Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That parliamentary approval should be required for Australian forces to be deployed to Syria.

You would be aware, I think, that the first bill that I introduced when I came into this place in mid-2008 was to pick up a bill by the former Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett on parliamentary approval for Australian troops to deploy into conflict zones. It was a bill that had been on the Notice Paper in this place in one form or another since the mid-1980s. I acknowledge the work, in particular, of the former Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, who was a long-time advocate for the transfer of what is called, somewhat casually, the 'war power' from the executive to the parliament.

This may sound a little bit dry and anodyne but what it means in principle and practice is this: at the moment there is nothing at all preventing the Prime Minister of Australia, on the advice from a very small handful of individuals, from deploying the Australian Defence Force into a theatre of war on the other side of the world, no matter what the consequences—without thinking through the strategic situation, without thinking through the risk to those on the ground, without thinking through or properly evaluating the risk to the personnel that we would be sending overseas or whether our participation in such a conflict would make matters worse. I am very strongly of the view, as are many other supporters of the proposal for parliamentary approval that that decision should never again rest in the hands of the Prime Minister alone.

I made a deliberate decision not to bring that war power bill back for debate in this chamber. It has been debated and voted on twice. It has been defeated twice by the government, voting in concert with the opposition, because the executive prefers to keep this power to itself. I am very strongly of the view that the bill and many of the arguments for it have been thoroughly misrepresented by its opponents, and I will go into that in a little bit of detail this afternoon.

The principal argument is the lessons of 2003, when Prime Minister John Howard committed Australian forces to the illegal invasion of another country on the other side of the world. That resulted in the unravelling of the security environment in Iraq and other consequences that, in part, we are grappling with today. The vicious insurgency that has emerged and evolved almost in viral form into something that now calls itself a state—and, indeed, as some analysts have pointed out, exhibits some of the characteristics of a state—was born in that cauldron of hideous sectarian violence in Iraq, particular during and immediately after 2006.

That decision to invade Iraq was based on false pretences. It was not because intelligence services read that situation wrongly, which is what they have been, I think, quite unfairly blamed for doing, but because politicians warped and twisted the defence and intelligence reports that they were being given by entities such as the ONA here in Australia and their counterparts in the United States and the UK, to suit a predetermined political agenda, which was to unseat Saddam Hussein and remake the Middle East in the image of secular Western democracies. Well, hasn't that been a resounding and spectacular success! If we needed more of a profound argument as to why the decision to send Australians into war should be made by the parliament, here in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, it is that grotesque miscalculation in 2003. To then turn around and pin the blame on our intelligence services, saying, 'They got it wrong; let's hold an inquiry into how they got it wrong,' really compounds the injustice.

I decided, however, that this motion today should stand alone, as it represents the principle that the Australian Greens and our allies inside and outside this parliament, picking up where the Australian Democrats left off, have been arguing for years—that this parliament is the proper place for those decisions to be made.

But I want to make this distinction very clear at the outset: once a decision has been made to deploy Australian forces into a conflict, parliament should not involve itself in tactical or battlefield decisions. That was not the purpose of the bill. I say that because I have no doubt that government and opposition senators will shortly be filing in here and telling us that parliament is not qualified to conduct a war on the other side of the world—and it isn't. Those are strategic and tactical decisions for military commanders in the event that a deployment is considered justified and necessary. However, the decision to participate in a war by choice, which is what this is, is a political decision, and it is my firm view that, before we line up in front of flags and farewell Australian service personnel who may not return or who, if they do, may return broken, we should sign our names to such a decision in this place if we support such a deployment and that we should consider very, very carefully the consequences for not just those that we send overseas but also those who will be subject to that Australian military commitment on the far side of the world.

Here again we see more than a decade later, 12 years later, a Prime Minister, having clearly made up his mind already, unilaterally committing Australian personnel to the Syrian civil war. I heard the comments that Mr Abbott has already made and those of the defence minister this morning, and they were almost unbelievably vague as to the intent of this deployment or its necessity, its purpose, its outcome, its objectives, its legality. 'Vague' barely does it justice. How long will we be there? What are the success criteria? Can you demonstrate in any meaningful way at all—and I genuinely invite a response to this from government senators and senators on the Labor Party side who again have uncritically signed off on this and simply failed to turn up to work—that this will not make things worse? It is the view of not just the Australian Greens that hurling Australian munitions into the Syrian civil war will make things worse. It is also the view of many others in the diplomatic community and in the defence community here and overseas that Australia's involvement would not be that of another foreign combatant merely trying to do our bit to preserve the global order and that it may in fact be precisely the wrong time for another foreign power to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war.

On the news wires just before I came down here, there appears to be confirmation that the Russian government, which has long been understood to be providing weapons, training and substantial material support to the Assad regime, now has, in the vernacular, boots on the ground, that Russian forces are in fact engaged against parties that are as yet unknown, and that US Secretary of State John Kerry has talked a number of times to his Russian counterpart expressing extreme concern on the part of the United States government that yet another foreign military party is now engaged in the Syrian civil war. Mr Kerry's comments, in my view, are justified and accurate, in that for any power to take a good look at what the Assad regime has done to its own people since March 2011 and then back it uncritically, as the Putin regime has done, is utterly unconscionable. Yet Mr Kerry's warning could just as equally apply to Australia's government as to the Russian government—that this is not the time for the further escalation of military violence inside Syria; this is the time for demilitarising that benighted country, as locals on the ground are attempting to do. I see Senator Back frowning. I will let you speak for yourself, Senator Back.

There are indeed the first tentative signs of regional ceasefire zones inside Syria that locals on the ground, secular and otherwise, are attempting to widen into a so-called freeze across certain parts of the country where, for sometimes quite brief but in some instances longer periods of time, fighting ceases, allowing aid agencies or locals to get food and other supplies in to those who have been suffering horrific adversity that most of us in here could not even imagine.

The United States does not have clean hands in this regard either. Analysts have taken the time to look at the state department cables that were released by WikiLeaks, and it is fascinating to look at what the United States administration was doing in 2006. I will quote briefly from Robert Naiman, one of the few analysts who has actually taken the time to go through the WikiLeaks state department cables and analyse what the US government foreign policy was in Syria at the time that President Bush was desperately trying to contain, with a troop surge, the extraordinary sectarian violence that was unleashed across Iraq around 2006. This is what Mr Naiman says:

This cable suggests that the U.S. goal in December 2006 was to undermine the Syrian government by any available means, and that what mattered was whether U.S. action would help destabilize the government, not what other impacts the action might have. … In public, the U.S. was opposed to “Islamist extremists” everywhere, but in private the U.S. saw the “potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists” as an “opportunity” which the U.S. should take action to try to increase.

There you have it. The consequences of that now unfold. It is not the United States government paying the price; it is the not the Russian authorities paying the price; it is the people of Syria.

He goes on to say in the WikiLeaks files:

… in December 2006, the man heading the U.S. Embassy in Syria advocated in a cable to the Secretary of State and the White House that the U.S. government collaborate with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to promote sectarian conflict in Syria between Sunni and Shia as a means of destabilizing the Syrian government.

Further, he says:

U.S. public disgust with the sectarian civil war in Iraq unleashed by the U.S. invasion had just cost Republicans control of Congress in the November 2006 election. The election result immediately produced the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. No one working for the U.S. government on foreign policy at the time could have been unaware of the implications of promoting Sunni-Shia sectarianism.

And now we see that not long afterwards, less than a decade later, Syria itself ripped apart, as Iraq has been, not through an active campaign of bombing and shock and awe and mission accomplished, as we saw unfolding over the skies of Baghdad in 2003, but quietly with weapons, with cash, with support, overt and covert, not just for the moderate democratic forces or the Free Syrian Army, as has been on the record for years, but for quite vicious Islamist subgroups and splinter groups that have now ripped that country apart.

Australians and others who have watched Syria effectively bleed to death since March 2011, I would propose, bear some foreign policy responsibility, as does the Iranian government, as does the Russian government and as does the Turkish government, who have used this entire horror show as an excuse to simply persecute Kurdish minorities inside and outside of Turkey. Nobody has clean hands, yet it is the people of Syria who have paid the price.

So are we tilting at windmills to imagine that there is any kind of peaceful solution to what is going on in Syria or, indeed, in Iraq at the moment? My colleague Senator Hanson-Young and some of her colleagues and allies in this parliament, who have put political differences and allegiances aside to argue and advocate in the cause of the asylum seekers and those refugees fleeing—not in their hundreds of thousands but in their millions—from Syria and from Iraq, yesterday heard from the UNHCR's lead in the Middle East and North Africa. One of the things that he told us—as many in this place, staff and journalists who participated in that briefing, will know—is that there is simply no military solution. There is no military endgame in Syria—and recent history surely teaches us that. Rather, we need to be looking towards a peace process. Those were the words that he used. He cannot undertake his mission in protecting those people fleeing from the Syrian civil war, without a peace process. As far as that may seem from the post-apocalyptic scenes that Syrians have experienced and have fled from, as far as that process appears to be from where we are today, it is incumbent upon us in this parliament, whether or not we support the Prime Minister's reckless and counterproductive deployment of the ADF into the skies over Syria, we should surely be doing everything that we can to promote demilitarisation and de-escalation of violence inside Syria. It is something that I believe my colleagues will be drawing out in a little bit more detail, but let us speak for the moment from some of those others who have had long experience in these matters—certainly longer than me. Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans said:

… trying to drain the Middle East swamps through military action is, we should know by now, more likely than not to be counterproductive.

It is not every day that I quote former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans in here.

The UN commission of inquiry into the conflict in Syria led by Paulo Pinheiro said:

A resonant cry for peace and accountability rings out.

The war is increasingly being driven by international and regional powers, primarily in accordance with their respective geostrategic interests.

The competition among regional powers for influence has resulted … in an alarming exacerbation of the sectarian dimension, instigated by the intervention of foreign fighters and extremists clerics.

This is what Australia is now implicated in. We could have played a profoundly positive role in the de-escalation of the conflict inside Syria, but instead we send F18s.

It is my firm view that this action does not make Australians any safer at all, and I think my colleagues will probably take up that thread in their contributions. While the focus, however briefly, of the global community is on the safety of the Syrian people, I think it is worth continuing along these lines of argument: how do we deescalate the conflict? How can everybody in a non-partisan way in this place do our bit diplomatically, globally, with those powers that we do have engagement with—allies like the United States government, allies like Turkey and allies like Saudi Arabia?—as distasteful as many us might find that concept. How do we de-escalate this conflict?

Many groups and commentators are now turning to de-escalation through local ceasefires as possible measures to address the conflict. These are not theoretical, as I was outlining before. These exist in a small way already on the ground. Most famously advocated by the current UN mediator, Staffan de Mistura, the idea is to spread local and often quite organic grassroots ceasefires until there is a 'freeze' in the conflict across the country and eventually political reconciliation. One brief example: Turkey and Iran have been involved in negotiating a brief, 48-hour ceasefire in Zabadani, a rebel-held town near the Lebanese border that was besieged by Hezbollah for many weeks. It adds to recent signs of new efforts in the region to end the diplomatic deadlock. I think it is quite powerful and important that it is local people on the ground inside Syria who are driving the demilitarisation. Because so many regional powers, including Australia, now have a part in this conflict, diplomatic engagement amongst regional powers is required to make the ceasefire stick.

Steven Simon, the United States National Security Council's senior director for the Middle East and North Africa between May 2011 to January 2013, and Jonathan Stevenson, the NSC's director for political military affairs between November 2011 and May 2013, put it this way:

The most realistic short-term policy goal in Syria is to find ways to limit the areas of the country in direct conflict, with the aim of both containing extremist violence and significantly reducing the number of non-combatant deaths. This goal is not as far-fetched as it sounds, and there is already a basis for pursuing it: through a series of local cease-fires that could, if properly implemented and enforced, provide a path toward stability in several regions of the country, even as conflict continues elsewhere. In particular, clusters of cease-fires around Hama, Horns, and Damascus, and possibly Aleppo, could help end the conflict in a larger region along Syria's principal north-south axis, bringing a degree of normality to daily life in a vital sector of the country.

That is how the UNHCR is able to do its job. That is how it is able to then bring aid back into the country with partners. Australia could play an immensely powerful role in doing that and then deliver aid to the people who need it most. It is aid that we should be dropping into that country, not more munitions.

I look forward to hearing the contributions of other senators in this debate, but I would have thought the proper time for this debate would have been before the deployment, not after. I think it is extraordinary that the Australian Labor Party will say one thing in the House of Representatives and in various interviews on television—'We're pro bombing. We're just going to let the government go ahead with a blank cheque and report to parliament at its leisure and let us know how it's all going.' That was effectively the essence of what Mr Shorten told the country. Then Ms Plibersek in the media last night, quite correctly, expressed in the extreme similar kinds of concerns to what I have expressed this afternoon—that we are inflaming an already volatile situation. Where are the opposition today? Where are they? The proper time for a debate in parliament about the deployment of the ADF into a war zone on the other side of the world was before that deployment, not after it was already underway.

We do not know where this is going. The Abbott government has provided us with no rationale, no exit strategy, no endgame and no success criteria. We do not trust the government's motives. Nor do we trust its competence to carry out any kind of productive military intervention into the Syrian civil war. The solutions lie elsewhere. That is what this parliament needs to be engaged with today and in coming months.