Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

March this year is the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, led by the United States and its lackeys, including, shamefully, this country. The Iraq war was bloody, aggressive and illegal. It should be remembered as a crime against humanity. How can the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, the attacks on civilians in Baghdad square and the bombardment of Fallujah be called anything other than crimes against humanity? The war destroyed Iraq and took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Nine million people were displaced. Five million Iraqi children were orphaned. Entire generations can never look at the sky the same way, and yet the architects of this war and these war crimes walk free.

Blair, Bush and Howard have faced no accountability. The Bush administration manipulated the facts and deliberately deceived the public after 9/11, hellbent on invading Iraq. Bush stoked fear, hate and Islamophobia to build support for war. Tony Blair exaggerated the case for war and rushed into conflict, the UK giving the US the diplomatic cover they needed for their criminal acts of aggression. John Howard gave false reasons for going to war. Howard lied to the parliament and he lied to the public, and he remains unrepentant.

Sadly, Iraq's people were not the only victims of the Western world's so-called war on terror, as the people of Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and others will attest to. Muslims throughout the world who felt this fear of Islamophobia because of the lies manufactured to enable the war were also victims of the so-called war on terror. Most offensive was the narrative that Iraqi people needed Western intervention to free them. Black and brown people have never needed white saviours. The reality is that they were seen, and they are seen, as pawns in the games of imperialists. Their pain and suffering is completely ignored.

Greed is often at the core of warmongering. Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq's domestic oil industry was state owned and closed to Western oil companies. After the war, it was largely privatised and is now dominated by foreign firms. ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron have all set up shop in Iraq.

Twenty years on, justice has not been served. The arrogant AUKUS dealers demonstrate the Western war machine remains as powerful and bloodthirsty as ever, including here in Australia. We see constant hysterical warmongering on our front pages and no regard for the impact on Chinese communities, just as there was no regard for Muslim communities 20 years ago.

Disgracefully, the Albanese government are as eager as the Morrison government was to make Australia America's little lapdog. They are too cowardly to admit that nuclear submarines, missiles and bombs will not protect people. In Australia we face the worst housing crisis ever. More and more people are living in poverty. Amidst the climate crisis, a code red for humanity has been declared. When it comes to these mammoth problems, the Labor government shrugs its shoulders and cries poor. They say there is not enough money to stop the growing homelessness crisis. They say there is not enough money to raise income support so people don't have to live in poverty and children don't have to go hungry. They say there's not enough money to provide higher education without punishing students with mountain-high debt. We are nowhere near the actions so desperately needed to stop the ticking climate bomb. But there is unlimited money for dangerous weapons and war machines that we don't need, $360 billion of it, to be precise, pumped straight into the US weapons companies and the military-industrial complex, courtesy of the Australian public. It's austerity for people and planet but abundance for the war machine.

Iraq deserves full accountability and reparations for what Western invaders did. We owe this to the people of Iraq and the countries that were targeted and the victims of this war. We need to push back against Labor's and the Liberals' war agenda with every fibre of our being. We must mobilise against war and militarisation. We must build a mass movement of peace. Let's learn the lessons from the past colossal failures of the entirely futile and bloody imperial wars that have been waged by Europe, the US and their Western allies, like Australia. Let's not repeat these unmitigated disasters.