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The 'intelligence failures' are a ploy to discredit the Allies' great work in Iraq

By Rob Shilkin - posted Friday, 20 June 2003


Iraq has been free for a little over two months. Saddam and his sadistic regime have been confined to the dustbin of history.

Potential menaces to the world order, from Iran to North Korea, are on notice that the West will not tolerate the proliferation of tyranny, or the sponsorship of terror.

Using the impetus gained from Iraq, the US is attempting to push the Israeli-Palestinian situation towards a temporary detente. The winds of change in the Middle East are gradually and painfully starting to blow.

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Yet the members of Australia's anti-war brigade still refuse to accept that this has all happened. Ever since the fall of Baghdad, they have been bitterly carping from the sidelines. The current furore over Iraq's "missing" weapons of mass-destruction is the latest effort from among their ranks.

This particular issue has been dressed up as a debate on flawed intelligence reports. But no one could sensibly assert that the West fabricated Saddam's WMD ambitions. Even war opponent, Richard Butler accepts that as recently as 1999 (before expelling the UN weapons inspectors) Saddam had a weapons of mass-destruction program. He also allegedly used chemical weapons on his own people in the late 1980s.

The issue is really whether Saddam, faced with the inevitability of the end of his regime, decided to destroy or hide his weapons. This is a moot issue for three reasons.

First, so what if Saddam trashed his stash at the last minute? Would the anti-war set seek to return him to power? Perhaps they would demand that the US issue a formal apology and reconstruct his statues and torture chambers.

Second, even if he disposed of his weapons, did the Allies go to war under false pretences as Robert Manne and others assert? Of course not - we went to depose a vicious tyrant who had openly threatened his region and the West, before he could fulfill his chemical, biological and nuclear ambitions, or assist others to achieve theirs.

Third, despite suggestions to the contrary by the anti-war set, these alleged intelligence "failures" will not make it more difficult for the West to take action against rogue states in the future. The war in Iraq succeeded despite immense pressure from the Old Europeans, Russians, Chinese, the UN Secretary General and leftist parties worldwide. The past two years have shown that the US and its allies are capable of leading the West into taking necessary action against terrorists and rogue nations in spite of the widespread opposition and intransigence of these groups.

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In light of these three factors, the current debate is a meaningless sideshow.

Why then, has this debate taken such prominence? In truth, it is being raised by the war's opponents, solely to paint the US and its Allies as being war-hungry aggressors. It is another attempt to discredit the Allies' success in Iraq. Such attempts have become painfully repetitive since the war began, as the following list attests.

Initially, when the war was not over in two weeks, the battle "not going according to plan"- the Allies had underestimated the strength of Iraq's defences. That line lasted for about a week.

As the third week of the war, the anti-war set, including Macquarie University's Andrew Vincent, argued that Iraqis would not welcome the Allied forces.

Next, when the Iraqis did, in fact, welcome them, Robert Fisk and others simply asserted that our television images were misleading. For example, Fisk found "secret camera angles" of the fall of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square to prove that it was all a propaganda stunt.

Subsequently, we saw the spectacle of the anti-war movement weeping over Iraq's stolen antiques -the looting demonstrated that the US condoned cultural vandalism and spilled blood for oil. "America only cares about Iraq's oil", they yelled, even as the humanitarian aid poured in and the US promised that Iraq's oil would be used exclusively for the benefit of Iraqis.

Then came the conspiracy theories that the US was poised to attack Syria, thereby proving that this was all an exercise in colonialism.

Next we had the horror of the US "imposing" a system of Government on Iraq. Worse still, it would be a democracy, where- shock, horror! - everyone gets a vote.

Up next were the Iraqi reconstruction contracts being handed out to Allied companies. The French and German multinationals who built Saddam's underground bunkers were understandably dismayed by this outcome.

The list goes on. The latest point-scoring exercise over "intelligence failures" is just the current "whinge du jour". There will undoubtedly be more to come.

The honourable thing for the opponents of Iraqi Freedom to have done was to swallow their pride and admit that the operation was far more successful than imagined. It caused fewer casualties than feared and was jubilantly welcomed by Iraqis.

Sadly, though, the members of Australia's anti-war set are now choked by such a thick fog of anti-Americanism that it prevents them from responding rationally to any issue with which America is even tangentially involved. Most on Australia's left display an unthinking knee-jerk reaction to all decisions or statements that emanate from the current US administration. In their narrow world, everything that President Bush and the "neo-cons" say, or do, must be wrong. It is simply not possible to reasonably engage in debate with Australians of this mindset.

The anti-war movement's refusal to let this issue rest also stems, however, from the incredible success of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Opponents of the war were understandably stunned by the rapid and painless success of the mission, and the US' ensuing commitment to delivering a true Middle East peace. Their arguments against the war have been dramatically stripped of all their moral and strategic force. They are now struggling for bases on which to assert that the war was unnecessary or ill-conceived. It is a classic case of "See -We-Were-Right syndrome" (closely related to its sister syndrome "Relevance Deprivation").

Australia's anti-war brigade will lose more than moral integrity by maintaining its opposition to the operation that brought freedom to the Iraqi people. In the long-term, by continuing to give oxygen to an issue that exposes its flawed predictions of an Armageddon, it will lose its credibility in respect of future world conflicts. Morally and strategically, opponents to the war should now leave the issue well alone and admit that the liberation of Iraq has been an almost unqualified success.

Any suggestion of a Parliamentary inquiry into this issue should be quickly dismissed. All that it would demonstrate is that Australia's anti-war set is suffering from its own intelligence failure.

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About the Author

Rob Shilkin is a lawyer at Clayton Utz in Sydney. His Op-Ed pieces on international affairs have been published in Australian newspapers and magazines.

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