On February 4, Prime Minister John Howard made a statement to federal parliament, in which he set out his government's reasons for supporting a US-led war on Iraq. The principal reason, Howard said, was that "the Australian government knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons".
Now, five months after US, British and Australian troops invaded Iraq, and with the 1400-member US-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) having not found a single chemical or biological weapon, Howard has begun to put a new spin on his justification for going to war. Now he claims that his government went to war because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) "programs" and "capabilities".
Prior to the US-led invasion of Iraq, Howard repeatedly claimed, as in his February 4 speech to parliament, that his government knew for a fact that Iraq possessed WMD. Of course, his government knew no such thing — it simply repeated the lies emanating from Washington.
According to an AC Nielsen poll published in the September 24 Melbourne Age, 68% of Australians believe Howard misled them about the reasons for going to war, and 51% believed the war was not justified.
Howard has taken comfort in the poll's finding that 42% of voters thought he was misleading only because he had been misled by others, while only 26% said he had deliberately misled the public.
The fact that a majority of those who believe Howard misled the public do not think he did this intentionally is in large part due to the uncritical acceptance by the corporate media — and the "opposition" Labor Party — of the repeated claims made by the US, British and Australian governments that Iraq possessed an arsenal of WMD.
Howard still claims that his government decided to go to war on the basis of "credible intelligence" that Iraq had WMD, though he, like Bush, is now putting a new spin on this — that this intelligence demonstrated that Iraq had a "capability" to make WMD.
Speaking on Melbourne radio on September 26, Howard said: "The intelligence we had at the time about their capability was very credible and very strong and I don't retreat one iota from the decision that we took [to go to war]."
Of course, even Saddam Hussein's regime had admitted that it had WMD programs and capabilities — prior to the 1991 Gulf War. But the Iraqi government affirmed that all its chemical and biological weapons, and the facilities to make them, had been dismantled in the early 1990s.
This was confirmed by UN weapons inspectors in the late 1990s — before they were ordered to leave Iraq by US President Bill Clinton. Former US Marine Scott Ritter, who as senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998, personally led the inspections, investigations and destruction of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs, pointed out in July 2002: "By 1995-96, we could ascertain a 90-95% level of disarmament. Not because we took at face value what the Iraqis said. I and other weapons inspectors never believed a word the Iraqis told us after their first lie. No, we achieved this level of verification based upon our own hard work."
Ritter also emphatically dismissed the possibility that Iraq had retained a capacity to produce either biological or chemical weapons.
Ritter's assessment was backed up by US Secretary of State Colin Powell. At a February 24, 2001, press conference in Cairo, Powell stated that Saddam Hussein had "not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."
A video of Powell's remarks, which remains on the State Department web site, was recently uncovered by London-based Australian investigative journalist John Pilger.
Questioned about Powell's February 2001 denial that Iraq retained any WMD capability, US President George Bush said on September 25: "9/11 changed my calculation." Indeed it did. 9/11 provided the Bush gang with a pretext to invade Iraq and take over its oil resources, a goal long advocated by its key members — vice-president Dick Cheney, war secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.
On September 17, 2001, Bush directed the Pentagon to draw up a detailed plan for invading Iraq. Not long after, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz set up the Office of Special Plans, which channelled bogus claims to media and intelligence outlets from Iraqi defectors coached by the Pentagon-funded Iraqi National Council (headed by bank embezzler Ahmad Chalabi) about Hussein having an arsenal of WMD and links with the al Qaeda terrorist network.
But Bush, Blair and Howard did not simply repeat the assessments they received from their intelligence agencies about these bogus claims. As Andrew Wilkie — who resigned from the Office of National Assessments, Australia's top intelligence assessment agency, in March in protest against the government's decision to go to war — told a parliamentary inquiry in August, Howard's office deliberately exaggerated the ONA's assessments that Iraq might retain some WMD.
Later this month, Bush will visit Canberra and publicly applaud Howard for backing Washington's criminal invasion of Iraq. Australia still has troops in Iraq assisting an illegal occupation that was, and still is, justified by a pack of lies.
All opponents of the unjust war that Bush and Howard are still waging against the Iraqi people should mobilise to protest against these liars and demand that they immediately withdraw their armies from Iraq.
From Green Left Weekly, October 1, 2003.
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