A shorter version of this column was first published in the Sun Herald today.
Call me crazy, but I reckon there’s a chance John Howard could be gone before the election because of Iraq. I think that’s why Howard behaved so badly towards whistleblower Mick Keelty for daring to admit that invading Iraq made us a much bigger target for terrorism.
Defending himself against Mark Latham’s first parliamentary censure debate last Monday, Howard proclaimed, with feeling, that his decision to invade Iraq was one “I will never apologise for and never retreat from”.
That’s because he can’t, of course. Howard has said often enough that he took personal responsibility for the decision. If he admitted it compromised our national security and the security of the West, he’d have to resign.
So if most Australians conclude in the next few months that invading Iraq made the world, and Australia, a more dangerous place, not a safer one – as Howard’s many critics across the political divide warned before the war – he’d have to go to give the Coalition a chance of survival. And if national security then became the major election issue, Peter Costello would have to take over to minimise a rout.
The Madrid bombings, and the Spanish people’s decision to sack a government that lied to them about who did the deed, have focused the world’s attention again on the crucial question: what is the most effective way to minimise al-Qaeda terror?
As part of his assault on Keelty, the Federal Police Commissioner, Howard admitted “Iraq is really irrelevant to the intent and purposes of al-Qaeda”, except that the war gave al-Qaeda a propaganda victory! So why did he back George Bush to the hilt and revel in Bush’s description of him as a “man of steel”? Revelations from former senior Bush officials now pouring out of the US prove that Bush’s war had nothing to do with combating terror and everything to do with grabbing even more economic power.
Pentagon whistleblower and former USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski said the US invaded for three reasons of pure self-interest. Unless America took Iraq by force, sanctions would soon be lifted against Saddam Hussein and European companies, not US firms, would get lucrative contracts. The US wanted to reverse Saddam’s decision to trade his oil in euros not the $US (one of Bush’s first decisions after Saddam’s statue fell). And Bush wanted to move US Middle East military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq.
Even more damning, not only did Bush con his own people about the reasons for war, but he made Iraq a higher priority than the war on terror.
Bush’s former top counter-intelligence man Dick Clarke wrote in a book released last week that Bush was more interested in Iraq than al-Qaeda, even on September 12, 2001, and saw September 11 as cover to get away with invading Iraq.
Bush “launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide”, Clarke wrote. “Nothing America could have done would have provided al-Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups [with] a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country.”
Rand Beers, the bloke who replaced Clarke in the month before the invasion, resigned five days before it for the same reason: “The administration wasn’t matching its deeds to its words. They’re making us less secure, not more.”
Web diarist Phil Kendall wrote:
“The biggest ‘heist’ of all time via an illegal invasion, alienation of half the world’s oil from its rightful owners and the possibility of an everlasting jihad against us – thanks Mr Howard.”
Howard a man of steel? A man of jelly, more likely, with his knee-jerk “yes, sir” to a president who forgot he was supposed to represent the American people, not his big business oil and armaments mates. That’s the line Latham is beginning to run and if Australians feel forced to agree, they’ll want Howard and his compliant MPs out big- time. It would be too late for a leadership challenge, so Howard would need to plead illness or whatever and step down.
Fortunately for Howard, Latham gave him a rung to climb this week by saying he’d have our troops home by Christmas. Like many others, I opposed the war without United Nations approval but once we invade a country we have a legal and moral obligation to secure the peace. We need to try to convince the US to forgo its dream of war booty and transfer control of the transition to democracy to the UN.
This is what new Spanish leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is hoping to achieve by saying he’ll pull Spanish troops out unless the UN takes control.
Spain did not invade Iraq. We did. We can�t pretend Iraq has nothing to do with us after we helped invade it, and we can�t restore our national pride by following Howard�s capitulation to Bush with a cut and run betrayal of the Iraqi people. The last thing the world needs is for Bush�s lie to become reality by abandoning Iraq to the terrorists who�ve swarmed in since Bush�s war.
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READER QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Darren Urquhart:�The Spanish threw their government out because (1) 90% were against the Iraq invasion in the first place, (2) the reasons for the invasion turned out to be lies and (3) they were now being attacked by terrorists with no Iraq connection. That is not capitulating to terrorists, it�s punishing an incompetent government. It’s also accepting that they did capitulate to the manipulations of that other dangerous gang, the Bush Administration.�