The unknown war and the known soldier

The reality, though, is that other rationales for the attack on Iraq did not appear until after the initial, defencist justification for the war became untenable when no weapons of mass destruction were discovered and the intelligence upon which the belief in their existence had been founded was utterly discredited. Now the bloody quagmire of contemporary Iraq hardly vindicates the invasion of Iraq as a “successful” crusade and even still, there has been no articulation as to Australia's war aims in the sense of a clear statement of the necessary preconditions for bringing the troops home.

In Baghdad alone, an average of more than 1,000 Iraqi people have died violent deaths each month of the year to date. Not all of those who are killed can be automatically regarded as victims of “insurgency” or “civil war”, of course, but then it would be vastly over-simplistic to imagine that what is going on in Iraq now can be understood as a single conflict.

In addition to the attacks directed against the American-led coalition forces and the violence between the principal ethnic groups, there are no doubt any number of “little wars”: regional, local, familial and even personal conflicts, hatched from the lawlessness which followed the destruction of the formal institutions of Baathist Iraq. Socio-economic chaos tends to supplicate the evening up of long-held scores. In truth, girt by sea and enjoying great national prosperity in our splendid geographic isolation, Australians perhaps tend to suspect little of such intricacies.

The good luck of our war in Iraq has, following the famous indictment of Donald Horne, been shared by the “second-rate people” in national government who committed Australia to the foolishness in the first place, but have themselves suffered no political consequences. A number of commentators have observed that a critical difference between Howard, Bush and Blair is that the latter pair has been faced with a steady stream of casualties; their foreign policy choices standing accused by the growing roll of the dead.

Howard, on the other hand, had luxuriated in the providence of a war, the waging of which, until April of this year, had not required the ultimate sacrifice by any Digger. Prior to the death of Private Kovco, no Australian had fought and fallen to become an Iraqi son as well.

I had a dream last night in which the Federal Government pulled out a pistol and shot itself in the head, but did not die. It was others who suffered.

Our deepest condolences to the family of Private Jake Kovco.