Senate debates

Monday, 26 February 2007

Adjournment

Iraq

10:00 pm

Photo of Lyn AllisonLyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | | Hansard source

The last two weeks have demonstrated very convincingly, I think, that the Howard government is dangerously out of step with world and public opinion on Iraq. President Bush and our Prime Minister have dug themselves into a hole that gets deeper with every bomb blast in Baghdad, with every civilian killed, with every US plane shot down—now eight just in the last month—with every American soldier killed, with every hospital in Iraq bursting at the seams with more injured people and with no end in sight to the slaughter.

Mr Cheney, a hawk behind the ill-fated strategy in Iraq, paid us a visit at the weekend. He is pulling out all stops to shore up the Bush administration’s hopeless surge and to shore up Mr Howard’s support as other countries bale out of this disaster. Mr Cheney wants us to believe, as does Mr Howard, that Iran will be the big winner if there is a significant coalition withdrawal—when in doubt, just find another evil enemy to distract from the mess that is Iraq. If Mr Howard is the greatest threat to Australia’s peace and security, as Mr Rudd says, then surely Mr Bush is the greatest threat to peace and security in the Middle East.

We joined the US in a pre-emptive attack on another country on the basis of false intelligence—intelligence known to be false by anyone who bothered to listen to the weapons inspectors at the time. And this week it seems the US intelligence provided to the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s supposed illicit nuclear weapons is just as inaccurate. Mr ElBaradei told the UN Security Council that the story about Saddam Hussein sourcing uranium from Niger was a furphy, and for his trouble his re-appointment as head of the IAEA was opposed by America.

Iran is now also accused of supporting insurgents inside Iraq and backing militant groups. According to the Los Angeles Times last week, even American officials privately acknowledge that much of their evidence on Iran’s nuclear plans and programs remains ambiguous, fragmented and difficult to prove. There is little doubt that Iran is enriching uranium in small amounts but no proof whatsoever that it is for nuclear weapons.

While Mr Howard worries about Iran being emboldened by a troop withdrawal, which he chooses to call a defeat in Iraq, the Prime Minister thinks nothing of supporting the US-India deal that supplies uranium to a country that does have nuclear weapons but is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Would we agree to a similar deal with Iran? I do not think so, even though Iran is arguably a safer option since, unlike India, it does not have illicit weapons.

Of course the geopolitical situation in the Middle East is very complex and becoming more so by the day, but one thing is very clear: it is not the withdrawal of troops that has emboldened Iran; it is the attack on Iraq in the first place. It was turning America’s military might on a largely defenceless country that emboldened and empowered not just Iran but, by all accounts, al-Qaeda and fundamentalists, who found more cause to resent the West.

The attack on Iraq was relatively quick but another war is underway in which the enemy is by no means clear. That is the problem when you wage an unjust war, destroying lives, services and the economy, particularly in such a politically sensitive part of the world. Four years later, the warriors have become the occupiers and their presence is an ongoing provocation. A third of Iraqis live in poverty and five per cent in extreme poverty, and most of the poorest Shiite Muslims are in rural areas, according to a UN study released a week ago. There are dangerous housing conditions, no access to school, not enough food and not enough medicines. It is hardly surprising then that Iraqis are antagonistic. It is fertile ground for recruitment for militant activity, according to a UN official in Amman.

Australian troops may be welcome for their good work in southern Iraq. The British troops are doing good work in Basra too, but British military chiefs are saying that their work is largely finished. According to Mr Blair, there is no Sunni insurgency in Basra, no al-Qaeda, and very little Shia versus Sunni violence. But Guardian journalist Jonathan Steele reported last week:

... the Sunni community is too small to fight back, and up to two-thirds of them have been forced to flee. Basra’s Christians are also escaping while they can. So, then, who is the enemy? ... everyone knows that it consists of a cocktail of different Shia Islamist militias, armed tribes and criminal gangs. Dealing with them cannot be the task of an army, either foreign or Iraqi. It is a job for police.

The task is made harder in Basra by the fact that the two main militias, the Badr organisation and the Mahdi army, are linked to different Islamist political parties that are vying for supremacy. The governor of Basra and the chairman of the provincial council have ties to one side, and the police chief to the other, while the police force beneath him is packed with men from both. They are engaged in a kind of civic civil war, a local struggle over who controls revenues, both legal and illegal—the most lucrative of which is the siphoning-off of Basra’s oil.

None of this lethal crew likes the British, so it is no surprise that British casualties over the past four months have tripled as troops go valiantly about. The Ministry of Defence keeps no monthly count of attacks on British troops, but the figures for the wounded who are taken to field hospitals have gone up from a rate of five a month between February and October 2006 to 17 a month since then.

The military says Britain should get out because their presence is provocative. But Mr Cheney says withdrawal is not an option. Emboldened jihadists could work their way through to Afghanistan, the Middle East, Spain, North Africa, Asia, across to Indonesia and then down to Australia—the domino theory used to justify the equally disastrous war in Vietnam 40 years ago.

To quote Mr Cheney, the ‘only option for our security and survival is to go on the offensive—face the threat directly, patiently and systematically until the enemy is destroyed’. What enemy is to be destroyed exactly—the whole of Iraq, al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, Iran? Will the war be over when they are all killed? None of us knows.

But Minister Nelson said tonight that the current threat to the world was as great as it was in 1942. With talk about destroying enemies broadly defined as those who oppose what the Coalition of the Willing is doing in Iraq, it could well be as great as it was in World War II. According to reports over the last few days, Iraq is soon to be robbed of its most valuable resource—its oil. Iraqis have suffered two wars, crippling sanctions and then, after 2003, the free market policies of the West. State-run enterprises that employed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were dismantled and subsidies dropped.

Now it seems the Iraqi government is about to hand over to the private sector all of its oil reserves, the second or third largest in the world. Heather Stewart, correspondent for the Observer in the UK, reported at the weekend on a leaked draft of legislation that would have the government sign away the right to exploit its untapped fields in so-called exploration contracts which could then be extended for more than 30 years. The Iraqi foreign minister admitted discussing the wording with British oil giants.

Stewart says control of oil is an explosive political issue in Iraq. When this sell-out becomes known, it is unlikely to calm what is generally understood to be a civil war. Iraq would continue to own the untapped oil, but contracts would give private oil giants exclusive rights to extract it. Kamil Mahdi, an Iraqi economist at Exeter University, says:

The whole idea of the law is due to external pressure. The law is no protection against corruption, or against weakness of government. It’s not a recipe for stability.

The new law is still shrouded in secrecy. Iraqi parliamentarians have yet to see it. I do not think that our troops should be there when this latest assault on Iraq becomes widely known. It is time to urge Britain and the US to back off on this oil deal; it is time we had a plan to bring our troops home.