BY DOUG LORIMER
Two weeks after Prime Minister John Howard denied that his government had received requests from Washington to increase the number of Australian troops in Iraq, he announced on September 8 that US President George Bush had accepted an invitation to visit Australia after the October 20-21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Bangkok.
Responding to a report in the August 25 Australian that Canberra was resisting pressure from Washington to commit more Australian troops to combat the armed resistance to the US-led occupation of Iraq, Howard told journalists: "I am not aware of any formal or informal request from the Americans."
The same day, foreign minister Alexander Downer stated: "We made it clear to the Americans, when they asked us to participate in the coalition to liberate Iraq from the regime of Saddam Hussein, that we would be prepared to do that, but we weren't going to keep troops in Iraq for a long period of time after the liberation."
In fact, Australian troops have remained in Iraq well after Hussein's regime was ousted on April 9. While most of the 2000 Australian Defence Force personnel were withdrawn from Iraq after Bush declared on May 1 that major combat operations were over, about 300 ADF personnel have remained in Iraq, with another 700 engaged in support operations in the Persian Gulf.
There is a RAAF "combat support element" of about 60 air traffic controllers working at Baghdad International Airport, and a detachment of about 70 soldiers to guard the Australian diplomatic mission in Baghdad. There is also a RAAF detachment of about 140 operating two Hercules transports and 90 ADF officers and communications personnel assigned to the US-led "coalition" headquarters.
Contrary to corporate media reports, Howard, Downer and other government ministers have not categorically ruled out sending more Australian troops to Iraq — including combat soldiers — if the Bush administration formally requests that Canberra do so.
When questioned about Australia's involvement in the Iraq conflict in the light of the increasing guerrilla attacks on US troops, treasurer Peter Costello on September 2 said that Canberra had agreed to "contribute combat troops and ships and aircraft to the war, but that when the war was over, we had other commitments closer to home, which would necessitate bringing our troops out, which is what we did".
Costello added: "Now, obviously we would all hope that the level of casualty and deaths ... would come to an end. But from the Australian government's point of view we did anticipate coming out once the active warfare had come to an end... Australia is making contributions but our policy was clear from the outset ... we would be engaged in active warfare with land forces, naval forces and air forces, but we would not be staying in Iraq with those active brigades in the long term."
These comments were interpreted by the corporate media as a definitive statement by a senior government figure that Canberra had "ruled out" sending more troops to Iraq. However, this was based on the assumption that "active warfare" had ceased in Iraq.
'Central front'
However, in his September 7 "address to the nation", Bush told the US people that Iraq was "now the central front" in the "war on terror" and that his administration would seek UN Security Council authorisation of a multinational force in Iraq under US command "in order to share the burden more broadly". This was an ignominious admission that the present number of US-led infantry troops in Iraq is inadequate to crush the Iraqis' armed resistance to Washington's occupation regime.
While Bush did not openly admit this, lieutenant-general Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US forces in Iraq, told the September 5 New York Times that he did not have enough infantry troops to meet all the challenges that were "looming". According to Sanchez, these include the need to seal Iraq's borders and to defeat and disarm Iraqi guerrilla fighters.
The predicament facing the Bush administration was spelt out by an unnamed UN diplomat quoted in the September 4 Washington Post: "The US had gone around knocking on just about every possible door looking for money and troops, and they got the same answer everywhere: We need some kind of a new [UN] resolution."
Securing such a UN resolution will be highly unlikely without Washington conceding substantial oil concessions and political influence in the creation of a new Iraqi government to its French imperialist rivals, the main business and trade partners of Hussein's capitalist regime.
However, such concessions could put the entire purpose of Washington's invasion of Iraq — transforming Iraq's potentially highly lucrative oil industry into a virtual US corporate monopoly — in jeopardy.
Writing in the September 15 Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing US ruling-class think-tank with close links to US vice-president Dick Cheney and war secretary Donald Rumsfeld — the leading advocates in the Bush administration of a "unilateral" US conquest of Iraq — warned: "In return for perhaps a couple of divisions' worth of Turkish, Indian or Pakistani troops, the administration has suggested it is willing to subject the reconstruction of Iraq to a threat more lethal than Baathism and bin Ladenism combined: a French veto."
Donnelly need not have worried. The draft resolution Washington circulated to other permanent Security Council member states on September 3 did not relinquish US control over the military occupation of Iraq or the political process of constructing a new puppet Iraqi regime.
On September 8, US Secretary of State Colin Powell rejected amendments proposed by France that would have replaced the US occupation administration with a UN-appointed authority. "To think that the UN could suddenly take this all over, to the exclusion of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is not realistic", Powell declared.
More troops needed
Even before they began haggling with French officials over the content of a UN resolution on Iraq, US officials knew that the adoption of any new Security Council resolution that conformed to Washington's terms was unlikely to get the additional numbers of foreign troops they are seeking.
Speaking on CBS television's Face the Nation program on September 14, Rumsfeld said: "If there's another UN resolution, my guess is the most we could hope to get, by way of additional international troops, would be something between zero or 10,000 and 15,000."
There are 136,000 US and 10,500 British troops in Iraq, plus 15,500 from 29 other countries. According to a report in the August 4 USA Today, the Pentagon "expected some 30,000 foreign troops to replace war-weary US combat forces". Without this number, the report noted, "there won't be enough foreign troops to permit the replacement and withdrawal of some US forces planned for early next year".
The September 15 USA Today reported that the "Pentagon has sharply sliced the number of foreign troops it hopes will help stabilise Iraq, but even the 10,000 to 15,000 it is now seeking may be unattainable".
Unable to get countries that did not participate in its blitzkrieg-style invasion of Iraq to contribute more troops to a lengthy and bloody war of occupation, Washington has already begun asking for more troops to be sent by its "coalition" junior partners.
The day after Bush declared that Iraq was the "central front" in the global "war on terror", the British government announced that it would send an additional 1200 combat troops to Iraq. British UK defence secretary Geoff Hoon later added that London envisaged sending another deployment of the same size in the near future.
Reporting the increased British commitment, Reuters news agency noted that it "followed a US plea for more non-American troops to counter violence and share the cost of occupying Iraq". It also noted that a week earlier, the London Daily Telegraph had reported that British foreign secretary Jack Straw had told Prime Minister Tony Blair that Washington and London faced "strategic failure" unless additional combat troops were sent to Iraq.
Purpose of Bush visit
This is the context in which Bush has decided to visit Australia next month — the first visit by a US president to Australia in seven years.
According to the Howard government, Bush is simply taking up an invitation Howard made when Howard visited Bush in May. However, as the September 8 Sydney Morning Herald noted: "Although Mr Bush accepted the invitation in principle, he'd had difficulty fitting a visit into his schedule. US ambassador to Australia Tom Schieffer said recently he doubted if the president could make it before the end of the year."
Announcing that Bush had decided to make a one-day visit to Australia, a spokesperson for Howard said on September 7 that Bush would "emphasise the war on terrorism" and the US-Australia military alliance. According to the September 8 Melbourne Age, the spokesperson said Bush's "specific purpose is to pay a courtesy visit to Mr Howard, and to thank Australia for its involvement in the war on Iraq".
The spokesperson failed to explain why the US president would see the need to come to Canberra to do this when he had already done it during Howard's visit to the US in May.
Bush is expected to be accompanied to Australia by Rumsfeld. Since early September, Rumsfeld has been publicly calling for an extra 10,000 non-US troops to be sent to Iraq.
When Howard told parliament on February 4 that his government had decided Australian troops would participate in Washington's criminal invasion of Iraq, he gave two key justifications for this decision. The first reason — that "the Australian government knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons" — has since been conclusively demonstrated to be a blatant lie.
The second reason given was that "no nation is more important to our long-term security" than the USA and, therefore, "Australia's alliance with the US has been and will remain an important element in the government's decision-making process in Iraq".
With Washington facing "strategic failure" in the "central front" of its global "war on terror" unless it can rapidly increase the number of non-US combat troops in Iraq, it seems highly unlikely that Bush and Rumsfeld will not press Howard for greater Australian involvement while they are in Canberra. And with Howard committed to demonstrating that Australia is Washington's "most loyal ally", only a fool would believe that his government would turn down such a demand.
From Green Left Weekly, September 24, 2003.
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