Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has now been 1,362 days since Australian troops first entered Iraq on the night of 18 March 2003, marking the start of Australia’s military operations in Iraq. My grievance this afternoon is with the Prime Minister, for the moral and strategic blunders that informed his decision to commit Australian troops to this war, for the twists and turns in rhetoric he has used throughout the war to deflect responsibility for these blunders and for his failure now, over three years on, to recognise his tragic error in judgement and to allow our troops to finally come home.

It is not easy here in Australia to fully comprehend the daily realities of the situation in Iraq. It has, after all, been raging for over three years; it takes place in a country the vast majority of Australians have never set foot in; and our understanding of it comes largely in three-minute packages squeezed in before the sport. But the Prime Minister has signed our names to this war and attached our international reputation to a successful outcome. So let us today take stock of what the daily realities are for our troops and for the over 20 million Iraqis who are at the bloody centre of this tragic quagmire.

This Saturday just past, car bombs and mortar attacks killed at least 51 people in Baghdad. The injured were reported to have filled the hallways at three hospitals. Elsewhere over the weekend, Iraq’s interior minister said 44 bodies were discovered in Baghdad. Most of the victims were middle-aged and had been shot and stripped of identification. At least half-a-dozen other Iraqis died in clashes around the country. The US military reported the death of a soldier who had been injured in combat in western al-Anbar province.

October and November were the bloodiest months of the war so far for Iraqi civilians, with the loss of 3,709 lives in October alone. International media reports suggest that sectarian killings are escalating between Sunnis and Shiites, and an estimated 1,000 Iraqis are fleeing their homes every single day for either a safer region within the country or overseas. The UK’s Independent newspaper reported last fortnight:

Across swathes of Baghdad, fearful residents have spent recent nights guarding their homes, terrified they would be the next victims.

This situation is horrific. But it is also an absolute outrage. It is an outrage because the Howard government has led us down this tragic path in defiance of the United Nations, also in defiance of the will of the majority of Australians and of every one of those families who protested against the war back in 2003 and in defiance of every single member of the Australian Labor Party in the federal parliament, who voted against this war from day one. I must also say at this point it is in defiance of the views of a very, very large number of the constituents whom I represent in this House.

It is also nothing short of outrageous that within the last fortnight it has been claimed that the Prime Minister made the decision to go to war in Iraq over a year before the invasion. In contrast to his claims that he did not decide to go to war before the issue was debated in the UN in late 2002, revelations from the Cole inquiry show that AWB had been briefed on the Iraq war back in February 2002—13 months before the invasion. The Howard government, it seems, had us committed from the very beginning and had kept us in the dark, and all attempts at a peaceful resolution to this crisis were simply empty rhetoric. From this position, the Prime Minister pushed ahead with the war, deploying SAS troops into Iraq before the United States President had even declared that the invasion had begun.

We must not forget that the power vacuum that we are seeing today, with Sunnis and Shiites engaged in violent conflicts across the country, was a predicted result of an invasion of Iraq. Yet the Howard government had Australia commit to this war without a sufficient plan to ensure a smooth transition to an alternate leadership in Iraq. The resulting instability and lack of security in the country not only continues each day but worsens more than three years after the invasion began.

These facts about Australia’s contributions to this war, as well as the lies and mistruths that were told at the time about prewar intelligence, the lies that were told about the impact of Iraq on Australia as a terrorist target and the lies that were told about the warnings it got about $300 million going to Saddam Hussein’s back pocket will be recorded in the history books. This is a great shame, but this is a new phase of the debate. We cannot undo what the Howard government has already done, but we must move forward with constructive solutions to the quagmire that is Iraq. Labor have done this from day one. We have outlined our strategy for troop withdrawal. We have been consistent in our approach. But today I argue that the Howard government continues to operate without a strategy for the future of Iraq.

The Prime Minister has refused to specify when he will consider the possibility of withdrawing Australian troops from Iraq. He has indicated only that a ‘signpost’ for determining withdrawal would be the handover of security responsibility to the Iraqi forces. But this vague answer is not really an answer at all. Despite repeated questioning from Labor and from the media, the government has refused outright to indicate to the Australian people—the Australian people who overwhelmingly do not support our continued presence in Iraq—when our contribution will come to an end.

And should we believe the Prime Minister if he tells us this anyway? The Prime Minister’s justification for keeping us in Iraq has been rewritten at every turn of this conflict. We were first told that we must go to war to search for weapons of mass destruction. But none were found. We were then told that we must stay for regime change. That new regime is now in place, albeit far from stable. More recently we were told that we must stay to protect the Japanese, but the Japanese government has now withdrawn its people, declaring its humanitarian mission a success. Since the Japanese left, the Howard government has told us that we must remain for security overwatch.

Clearly, the Prime Minister is continuing his approach of keeping Australia in the dark about the slippery slope that he is taking us all down. In the process, the terrorist threat to Australia has increased and tensions in our own region and in our own country have increased as a result of the government’s war strategy based upon lies and deception. This is an outrage.

The Prime Minister’s prewar claims were explicit. In March 2003 he stated:

... I see disarming Iraq as being part of the wider war against terrorism because of Iraq’s past and continuing assistance to terrorist organisations.

Yet this ran counter to what the Prime Minister had been told by the British just the previous month. In February 2003 the British Joint Intelligence Committee had concluded:

... the Joint Intelligence Committee assessed that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq. The JIC assessed that any collapse of the Iraqi regime would increase the risk of chemical and biological warfare technology or agents finding their way into the hands of terrorists, not necessarily al-Qaida.

It is an outrage that the Prime Minister of this country defied this intelligence and made arguments to the Australian public that were contrary to the advice he had received. The Howard government has an abysmal and shameful record on Iraq, and it will be recorded this way in Australia’s history books. We must take steps in the future to ensure that Australia is never again taken to war on such flawed intelligence and deceptive rhetoric.

I support the suggestion by the Leader of the Opposition that, for any future foreign policy and national security policy crisis, the parliament should mandate the Office of National Assessments to produce a formal national assessment of the implications of a particular course of action for Australia. The Leader of the Opposition has also proposed that it should be mandatory for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to provide formal policy advice to government on the merits or otherwise of any decision to commit Australian troops to the field in whichever theatre. He has also suggested that, if military action is to be contemplated by Australia in the future under any circumstances, the government should consider making these assessments available to the Leader of the Opposition.

The veil of secrecy that has surrounded Australia’s contribution to the Iraq war cannot be undone. But I believe we must take every possible step to ensure the Howard government never again have the opportunity to commit us to warfare without full consideration of the consequences. The Australian people deserve this commitment, our troops deserve this commitment and the Iraqi people deserve this commitment. The Howard government’s actions in the war on Iraq have been nothing short of shameful. Their actions have not been done in the name of the Australian people, and they have certainly not been done to represent the views of the people I represent. I will continue to hold them to account both within this parliament and within the wider community until the Australian public turf them out as they deserve to be. (Time expired)