Doug Lorimer
On August 7, 43 former Australian military chiefs and top diplomats issued a statement attacking Prime Minister John Howard's government for joining the US-led invasion of Iraq "on the basis of false assumptions and the deception of the Australian people".
The military brass who signed the statement included General Peter Gration and Admiral Alan Beaumont, both former chiefs of the Australian Defence Force. Also signing the statement were former defence department secretary Paul Barratt, and former prime minister's department secretaries Alan Renouf and Richard Woolcott.
"We did not have to go to war and we did and it's a mess as a result", one of the signatories, retired air marshal Ray Funnell, the former chief of the Royal Australian Air Force, told ABC television's 7.30 Report on August 8.
Saying he was not "going to cop a charge of dishonesty against me or against my government", Howard told the House of Representatives the next day: "I accept and I always have, a sizeable chunk of the Australian population disagreed with my decision to join the coalition of the willing", however he would "never accept that we set out to mislead the Australian public".
Responding directly to the statement of the 43 retired senior military chiefs and diplomats, Howard said: "Well, I just say to them through you, Mr Speaker, where is the evidence of the government having deliberately misled the Australian people? There is none...
"There have been no lies and there was no deceit. The argument that I took this country to war based on a lie is itself a lie, Mr Speaker."
However, Howard's pre-war statements were full of deliberate deceptions. On February 4, 2003, for example, Howard told parliament that 2000 Australian military personnel were being sent to the Persian Gulf because "Iraq's continued defiance of the United Nations and its possession of chemical and biological weapons and its pursuit of a nuclear capability poses a real and unacceptable threat to the stability and security of our world".
This sentence contained two lies — that Iraq possessed WMD and that it was defying the United Nations. Far from defying the UN demand that it cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, from late November 2002 Iraq provided unrestricted access to UN weapons inspectors headed by Hans Blix. However, the failure of Blix's team to find any WMD was used by Washington, London and Canberra as a justification for invading Iraq — by claiming their failure to find WMD "proved" Iraq was hiding its WMD.
In the same speech, Howard declared that the "Australian government knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons". This was untrue and Howard knew it was untrue.
According to the report on Australia's WMD "intelligence" prepared by spy chief Philip Flood, released last month, the material on which Howard based his claim the government knew Iraq had WMD was "thin, ambiguous and incomplete". Flood's report confirmed that Australia's spy agencies had no credible evidence that Iraq possessed any WMD.
In his February 4 speech, Howard cited just one specific piece of evidence to support his claim that Iraq possessed WMD: the revelations that Saddam's defected son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, made to UN weapons inspectors about Iraq's pre-1991 WMD programs.
General Kamal, previously head of Iraq's WMD program, and his brother, Colonel Saddam Kamal, fled Iraq in August 1995. They brought with them crates of documents revealing Iraq's past weapons programs.
What Howard did not disclose, however, was that Kamal, as Newsweek magazine revealed on February 23, 2003, had "told CIA and British intelligence officers and UN inspectors in the summer of 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons, and the missiles to deliver them" shortly after the 1991 Gulf War.
A complete copy of the transcript of Kamal's August 22, 1995, interview with UN weapons inspectors was obtained by Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University and posted on the internet on February 26.
In the interview, Kamal stated categorically, "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed." Asked by Nikita Smidovich, the Russian deputy head of the UN weapons inspection team, "were weapons and agents destroyed?", Kamal replied: "Nothing remained." This claim was subsequently verified by UN weapons inspectors in 1995-98, and again in the lead-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq on March 20 last year.
In 2001, senior members of the Bush administration acknowledged
that Iraq did not have WMD. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in Cairo as early as February 2001 that Iraq "had not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction". Two months later, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, said Saddam Hussein's "military forces have not been rebuilt".
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched a massive propaganda campaign to insinuate that Baghdad was involved in the 9/11 attacks, had stockpiles of WMD and might turn them over to Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. The Howard government, ignoring all the evidence to the contrary, eagerly signed up to be part of the US-led invasion force.
The Howard government has subsequently sought to put the blame for the WMD fiasco on an "intelligence failure" by the spy agencies. However, the Defence Intelligence Organisation admitted to the David Jull-headed parliamentary inquiry into Australia's WMD intelligence: "We made a judgement here in Australia ... that the United States was committed to military action against Iraq. We had the view that that was, in a sense, independent of the intelligence assessment."
The invasion was not motivated by the desire to deprive Iraq of (non-existent) WMD or, as US officials now claim, to bring "democracy" to the Iraqi people. Washington invaded Iraq to install a pro-US puppet regime that would allow US oil corporations to take over the country's lucrative oil resources and allow the US to use Iraq as a staging post for a similar invasion of neighbouring, oil-rich, Iran.
The conquering of Iraq and Iran (and Washington's existing relationship with Saudi Arabia's ruling elite) would give the capitalist gangs that rule the US a stranglehold over the largest and most profitable supply of the world's most strategically important energy source.
Despite massive public opposition, the Howard government calculated that its real boss — Australia's corporate elite — would be well rewarded by supporting Washington's invasion.
Significant elements in Australia's capitalist elite, including a range of previous Liberal Party leaders, military chiefs, top civil servants and diplomats, opposed Australia's involvement in the invasion of Iraq. They rightly feared that the inevitable exposure of the lies used to justify it would expose the real lack of democracy that exists in the capitalist parliamentary system of government.
This is the chief concern of the "gang of 43", as they hae been dubbed by their media critics. "We believe that a reelected Howard government or an elected Latham government must give priority to truth in government. This is fundamental to effective parliamentary democracy."
But Australia's so-called parliamentary democracy has always operated with the deception of the majority of voters at its core. Government policy is determined by a small group of bureaucrats and politicians: we are encouraged to limit our involvement to voting every few years. It is ludicrous to imagine, as we are supposed to, that a humble pensioner has the same say as billionaire media barons like Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch with their hired armies of public opinion makers.
Howard's elite critics are clearly worried that the crude lies peddled by the Coalition government to justify participation in the imperialist invasion of Iraq will lead large numbers of working-class Australians to distrust the entire parliamentary system — and start to organise outside it.
[On the weekend before the election, a series of End the Lies! Troops out Now! Rallies will be held. For details, see the advertisement on front page]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 18, 2004.
Visit the