Rohan Pearce
On March 18, 2003, Prime Minister John Howard announced in federal parliament: "The government has now authorised our defence forces, which were predeployed to the [Persian] Gulf to acclimatise and contribute to the campaign to persuade Saddam Hussein into compliance, to take part in coalition operations."
In reality, the government's decision to invade Iraq — in order to shore up Australian imperialism's alliance with the US — had been taken long before this date.
On February 23, the defence department released The War in Iraq: ADF Operations in the Middle East in 2003, a report dealing with the lessons learnt during the Iraq invasion, which recounts Australia's preparation "mid-2002" for participation in a US-led invasion of Iraq.
The report describes how Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel took part in "preliminary operational planning" with the Pentagon in July 2002 and worked with US military planners in Tampa, Florida, in August 2002. It disingenuously claims that during these meetings — planning for the invasion of Iraq — the Australian government "communicated its commitment to pursuing all practicable peaceful means to US defence planners".
It claims that "at the time, the US clearly indicated that there was no plan for operations against Iraq on the president's desk". However, it is well documented that Washington's war planning was well advanced by August 2002.
Most recently, a book released in February by Washington Times correspondent Rowan Scarborough, Rumsfeld's War, describes secret documents obtained by the author that reveal US President George Bush signed an order in February 2002 authorising the Pentagon to commence planning for an invasion of Iraq.
Despite the war planning by the ADF which was underway at the time, Howard told Radio 3AW's Neil Mitchell on August 23, 2002, that there had been no decision on military action against Iraq and that "if we were to receive a request I would make a judgement based on what I thought was the right thing in the long-term interests of Australia".
In an August 30 doorstop interview in Sydney, Howard told journalists that the government's "position on this is that no decision [on whether to invade] has been taken by the United States. If a decision were taken to do something and a request were made to Australia, then that is something that we would consider according to Australia's national interest."
He later commented that the government's view was that "if Iraq were to dismantle any weapons, if she were to allow inspectors in and were to guarantee unrestrained inspection and dismantling of any weapons of mass destruction [WMD], then that would transform the situation overnight".
On November 27, 2002, UN weapons inspections were resumed in Iraq with the cooperation of Hussein's government. As the inspections continued, and it became clear that they would not discover any WMD, the warmongers' pronouncements about Iraq and its alleged arsenal of WMD increasingly diverged from what the UN inspectors were finding on the ground.
On March 17, Bush gave Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq; US bombing began on March 19.
Less than a fortnight before, on March 7, chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix had told the UN Security Council that progress was being made with weapons inspections. Iraq's government was being "proactive" and there was "a significant Iraqi effort underway to clarify a major source of uncertainty as to the quantities of biological and chemical weapons, which were unilaterally destroyed [by Iraq] in 1991", Blix told the council.
Blix concluded from this that "one can hardly avoid the impression that, after a period of somewhat reluctant cooperation, there has been an acceleration of initiatives from the Iraqi side since the end of January".
Although the Howard government officially committed itself to supporting an invasion on March 18, the ADF had begun deployment in the Gulf from January 23. Federal parliament didn't even debate whether Australia should participate in Washington's war of conquest until February 4, during which the government justified participation in the war with strident warnings of the "danger" posed by Iraqi WMD.
Almost as soon as Baghdad fell on April 10, the government's case for war began to fall apart. The inability of the "coalition of the willing" — the US-Australian-British invasion force — to find either WMD stockpiles or convincing evidence that Iraq still possessed the ability to produce WMD has damaged the credibility of Bush and British PM Tony Blair to such an extent that "regime change" is a real possibility in the White House and in 10 Downing Street.
In Australia, the scandals surrounding pre-war lies have yet to seriously threaten Howard's government. However, thanks in part to the courage of whistleblowers such as former Office of National Assessments (ONA) analyst Andrew Wilkie, who resigned his position on March 7, 2003, in disgust at the government's duplicity, the full extent of the government's deceit is continuing to be revealed.
A report in the February 14 Melbourne Age has given a new boost to the WMD controversy. The report by Mark Forbes, the paper's foreign affairs correspondent, revealed that in a private briefing one of "Australia's most senior intelligence officials... said the threat posed by Iraq last year did not justify its invasion".
"The briefing", reported Forbes, "painted a picture of intelligence on Iraq at odds with some of Mr Howard's comments before and after the war".
"We have always told a consistent and reasonable story", the official reportedly said. "We had said Iraq had a WMD program, but to a large part it represented a latent capability. We said the degree of weaponisation of chemical and biological material in Iraq was unknown." In the lead-up to the war, the Coalition government had claimed that Iraq possessed stockpiles of ready-to-use WMD.
Frank Lewincamp, head of the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO), claimed on February 18: "I believe that I am, at least in part, the official to whom Mark Forbes refers in his article ... I say in part because I have never made, nor would I make, a number of the statements attributed to that official by Mr Forbes."
Lewincamp told the Senate foreign affairs, defence and trade (FDAT) estimates committee that the comments were based on a seminar he gave at the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre in September 2003.
Lewincamp explained: "I have never said that the Bush administration's claims justifying an invasion were exaggerated, nor have I said that the government was told that Iraqi WMD did not pose an immediate threat".
The Age's editor-in-chief, Michael Gawenda, responded by standing by the story. Gawenda told the Age: "From everything that has been raised today, it is clear to me that the story was fair and accurate."
Despite Lewincamp's supposed refutation of the Age article, he admitted that the comments attributed to him were similar to those he made before the FDAT committee on November 5, 2003.
Then, Lewincamp said that the DIO's assessment of Iraqi WMD capabilities in the lead-up to war was "reasonably consistent". He admitted that the DIO's view was that "the then current — that is, 2002-03 — state of those weapons was unknown, and they were likely to be fragile or degraded and in a relatively poor state".
The DIO maintained the view that Iraq possessed a "latent capability" to manufacture WMD — "available technology, skilled personnel, industrial production facilities, dual-use equipment and stocks of precursor materials" that could be used to produce biological or chemical weapons.
However, added Lewincamp, "we also made the judgment that we had no evidence that Iraq had done so". He told the FDAT committee that between 2000 and 2003 there was no significant change in the DIO assessment, and described the DIO assessment as "very cautious" and "conservative" about Iraq's alleged WMD. The intelligence was "highly suggestive" and "inferential" about "aspects of weapons of mass destruction programs" in Iraq.
An intervention by defence minister Robert Hill and the committees' chairperson, the National Party's Sandy Macdonald, prevented Lewincamp from answering a question by Labor senator Chris Evans, about whether the DIO's WMD assessments differed very markedly from US and British claims (which included wildly inaccurate claims such as Iraq could deploy WMD within 45 minutes).
Other members of Australia's "intelligence community" have come forward with information which corroborates accusations of government deception. For example, Dr Carl Ungerer, an ONA analyst who oversaw intelligence on Iraq until 2002 when he left the agency, told ABC TV's Lateline program on February 17 that "There were doubts both within the Australian community and within the US and British intelligence communities...". Unsurprisingly, none of these doubts were reflected in the government's pre-war scare campaign about Iraqi WMD.
Ungerer also told the program that there "was a clear understanding within ONA's senior management about the political objectives and the strategic objectives of the PM in the conduct of his actions over the Iraq war and that would have been, that view, would have been reflected in some of the ONA reporting".
Wilkie told Lateline on February 17: "I don't think there is any doubt that the government is now working hard to shift the blame to the intelligence agencies. I think the government's strategy will get limited traction, because I think the intelligence agencies are responsible for a limited overestimation of the threat posed by Iraq.
"But as I have said many times, any fault on the part of the intelligence agencies is overshadowed by the way the government took what was still reasonably ambiguous assessments and hardened them up and took the ambiguity out and turned uncertainty into certainty."
From Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.