Letter to The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP

26 August 2013

The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP

c/- ALP National Secretariat

Unit 5, 9 Sydney Avenue

BARTON ACT 2600

Dear Mr Rudd

I refer to my letter of  13 August 2013 seeking, on behalf of the Campaign for an Iraq War Inquiry, to ascertain the Australian Labor Party’s policy in the context of the current Federal Election campaign on several matters which are of central importance to our membership.

In that connection, I write to commend the comments attributed to you in today’s edition of The Age, connection with recent developments in Syria, to the effect that we need to be mindful of wrong decisions made in the past in relation to Iraq, leading to Australian and other governments went into armed conflict “based on … something that was entirely incorrect”. Calling for a “calm and measured response” to the allegations of a chemical attack in Syria, you (correctly in our view) state that no one should rush to a conclusion that the regime in Syria has used chemical weapons “until we have the definitive report from UN weapons inspectors”.

The comments attributed to you as noted above lead us to conclude that you would certainly be in agreement with at least part of our Campaign’s agenda, so I write again to urge you to let our members and supporters, as well as the general public, have your answers to the following questions as set out in my letter of 13 August:

1.   Do you believe the Prime Minister should continue to have the authority to take Australia to war on her/his own?

2.   Would you support a new bill requiring parliamentary debate and approval before the Australian Defence Force is deployed in overseas combat operations?

3.   Do you support taking ANZUS back to its

(a)   Original obligation of consultations (not automatic military action);

(b)   Original geography (the Pacific area); and

(c)   Original purpose (defence against an armed attack)?

4.   Do you support Article 1 of the ANZUS Treaty which obliges Australia "to refrain... from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations"? Would you support legislation to require UN authorisation for Australia to go to war other than in response to an armed attack?

5.   The United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark have each initiated a public inquiry into their involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Do you support a review of the process by which the Australian Government decided to join the invasion, in order to determine whether the process was satisfactory?

6.   Do you believe that Australia should defer to the established international channels for WMD verification, monitoring and compliance?

I realise that considered answers to some of these questions might require more time for careful reflection than would be available to you in the limited time remaining before election day, but they are important questions and we would appreciate whatever insights or in-principle guidance you might feel able to give us in order to enable us to evaluate your policy thinking about these important matters ahead of the election.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Barratt

President

The article in today's edition of The Age  to which reference is made above may be found at

Kevin Rudd calls for caution on Syria.

Crikey: the one list you must read

Below is electronic newsletter Crikey’s editorial for today. What can one say?

BEGINS

A short list to illustrate the US government's priorities when it comes to military justice:

• Twenty-four unarmed Iraqi men, women and children were killed by US marines in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005. Result: staff Sgt Frank Wuterich convicted of a single count of negligent dereliction of duty, sentenced to three months' jail, suspended, and a pay-and-rank reduction;
• Blackwater military contractors killed 17 civilians and injured 20 more in Baghdad in 2007. Result: a US judge dismissed charges against four "contractors" in 2009. The charges were reinstated in 2011; proceedings are ongoing;
• In 2007, airstrikes from US helicopters killed two Reuters journalists and a number of civilians and injured others, including two children in a van that stopped to help one of the injured men. Result: no charges;
• In a 2004 US assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, 800 civilians were killed, unarmed and bound prisoners were executed, and white phosphorous was used. Since then, there has been a massive increase in childhood cancers and infant mortality there. Result: no action;
• In 2002, in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan, 30 people were killed when US forces bombed a wedding party. Result: no action;
• In 2008 in Deh Bala, Afghanistan, 47 people (mostly women and children) were killed when US aircraft bombed a wedding party. Result: no action;
• Between 2004 and 2013, at least 168 children, and likely many more, have been killed by US drone attacks. Result: Pentagon recently agreed drone operators will be awarded a special "distinguishing device," after a backlash against earlier decision to award medals;
• In 2011, Denver teenager Abdulrahamn al-Awlaki was killed with six other civilians in a US drone strike while eating dinner at a Yemeni village. Result: the man who ordered the strike, John Brennan, was promoted to head the CIA.

In contrast, in 2010: Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning released material revealing war crimes, corruption, State Department spying and much else by the US government. The US government later admitted, after an extensive study, that no one had been harmed as a result.

Result: Manning sentenced to 35 years' jail.

ENDS

Max Walsh on our Presidential political style

Veteran political journalist Maximilian Walsh, commenting on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme that is all his own work and causing much angst within the Liberal Party, says in today’s Australian Financial Review (see here) that the increasingly presidential style of Australia’s leaders has changed the balance of power between the Prime Minister and the Government, allowing them to present policy to the cabinet as a fait accompli.

He is absolutely right, as we saw in the case of the decision to join in the invasion of Iraq. This is one of the many important reasons why we must shift the power to deploy the ADF from the Executive (in effect the Prime Minister) to the Parliament.

Selling the Iraq War

In the course of reading and research for a paper I am writing in relation to the process by which Australia made the decision to participate in the Iraq War, I came upon an interesting paper by Chaim Kaufmann of Lehigh University, published in the MIT Belfer Centre’s prestigious journal International Security in 2004. It is a solid read but well repays the effort. Its central thesis is that in the case of the Iraq War, and perhaps more generally, the democratic “marketplace of ideas” failed to deal with “threat inflation” and manipulation of public opinion on the part of the Bush Administration as it sold the case for war.

In the process it gives a detailed rebuttal (based of course on information available by 2004, not any recent revelations) of all of the “evidence” produced by the Bush Administration, a detailed account of the contrary evidence (and advice from intelligence agencies) that was suppressed, and a detailed account of how public opinion was manipulated – in particular why the threat posed by Saddam Hussein had to be re-characterised: the threat of upsetting the regional order in the Middle East was not good enough as a casus belli – people had to be convinced there was a direct threat of an attack on the United States.

The key take-outs for Australia are, to my mind:

• Was John Howard a willing accomplice in all this deception or was he too deceived by our major ally?

o   If he didn’t know he should have – that’s what embassies are for and why we have very senior people in the most important of them

• If he wasn’t in on it, what does it say about the alliance and how do we protect ourselves from future deceptions within the alliance framework?

Whether he was in on it or not, I suggest that the episode strengthens the case for Parliamentary control of decisions to deploy the ADF, to avoid the dangers of “small group decision making” that military historian Robert O’Neill warned about in his submission to the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee in relation to Senator Scott Ludlam’s Defence Amendment (Parliamentary Approval of Overseas Service) Bill 2008 [No. 2].  (Dr O’Neill’s submission may be downloaded from Committee’s website here; it is Item 5 on the list).

The published abstract for Kaufmann’s article reads:

Are mature democracies better at making foreign policy than other kinds of regimes? Do their robust civic institutions and a flourishing marketplace of ideas reduce the likelihood of inflated threat assessments and “myths of empire” that can lead to risky foreign policies and, in some cases, war? To answer these questions, Chaim Kaufmann of Lehigh University examines the 2002–03 U.S. debate over going to war against Iraq. Kaufmann concludes that the democratic marketplace of ideas failed to challenge President George W. Bush’s case for toppling Saddam Hussein—despite the existence at the time of information that exposed the speciousness of many of the claims of the president’s foreign policy team. Kaufmann traces this failure to the Bush administration’s successful efforts to withhold or manipulate information that would have substantially weakened their argument for invading Iraq. He considers the implications of this strategy for U.S. foreign policy given the administration’s preventive war doctrine.

Download the paper from here or read the paper on line here.

Academic citation

Kaufmann, Chaim. "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War." International Security 29, no. 1 (Summer 2004): 5-48.

Looking ahead to France Libre, October 1943

Last evening I did some browsing around the web in search of information about an old family friend, Isabel Blanche, who became the first female member of the academic staff at the fledgling New England University College when she took up an appointment as a Lecturer in French in 1939.

In the process I came across an interesting document: an “Affirmation of Faith in the destiny of France”, published in Le Courrier Australien on 1 October 1943. It is signed by a large number of citizens from the churches, academia and the arts, educators and Members of Parliament. Isabel is one of the signatories.

What fascinates me about the “affirmation” is the fact that, eight months before the Normandy landings, such a large group of prominent Australians was looking ahead to the future of France in the post-war world.

Another signatory is one of my father’s particular heroes, John Eccles (later Sir John), who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1963, and who was Australian of the Year that year.

To see the document online, see An Affirmation of faith in the destiny of France.