No democratic oversight of the power to wage war

Governments have a right and duty to pursue national interests. But they also have a responsibility to respect community values and the two are often in conflict. When violence is used without just cause they betray these values and shame the nation. This is why, on contentious issues of foreign policy, they will seek to avoid parliamentary scrutiny, often with tragic results.

This is unfortunate because civilisation requires institutions to curb the use of violence. In order to keep the peace, there must be an acceptance that conflicts of interest will be settled by appeal to values, not armed force; hence the importance of international law.

The Greens' bill to amend the Commonwealth War Powers Act was, as expected, rejected by a Senate sub-committee chaired by Senator Eric Abetz. It aimed to restore democracy by requiring parliamentary approval to wage war. In practice, it meant the Senate would have the power to subpoena witnesses to test the factual basis of the argument for war. Without this scrutiny, a government might support a war for party political reasons. It may also be led into war by powerful allies with their own agenda.

The need for reform is therefore obvious. When John Howard and Alexander Downer decided to join the invasion of Iraq they relied on three unproven claims. The first was an assurance from US President George W Bush that Iraq shared responsibility with al Qaeda for the 11 September attack. Secondly, Bush said it possessed WMD and posed an imminent security threat to Australia, the US and UK; thirdly, there was a risk these weapons would get into the hands of terrorists.

Astonishingly, at no time did Howard ask for or receive US raw intelligence on these claims. This made it impossible for Australian intelligence services to assess their reliability or warn Howard they might not be reliable. Andrew Wilkie, a senior Iraq intelligence analyst resigned, at considerable personal cost, to go public. He was vindicated years later when the Parliamentary Inquiry, with the further testimony of Margaret Swieringa, Secretary to the Cabinet Defence Committee, published its findings in April 2013.

It concluded that the "case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD in large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq's WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations…This is not the picture that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to the Committee by Australia's two analytical agencies."

This finding was confirmed by the UK Chilcot inquiry which, after a seven-year investigation, reported on 6 July 2016. Its executive summary was a scathing indictment of willful misrepresentation by the American, British, and Australian leaders, all anxious to appease the US President, who had warned all nations they would pay a heavy price if they did not support the invasion.

This threat, together with false statements by the White House, US Secretary of State Colin Powell (for which he later expressed regret) and the British Prime Minister, were instrumental in Australia joining a war that killed between one hundred and fifty thousand and one million Iraqis. It left countless numbers wounded and crippled and destroyed Iraq's infrastructure and economy. It is now widely agreed to have lacked justification in law or morality.

The leaders were under pressure because Bush warned nations they were either for or against the US - there was no middle ground, and that he had now "taken the gloves off". Many prominent US critics saw the war as an attempt to regain control of Middle-East oil supplies while others pointed to Bush's 2004 re-election problems after the disastrous intelligence failures leading up to 9:11. Others looked for an explanation in his character and psychological make-up.

However that may be John Howard, in his 700-word autobiography Lazarus Rising (2^nd edition 2011), devotes 38 pages to justify the Iraq War and insists he has not changed his views. After the Chilcot inquiry released its long-awaited report both he and Downer reaffirmed their support for the war. Paradoxically, Howard's self-serving account itself highlights the need for reform; it shows how easy it is, in the fog, stress and disorienting drama of war, to lose sight of the lives lost and the human suffering. This explains his failure, shared by the US and UK leaders, to consider the likely or actual Iraqi casualties - there is not a word in the text or in the extensive index at the end of the book. How we should ask, can one justify an armed invasion of another nation without weighing the supposed benefits against the appalling human cost?

The US, however, had given up the Vietnam policy of measuring success in the struggle against communism in Asia by body counts. This would also lessen the risk of a domestic backlash arising from the sheer savagery of the Iraq war, in which the US used napalm, white phosphorous, depleted uranium and industrial bulldozers to bury alive thousands of Iraqi conscripts over hundreds of kilometres of trenches.

Howard's account ignores these consequences just as it ignores the possibility he may have been wrong to rely on the honesty and competence of Bush and those who advised the US leader. His thinking at the time is recounted in an interview he arranged with prominent pro-war journalist Janet Albrechtsen. This was broadcast on 14 September 2014 on the Seven Network:

"I was struck by the force of the language used in the American national intelligence assessment late in November 2002. It brought together all the American intelligence and paragraph after paragraph, they said, we judge Iraq had weapons of mass destruction." However, as evidence emerged that there were no weapons of mass destruction, he sought to explain the government's decision. "I felt embarrassed, I did, I couldn't believe it, because I had genuinely believed it," he told Albrechtsen., "So, I felt embarrassed and I did my best to explain … that it wasn't a deliberate deception. It may have been an erroneous conclusion based on the available information but it wasn't made up."

So the WMD claim may have been wrong but he himself believed it and acted in good faith. He could not, of course, know if the Americans were lying but was impressed by their confidence in the need for war. It had never occurred to him they might be wrong. Nor could he believe that Bush, by then a personal and family friend, might lie to him, or might have been lied to by Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose motives were controversial from the beginning. The naivete evident in this account seems so out of character that many critics have found it easier to question his honesty.

But, as noted above, the case for parliamentary oversight is not merely that a PM might be less than trustworthy - it is more likely that an honest leader anxious to protect the nation might be persuaded by false claims, especially when made by a powerful ally who has made it clear it would be offended if they were challenged.

One puzzle is Howard's failure to mention the role of Defence Minister Alexander Downer. One would expect them to have consulted almost daily in the weeks preceding the invasion. The explanation emerged in July 2007, when Phillip Coorey, Chief Political Correspondent of the SMH, revealed that Downer had a different view of the war. Under the title "Downer admits safety of oil key to Iraq war," he reported that the Foreign Minister had contradicted the PM, saying the mission in Iraq is linked to safeguarding the war-torn nation's oil reserves."

As Downer saw it, allowing al-Qaeda to prevail would affect Iraq's oil industry and cripple the country economically. "They have to be able to generate some income in Iraq," he said. "The suggestion that the Iraqis shouldn't be able to export oil and generate any income to sustain an economy which has already been attacked by terrorists is pretty absurd."

Downer continued in this altruistic vein, saying the challenge "is to make sure, first and foremost, al-Qaeda is defeated in Iraq", but this could not be separated from the issue of oil. "Iraq has very little going for it except its oil reserves and it has to be able to earn revenue from oil," he said. "Al-Qaeda have spent a good deal of time trying to destroy Iraq's one export-earning … capacity - blowing up pipelines in the North and trying to destroy oil facilities down in the South around Basra." Hence denying Iraq the capacity to export oil would "just completely destroy the whole of Iraq". It would also, of course, deny access to this oil by the West.

This difference over what the war was about, despite both having access to the same US policy information and intelligence estimates, is another reason to support parliamentary oversight. Howard saw himself as acting in accordance with international law (despite 43 opinions from Australian legal experts to the contrary) but refused to release his legal advice. Downer, it seems, was prepared to ignore the basic precepts of international law.

There are lessons to re-learn from the abuses of power which led to the Iraq war. Foremost is a reminder of the fallibility and hubris of political leaders. There are also cultural factors - history, education, economics, etc., which shape the views of the public and the mood of the nation. But the latter is always subject to the power of persuasion, shared between the public and private media. Howard knew that only 6% supported the war but that once Australian troops were in action this would change, as it did.

This was not the first time since the Second World War that Australia joined US wars against third-world countries based on false claims. Vietnam is a compelling example, as proved by the Pentagon Papers and the memoirs of its chief architect, the US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. Much the same story has emerged in recent years from studies of the Korean conflict, exemplified by Australian author Michael Pembroke's insightful and scholarly "Korea - where the American Century began."

The Labor Party, despite its qualified opposition to the war, has much to answer for. After twenty years of official inquiries and expert evidence of the need for parliamentary oversight, it chose not to make a submission on the proposed reforms, but to set up yet another inquiry to look into the matter. Its media release on 14 April confirms it will kick the can as far down the road as it can:

"National Conference resolves that an Albanese Labor Government will refer the issue of how Australia makes decisions to send service personnel into international armed conflict to an inquiry to be conducted by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade. This inquiry would take submissions, hold public hearings, and produce its findings during the term of the 47th Parliament."

This is deeply misleading because the issue has been researched and analysed to death in dozens of commissioned reports and hundreds of articles both here and overseas. It is also a simple question of political principle - whether the lives of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocent people, including our own defence force personnel, should be put in jeopardy because government leaders assume they will not be misled by the leaders of nations with whom we share trade relations and defence treaties.

That risk is seen in the discretionary wars, based on controversial claims, which led Australia to join the US in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East. They are compelling evidence of the need for Parliament to have the power necessary to examine such claims in future. This seems so obvious that many critics think Labor's do-nothing policy rests on little more than a wish to deny the Greens credit for a long-overdue reform.

With an election due in May the public is still waiting for Albanese, Wong, Shorten, Plibersek, Burke, Keneally, Dreyfus and other leaders of the federal Labor Party to come out from the non-committal world of shadow ministers and explain why a prime minister should have the kind of military power we normally associate with a medieval monarch or a totalitarian state.