SMH, President George Bush has rendered to the Australian Parliament his ex post facto justification for the war in Iraq. It is a justification somewhat different from the one he advanced before the war began.
Back then it was a case centred squarely on Saddam Hussein's possession and imminent use of weapons of mass destruction.
Bush said yesterday that since the “liberation” of Iraq what has been discovered was a “clandestine network of biological laboratories” and “design work” for prohibited long-range missiles.
Unfortunately, no actual weapons of mass destruction have been discovered after more than six months of US occupation of Iraq.
It's a bit embarrassing, really, as the existence of WMDs was the central plank in the so-called legal case advanced to legitimise the war. Because Saddam hadn't disarmed he was in violation of Security Council resolutions that were framed in the context of securing Kuwait's sovereignty in 1991.
The later resolution 1441 of last November toughened up the language about Iraq but failed to employ the usual UN euphemism for military action, “all necessary means”.
In March, just before hostilities began, the Australian Government released a seven-page legal advice on the war prepared by Bill Campbell, of the Attorney-General's Department, and Chris Moraitis, of Foreign Affairs. It closely mirrored the advice issued by the British Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith.
Actually only a summary of the British advice has ever been released and now because its underpinning has been shot to pieces, so to speak, there is a clamour across the British political spectrum for the opinion in its full scabby glory to be revealed.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, insisted that the “legal niceties” for an attack on Iraq had been satisfied, even without one last resolution from the Security Council.
What seems more persuasive now is that when Iraq was attacked it did not possess the weapons capability that posed a “serious and current threat” to the US, Britain or the Middle East. All that Bush and his partners in the coalition of the willing desperately want for Christmas are weapons of mass destruction. Just one will do.
The watertight case of February-March looks utterly wet.
In view of all this it is rather amusing to trawl through the commentary of the war's most strident supporters in the Australian media. Mostly they were flinging down their burning arrows of desire in the Murdoch newspapers.
My personal favourite is Janet Albrechtsen's column in The Australian of March 19: “There is a current authorisation from the Security Council for member states to use force to disarm Iraq. That is the law. This war is legal.” There was no room for any doubt that there was something worth disarming.
Of course, in February Newspoll told us 75 per cent of Australians thought Saddam was hiding WMDs. A slightly lesser percentage thought he was a threat to global security. The fact that neither was true shows that not only columnists can go off beam.
Also in February we had another of the war's claqueurs, Piers Akerman of The Daily Telegraph, getting behind the inexorable machinery for invasion. He supportively referred to remarks made by the Australian ambassador to the UN, John Dauth, who listed Iraq's “patently incomplete” declaration of its weapons inventory. There were still unanswered questions about the production of anthrax, VX and mustard gas.
Akerman rounded off his analysis of Dauth's speech to the UN with one of his fetching salvos: “As a counterpoint to the rave Baghdad reviews which greeted the performances of those who took to the streets last Sunday, giving support and succour to Saddam, John Dauth's address is unlikely to be met with the same frenzied acclaim. Then again he's telling the truth and that doesn't get much of an airing in Saddam's state of terror.” Oh dear.
Possibly most insistent about the nexus between the weapons of mass destruction and the need to invade was The Australian's foreign affairs commentator, Greg Sheridan. On March 13, just days before the shooting started, he wrote: “The first and most important reason to act is that Saddam Hussein possesses, and is seeking more, weapons of mass destruction. No serious figure in the debate anywhere believes Iraq does not have such weapons.”
It got scarier because he thought Saddam might give his WMDs to terrorists. He cited Howard with approval: ” If Iraq cannot be disarmed, there is no chance of stopping North Korea's WMD program.” All that dead-set certainty now seems quite hilarious.
Not that there's too much chatter these days about Saddam's WMDs. It's just journalism, after all, and tomorrow there'll be something fresh about which to be really dogmatic, and wide of the mark.
