http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2002/08/16/1029114013308.htm
Pressure for attack eases
Date: August 17 2002
By Louise Dodson
Chief Political Correspondent
Canberra
The Howard Government has given its first public assessment of when the United States might attack Iraq, saying a strike is not likely before next year.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has also signalled that any Australian contribution would be very limited.
Although polls show strong resistance to Australian involvement in a war against Iraq, Mr Downer told The Age the public was deeply worried about Saddam Hussein, and "has been for a long time".
"The public's view is that it was a mistake to leave Saddam there in 1991 (at the end of the first Gulf War)," Mr Downer said.
The Foreign Minister rejected Labor leader Simon Crean's accusations that he has been warmongering for domestic political reasons or trying to depict Labor as weak on national security.
"Why would we, two-and-a-half years out from an election? The Labor Party is not an issue for us," he said.
But Mr Downer said it was important for Australia to have a serious debate about the possibility of a US attack on Iraq - which the government has consistently said is more likely than not.
In the first public indication of the timing of any action, Mr Downer said that it if it went ahead, it was "not likely to happen until some time next year".
Meanwhile, senior sources revealed that the government was developing a detailed strategy to prepare the public for any strike against Iraq.
This campaign would begin with a full parliamentary debate.
Government sources said the strategy's key elements were to:
Tone down what has become an overheated and politicised debate.
Make sure the public knows that if Australia were to militarily support a US attack against Iraq, it would be minimal.
Focus attention on how recalcitrant Saddam Hussein has been in meeting United Nations requirements over its weapons.
Australian involvement may be as minimal as directly engaging the navy's ships already in the Persian Gulf on sanctions activities, sources suggest.
Government sources believe that if people know Australia's involvement will be limited, they will be more reassured about committing to the war.
As the government is crafting the strategy, Iraq is signalling retaliation by rejecting the latest plea by the Australian Wheat Board to save around $400 million in wheat sales.
Iraq has told a delegation of Australian wheat growers it will resume buying wheat from Australia if the Howard Government rules out military action.
Simon Crean and Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd say that "neither Australia nor the Australian wheat industry would have found itself in this mess had Foreign Minister Downer not sought to place Australia ahead of international and even US sentiment on Iraq".
Mr Rudd accuses the Foreign Minister of using "Rambo rhetoric".Mr Crean says Mr Downer is stepping up his rhetoric for "no other reasons than to promote his leadership ambitions within the Liberal Party".
Mr Downer says his aim is to concentrate on the international debate.
"I don't want the United Nations Security Council members to say, 'Let's negotiate a new package of concessions with Iraq'," he says.
After Mr Downer warned against appeasing President Saddam and Mr Howard cautioned that it was "always in Australia's national interest to see that the threat posed by people like Saddam is not allowed to go completely unchecked", the Prime Minister is now making clear he wants to tone down the debate.
"I think this whole discussion has got to have a sense of proportion and a sense of perspective. We're not dealing here with a potential world war," Mr Howard says.
"We're dealing with a concern, a very legitimate concern, about the failure of a country to comply with Security Council resolutions."
A new opinion poll, commissioned by Labor Party pollster Hawker Britton UMR Research, has found 57 per cent of Australian disapprove of Australian participating in a US-led attack on Iraq and 47 per cent think there is too much support for the US foreign policy.
However, the government insists it is undeterred by polls.
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2002/08/15/1029113981159.htm
It's deja vu as Howard heeds Bush's call to battle
Date: August 16 2002
Labor prime ministers have a better record of protecting the national interest than their conservative counterparts.
The Howard Government's belligerent rhetoric on Iraq is reprehensible - but also predictable. It is hardly surprising given the Prime Minister's shameless electoral exploitation of the counter-offensive against terrorism last year. Remember the staged stunt of the SAS farewell during the election campaign, when the SAS members were still here weeks later?
The government's willingness to go all the way with George Bush into Iraq is no surprise, not just because of what happened last year, but because of what happened last century and particularly in 1942, the year of the Kokoda combat that John Howard is commemorating this week.
Many of the Seventh Division men who fought at Kokoda would not have been able to safeguard Australia there if the urgings of Howard's political predecessors had been heeded. Instead they would have already been killed or captured by the Japanese in the course of a wild goose chase that represented a gross dereliction of Australia's national interest.
Australian conservatives like to portray themselves as the true custodians of the national interest in defence and foreign policy matters. The reality is very different, not only at the moment concerning Iraq, but also in 1942 and for much of Australia's history.
In all the major conflicts last century, Australia's national interest was best served by Labor, not by its opponents.
It is little known that Labor's superior record on defence before 1914 was pivotal in its success at that year's election, which was held a few weeks after the outbreak of World War I. Then, during that conflict, Labor activists, John Curtin among them, opposed the conservatives' repeated attempts to conscript young Australians for the Western Front slaughterhouse. In the calamity of Fromelles, an operation catastrophically botched by the British, 5533 Australians became casualties on July 19, 1916. It remains Australia's most tragic day. A month later, British strategists delivered a deliberately unattainable ultimatum about Australian recruiting requirements, in order to bring about the introduction of conscription in Australia. Conscriptionists did not challenge this move.
As for the dramatic year of Kokoda, Australia looked alarmingly vulnerable early in 1942 when the relentless Japanese sweep south culminated in the fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin.
Curtin, now prime minister, decided it was time to bring Australia's soldiers home. Instead of helping Britain far from their own shores, they should be brought back here to safeguard Australia.
The ensuing nervous ordeal Curtin endured is reasonably well known. The sleeplessness, the nightmarish visions of troopships meeting with disaster, the fretful pacing around The Lodge in the middle of the night - all this is integral to Curtin's image as a dedicated war leader whose health suffered so severely under the strain that he eventually became a war casualty himself.
Less well known is a controversy affecting the troopships on their way home. British prime minister Churchill and US president Roosevelt became concerned about the situation in Burma, where the Japanese were advancing ominously, and proposed that Australia's returning Seventh Division should be diverted there to deal with it.
Curtin rejected this proposal. Not only was the Seventh Division needed for the defence of Australia, if it went to Burma a fiasco was on the cards. The men lacked air support, and were detached from their arms and equipment. Casualties of even Fromelles-like magnitude could well have resulted.
However, the five conservative members of Australia's Advisory War Council, a consultative body including senior opposition MPs, unanimously advocated compliance with Churchill's proposed diversion. This non-Labor quintet comprised four past or future prime ministers - Billy Hughes, Arthur Fadden, John McEwen and Howard's hero Robert Menzies - and the eminent frontbencher Percy Spender. Two other former prime ministers from the non-Labor side of politics, Stanley Bruce and Earle Page, both then serving as Australian government representatives in London, also endorsed Churchill's notion and lobbied Curtin to support it.
Curtin refused to budge. Churchill and Roosevelt redoubled the pressure. Curtin reiterated that the Australian divisions had to come home. Remarkably, Churchill ignored him and ordered the Seventh Division to Burma anyway. Curtin reaffirmed his government's insistence, and rebuked Churchill for treating so cavalierly Australia's clear wishes and increasing the risks of Japanese attacks on the convoy en route. Churchill grudgingly backed down and redirected the convoy to Australia - but he remained under the mistaken impression that the Seventh Division could have prevented the fall of Burma.
The unanimous compliance with Churchill's demand 60 years ago by those six men who held the office of Australian prime minister remains surely the most flagrant dereliction of Australia's national interest since Federation. Australia was vulnerable. It seemed the so-far invincible Japanese forces could well be about to invade Australia, as some Japanese strategists were advocating.
When the Burma proposal was raised, the appropriate response in Australia's national interest was obvious to the Curtin government. But Curtin's opponents instinctively did the bidding of Australia's great and powerful friends.
Their successors are still doing it.
Ross McMullin is the author of Pompey Elliott and the ALP centenary history The Light on the Hill.
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2002/08/16/1029114011837.htm
A new level of war-mongering
Date: August 17 2002
By Hugh MacKay
It's possible to imagine how nations could decide to go to war over territorial issues. The urges involved are ancient and primitive, and you can see why land has always been such a potent symbol of survival, security and, therefore, of identity as well.
You can also imagine how a megalomaniac might want to grab other people's land as a sign of his supremacy. Perhaps, at a pinch, you could even imagine people being so fanatical about their religious or political beliefs that they can convince themselves of the need to shed blood over their differences with others.
Religious wars may be more arcane than territorial wars, but human passions have always run hot when it comes to matters of belief: kids fight each other in the playground over almost imperceptibly tiny differences of opinion; philosophers do the same in learned journals (though they've been known to slug each other as well).
But the United States' sabre-rattling over Iraq - and the Howard Government's eagerness to join in - takes war-mongering to a new level. This would be neither a territorial nor religious war, nor even part of President Bush's "war against terror". Some US officials are euphemistically describing the proposed war on Iraq as "pre-emptive self-defence", designed to bring about "regime change".
Translation: "We don't trust Saddam Hussein, so we intend to get rid of him by invading his country." What might happen to the Iraqis after that is anyone's guess. Perhaps they'll be thrown to the next pack of wolves, as the Afghans have been. (Whoever presumed the Northern Alliance would be a safer bet than the Taliban?)
There's no word from the US - or from our own trigger-happy PM - about the intended successor to Saddam, waiting in the wings, ready to bring democracy to Iraq and harmony to the region.
Does this mean that any regime the US doesn't like is fair game? Will the US rove the world like some bandy-legged Western sheriff, evaluating regimes and deciding which may survive and which should be toppled by military intervention?
Will Zimbabwe be next? What about North Korea, part of George Bush's infamous "axis of evil"? Or Libya? (Oops, I forgot: Gaddafi's suddenly, remarkably, changed from a bad guy into a good guy, it seems.) What about Saudi Arabia, breeding ground for most of the terrorists involved in September 11?
(Psst! Whatever you do, don't tell Dubya that Tony Blair is a devout Catholic. There are plenty of Protestant fundamentalists in the US who think the Catholic Church is the antiChrist, and they just might get into the President's ear, believing America shouldn't form alliances with any leaders loyal to the Vatican.)
If the new world order means the US can impose its will on the regimes of other countries by military intervention, why wouldn't other countries follow suit? Why wouldn't India decide to effect regime change in Pakistan? And mightn't someone, some day, decide the US is itself ripe for regime change?
Ah, but Iraq is a special case, the pro-Bush advocates would argue. Haven't you heard the reason why Saddam has to go? There's every chance that if we let him stay, Iraq will acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Bush talks about "weapons of mass destruction" as though such things are the abhorrent figment of some alien imagination. He appears oblivious of the irony of his own position, as custodian of the world's greatest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. The US defence, presumably, is that such weapons are safe in the hands of Americans, but not in anyone else's... so that's all right, then.
Frankly, I'm appalled by the prospect of weapons of mass destruction being in anyone's hands, and there's little in the rhetoric of the Bush Administration that reassures me. I'd like to believe that this is a peace-loving, moderate, wise and responsible outfit, but the signs are not encouraging, especially if you're an Afghan, or an Iraqi, or...
At one level, I can see why John Howard would support whatever mock-heroic schemes Bush might propose between now and the US mid-term elections: our PM wouldn't want to find himself on the list of leaders earmarked for "regime change". On the other hand, the Howard Government's apparent indifference to diplomacy in the gulf and its gung-ho determination to be part of any force that invades Iraq are so extraordinary you'd have to wonder if there's another agenda.
If there is, it's probably nothing more sinister than domestic politics. The refugee "crisis" won't go on forever, so another Gulf War could be just the thing to keep us all spooked, and Howard & Co are most secure when the rest of us are spooked. (Primitive stuff, but effective - like war itself.)
Hugh Mackay is an author and social researcher.
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