On June 18, Prime Minister John Howard addressed the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a government-sponsored think tank dedicated to developing Australian foreign policy. Howard outlined his vision of an aggressive militaristic foreign policy for Australia. In particular, he presented a defence of the Coalition government's support for the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. Not unexpectedly, given the government's history of dishonesty in the "war on terror", it was a pack of lies. Green Left Weekly's Rohan Pearce looks at Howard's "justifications" for this brutal, illegal occupation.
Howard said: "I would remind those who now want to rewrite history that disagreement over the war centred on how the international community should respond to Iraq's continued non-compliance with UN resolutions and defiance of the UN's authority, not whether the regime had weapons of mass destruction."
Howard asserts that Iraq defied the UN, however his claim is undermined by the fact that, in compliance with UN Security Council resolutions, Saddam Hussein's regime had clearly destroyed the remnants of its Western-backed 1980s WMD programs.
Despite claims to the contrary by Howard and US President George Bush, during the UN-mandated weapons inspections in 2002 and at the beginning of 2003, Hans Blix, who headed the inspections, admitted that Iraq cooperated with the process. In a February 14, 2003 report to the UN Security Council, Blix stated that the Iraqi government was allowing "access to all sites and assistance to UNMOVIC in the establishment of the necessary infrastructure", including sites "that had never been declared or inspected, as well as to presidential sites and private residences".
In a March 7, 2003, address to the council, Blix confirmed that Iraqi cooperation with the inspections was "proactive". "There is 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 in 1991", he stated.
"One can hardly avoid the impression", Blix concluded, "that, after a period of somewhat reluctant cooperation, there has been an acceleration of initiatives from the Iraqi side since the end of January."
As for Howard's claim that the invasion was not about "whether the regime had weapons of mass destruction" — on March 14, 2003, he told the National Press Club a very different story. "Well I would have to accept", said Howard, "that if Iraq had genuinely disarmed, I couldn't justify on its own a military invasion of Iraq to change the regime. I've never advocated that."
"There was in fact a shared assessment by political parties on both sides of the debate [Labor and the Coalition] that Iraq still maintained WMD programs."
In this part of his speech, Howard made an accurate observation — the leadership of the Labor Party went along with the lie that Iraq was a "threat" because of its (non-existent) WMD. Many in the anti-war movement, including Green Left Weekly, pointed to the evidence that Iraq's WMD had been destroyed by the 1991 war and the intensive UN weapons inspections conducted until the US began bombing Iraq again in 1998.
This evidence included the claims by Scott Ritter — a senior investigator in the UN weapons inspections that followed the 1991 Gulf War — that inspections had verified Iraq had dismantled its WMD programs.
When making the case for war, Howard and Bush were happy to cite the testimony of Iraqi general Hussein Kamel, who defected in 1995 and revealed the extent of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs. However, neither Howard nor Bush admitted that Kamel also told interrogators that Iraq had destroyed its WMD after the 1991 war.
William Arkin, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, noted in a March 9, 2003, opinion piece: "Incredible as it may seem, given all the talk by the administration — including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's discourse last week about continuing Iraqi deception — there is simply no hard intelligence of any such Iraqi weapons."
Members of the US Air Force who had worked on the invasion plan revealed to Arkin that there wasn't a "single confirmed biological or chemical target on their lists" for US attack.
Of course, even if Iraq had possessed remnants of its WMD arsenal, the idea that it was a "threat" to the US was ludicrous. By the time of last year's invasion, the aftermath of two wars (the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and the 1991 Gulf War), over a decade of vicious UN economic sanctions and regular bombing raids by US and British warplanes in the late '90s had reduced Iraq's armed forces to a third of their pre-1991 level and totally impoverished the country.
Just one example of the devastation of Iraq is the mass-murder of Iraqi children by the 13 years of economic sanctions. In a 1998 speech, Dennis Halliday, United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq from September 1997 to September 1998, revealed: "The World Health Organisation confirmed to me only 10 days ago that the monthly rate of sanctions-related child mortality for children under five years of age is from 5000-6000 per month. They believe this is an underestimate, since in rural parts of Iraq children are not registered at birth, and if they die within six weeks of birth, they are never registered."
The sanctions had an impact on Iraqi society so devastating that in April 1998 UNICEF reported that at least half-a-million Iraqi children had died as a result between 1991 and 1998. Yet Howard would have us believe this country represented a threat to neighbouring nations and "world peace"!
According to Howard, "getting rid of Saddam's odious regime was the right thing to do — right for the world's long-term security, right for Australia's national interest and right for the future of the Iraqi people, who deserve an opportunity for a life lived in hope under a democratic, lawful regime, rather than a life of hopelessness under a brutal tyranny."
While many Iraqis welcomed the end of Hussein's tyranny, the US has replaced it with another tyrannical regime. One Iraqi who experienced firsthand the true face of Iraq's new "democratic, lawful regime" is Hiadar Saber al Aboodi. A prisoner at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, he described his torture at the hands of US soldiers in a sworn statement obtained by the Washington Post: "We stood in the hallway ... and they started taking off our clothes one after another... They were laughing, taking pictures, and they were stepping on our hands with their feet... they forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees. And we had to bark like a dog and if we didn't do that, they start hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything."
The abuse Aboodi suffered was mild compared to that of other inmates at Abu Ghraib, some of whom were raped and at least one of whom was murdered. The brutality at Abu Ghraib is not isolated. The occupation regime has closed down newspapers that criticise it, arrested and imprisoned tens of thousands of Iraqis without charges or trial, and its troops have fired repeatedly on unarmed Iraqi protesters.
"Today, the challenge is to support the Iraqi people themselves through their new, sovereign government after the 30th of June, in their efforts to build a stable, secure, democratic Iraq — a country at peace with itself and with its neighbours."
Iraq will be neither sovereign nor democratic following the June 30 "handover of power" to Washington's handpicked pack of Iraqi puppets. The new Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, was for many years in the pay of the CIA.
Top posts in Iraqi ministries have been stacked with Washington-friendly bureaucrats who are unlikely to challenge the interests of their former paymasters. If this wasn't enough to ensure that the interests of the White House and its allies prevailed in "post-occupation" Iraq, commissions established by the outgoing US viceroy, Paul Bremer, will take on many of the powers of Iraqi ministries. They are staffed by US "consultants" and have terms that extend beyond the 18-month term of Iraq's "interim government".
The "interim government" will have no control over the US-led occupation forces which will remain in Iraq, including no power to compel them to leave the country.
Already, Iraq's shattered post-war economy is dominated by US corporations, particularly since Bremer illegally signed into law a restructure of Iraq's economy that allows foreign-owned firms to dominate in most sectors.
"To give up on Iraq would be to create a haven for extremists; a sanctuary from which they can spread their ideology of totalitarianism and terror. This alone makes it vital that Australian forces remain in Iraq until their task is completed."
What Howard and his co-thinkers in Canberra, Washington and London really fear is another defeat for imperialism, the impact of which would be on a par with the defeat suffered by imperialism in the Vietnam War.
The victory of the national liberation forces in Vietnam was a massive set-back for First World warmongers — it made it politically difficult to send troops in to wage war against other Third World nations and spurred on other national liberation struggles. A defeat in Iraq would be a defeat for the goal of creating a "new American century" of unchallenged US political and economic domination.
From Green Left Weekly, June 30, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.