Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary of the excursion into Iraq, and yesterday the leader of the federal Labor Party, Kevin Rudd, said that one of his first actions on becoming Prime Minister later this year would be to speak to President Bush and ask him for an exit strategy. I do not think that is an unreasonable request for one of America’s most loyal and longstanding allies to make. We have been allies with the United States formally since the 1950s, but we have had a long relationship with them. They should understand, as I am sure their administration does, that we may not necessarily agree all the time on the actions that they take. It is only right and proper that we seek and demand what the strategy to exit Iraq should be. It is only natural that we should expect it for a military excursion like this, which has been carried out finely by our troops in that part of the world.

The greatest effort by our armed forces since World War II was in East Timor. That is where we had probably the most of our armed forces committed in one single action. Are you telling me that, over in Russell Offices and DFAT, there were not scores and scores of committees and meetings held by those honourable public servants and military officers working on an exit strategy for East Timor? Are you telling me that they were not working out, chapter and verse, what would be the next step for our men and women to come home?

We still have a military presence in East Timor, but we do not have the thousands of troops, air men and women, and sailors that we did when we first went in there, because our people sat down and worked out how we were going to get back. We did that in Vietnam. Even before the Whitlam government was elected in 1972, our troops were on their way home, because those same public servants and military officers worked out what our exit strategy was going to be. So why shouldn’t we demand to know from the United States what their exit strategy is and what ours should be? We have an entitlement to do that.

Senator Payne talked about a ‘nation of Iraq’. Iraq was created after World War I at the peace conferences at Versailles. It is as much a nation, in that part of the world, as any of the other ones created after World War I—and we have seen the disastrous consequences throughout the Middle East and south-east Europe as a result of that. We are seeing a civil war that has been underway on and off for some time, with divisions within the Shia and the Sunni Muslims—let alone the Kurds, who have been demanding their own independence, as they have for some time. So let us not get distracted by the notion that this is about the nation of Iraq. Iraq did not exist before World War I, and it is slowly crumbling now.

Let me also point out certain issues about the exit strategy. President Bush’s father has been criticised because the neo-conservatives claim that during the first Gulf War he should have not stopped at Kuwait but continued through and dealt with Saddam. I wonder why he and his military officers and civil servants did not do that. I imagine it was mainly because the Americans did not know what they were going to do once they got there. They did not have any exit strategy. Their strategy was to kick Saddam out of Kuwait and reinstate the government that had been overthrown. They knew what they were doing there—and it was a success. The state of Kuwait still exists, its government is still in charge there and, for all I know, it is still as antidemocratic as it was before Saddam’s time there.

That leads me again to the fact that government senators have got up here and talked about that part of the world and about America, saying that it is trying to put democracy into Iraq. I wish it luck, because what has happened as a result of America’s excursion into Iraq? For a start, it now has to have relationships with some of the most autocratic and antidemocratic regimes in the world. Where are its relationships with any of these democracies in the Middle East? Maybe Professor Trood will enlighten us when he gets the opportunity to contribute to this debate. It has no such relationships. It is dealing with the most autocratic and antidemocratic regimes in the world, trying to impose—