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

I want to add some comments to the comments I made this morning, recognising it is likely that the Senate will be debating legislation later this week about parliamentary approval for a deployment. I will reserve my comments on the issue until Thursday, in large part. I contrast the way Senator Dastyari approached the debate with the approach of the previous speaker, Senator O'Sullivan. I do not want any of us on this side of the chamber to be put in the position where, if we do not agree with another speaker, we are pro beheading or we are pro the kind of vile activities we see the so-called Islamic State perpetrating in the territory over which it has control. That is an incredibly degrading way to conduct the debate and I do not think any of us should descend there.

One of the reasons we believe this debate should be brought forward—and we acknowledge that it has been—is that the situation is inordinately complex. We are attempting to help—and I will extend this courtesy to those on the other side of the chamber because everybody who has lined up has expressed a willingness to help and that is why there is such broad support for humanitarian intervention in the areas where we may have some agency to do something—but the line between humanitarian intervention and armed aggression in another part of the world is incredibly fine and it is difficult to draw that line. We have already seen the concept of humanitarian assistance ranging from air drops of food, first aid equipment, water and some of the other materials that Senator Johnston outlined to the Senate earlier in the day to the provisioning of weapons to a group that Australia in part has listed as a terrorist organisation, the PKK, who are well and truly entrenched in that theatre of war. The minister was unable to explain earlier how we can prevent this weaponry falling into the hands of those who Australia has listed as a terrorist organisation. We have gone from humanitarian intervention to drops of weapons by the Royal Australian Air Force from Russia or Eastern Europe—flights that will almost certainly need to be protected by SAS troops, if they are not already there, either to secure the landing areas or to secure the flight crews when they arrive. As I mentioned this morning, the Pine Gap installation is almost certainly being used to guide drone attacks inside Iraq and perhaps inside Syria—we do not really know.

We have already well and truly blurred the line, and I would argue crossed the line, from humanitarian intervention to again being a combatant in this theatre of war. Maybe that is something that those on the other side are completely comfortable with, but that is why the Australian Greens believe that not only should these issues be submitted to respectful debate in this place before we commit other people to risking their lives in this part of the world but indeed the legislature should be given sufficient respect to enable each of us to line up and record our names on one side of the ledger or another, with these issues having been submitted to a vote. That is what the United States Congress does and it is what the United Kingdom parliament in Westminster does—by convention, I acknowledge, not by law; that was what they learned as a result of deep inquiries into the Iraq disaster—and it is what many kindred of democracies do elsewhere.

I listened very carefully to Prime Minister Abbott's words at his press conference yesterday, and other comments to parliament today, and they suggested that this is being done with the consent of the Iraqi government. I wondered at the time, and I think others did as well, why the Iraqi ambassador was not present at that announcement and why there was no statement, that I am aware of anyway, from Iraqi officials here in Australia. It turns out that while this debate has been unfolding the ambassador has been conducting an interview with David Speers on Sky News and has warned against doing what we have done. He has said that the arms shipments should go through the central Iraqi authorities and not be supplied to the Peshmerga. I will have to go back and see exactly what their statement is, but it appears on our reading that they were not even notified of the terms of Australia's intervention where we slipped from humanitarian supplies of food and other essentials to light arms. Now the Iraqi authorities here are saying, 'Well, if we were going to drop weapons into Victoria we would probably consult Canberra first.' What exactly has the government got us into? This is the kind of question that needs to be thoroughly ventilated in this place.

The Australian government seems determined to take its lead from the United States on undertakings that are never made public until many years after these engagements. I listened to Prime Minister Abbott's comments very carefully, and he said there is no intention to put Australian boots on the ground; that is what President Obama has said—as though our foreign and defence policy is being guided entirely by decisions taken in the White House. No other sovereign country does that—nobody does that. It is something that appears to have uniquely evolved here in Australia.

I will have more to say about this on Thursday, but the reason why parliamentarians from the major parties in this place would refuse to submit a vote to parliament on any given deployment, no matter how meritorious, is it would prevent these kinds of blank cheques being written to the United States government. I suspect you would find, as has been made clear by Senators Wong and Conroy this morning, that the deployment is strongly supported by the ALP. It means that vote would be carried—it would be carried in the House of Representatives and it would be carried in the Senate. It is not that the government's objectives would necessarily be put at risk, but you would have to stand up and justify them.

Because Prime Minister Abbott appears to have made undertakings to the President of the US—in what looks to us like an open-ended commitment—it is worth looking to some of the more moderate voices in the US defence and national security establishment about how this debate is playing out in the United States where, unlike Australia, the invasion of Iraq came at an extraordinary cost of US lives. It goes without saying—or it has largely gone without saying—that it came at an extraordinary cost of Iraqi lives.

Joe Cirincione is one analyst whose views should be more widely considered here in Australia. This is something that he wrote in 2004 under the general principle of 'first do no harm'. In 2004, he wrote the following:

It was almost inevitable that a U.S. victory would add to the sense of cultural, ethnic, and religious humiliation that is known to be a prime motivator of al Qaeda–type terrorists.

This was written in the context of President George Bush's infamous 'mission accomplished' stunt on the deck of a US aircraft carrier, which has continued to resonate. Mr Cirincione continues:

It was widely predicted by experts beforehand that the war would boost recruitment to this network and deepen anti-Americanism in a region already deeply antagonistic to the United States and suspicious of its motives. Although this may not be the ultimate outcome, the latter has so far been a clear cost of the war. And while a successful war would definitely eliminate a 'rogue' state, it might—and may—also create a new 'failed' state: one that cannot control its borders, provide internal security, or deliver basic services to its people. Arguably, such failed states—like Afghanistan, Sudan, and others—pose the greatest risk in the long struggle against terror.

I read that—it is 10 years ago, this year, that it was written—and thought he had more or less accurately predicted the collapse of that part of Iraq into what could effectively develop into a full-blown civil war and the establishment of a terror state where none existed before.

Chas Freeman Jr, who is a former US diplomat, writes more recently—only this past July—in an article called 'Obama's foreign policy and the future of the Middle East':

To begin. If we are at all honest, we must admit that the deplorable state of affairs in the Middle East—in Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iran, the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, and, peripherally, Afghanistan—is a product not only of the dynamics of the region but also of a lapse in our capacity to think and act strategically.

In other words, there are voices—wiser voices, which we have heard largely in the Australian context—in the United States cautioning very strongly against further open-ended military commitment to this part of the world. That is partly because it may well make things worse to give credibility to, and increase, that sense of isolation and attack by foreign powers on an organisation like the Islamic State, rather than deferring to their neighbours, who by and large utterly loathe the existence of this new creation. It may very well be the thing that consolidates them and allows them to continue their recruiting. There are voices in Australian foreign and defence policy establishment who have been quite compelling in running the argument that this might be exactly what they are after—that it plays to their narrative. Again, this is precisely the kind of reason why these measures should be subjected to full debate that is respectful, rather than simply hurling abuse across the chamber.