We Now Know About Going to War in Iraq

Contents 

1. Introduction
2. Essay: We Now Know About Going to War in Iraq
3. Nautilus invites your response

Introduction

Garry Woodard from Melbourne University writes that “going to war usually involves secrecy and deception”. Referring to the Australian decisions to join both the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, Woodard notes that “we nevertheless now know a lot“, despite the fact that “no government has been more secretive than the Howard government, which is an astonishing regression”. Woodard compares Australian decision-making in the two cases, and also compares Australian decision-making over Iraq with that of the United States and Britain. “As never before”, writes Woodard, “the Iraq war has raised questions about whether governments lie and can be trusted by the people.” Woodard concludes by arguing that “Iraq strongly reinforces the most serious lesson of Vietnam, that the royal prerogative, or executive privilege, to decide on going to war which the Prime Minister exercises is an anomaly and should be made subject to rules and conventions.”

Essay: We Now Know About Going to War in Iraq

How and why did Australia get involved in the war against Iraq?

How and why sound like and usually are different subjects, but not in the two cases in which Australia has gone to war alongside the United States without broad international authority, Vietnam and Iraq.

The similarities in decision-making by the two prime ministers, John Howard's hero Robert Gordon Menzies and Howard himself, are marked, while the differences in the two situations are also illuminating. Can we learn from history's lessons? In what looked like a pre-emptive strike against historians of the wars and analysts of decision-making, Howard rejected such comparisons as politically inspired, historically inaccurate and designed not to help but to hinder.

Howard’s pre-emptive strike did not succeed. The preface to the Australian Institute of International Affairs’ (AIIA) latest evaluation of Australia in World Affairs, now in its sixth decade, begins:

Since the era of the Vietnam war, foreign policy issues have seldom been as prominent on the political agenda as they were during the five-year period covered by this volume.[1]

Eminent war historian and adviser[2] Professor Robert J. O'Neill delivered a powerful address, to which we shall return, at the Lowy Institute, the 2006 Lowy Lecture on Australia in the world, making comparisons between the Vietnam war, in which he had served, and Iraq. My 2004 book Asian Alternatives: Australia's Vietnam decision and lessons of going to war was directed to studying Australian decision-making on Vietnam and other South-east Asian conflicts, and provides the basis for comparisons which I make here with Iraq.[3] University of NSW and the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) Professor James Cotton judges that the common features of the two wars which the book notes show that ‘very little had been learned about the management of the alliance with the US.’[4]

Howard's pre-emptive strike was not by intercontinental missile. There has always been a flourishing literature in the US seeking to learn from the lessons of Vietnam, especially as Iraq degenerates into civil war. On two occasions in 2007, George Bush has also made the comparison, in decidedly politically divisive words. They would have been unwelcome to Howard, particularly as on the second occasion, in his recent address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Bush raised the spectre of boat people. All the indicators are that the Howard government would not be in the Liberal tradition in granting asylum to refugees. Comparing Iraq with Vietnam is the one public path down which Howard is unlikely to follow Bush.

Penetrating the veil of secrecy

Going to war usually involves secrecy and deception. These features were apparent in the Menzies government's decisions to go to war in Vietnam in 1964-5. We are still making discoveries about this period. No government, however, has been more secretive than the Howard government, which is an astonishing regression. Nevertheless it is possible to penetrate the veil of secrecy, even about Australia's bit role, by making use of what has emerged overseas, through publications, parliamentary enquiry, investigative journalism and leaks, about how the leaders of America and Britain, Bush and Tony Blair, decided to go to war against Iraq.

Revelations will proceed apace as the participants depart the scene and their intimates publish their memoirs. An early and admirable account from within the British Labour Party is The Point of Departure, by Robin Cook, Leader of the House of Commons and former Foreign Secretary, who resigned over the war. The British ambassador in Washington from 1998 -2003, Christopher Meyer, published his memoirs, DC Confidential, with official approval, but to a chorus of criticism[5], because of his below stairs criticism of his Prime Minister. There is no reason to doubt their accuracy, but they are self-indulgent and Meyer is patently aggrieved at having been cut out of the action. In 2007 former CIA director George Tenet published At the Center of the Storm: my years in the CIA. Four years in the making, his memoirs have been dismissed as self-serving, and written to defend the President and settle scores. However, they do of course contain some useful information on the CIA. More is expected of the promised memoirs of former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The three governments forming the coalition of the willing practised deception about when decisions were taken, and why Iraq’s cruel dictator Saddam Hussein had to be removed. The age of spin and elite manipulation in democracies has refined the art of misrepresentation, though often with exaggerated and emotive overtones, to obfuscate, to engender fear, and to bludgeon doubt and dissent. Deception has long-term effects in lowering standards in public life and diminishing democracy.

We now know

We nevertheless now know a lot. I adopt this expression in the sense that it is used as the title of his reflections on the Cold War, ascribing the blame to Stalin, by American historian John Lewis Gaddis, who explained that he was writing about the current state of knowledge in 1997, and not providing all the definitive answers that would emerge over time.

Al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11. America was outraged and transformed. On the evening of that day a shaken President Bush declared that the perpetrators would be brought to justice and no distinction would be made between them and those who harbor them. In an Address to the Nation on 20 September, Bush wrapped himself in Old Glory and declared war on terror. He issued an ultimatum to the Taliban in Afghanistan to deliver up the terrorists. ‘We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorists …You are with us, or you are with the terrorists… Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war and we know that God is not neutral between them’.  

Within the Bush administration there was a strongly held view, which immediately found expression, that the US should go on from Afghanistan to eliminate Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. At its heart was Vice President Dick Cheney, whose past political positions and business interests had brought him into close contact with conservative Australian politicians, including Howard.

Investigative reporter Bob Woodward's inside account of the Bush administration's decision-making, Plan of Attack, describes how Iraq was Cheney's first priority, as unfinished business from the first Gulf War, in 1991, when he was Secretary of Defense. Cheney saw how existing US military operations to enforce ‘no fly’ zones in Iraq and the existence of a 1998 Congressional resolution urging the removal of Saddam Hussein and promotion of a democratic regime could be turned to advantage.  

According to Woodward, and Tenet, Cheney was amongst the first to articulate the doctrine of pre-emption, to deal with the worst-case scenario of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons. This was to become a staple of Howard’s presentations. But, as the strategists have been unanimous in pointing out, the pre-requisite for justifiable pre-emption is accurate intelligence. The intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which was to be removed by pre-emptive action, was ‘dead wrong’. Further, Iraq did not figure in the CIA's nuclear proliferation scenario, which was from Pakistan’s A Q. Khan, who was put under house arrest in 2004, to customers in Iran, Libya, North Korea and Southeast Asia.

These convictions of the strong silent man of the Bush administration provided essential ballast for a disparate but highly articulate group known as the neoconservatives (neocons), or the self-styled Vulcans[6], to shape policy. They were linked with influential conservative think tanks and occupied key positions at the second level in government departments, especially the Department of Defense (DoD), as well as the White House. The neocons were ideologically charged believers in American exceptionalism, America as ‘God's own country’ and ‘the light on the hill’, and in putting predominant power to use, in one way or another. In Washington in 1991, one of them asked me ‘America and China: who needs the other more?’  

They also saw 9/11 as providing an opportunity to link Iraq's Saddam Hussein with Al-Qaeda. He had been their target from the first days of the administration, for which we have the testimony of two well-placed members of the administration who left it early, counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.[7] Tenet describes how the link was made by Richard Perle, known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’, to him on 12 September 2001, and then by other neocons in the following week, until Bush declared priority for Afghanistan and ordered a deferment.

Linking Saddam Hussein to terrorism and to Al-Qaeda would provide the justification for war. It became crucial to converting Iraq's alleged possession of, or intention to acquire, WMD into a direct and imminent threat, which had to be removed by a pre-emptive strike. The link was spurious. In Australia the Labor opposition continually queried it. The intelligence agencies denied it, but were ignored.[8] They could not really stop their political leaders from saying and conveying that there was a link. Bush seems to have simplified the proposition in his own mind to Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, terrorised the Shi'ites and the Kurds, therefore he was a terrorist. 

There were a range of motives for wanting to attack Iraq, not all of which could be agreed or acknowledged. A leading neocon, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, confessed with famous candour, in an interview for Vanity Fair, in May 2003, that WMD was an excuse of convenience. All could agree on it. It would have looked easy to sell because Saddam Hussein was a vicious dictator who had form. He had once come close to developing a nuclear capability, he had used chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurdish minority, and he had obstructed the efforts of United Nations (UN) weapons inspectors to find and destroy WMD as part of the sanctions regime after the first Gulf War. In those days, he was responsible for an assassination plot against President George H W Bush.

Many Republicans, most ardently neocons, had long seethed over Democrat President Bill Clinton's foreign policy as humiliatingly weak, and no more than ‘global social work’[9]. They wanted to demonstrate American military power, resolution, and willingness to act unilaterally. Eliminating Saddam Hussein, a former ally, almost certainly would have to be by force. In August 2001, the CIA's Iraq operations group concluded that they could not get rid of him by covert action, for which Tenet uses the term ‘immaculate deception’. Neocons had thought the CIA wimpish, but their Iraqi front men, who wanted American boots on the ground, were pleased. 

Amongst the neocons’ strategic objectives, one was that Iraq seemed to offer an attractive prospect for establishing a more secure base structure in the Middle East than the one based in Saudi Arabia, which had continued after the Gulf War. Bush spoke simply of the fight for freedom, but ‘the vision thing’, as his father called it, was more sweeping, and even more ideological, for many neocons. As it was described by the former senior CIA analyst on the Middle East, Paul Pillar, in Foreign Affairs, they aimed ‘to shake up the sclerotic power structure of the Middle East and hasten the spread of more liberal politics and economics in the region’.

It was hoped that regional change would broaden acceptance of Israel and thus ensure its security and remove the prospect of another Arab-Israel war, which could be nuclear. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein took on a certain urgency because of a fear that the UN sanctions regime instituted in 1990 was crumbling, and that Russia and China stood in the wings waiting to exploit the end of the sanctions regime. 

Gaining control of Iraq's great oil reserves also seemed attractive. Bush and Cheney have backgrounds in oil. That this was an objective was confirmed on a recent visit to Australia by another former key CIA officer in the war on terror, Michael Scheuer. Further confirmation from a more prestigious source appears in US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan's new book The Age of Indulgence: Adventures in a New and World:

I am saddened that it is politically inexpedient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

Hagan and Bickerton see the US military as having become ‘and a global oil protection Force’.[10]

Most of these American motivations made an appearance in Australian, and British, intelligence assessments, according to Andrew Wilkie, an ONA analyst who resigned in protest at his government's public justification of the Iraq war[11]. There was not however a formal and comprehensive assessment by the Australian intelligence community (AIC) on the politically sensitive issue of the neocons’ aims and influence. Almost certainly the Joint Intelligence Committee in London (JIC(L)) did not write one either, for Blair and his circle, which included the JIC Chairman, were confident that they understood the power structure in Washington. In any case, members of the Anglo-Saxon intelligence community (UKUSA) do not acknowledge that they prepare assessments on each other and certainly do not exchange them.

The Australian government would have seen most of the neocons’ aspirations as legitimate, if they could be achieved at acceptable cost. A couple were tricky. War to get control of oil is a problematic aim for a resource rich middle path to endorse. Australia was at a full participant in supporting the sanctions regime, but it emerged later that the Australian Wheat Board was a major contributor to its crumbling. However, in toto the American aims were, and should have been seen as, over-ambitious and unrealistic, as showing scant regard for world opinion or even allies, and as smacking of hubris. They did not provide an acceptable justification for war against Iraq.

Insouciance about the use of force and the diversity of motives for doing so aroused fears of a return to a Hobbesian world. The license which would be given by an Iraq war to autocracies with an imperialist past appalled many. John Killick, former British ambassador to the Soviet Union and NATO and standard-bearer for Atlantic unity, was amongst those who wrote extensively about this. Acclaimed Australian strategist Coral Bell did too, quoting Shakespeare[12]:

O it is excellent
to have a giant's strength
but it is tyrannous
to use it as a giant.

University of Melbourne Professor John Langmore’s valuable book Dealing with America, describes the damage done to the post-war system created by the United Nations Charter, in the drafting of which Australia played a distinguished role. His book contains many excellent points and quotes, including one we shall the note later by another distinguished British diplomat, Brian Barder.

Blair and humanitarian intervention -- a new norm?

By the time of 9/11 Blair had had considerable experience of managing the trans-Atlantic special relationship, and had developed an activist approach of seeking to influence the US, including on the Arab Israeli dispute. Blair and Clinton together had taken air action against Iraq in ‘Operation Desert Fox’ in December 1998. Anthony Seldon, in Blair, says the operation gave Blair international prominence and did wonders for his self-confidence in using military force for moral purposes. Seldon adds:

World opinion was not yet ready, however, for them to attempt to take a more full-blooded path, such as assassinate the Iraqi leader. ‘Only after 9/11 did Bush have public support for action against Saddam’, Clinton’s national security adviser Sandy Berger said, adding ‘even though Saddam was not connected with that tragedy’.

When Bush replaced Clinton, the latter advised Blair to hug Bush close.

Blair put a special slant on removing Saddam Hussein. He had early fixed on Saddam Hussein as a desirable target of his doctrine of humanitarian intervention. He first made his mark in the United States with a speech on the concept in Chicago in 1999. Blair seemingly believed that Britain had a Christian mission to civilise the savages, taking up the white man's burden to dislodge oppressive regimes and support replacement governments until they could take their place in a globalising world economy.

The Chicago speech was not written by Blair's advisers, amongst his powerful ministerial staff or in the bureaucracy. The author was an eminent academic, then Professor of War Studies at King's College Lawrence Freedman. It came as a surprise to his advisers and officials.

Blair then had a formative experience, in which once again he did not rely on officials, in pulling off a successful intervention by NATO in Kosovo, despite Clinton's reluctance to put American boots on the ground. The experiences bolstered his self-confidence. Seldon describes the effect of Kosovo:

It took him to the very brink of his self-belief and his ability to endure stress. He had never before felt so much weight on his shoulders. The stakes were very high, and if it had gone wrong the consequences for him, and for the refugees, were almost beyond contemplation. But he trusted his instincts and he came through. Very few had shared his sense of certainty…. It was to this tight-knit group that he would turn again in future foreign crises. No previous single episode had so challenged him and no other test provided the same powerful boost to his self-belief.[13]

These words, and other analyses that I include about Blair by his biographers, ministers and officials, are quoted because there are parallels with Howard which make them instructive. There are differences which are equally instructive. According to Seldon, for instance, the Kosovo experience sowed in Blair's mind a seed of mistrust of American decision-making and the conviction that he had to inject himself into it.

Blair’s concept of humanitarian intervention brought together idealists on the left and neoconservatives on the right, in an evangelical cause. Realists were sceptical, and thought that in most instances intervention would prove counter-productive. A notable spokesman for the realist school is Australian Owen Harries, who edited the influential Washington magazine The National Interest. The great majority of nations, whether they know it or not, are Westphalians, supporting the sanctity of the nation state, and. rules for the legitimate use of force laid down in the UN Charter. International opinion has moved to conceding that under proper international authority humanitarian intervention might be necessary to avert imminent disaster.

Humanitarian intervention, with the emphasis on the adjective, must be clearly distinguished from the intervention in Iraq. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan reacted to international concern that NATO's intervention in Kosovo had not had Security Council authorisation. His and international concern led to an experts' report, The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which Canada commissioned. That resulted in the adoption at the World Summit in mid-September 2005 of acceptance of international responsibility through the Security Council to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and wars against humanity. However R2P had nothing to do with the war against Iraq, which Canada did not support.

Blair must have believed that Saddam Hussein was such an attractive target for humanitarian intervention that the operation would attract a broad coalition. This hope proved illusory. Both he and Bush believed that Saddam’s forceful displacement and the emergence of a viable successor regime would prove a lay-down misere. From go to whoa, however, Iraq has been a political failure and a setback for the cause of humanitarian intervention.

Blair’s Chicago doctrine, about which he is unrepentant, nevertheless still resonates. The mistake, New York Times columnist David Brooks, putting a conservative case, suggests, may have lain in trying it in the Middle East.[14] He argues ingeniously that the alternative to successful humanitarian intervention is Samuel Huntington's clash of civilisations and cultures. Iraq may yet prove that, with the extra dimension that in parts of the Middle East, as in parts of the Balkans, blood feuds are tenacious and memories of imperialist occupations are long. This is not an attractive prospect for Australia, whose leaders have roundly rejected Huntington's thesis, and his description of Australia as a ‘torn country’.

Howard and the East Timor intervention

In an amazing coincidence, in 1999 Australia's intervention in East Timor provided Howard with a very similar experience to Blair’s in Kosovo. The similarities and differences tell us much about the two men.

The successful Australian-led intervention in East Timor, which, unlike Kosovo, was authorised by the UN Security Council, affected Howard in very much the same way as Blair in Seldon's description was affected by Kosovo. It was a turning point in his self-confidence, and in his confidence in the use of force and relations with the military. In launching My Story, the autobiography of Gen. Peter Cosgrove, who commanded the international force in East Timor, and went on to become Chief of the Defence Force (CDF), on 20 October 2006, Howard spoke in moving terms of the weight on his shoulders during a pre-invasion one-hour briefing by Cosgrove and the Director of the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO), Frank Lewincamp.

Experience in the lead up to the intervention had forced Howard to face up to the reliability of the US. Howard, like Blair, had wanted American boots on the ground, and had been unsettled by Clinton's seeming lack of interest and unwillingness to stand up to the Pentagon. However, when by happy chance Clinton did have to give the matter his personal attention because he and Howard were to meet in Auckland at an APEC conference in September 1999, Howard got all he wanted, except boots on the ground, and everyone now recognizes that would have been unwise.[15]  

Howard was happy to bask in the praise of liberals for bringing freedom to East Timor, which had aroused intense emotion in Australia, but he did not share Blair's ardour for humanitarian intervention. Although the liberation of their country was a triumph for the long-suffering East Timorese, Howard did not start from a humanitarian impulse or desire to see the East Timorese independent. Just at the time of Kosovo on the other side of the world, his government was opposing international and domestic pressures to insert a peacekeeping force between the marauding Indonesian Army (TNI) and its militias and the hapless Timorese, Downer deriding the advocates of it as ‘bunyip Napoleons’. Howard began by seeking a more defensible status for East Timor within the Indonesian Republic, which would remove it as a bilateral problem. He was taken by surprise by new Indonesian President J. B. Habibie’s irrational reaction, feeling under pressure from all sides, which set in train a course of events in which independence became an option. Under increasing domestic pressure, he then proceeded pragmatically when it became apparent, in the words of one of his senior officials, that ‘we might swing it’.[16]

Following a successful outcome, Howard in effect affirmed Labor’s defence policy of giving priority to the close defence of Australia and stability of its region, the ‘arc of instability’, from East Timor through the South Pacific. Blair might see his country as Greece to America's Rome, as many of his predecessors had done. Howard's vision was more modest. In an interview with the Bulletin Howard portrayed Australia as having shown that it is uniquely placed to take the lead in peacekeeping operations in Asia because of the combination of its geographical situation and its values as ‘a Western European civilisation with strong links to North America’. Whatever distinction between a Western European heritage and American values these words implied was negated by Howard allowing himself to be portrayed as America's ‘deputy sheriff’, which was contrary to Australia's regional interests. 

Although the Australian government’s motive for intervention in East Timor was not humanitarian intervention, over the next few years it became apparent that Australia was saddled with the responsibilities which accrue from it. Although there was an international presence, the essential responsibilities for maintaining law and order, nurturing the political process, and rehabilitation, all part of nation-building, fell on Australia. It was a daunting prospect, even though Australia had volunteers and experts with local knowledge and commitment. Timor has demonstrated the need to be sensitive to a new government’s need to have control of its resources, notably oil. These might have provided lessons for Iraq, demonstrating three challenges of nation-building and the need to think about them on from the start.

April foolishness

Blair had rushed to Washington after 9/11 and had heard Bush describe Britain as America's greatest ally in telling Congress on 20 September of his intention to declare war of terrorism.  

Bush, as a realist, who had opposed nation-building in the election campaign, seems to have been lukewarm about the neocons' advice to change the Iraqi regime before 9/11. After the unexpectedly quick military campaign in Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban, who had, however, refused to surrender Osama bin Laden, the myriad vistas opened up by regime change in Iraq and the certainty and forcefulness of the neocons were irresistible. He enquired about the state of contingency planning for invading Iraq on 21 November 2001.

Between then and Blair's visit in April, important political developments included Bush targeting the ‘axis of evil’, Iran, Iraq and North Korea, in his State of the Union speech on 29 January 2002, Cheney's Middle East tour in March seeking support for an invasion of Iraq, and military planning developments, which included a presentation to Bush on 3 March by General Tommy Franks, Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander in Tampa, Florida. He then went on to brief his generals at Ramstein, Germany. 

When Bush and Blair met at Bush’s ranch in Crawford in April 2002, there was no impediment to them agreeing on the need to remove Saddam Hussein. Sharing a Christian ethic, they nevertheless were not squeamish about methods. Indeed, as Blair was en route, an adviser, Robert Cooper, expounded a brutal creed in the Observer:

We need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle we must also use the laws of the jungle.[17]

These words bluntly convey that in the decisions to attack Iraq there was arrogance of power, in the parlance of Vietnam critic Senator William Fulbright, and tenacious cultural, and, many accused, racial superiority.

 A week earlier, on 1 April 2002, in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann had laid out the administration’s scenario for regime change in Iraq with astonishing accuracy, and had noted that one of the strategic aims was to demonstrate that it would take pre-emptive action. As retired diplomat and intelligence chief Gordon Jockel noted, in a submission to a parliamentary enquiry by the Jull committee, this article would have been brought to Canberra’s attention with the Embassy’s comments.

In anticipation of agreement on regime change in Iraq, Blair was briefed to tell Bush of Britain's conditions for participation. Blair asked that efforts be made to construct a coalition, that the Israel-Palestine crisis be ‘quiescent’, and that ‘options for action to eliminate Iraq’s WMD through UN weapons inspectors’ should be exhausted. Although later British documents described Blair as stating these as conditions, Meyer speculates (some of the leaders’ conversations were one on one) that Blair stated them as aspirations only. Meyer paints a devastating portrait of his Prime Minister, alleging that Blair did not have Margaret Thatcher's backbone or mastery of detail, was too eager to please, and was too easily seduced by the aura of the White House. Blair’s colleague Cook makes a similar assessment:

He is programmed to respect power not to rebel against it. Psychologically, Blair is ill-equipped to repeat Harold Wilson’s refusal of US demands for British troops in Vietnam…the real reason he went to war was that he found it easier to resist the public opinion of Britain than the request of the US President.

Meyer notes the significance of a speech by Blair when he was at Crawford, advocating regime change and the right of pre-emption, specifically against Saddam Hussein. Pre-emption then was the theme of Bush’s speech at West Point in June. In September it reappeared in the administration's The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, described by Harries as the most important foreign policy statement since the enunciation of the Truman doctrine of containment in 1947.[18] It takes the same view as Howard about the likely longevity of American world dominance and rejects the view of realists, like Harries, who argue that counter balances will inevitably emerge and cannot be nipped in the bud.

Meyer considers that the totality of Blair's April speech did not attract the attention it deserved. Perhaps this was because it was delivered in Texas, Meyer singles out the following words in it as most significant and presumably as laying down his guidelines: ‘when America is fighting for (democratic) values, then, however tough, we fight with her - no grandstanding, no offering implausible & impractical advice from the sidelines’. This sentiment of positive loyalty was incompatible with stating ‘conditions’. They stood little chance anyway because both concept and content were anathema to the neocons.

Cheney’s chief aide, Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, later to achieve a measure of notoriety in the Iraq context, would say to Meyer that Britain ‘was the only ally that mattered’: Britain provided critical base facilities in Cyprus and Diego Garcia. But, as Seldon notes, Libby was one of ‘many influential voices around Bush (who) sneered at Blair’s idealism (and) would jibe “Oh dear, we’d better not do that or we might upset the Prime Minister”’. There is no hint that the Americans said anything similar about Howard. On the contrary, in 2002 Australian Ambassador to the US Michael Thawley said, as Langmore quotes, that ‘ Australia had better access to the Bush administration than any other country’ (including the UK), and alluded to a ‘similarity of political positions-ideology’.

Australia tacks on and invokes ANZUS

Howard had had a consistent view since he came to power that Australia should be alongside the world's only megapower and that this would serve Australia's security and economic interests, as well as conservative political fortunes which are always close to his heart. He had been unsettled by his inability to establish a close relationship with Clinton, and the advent of Bush offered a promise of congenial certainties.

Howard was a paid-up member of the war club from the start. He was in Washington at the time of 9/11, scheduled on the following day to address Congress to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ANZUS treaty. In three hours on 10 September with Bush, who had attended a barbecue at the Australian Residence, he had been captivated by Bush’s personality and beautiful mind. This was apparent to his colleagues and staff on his return to Australia. The warmth of his reception was very different from his perfunctory treatment by Clinton, who much preferred his Labor predecessor Paul Keating. (However, despite their mutual affection, recorded by Keating's chronicler Don Watson, Clinton can find no room to mention Keating in his 762 page autobiography).

On 9/11 Howard was much affected by being on the spot, as an honored guest. We have here an example of a phenomenon frequently noted by historians[19], how important atmospherics can be in the decision to go to war. On 17 December 1964, a Saturday morning just before the Christmas break, Menzies in the presence of a handful of ministers took the decision in principle to put a battalion into Vietnam. He was basking in the warm glow of having been tendered the previous evening a dinner to celebrate his 70th birthday, 15 years as prime minister, and an election victory. In 1969, in an oral history for the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, he recalled, seemingly accurately on the papers available, that the decision was taken in 5 minutes.

After Bush's speech on the evening of 9/11, Howard immediately responded with revealing public statements, committing Australia to play a part in hunting down terrorists and hinting at knowledge of multiple targets. He said Bush’s statement was ‘absolutely understandable and reasonable…you are all aware of where some of the suggestions lie’ (which seems to anticipate more than just Afghanistan). On 12 September he equated the new war against terrorism with the Cold War, (but soon changed to the more advantageous tack that 9/11 had introduced a new era for which history was irrelevant). Yet if the world was new, his responses were tried and true. He said on 14 September that Australia ‘stands ready to cooperate within the limits of its capability concerning any response that the United States may regard as necessary in consultation with her allies’.

Since October 2002 Richard Woolcott, a leading critic of the war and former Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), has repeatedly expressed his view of the significance of Howard’s choice on 14 September of the word ‘any’. Alleging ‘sustained deception’, he says it demonstrates that from the outset Howard had decided in principle ‘to join the invasion in Iraq if the Bush Administration went down this route’. Woolcott’s many articles and addresses asserting this did not elicit a specific denial from the government. However, Jim Hacker’s ‘first rule of politics is Never Believe Anything Until It’s Been Officially Denied’.[20] While journalists have written that the use of the formula ‘within the limits of our/its capability’ indicates there was no commitment, this looks like falling for Prime Ministerial spin. Similar reservations are stock statements in the context of decisions already made to go to war, as the Vietnam record shows.

While Afghanistan, to which Australia contributed 200 troops, was to be the first target, Howard would surely have been briefed in Washington on the possibility of war against Iraq. His Ambassador and former senior adviser (international), Thawley, who now is a funds manager in Washington, is often paid the compliment of having been as close as any ambassador to the neocons. His description of the special relationship points to Howard having no problem with the neocons’ agenda. As the ides of March 2003 approached, Thawley delivered his own personal ultimatum to Saddam Hussein on Fox.

Thawley's consistent influence can be contrasted with the way his British colleague felt that he was edged to the periphery by Blair's inner circle in Downing Street, who took over dealing with the White House, and always seemed to be on a trans-Atlantic flight or the telephone hot-line. However, Meyer can capture the allure of getting on the inside of a highly secretive operation:

I had a handful of especially important contacts in the higher echelons of the US administration -- people at the head of planning for the Iraq campaign. I was talking to the highly sensitive. Absolute trust was the indispensable ingredient in our relationship. After each conversation, one of them would always say ‘don't get me burned’.

Both Blair and Howard sought to get close to Bush and stay there, but the former had a vision of broadening Bush’s agenda, while the latter sought to convey ‘a simple essence’. Howard had the realistic aspirations of a minor player. Insofar as he had a specific objective, it was for the US to fast track a free trade agreement, about which Thawley had always been optimistic. This accorded with the mercantilist cast of his foreign policy, and emphasis on bilateral ties. It had been an article of faith for both countries that the security alliance should be kept separate from economic issues, which are often a cause of friction. The FTA and issues which arose relating to Australia's wheat trade with Iraq marked the abandonment of this tradition.

The Crawford meting and the large issues which Blair raised there would have been covered in Howard’s brief for his visit to London soon after for the Queen Mother's funeral. Blair may well have asked Howard to support his three ‘conditions’, but if he did it seems certain that he was disappointed. Howard was determined not to get out in front of Bush, particularly on Israel and the Middle East peace plan.

A(NZ)US

On his way home from Washington on 12 September, from Air Force Two ‘high above the Pacific Ocean’ (the atmospherics were still potent), Howard telephoned Foreign Minister Alexander Downer about extending the geographical ambit of the ANZUS treaty worldwide in the war against terrorism. It was a heartwarming gesture when a wave of sympathy went out towards Americans. Asked whether he or the American Ambassador, Tom Schieffer, had thought of it first, Howard offered the curious explanation that they had sort of thought of it together, which leaves open the possibility that the suggestion came from the Ambassador. In a thorough and perceptive study of this period[21], Australian journalist Robert Garran attributed the decision to Howard, noting that it was smack in the middle of the Liberal tradition of using the alliance for party political gain. However, this doesn't exclude an American initiative as there are precedents for Americans showing the way to do this.

The significant decision clearly involved little deliberation, although Downer tried to suggest otherwise. The extension of the treaty to support Americans worldwide signed up Australia to the targets then on America’s agenda, the numbers to be written on the cheque later. It anticipated the US administration’s demand to be ‘with us’.

Such a commitment to what is now an essentially bilateral arrangement obviously can carry military and a great many political costs, ranging from perceptions of Australia as having ceded some of its independence to making Australia vulnerable to American pressure to be part of its future misadventures. The disturbing possibilities include an American attack on Iran, with which Australia had a much better relationship than the US in the years following the fall of the Shah, and being caught up in American policies based on regarding China as its strategic competitor. Vulnerable areas for Australia are the Taiwan Straits, where Australian governments for 45 years took the view that ANZUS did not require Australia to become involved militarily, and theatre missile defence, where Australia is already tied in to a degree by the presence of the joint facilities and a research contribution. It provides the US with a tool to put economic pressure on China through a form of arms race, akin to Star Wars’ destabilising effect on the Soviet Union, and also psychological pressure through encirclement, especially if, or when, India is included.

Military planning generates its own momentum

In December 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then Bush received Franks’s preliminary commander’s estimate, followed by the first workable’, in Tenet's words, Iraq war plan put to Bush on 1 February 2002 and successive plans through to Bush's final approval on 6 September.[22] One of the variables from the outset was the degree of international support and involvement. The assumptions about levels of allied support ranged from ‘robust’ through ‘reduced’ to nil. If the American military had their way, they would operate unilaterally, but pressures come from the politicians to make room for allies.

From quite early in 2002 the administration asked how soon the military could move. In June after a meeting with Bush Franks told his commanders that Bush was becoming impatient. On 1 August he instructed them to be prepared to attack immediately if so ordered. However, in the following month the starting date was set at 10 March 2003. It slipped a couple of weeks just before the operation was finally mounted.

Australian personnel were involved in planning in CENTCOM, to which a Colonel had been posted earlier, for the invasion of Afghanistan from October 2001. With that war quickly over, planning for the next war in Iraq was pretty much a seamless web. It is acknowledged publicly that Australia participated in the war planning from July 2002. Thawley in claiming an active Australian diplomacy said in the Sir Robert Menzies Lecture on 4 November 2005 that ‘on Iraq, we set out clearly what forces we would provide, what we would be prepared to do and what we would not…options were and analysed and discussed for months’.[23] Military planning is always ad referendum, so it is possible to argue that while it goes on there can be no final decision to go to war. Planning was completed by August.

Being embedded in military planning nevertheless generates a moral commitment, and this was wholly consistent with the politicians’ similar sense. It provides a charge like that of getting on the inside of policy-making, as described by Meyer. An instant communications network provides enormous amounts of information for despatch to headquarters in capitals. Planning incorporated political tools, information and propaganda.

However the trees can crowd out the wood. In the Iraq planning Rumsfeld and the military preferred not to look beyond the trees. As a result, notes National Security Archive executive director Thomas Blanton:

Completely unrealistic assumptions about a post-Saddam Iraq permeate the war plans. First they assumed that a provisional government would be in place by D-Day, then that the Iraqis would stay in their garrisons and be reliable partners, and finally that the post-hostilities phase would be a matter of mere months. All these were delusions.

Being part of the US military planning process may have induced Australian personnel to accept the US view of the post-war phase and share their complacency, although they would have known that the British colleagues were concerned about American insouciance. Of course, subsequent American policies, particularly the contentious reliance on the neocons’ choice of leader, Ahmed Chalabi, and the wholesale purge of the Sunnis, proved as damaging as the foreseeable problems of planning gaps and insufficient occupation personnel.

The military planning, and ostentatious buildup of forces, did persuade Saddam Hussein to accept the return of UN weapons inspectors. But it was too late to save him, and to avert the war which was the purpose of the planning.

A flashback to Vietnam shows a similar inexorable logic. In new major contributions in this decade to the flourishing historiography on the war in the US, David Keiser in American Tragedy described how Presidential decisions in December 1964 put the US on the path to ‘a major ground war in the South’[24], and Fredrik Lagevall in Choosing War argued that the US missed the North Vietnamese reaction, which was to signal flexibility about negotiations, without compromising their ultimate aim of reunification. A US State Department paper in July 1965 said ‘has Hanoi shown any interest in negotiations? Yes, repeatedly’. But by then the die was cast. No country was more relieved about that than Australia. In 2005, Gareth Porter in Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam made similar points, within a thesis that American confidence in its own strategic invincibility had led it into war.

Parallels between Vietnam and Iraq remain a contested area, capable still of arousing strong emotions. Those relating to Australia's military contribution are pretty straightforward. Australia initially fitted into an American military plan, and its role and functions, protecting an American base and participating in ‘search and destroy’ operations, were assigned to it. From 1966, when Australia increased its forces under American pressure and established the Australian Task Force, it was able to operate independently of the Americans, on its own patch of turf, in a relatively safe area with an assured exit by sea. Australian military historian and biographer David Horner regards this as Gen. John Wilton's greatest decision. Because these are features of the deployment of the second Australian tranche of 450 in Iraq, and because his approach overall has been designed to contain casualties, we can say that the lessons of Vietnam were clearly understood by Cosgrove, a Vietnam veteran.

Naturally there are differences in war fighting in jungle swamps and in desert sands. However the resemblances between Vietnam and Iraq outweigh the differences, and are more instructive. In a sectarian, religious and civil conflict, the essential objectives are winning hearts and minds, establishing a viable government conducive to stability, neutralizing the opponents’ hard-core political cadres, and providing population security and basic services. The approaches of consolidating secure areas (inkspots) and progressively passing responsibility to local forces are similar. Retreat to enclaves is an alternative strategy and disengagement is messy. Then of course there are the concerning features of civil wars; atrocities against the captured, civilian casualties, collateral damage, and corruption. There are likely too to be effects on America’s budget and morale which will impact on Australia, in the political and economic fields.

For Australia a basic continuity between Vietnam and Iraq is the professionalism, discipline and adherence to the rules of its armed forces. The fact that Australia is remembered by Vietnamese leaders as unique amongst the belligerents for its treatment of their fallen comrades gave Howard the latitude last year to defend the war and Australia's involvement on Vietnamese soil.

Mid-summer madness

In June, Howard visited Washington at a crucial time. Iraq was very much in the air. Howard was there to address Congress, He competed with Blair's April declaration of loyalty in his address on 12 June: ‘no matter what will happen – and there will be many paths of difficulty requiring courage and grit and sacrifice – we travel through the century in the constant company of a true and great friend’.

In similar language, and about the same time before going to war in Vietnam, Menzies had declared at the White House that ‘whichever way it goes, my little country and your great country will be together through thick and thin’. This was followed by his successor Harold Holt’s memorable ’All the way with LBJ’, on which the latter later commented ‘when ah heard Harold say that, ah winced’. So did many Australians, of all political persuasions. However, while Menzies, like Blair, had specific and even devious game plans, Howard, like Holt, was swearing allegiance.

Howard had decided that he would follow Bush's public line but not get out in front of it. He took his cue from the Bush Administration's lines that war would be a ‘last resort’[25] and that there were no war plans on the table. Late in June, however, a reporter, William Arkin, published details of the war plan, setting off an investigation in which more than 1000 personnel were interrogated. Downer's public line became bolder. In July in the US he said that anybody who advocated appeasement of Saddam Hussein was a fool.

Howard was accompanied to Washington by his chief intelligence adviser, Kim Jones, head of the Office of National Assessments (ONA), being apparently content otherwise to rely on Thawley. Howard and Jones lunched with Tenet, but we do not now know what transpired. The latter's memoirs do not mention this occasion and no Australian appears in the book’s preparatory cast of many characters.

We do know, however, that vital decisions were being taken in Washington around this time. The President of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, at that time director of policy planning in the State Department, Richard Haas, has recalled that national security adviser Condoleeza Rice told him in early July that essentially the decision on war had already been made. Tenet quotes this. And Tenet had also had an important conversation with one of his British counterparts, which he dates to May.

We know further, from the British documents leaked to The Times, known as the ‘Downing Street memos’ (though their status is higher than mere memoranda), that in July 2002 British MI6 chief Richard Dearlove, reporting on talks with Tenet, advised a meeting of ministers that the US was set on war. ‘Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy’.

Tenet writes in glowing terms of Dearlove, describing him as ‘a spy’s spy’, who had easy access to political leaders. He also mentions a subsequent falling out over a PBS television interview given by Dearlove. Dearlove is of course not the first British spy supremo to overwhelm the American cousins. As Tenet maintains that he does not know when Bush decided to go to war, either the two men have different recollections of their conversation or Dearlove was not relying solely on it. Tenet hints at the latter, though perhaps in self defence or as part of his general defence of the President.

There has been much comment on the possible range of meanings of the word ‘fixed’. Tenet claims that Dearlove says he was misreported. In retrospect, the intelligence about WMD, largely of US origin, does appear to have been fixed around the policy. As we shall see, this is patently true of so-called intelligence from those working to Rumsfeld, and through him to Cheney, about a link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Tenet recounts that Libby urged this line on Dearlove.

In July the British Cabinet took significant decisions. It approved preparations for war, its military chiefs emphasising the long lead time they required. It decided, in Blair's words, to provide ‘the political context (in which) people would support resume change’.

Equally importantly two of the three ‘conditions’ which had been inserted in Blair’s brief for the Crawford talks, but which he had almost certainly downplayed, seem to have disappeared, to take account of the realistic possibilities of influencing the US and of more pressing needs. Ministers accepted advice to ‘engage the US on the need to set military plans in a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action, which might include an ultimatum for the return of the UN weapons inspectors’. The first strategy addressing Iraqi politics never succeeded in making any impact on the Americans, who went their own way. The UK could not shake the neocons’ faith in Chalabi. The second strategy appears to be phrased to provide a justification for war. It can be interpreted as a tactic only, as ultimately it became, rather than intending to give the inspectors a real chance.

The British documents state that it was expected in July that Australia would participate on the same basis as the UK. However, one should not expect confirmatory evidence of an unequivocal Cabinet decision to that effect, even when the archival records become available in 2032 and 2052. The documents will be carefully phrased; ‘if President Bush decides’, ‘if Australia has the capability’, ‘any military action’ etc. This was made possible because there was no American decision as such to declare war and no Presidential request for Australian participation.

Comparison with Vietnam is again illuminating. We know now for the first time that the decision in principle was taken on 17 December 1964, by Menzies and a subcommittee of Cabinet. It was in response to a Presidential request. However, discussion was perfunctory (Menzies later said it took five minutes). Because ministers were committed to putting troops alongside the Americans, normal procedures were not followed. Neither the Defence Committee nor the civilian departments were asked for advice in the normal way

We know a decision was taken because of the discovery of previously overlooked brief notes of what Menzies said. Contrary to the rules, the record was apparently prepared by the acting Cabinet Secretary for his superior, who was on Christmas leave, and found its way on to a file in the Prime Minister's Department. The accuracy of the note has been confirmed by the recollections of External Affairs officials, notably Secretary Arthur Tange. There is collateral evidence that Tang went to his minister, Paul Hasluck, and protested that this unusual procedure. In the best Westminster tradition he also sent in a paper setting out how his department would have advised him and why a decision should have been deferred.

While Menzies made the offer of the battalion to Johnson immediately, references to it thereafter until the decision was announced in April are usually in conditional phrases, taking account of ministers’ wishes for confirmation of Australia's military capability and intended military staff talks. The US did not convene them for over three months. They did not turn out to involve any serious discussion of the strategic context, as officials had hoped. The Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, Air Marshal Frederick Scherger, apparently had private authority from Menzies to cut through all that, and to confine himself to discussing the actual deployment arrangements. The Americans, having dragged their feet, pressed for quick deployment.

When Australia's decision was announced in April 1965, Menzies was advised to blur the actual date on which it had been made, acknowledging that a Presidential request had been received and considered in December. As we shall see in examining issues of trust, the standards of circumspection about not misleading Parliament and the people have slipped.

The failure to build regional support

Building an international coalition,, one of the conditions stated in Blair's April brief, slipped down the order of priorities from July. This was presumably in recognition of the strength of unilateralist thinking in the US administration. Meyer has an amusing anecdote about Rupert Murdoch, Blair's patron, mumbling about ‘appeasement’ when British relations with Europe were discussed round his dinner table.

Australia made no effort to build a regional coalition, even to take account of the Opposition foreign affairs spokesman's view that regional consultation should be ‘axiomatic’. As at the time of Vietnam, the most important thing was the relationship with the US. So Howard advocated pre-emption, which caused serious offence in the region. It was insensitive, unnecessary and ill timed, and advisers despaired. In contrast, Menzies on his officials’ advice successfully opposed a British plan for a pre-emptive strike against Indonesia in September 1964. He did so primarily on the ground that it would have disastrous long-term political effects in Indonesia and on Australian-Indonesian relations, though a subsidiary factor was that it had not been cleared with Washington.

Menzies, had he not wanted to seize the opportunity when it arose to get into Vietnam alongside the US, could have chosen an option which the US had marked out from the beginning of Indonesia's confrontation of Malaysia in January 1963. This was a division of labor under which the US would handle Vietnam and Australia, and the Commonwealth, would handle Sukarno’s Indonesia. In October 1964, just two months before Australia made its commitment to Vietnam, the Commander-in-Chief Pacific confirmed the arrangement and said that its Indonesia commitment might prevent Australia sending troops to Vietnam. He was surprised to find that Hasluck was not receptive. Hasluck's eyes were fixed on the eagle and the dragon.

The acknowledged importance of Australia's regional relationships, particularly with Indonesia, could have provided Australia with grounds for advising Washington that it was inadvisable for it to get involved in a distant war against Moslems, which might play into the hands of Al-Qaeda and local terrorists, who targeted Australians in the Bali bombings on 12 October 2002. . The incoming Bush administration had from the start recognized the importance to it of the Indonesia-Australia relationship. No doubt with the East Timor success in mind, Powell singled out a role for Australia in dealing with Indonesia. Powell meant well, but Indonesia's wounds were still raw, and re-establishing Australia's standing there was a multifaceted challenge.

It was reported that immediately after the war Howard was prepared if necessary to plead that Australia had its hands full in the ‘arc of instability’, especially the Solomon Islands. At this time, he could have played the card that Australia had done all that it promised, and its troops had performed superbly.

When Australia offered the battalion to the US it volunteered to go out and drum up regional support for the Vietnam war, but then did nothing, when it discovered how unpopular the South Vietnamese government, as a Christian regime repressing Buddhists, and the long-running war in which authentic nationalism lay with the North were. Majority Asian opinion felt similarly about the government the victors installed in Baghdad, perceived a Western bias towards Israel, and opposed the war. A Pew poll showed favorable opinion of the US in Indonesia slipping when war began from 61% to 15%.

America's unpopularity has to rub off on Australia, but is doubtless retrievable in one area, state-to-state relations. There is one school of thought which supports Howard's claim that foreign policy has been his greatest success. As evidence its members point to Australia's admission to the East Asian Summit and its success in navigating between the US and China.

Leading exponents of this view of Howard’s success include The Australian’s Paul Kelly[26] and Greg Sheridan[27] and Griffith University Professor Michael Wesley, a former intelligence analyst, who, in The Howard Paradox, draws on background interviews with a score of informants within the Australian government. Wesley’s book’s cover is a photograph of Howard firmly grasping the right forearm of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono; it calls to mind Meyer’s account of a similar embrace from Clinton, which he interpreted as showing the success of his mission, only to be deflated by a White House aide saying Clinton was merely wiping his hand.

Woolcott has led the opposite school, arguing that Howard has endangered 50 years of building up relations with Asia. His line of argument is well covered by Garran. Partly because of Asian reticence, there is insufficient evidence to judge how much Howard's foreign policy, including identification with Bush, the ‘deputy sheriff ‘embarrassment, pre-emption, and complicity in the harm inflicted on Iraqis will leave any lasting damage. What Howard has lost on the swings he gains on the roundabouts of having influence in Washington which he can use on behalf of Indonesia in particular. Nevertheless, there is clearly disapproval in informed regional circles.

Significant for Australia in this context were comments in April 2007 by Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, in an ABC interview with Phillip Adams. Despite his close ties with Australia and the fact that he is the only dissident leader in Asia for whom John Howard has spoken up, Anwar not only criticised Australia's participation in the war, but said there was a racist motivation. This, takes us back to square one in our post-war foreign policy in Asia, when we first began to grapple with resentment over the White Australia Policy, and into the dark world of the mind of the scourge of both Australia and Anwar, Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

Australians may consider the region would fall short of its own national standards in regard to respect for the rule of law and the impartiality of justice, but these are values which it is in Australia's interest to maintain and encourage.[28] Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani is paid to put a lawyer's case for his government, as he readily conceded when defending Asian values, ‘the West against the Rest’, but his comments have force, including for Australia:

The Iraq war shocked most of humanity, because America, the traditional custodian of the Truman world order, was seen to explicitly violate one of the most fundamental sets of rules of that order, governing the legitimate use of force.[29]

The (dis)United Nations

The UK might have anticipated that because of common traditions and the importance to Australia as a middle power of respecting international law it would receive strong support for its efforts to get UN authorisation for war. In practice Australia always seemed to be at least a step behind. This was made easier by the fact that Australia was not a member of the Security Council, and has not been since 1986.

After Powell, with an assist from Blair, and enjoying an unusual victory over the neocons, had successfully insisted in August that it was essential to make a serious effort in the UN, Howard gave lukewarm support. He had Thawley inform the second level of the US administration that going to the UN would give ‘any action that might have to be taken that much greater authority’. This was a Blair formulation, and certainly does not suggest that UN authority was a prerequisite for action against Saddam Hussein. Bush then rang Howard when Blair was in Washington on 7 September, and was presumably able to use his support against the neocons’ opposition. Cheney sat in throughout the talks with Blair at Camp David, and was not convinced. Howard, despite the evidence to the contrary, publicly minimised the differences between the neocons led by Cheney (who Woodward writes ‘detested’ the UN) and Powell.

After agreement had been reached on seeking a UN resolution, the tone of the government's rhetoric changed dramatically, albeit briefly, to sweet reasonableness. The most likely explanation is domestic politics. The government was faced with increasing domestic disquiet, and Australians prefer UN authority for going to war, especially outside Australia’s immediate strategic area. In an ABC interview on 15 September Howard was unusually accommodating on key issues from which he soon drew back. He did not boggle at a prediction by the head of the UN Monitoring, Investigation and Inspection Commission in Iraq, Hans Blix, that the inspection process could take 12 months. Blix was later to narrow the timeframe to not weeks and not years, and has since explained that he was looking for no more than a couple of months. Howard was also inclined to the view that if force were required there would need to be a second UN resolution, following up resolution 1441, which provided for the return of the weapons inspectors. The resolution papered over the deep differences about the need for another resolution. Russia, France and China explained that their support of the resolution was based on it excluding the use of force, that the US and UK representatives had confirmed this, and that there will be need for further Security Council consideration if events required consideration of use of force.

Howard gave up easily on his brief flirtation with giving the UN inspectors a chance. If they had been allowed to complete their task and to show before the end of 2003 how Iraq's weapons systems had been degraded, it is very possible that Saddam Hussein would have been forced out of office peacefully by the humiliation and the demonstration of Iraq's vulnerability to Iran. In 2002 Howard appeared to foresee just this scenario and to be relaxed about the UN timetable. However, within a fortnight, the coalition was to embark on a propaganda campaign about the threat from Iraqi WMD, issuing dodgy dossiers’ based on material extracted from the intelligence communities.

On 31 January 2003, Blair made a last approach to Bush for support for a second UN resolution He had only limited success. Howard was with Bush and Cheney and joined in the tactic, brilliantly sketched in David Hare's play Stuff Happens, of turning the attack on the UN. On 4 February, before going overseas, Howard made a statement to Parliament in which he argued that the UN was on trial over Saddam’s WMD. His treatment of the intelligence on Iraq’s WMD anticipated what Powell would tell the UN on the following day, was based on largely US source material, and did not take account of his DIO experts' reservations.

Langmore, in one of many telling quotes on Iraq in Dealing with America, cites former British High Commissioner to Australia Brian Barder (on the US): ‘to tell the rest of the world that we have got to “recognize” the new American hegemony and the “failure” of the whole United Nations experiment is simply outrageous’.

Opposition leader Simon Crean asked Howard to take to Bush the message that ‘the majority want to see Iraq disarmed, but they want it done under the mandate of the United Nations and with the authority of international law’. He added ‘the Prime Minister must stop treating the Australian people like mugs’. This was probably Crean's finest hour in foreign policy, comparable with his predecessor Arthur Calwell's accurate prognosis in May 1965 of the likely fate of foreign intervention in Vietnam, and had as little effect.

When Howard called on Bush on 10 February the focus was on regime change. Woodward quotes Bush saying ‘we’re still in the mosh pit, but thanks to your strong resolve we’re finally getting clarity. Either (Saddam Hussein) will leave or we’ll get him’. Howard is depicted by Woodward as being most anxious thereafter that Bush should contact him before issuing an ultimatum to Saddam, saying that ‘otherwise it would look to the Australian people like Bush just started the war without even telling his biggest allies’. The embarrassment would have been compounded because Australian troops had been assigned their traditional shock troops role, moving deep into Iraq and engaging in combat in advance of the main forces’ invasion.

The memoirs of Britain's UN Ambassador, Jeremy Greenstock, well known to Australians because of his crucial role in getting UN authority for Australia’s intervention in East Timor in 1999, when he held the Security Council chair, have not been approved for publication. He would not speak privately about his UN experience when he visited Australia. Presumably he is critical of his Prime Minister but so was Meyer, his colleague in Washington. Meyer reproaches himself for not having done more to pin Blair and Bush down publicly on a second UN resolution, which they had instructed their UN representatives to acknowledge was necessary when getting 1441 passed. Presumably he feels a sense of guilt about Greenstock, who suffered more immediately from the perfidy of politicians and allies.

In the speech on 4 February, Howard made the case for dependency in an uncertain world, saying that the crucial importance of the American alliance would grow ‘in an increasingly globalised and borderless world’. He resented Harries’ later contrary viewpoint, that his ‘unhesitating, unqualified and-given the attitude of many other countries-contemptuous-support’ for the US has made Australia ‘nothing more than a shortsighted bilateral affiliate of an American hegemon that is guilty of Imperial overstretch’. In moving the resolution for war, Howard devoted 26 paragraphs to WMD, and only 2 to the American alliance, but no one had any doubt which was the more important in his mind. It was a similar situation to that of Menzies announcing the decision to go to war in Vietnam, but public opinion about the US, which was favorable in 1965, was now swinging in the opposite direction, strengthening opposition to war.

From first-hand observation, Langmore deplores the damage done to Australia in the United Nations, not only by the Iraq war, but also by its policies on economic and social programs and human rights. Quantifying the damage has to be done through negative markers. It would be impossible today for Australia to pull off a coup like the agreement to protect the environment in  Antarctica, where Hawke started out alone, gathered essential support from     France, and then other western European countries, and so developed the momentum to sway the last hold out, the US. Langmore and Woolcott, regular visitors to New York, think that Australia's reelection to the Security Council, where it last sought a seat, unsuccessfully, in 1996, is not a foreseeable proposition.

An illegal war

British ministers were warned in July that the UK had to act legally. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, advised that finding a justification for war would be difficult. Regime change and humanitarian intervention did not provide a legal basis. The Attorney General's views were powerfully supported by the legal advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). An assessment prepared in March, before Blair went to his meeting with Bush at Crawford, and tabled again in Cabinet on 21 July, pointed out that for the exercise of the right of self-defence under the UN Charter there had to be an actual or imminent attack, that deployment of nuclear weapons was not a sufficient justification, and that the Security Council had to be brought in as soon as possible.  

Any use of force in the exercise of the right of self-defence would raise problems of immediacy and proportionality. As to priority, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made the point that Libya, North Korea and Iran had greater WMD capability.

Cabinet was asked to note that legal cover would be most simply achieved if Saddam Hussein rejected an ultimatum for the weapons inspectors’ return, or through an authorizing Security Council resolution, which was seen to be highly improbable but not impossible. The inspectors did return and the resolution which was passed, 1441, did not authorise war.  

These concerns continued to bedevil Blair's commitment to regime change, to the point that late in the day the armed forces sought an assurance of legality. It was acknowledged that legality was not of similar concern to the US, which took the view that there did not have to be Security Council authority, but that individual states could decide if there had been a breach of existing Security Council resolutions. However, at this time it was noted that no other state took this view.

Meyer recounts that the differences between Blair and his ministers over the legal difficulties and political imponderables were well known to and closely watched in Washington. No such cracks appeared in Canberra’s governing edifice.  

The FCO’s advice would presumably have been shared with the Australian government. There is no evidence, however, that legality was seen as an important issue by Australian ministers. It can be inferred that their approach was that the lawyers could always be brought to come up with something. So it proved, although it seems to have been a case of the Australian lawyers, like their political leaders, taking their cue from the US and the UK. The Attorney-General's Department (A/Gs) was bruised by the Tampa affair, when the Prime Minister demanded a second legal opinion, according to a recent book, John Winston Howard: The Biography, by Wayne Errington and Peter van Oveden. According to an article in the Age on 23 July by David Marr, A/Gs was forced to dance to the tune of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC), whose head, Max Moore-Wilton called their position ‘crap’. He modelled himself upon his first boss, non-career Trade Secretary Alan Westerman, and revelled in a reputation for ruthlessness, while denying that he was a bully.

In March 2003 Howard seemed to show an uncharacteristic loss of nerve in denying that he had ever advocated regime change, thus clearly distancing himself from his partners. If this was due to him suddenly becoming concerned about legality, he was thrown a lifeline by fortuitously timed British legal advice which Goldsmith had come up with for Blair (and FCO Assistant legal adviser resigned in protest). It relied on Iraq being in material breach of 17 UNSC resolutions going back to the original resolution (678) authorising force in the Gulf War. Howard quoted Goldsmith, while referring less specifically to Australian advice, which was not tabled, when moving in Parliament on 18 March 2003 that war would be lawful. He also cited Iraq's support for international terrorism and abuse of human rights.  

The ‘legal justification’ was a good political device to muddy the waters after the failure to secure a second UNSC resolution, and exploited the long-standing antipathy to Saddam Hussein. It certainly seemed to satisfy the Canberra press gallery, which also did not really press for the evidence of Iraq support for international terrorism. The Age did on 19 March carry an article by ANU academics Hilary Charlesworth and Andrew Byrnes stating that the war was illegal. They described the Goldsmith interpretation as ‘untenable’. In the 2024 Solferino lecture at the University of Melbourne, Garry Simpson from the London School of Economics dismissed it as ‘arcane and unconvincing’. Also in 2004, 43 Australian academics in Law faculties developed the case for illegality, and without sparking the animus Downer has showed against the 43 former senior military commanders and diplomats who criticised the war and government deception.[30]

Howard was on even more shaky ground than Menzies was in 1965 when he relied on the justification, which was subsequently revealed to be largely specious in much the same way as the disappearing WMD, of a request from the South Vietnamese government as a protocol party to the SEATO treaty, with both men giving less prominence to the real reason, their perceptions of relations with the US administration of the day.

The hydra-headed monster of trust

As never before, the Iraq war has raised questions about whether governments lie and can be trusted by the people. They have been sufficient to bring down Blair. While the early criticism was of dodgy dossiers and pressures on the intelligence community, he has recently been questioned about illegality and his assurance that the US had planned for the post-war phase. These issues, and ill-treatment of detainees, have greatly damaged the Bush administration too, although the larger focus is on how to disengage from the costly and unwinnable war. In Australia the issue is still playing itself out.

In 2004, 43 retired senior military and diplomatic officers[31] issued a statement opposing the war and appealed for more truth and openness in government.[32] Groups of critics of the Iraq war issued similar appeals in London and Washington. Briefly Howard was rattled, but then with twinkling spin he turned the issue into trust in running the economy (and holding down interest rates). Characteristically too, the government preferred to play the man instead of the ball, deriding the signatories as out of touch with the post-9/11 world. Evidence of Downer's resentment recurs regularly, even to this day. One of the diplomatic signatories, Rory Steele, predicted accurately on 9 August 2004 that without openness (which continues to contract up to today) ‘we risk costly military engagement, greater insecurity in our own region and at home, and harm being done to our parliamentary democracy’.[33]

On 20 February 2006 the Fairfax press reported the findings of a Saulwick poll on Howard’s decade in office, including the following comment:

The war with Iraq is the most commonly quoted ‘worst thing’ Mr. Howard has done. This is followed by a related criticism that he is too close to US President George Bush. It is also clear from people’s responses to this open-ended question that his statements about Iraq’s supposed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and the ‘children overboard’ affair have contributed to concerns about his credibility – 5 per cent of voters specifically identified what they saw as his propensity to tell lies or act deceitfully as the ‘worst thing’ he has done during his Prime Ministership.

There are issues of trust in the linked questions of whether the war was legal and whether Australia was party to a damaging manipulation of the UN system. Everything is now known about the permutations of British legal advice. Presumably, the ins and outs of the Australian legal advice, which received much less prominence, will not be made public until 2032 - 2033.

Other important issues of trust relate to whether the Australian people have been told the truth about when and why it was decided to go to war.

When was the decision made?

Speculation about when the UK and Australia committed themselves to fight if the US decided to go to war against Iraq has run along parallel lines, involving the gamut of possibilities from September 2001 on, but no conclusive evidence. Blair and Howard were able to treat the question as hypothetical, in the absence of hard evidence of a definitive US decision and formal request to allies. The nine-month process of war planning, now revealed, concluded with presidential approval in September. War was inevitable then, though arguably from June, or earlier, unless Saddam Hussein could be removed by other means, or removed himself, a most unlikely contingency.

Because of his wish to get close to Bush, and his own strong convictions and his background of experience with Iraq, Blair committed himself fully to whatever action Bush should decide on, and indeed urged intervention. Myer has denied a statement in Vanity Fair, in an article for which he was a main source, that Blair suggested attacking Iraq when he met Bush on 20 September, 2001. But his account of Blair's conversations and public statements when visiting the Bush ranch in April strongly suggest an unconditional commitment to remove Saddam Hussein by whatever means necessary.

Meyer has written that, if there were a straight line in Blair's policy from September 2001 until war began, that would constitute the ultimate deception, yet most of his countrymen seem to have concluded that that was the way it was. While Meyer argues against this, his book would never have been approved for publication if he had said the opposite. Meyer also has to take his view to justify his two main gripes, that he toiled unavailingly to advise caution and give the UN weapons inspectors a fair chance, and that Blair failed to exert leverage. Also, he cannot bring himself to admit that he misread Washington’s bureaucratic power game, being not the neocons' sort of chap.

The evidence also suggests that Howard never deviated from his public indications that Australia would stick with the US, and that no one tried to persuade him to reconsider. The commitment was there, though just what it would entail had to be worked out within the context of development of joint and American planning. The latter at least was over by September. Woolcott began to accuse Howard of ‘sustained deception’ in October.

Rumsfeld offered Blair the option of pulling the UK out late in the day, more out of impatience with his political difficulties than empathising with them. Blair would have had good reasons to accept, but instead elected to stay in. If he had decided differently, it would have put Howard in a dilemma, and in the unlikely event that he followed suit the course of events might have been different and war averted. The chances of Howard doing that seem infinitesimal. He might have seen it as even more advantageous to be America's only ally, attracting a similar encomium to that former President Dwight Eisenhower gave in 1965, when he told a wavering President Johnson that it was sufficient for America to have Australia and its own conscience.

Intelligence on Iraq - more than stuff happens

The primary justification for going to war, ‘the conjunction of terrorism and WMD’, had to have a third link, to Iraq. That link was, then, not soundly based. It was widely believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction of one sort or another, but this was certainly not a unanimous view amongst the experts. The majority’s assessment, taking its lead from Washington, turned out to be false. The baseless impression was created that Iraqi WMD could be transferred to terrorists. Saddam Hussein was represented as a necessary target of the war on terror. Even as he retired, Blair made the link, saying that we had got rid of Saddam Hussein and his sons as we had the Taliban.

This brings us to the world of intelligence assessment. The fate of facts in a world of men and vice versa is often harsh.[34]

The intelligence process combines collection from all possible sources, open and covert, on international issues for which policymakers have a requirement to know, and objective analysis of vast amounts of material so that policymakers understand. Intelligence communities need to be close to policymakers so that they can understand their requirements, but in their analysis they need to be distant from them, so that they do not provide what policymakers want to hear and ammunition for the cases they want to make to their parliaments and electorates.

The US intelligence community, most recently Tenet in interviews related to the unusual circumstance of publishing his memoirs, defends himself against having got it wrong in assessing that Saddam Hussein had WMD by saying that all intelligence agencies made the same assessment, and that the UN did too. A similar justification was advanced by Columbia University Professor Robert Jervis in a review of the CIA assessment performance published on the web bulletin H-Diplo.[35][1] This is a circular argument, that gives insufficient weight to the heavy reliance that was placed on American assessments and the widespread assumption that the US must have the intelligence to back them up. National intelligence assessments had to be made within the international context of expectations of following the leader in the UKUSA club and the domestic context of expectations that they would support policy.

Nevertheless, there were some intelligence assessors who were doubtful. Even in Australia, we know from the guarded language of the Jull committee and Flood reports, which will be examined shortly, that DIO was more sceptical than the senior assessing body, ONA, which for a variety of reasons did not provide rigorous and independent judgments.

According to a Canadian commentator on Jervis’s post, his interviews on background with officials indicate that the Canadian government had concluded that UN weapons destruction teams had been effective, particularly in the early 1990s, and that it was unlikely that Iraq had an effective WMD capability. His view was that France and Germany had made similar assessments. These countries therefore supported more time being given to the UN inspection teams as requested by their leader, Hans Blix, who had reached a similar view.

Whether Iraq actually had WMD was easily obfuscated by the fact that this compendious term covered nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The UN assessment had narrowed down the field to chemical weapons, and then it was a question of whether they had degraded to the point of uselessness or were still operational or could quickly be made so, as an Australian on Blix’s team thought. On this point the leader of the British House of Commons and former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had no doubt, and told the House around the time the war began that they were useless. Cook had had intelligence briefings.

But no doubts were expressed by the political leaders of the US, the UK and Australia. They spoke of immediate and imminent threats, and made public ‘intelligence assessments’ in their support. Of the most infamous, which claimed that Iraq had a capability to deliver WMD within 45 minutes, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a Foreign Affairs Select Committee in June 2003 that it was ‘the dodgy dossier…a complete horlicks’. All the three belligerents published dodgy dossiers, within weeks of each other.

The main focus of political rhetoric was on the nuclear threat. The threat was described unequivocally and luridly (the smoking gun turning into a mushroom cloud),