by Brian Toohey
Fairfax Media journalists Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters went much further in a series of reports in June 2018. They said a report commissioned by the ADF had found that some special forces soldiers allegedly committed war crimes in Afghanistan amid a ‘complete lack of accountability’.23 They said some troops embraced warrior culture but others loathed it. This culture included a devotion to the Hollywood movie 300, which glorifies the fighting prowess of the ancient Spartans. Legal action precludes giving details of serious allegations and denials here.
The Afghanistan war has been lost. A pro-Western government might control some territory around Kabul, but it’s unlikely that it can rely on Western security assistance as a form of unending welfare dependency. At a minimum, the Taliban is likely to consolidate its control of the south and probably negotiate a role in the central government. Foreign terrorist groups might expand, but the Taliban won’t want to tolerate their presence if it attracts heavy air strikes.
The historian Andrew Bacevich says avoiding war was once a US national priority: ‘In Washington, war has become tolerable … War now serves as a medium through which favours are bestowed, largesse distributed and ambition satisfied.’24 Similar concerns apply to Australia. The goal of ridding Afghanistan of al-Qaeda was achieved in late 2001, and that’s when the troops should have been withdrawn.
We have spent over $8.3 billion on a futile expeditionary war that by the end of 2018 had killed forty-two Australian soldiers and wounded 261.25
55
HOWARD AND IRAQ: KNAVE OR NAIF?
‘The Australian government knows Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons … that pose a real and unacceptable threat to the stability and security of our world.’
John Howard1
When Prime Minister John Howard made this statement in parliament on 4 February 2003, his government knew no such thing. Nor did he. Yet he was about to publicly commit Australia to another expeditionary war when the nation’s security was not threatened. It was a war of aggression that breached Article 1 of the ANZUS Treaty prohibiting using force without UN approval, and it led to continuing death, turmoil and suffering in the Middle East.
When Howard spoke, Iraq had not possessed WMDs for over ten years. Given the magnitude of his blunder, his speech is worth a closer look. He said, ‘Iraq continues to work on developing nuclear weapons. Uranium has been sought from Africa.’ However, UN pressure had already forced Iraq to abandon its nuclear weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency announced in March 2003 that the uranium-from-Africa story was based on a crude forgery.
A parliamentary committee on the WMD intelligence, chaired by Liberal backbencher David Jull, concluded in its March 2004 report that the Defence Intelligence Organisation had ‘always expressed doubts about the production of biological or chemical weapons beyond 1991’.2 DIO also said that if Iraq still had any functioning WMDs their use was likely to be ‘defensive rather than offensive’.3 The committee found that other assessments by Australian agencies didn’t support the government’s suggestion that the Iraqi ‘arsenal’ represented a ‘grave and immediate [or] real threat’.
WMDs were central to Howard’s case for war. He told the National Press Club on 14 March 2003 that Iraq’s WMDs were the only sufficient justification for war—unlike regime change, human rights abuses or spreading democracy.
As the invasion was underway on 20 March, Howard gave a televised address to the nation that upped the threat from Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons: ‘Even in minute quantities [they] are capable of causing destruction on a mammoth scale.’ This was demonstrable nonsense. Australian weapons inspectors who had tested Iraqi nerve agents after the 1991 Gulf War found these agents could not cause destruction on a mammoth scale. The deputy director of the UN’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Dr John Gee, told me in 1998 that the Iraqi nerve agents (sarin and VX) were of a much poorer quality than those the West produced. Gee, who had been an Australian weapons inspector, said, ‘The Iraqi compounds degrade very rapidly due to contaminants which speed up decomposition.’4 Western forces also inoculate their troops against the effects of nerve agents before entering a danger zone, and antibiotics can treat infections from biological weapons such as anthrax.
Although the US, UK and Australian governments treated the weapons inspectors contemptuously (and the Iraqis sometimes obstructed them), most did an outstanding job in Iraq after 1991. Helped by tough import bans on sensitive equipment and materials, the inspectors and the Iraqis destroyed all WMD stocks that were left. The inspectors also ensured that attempts to resurrect the previous WMD programs would be detected by ground, air and space-borne sensors.
In a submission to Jull’s committee, former Defence Department head Bill Pritchett said that even if Saddam Hussein still had some WMDs, it was hard to believe he wouldn’t be deterred from attacking his neighbours by the overwhelming US response to his 1990 attack on Kuwait. Pritchett, who had provided Australian governments with strategic guidance over many years, said the US plans against Iraq ‘broke far away from our own national interests and the urgent task of dealing with terrorist movements’.5 He also cautioned against letting US intelligence shape Australian policy.
Howard said in his 20 March address that Australia’s security alliance with the US was another reason for participating in the invasion, but his careful placement of Australia’s troops in Iraq meant that none died. Pentagon figures show almost 4500 US soldiers had died by the end of 2017. Estimates vary, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqi fighters and civilians also died and millions more were injured or displaced. A future president is unlikely to consider that the US owes Australia a big debt for deploying troops to a debacle in 2003 where no Australian soldiers died.
Howard also said on 20 March that the supply of intelligence was a ‘priceless component’ of our relationship with the US and the UK. Far from being priceless, the WMD intelligence was worse than useless: it provided the rationale for a disastrous invasion. Yet he persisted with this claim in his 2010 autobiography, Lazarus Rising.6 He also implied in his address that joining the invasion was crucial to obtaining ‘timely and accurate intelligence’ on terrorism—but the US swapped intelligence on terrorism with dozens of countries that didn’t participate in the invasion.
Before the invasion, the Australian media was mostly content to treat government claims about WMDs as true, while denigrating the inspectors. The ABC’s Four Corners broadcast a Panorama program the BBC aired on 23 September 2002 called ‘The Case against Saddam’. Four Corners deleted some of the more outrageous errors, but the program still promised ‘hard evidence of what Hussein’s actually got today and what he stands a good chance of getting in the not-too-distant future’. Panorama had no evidence, hard or otherwise—just government propaganda. When I asked Panorama’s reporter Jane Corbin detailed questions about specific errors in her program, she gave a comprehensive reply saying that when she used the words ‘hard evidence’ she did not mean ‘proof’, and continued in that vein without addressing the core problem that she had no hard evidence, let alone proof, for the program’s claims.7 Despite this travesty, the BBC sacked its director-general for allowing a radio journalist to report correctly that UK prime minister Tony Blair had used ‘sexed-up’ intelligence.
Most Australian newspapers displayed pictographs showing Iraq’s military assets as roughly comparable to those of the invaders, but Iraq didn’t have a functioning air force or navy by 2003, and its army was in no condition, or mood, to fight. One of the ABC 7.30 Report’s ‘expert’ panellists during the war, retired brigadier Jim Wallace, suggested Saddam could detonate large conventional bombs that were ‘dirty with chemical or biological agents’.8 He ignored the point that the intense heat from detonating high explosives would kill biological agents and degrade any chemical weapons. The program also stated that the Iraqis had fired nine Scud missiles—but none were fired because none existed, as the weapons inspectors had made plain.
The Defence Department was little better: it released a report claiming that the SAS had ‘neutralised’ Iraq’s ability to fire WMD-armed Scuds into Israel. There were no Scuds to neutralise.9
One senior Australian official who was intimately involved in the prewar discussions told me on a non-attributable basis, ‘It didn’t matter that Saddam hated Islamic extremists. The Americans just wanted to see body parts flying through the air somewhere in the Middle East.’
Some commentators tried to resuscitate the nonsense that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda. Former intelligence officer turned commentator Paul Monk bluntly stated that a meeting in Prague between the al-Qaeda terrorist Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official had taken place.10 It hadn’t. FBI director Robert Mueller proved Atta, who led the 11 September hijackers, had been in the US at the time of the alleged Prague meeting. Monk even suggested in the same article that the 11 September mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was really a deep-cover Iraqi intelligence officer and not a Kuwaiti. If true, the US would eagerly have told the world after repeatedly waterboarding the boastful Mohammed following his capture.
As late as July 2003, one gullible Australian journalist was still swallowing the fairytale spun by his US contacts. Under the headline ‘WMD Doubts Are Ludicrous’, Greg Sheridan quoted US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton as saying the evidence that Saddam had WMDs ‘is so overwhelming, he can barely understand how it is doubted’.11 At the time of writing, Bolton is President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
When the final report of the US presidential commission on the intelligence about WMDs was released in March 2005, it demolished the rubbish peddled by George W. Bush, Blair and Howard. But Howard has insisted with each passing year that he made the right decision to participate in the illegal invasion. Never mind that it spawned a horrendous new terrorist threat where none existed before; nor that the US installed a corrupt and incompetent government influenced by Tehran’s Islamic revolutionary regime; nor that the Iraqi government approved a new constitution recognising Islam as the source of law in the once-secular nation.
By 2010 the Islamic State (IS) terror group had occupied large parts of Iraq and Syria. It faced almost no resistance from Iraqi forces that had received billions of dollars of US assistance, which had created a dangerous form of welfare dependency. Although Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd withdrew Australian forces in 2008, Australian fighter planes returned to help the US bomb IS-occupied cities, causing heavy civilian casualties. Countries in the region with bigger air forces than Australia’s did not contribute. IS eventually lost its Iraqi territory, but it can still conduct terrorist atrocities around the globe. Australian jets also bombed suspected IS targets in Syria, without the Syrian government’s approval.
Australia did not join the US–French decision to bomb yet another country, Libya, in 2011 to help overthrow yet another dictator. The target was Libya’s Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, although he had abandoned his WMD programs and support for terrorism. Gaddafi was murdered after being anally raped with a knife.12 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later gloated, ‘We came. We saw. He died.’ She didn’t mention that Libya was left in chaos: slave markets prospered, terrorist groups and army factions took control of large parts of the country, and a huge flood of refugees swamped Europe.13
Howard was so confident of his own judgement that he did not seek the normal public-service advice before joining the invasion. He took strategic advice from a staff member, Peter Jennings, who later became the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is funded by the government and arms manufacturers. A department head with intimate knowledge of the prewar decision-making process later said, ‘It was not really a matter of advising on the strategic pros and cons, only what to do if the word was “Go”.’14 The debacle reinforces the case for parliament to decide whether Australia should go to war, not prime ministers whose decision is ticked by a Cabinet subcommittee.
Howard has repeatedly tried to justify himself by saying that he ‘genuinely believed’ Iraq had WMDs,15 but personal belief is no way to make public policy, particularly when the believer is eager to believe. Even after Sir John Chilcot’s highly critical 2016 official report on the British involvement in the war concluded that the action was based on flawed intelligence, Howard told journalists he wouldn’t ‘retreat from’ his decision to invade.16 Chilcot said the benefit of hindsight was not needed to understand that the intelligence was flawed. He also said, ‘The risks of internal strife, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability and al-Qaeda activity were each explicitly identified before the invasion.’17
Although Howard is widely considered a shrewd observer, he failed to notice, in the memorable words of MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, that the ‘intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy [to invade]’. Demonstrating how a leak to a journalist can be in the public interest, Richard Smith quoted Dearlove’s words from a secret memo and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s remark that the case for military action was ‘thin’.18 Despite his intimate participation in the inner circle, apparently Howard was not told about the contents of this devastating memo. Perhaps he knew, but couldn’t reveal the grubby reality because he wanted to participate in the invasion. Alternatively, he was just another Australian politician mesmerised by high-level access in Washington and London.
Either way, Howard is responsible for one of the most shameful and damaging decisions in Australian political history. He should have admitted his blunder long ago—a blunder based on his ignorance and phoney ‘intelligence’ stamped ‘Top Secret’.
PART 9
NUCLEAR RISKS ARE EVER PRESENT
56
THE DEPRAVITY OF NUCLEAR WAR PLANNING
‘A defective computer chip … had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.’
Eric Schlosser1
Nothing so starkly illustrates the depravity of nuclear war planning as the targeting list for the US’s Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). Nothing so bleakly illustrates the irresponsibility of the planners as their continued refusal to install self-destruct devices that activate when missiles are launched by accident. The war plans have changed over time, but the number of anticipated deaths remains unconscionable. The 1962 version of the SIOP envisaged killing an estimated 108 million Soviet citizens, 104 million Chinese and 2.6 million Poles.2 A later version planned to strike Moscow with 400 warheads as part of 12,000 targets in the USSR; China would also be attacked even if it wasn’t threatening the US.3 By the latter half of the 1980s, the US still planned to use 12,000 warheads launched from land, submarines and heavy bombers.4
This level of death and destruction was calmly and secretly planned in the name of national security by respectable members of the US national security state. Using 400 warheads on Moscow, each much more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima, meant a great city and its inhabitants would be killed in horrific explosions, monstrous fires and dust storms. Planning to use 400 warheads to keep pummelling the radioactive rubble long after almost all life was extinguished would have displayed a level of depravity never before experienced in human history.
During the Cold War, Australian leaders relied on the SIOP to shelter under the US nuclear umbrella when the number of USSR and US strategic nuclear warheads reached a peak of 31,000 each. The total number has fallen, but how many are still targeted on Russia and Moscow is secret. Australia still relies on the US nuclear umbrella, and is also directly complicit. The Pine Gap intelligence-gathering base helps identify nuclear targets, and the North West Cape communications base is linked to US submarines that can be tasked to detect and destroy Chinese and Russian ballistic-missile submarines, potentially undermining deterrence because they are in a strategically weaker position geographically than the US.
Unlike the US submarines, the noisy Soviet submarines during the Cold War didn’t have ready access to op
en ocean. Those based at Murmansk had to make a long transit through multiple choke points before reaching their patrol areas in the Atlantic Ocean. Those based at Vladivostok also faced barriers before reaching open waters in the Pacific. The Soviet submarines were all relatively easy to detect with a wide range of overhead and underwater sensors, and could then be trailed by US nuclear-attack submarines, often for an entire trip.5 In 1985, Navy Secretary John Lehman confirmed that US nuclear submarines would attack Soviet ballistic-missile submarines ‘in the first five minutes of a war’.6 This meant that the US could sink the supposedly invulnerable submarines intended to deter a US first strike. Australia’s submarines played an important detection role in what was called Gateway operations near Vladivostok, without any apparent consideration of how this could undermine nuclear deterrence. The USSR had so many land-based ICBMs that enough would survive to retaliate to a first strike.
Russia might just have enough today, but China almost certainly doesn’t. The Pentagon reported in 2018 that China now has seventy-five to a hundred ICBMs and four nuclear submarines.7 Each submarine carries twelve nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. These submarines are confined behind natural underwater obstacles plus a vast array of US, Japanese and other sensors.8 Given that it would be relatively easy to detect and sink the submarines and destroy China’s small number of land-based missiles, China doesn’t seem to have enough missiles to deter a nuclear attack.
