weapons production.

6. There was no specific evidence of resumed biological weapons production.

7. There was no known biological weapons testing or evaluation since 1991.

8. There was no known Iraq offensive research since 1991.

9. Iraq did not have nuclear weapons.

10. There was no evidence that chemical weapon warheads for Al Samoud or other ballistic missiles had been developed.

11. No intelligence had accurately pointed to the location of weapans of mass destruction.

There were minor qualifications to this somewhat emphatic picture. It found there was a limited stockpile of chemical weapon agents, possibly stored in dual-use or industrial facilities.

Although there was no evidence that it had done so, Iraq had the capacity to restart its chemical weapons program in weeks and to manufacture in months.

The committee concluded the ''case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD in large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq's WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations.

''This is not the picture that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to the committee by Australia's two analytical agencies.''

Howard would claim, no doubt, that he took his views from overseas dossiers. However, all that intelligence was considered by Australian agencies when forming their views. They knew, too, of the disputes and arguments within British and American agencies. Moreover, Australian agencies, as well as the British and American intelligence agencies, also knew at that time that the so-called ''surge of new intelligence'' after September 2002 relied almost exclusively on one or two entirely unreliable and self-serving individuals. They knew, too, that Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid, who had defected in 1995, had told Western agencies that the nuclear program in Iraq had failed, that chemical and biological programs had been dismantled and weapons destroyed, largely as a result of the UNSCOM weapons inspections.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Margaret Swieringa is a retired public servant living in Canberra.

See the published version online at Howard ignored advice and-went to war in Iraq

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.