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

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.