As we move into an election year in Australia and in the United States where the incumbents John Howard and George W. Bush have led the initiatives for countering the emerging terrorist threat unveiled since September 11, 2001, there is the risk that any critique of these initiatives can be seen to be party political or partisan. That is not my purpose. I am quite agnostic as to whether Mark Latham, John Howard or any other conceivable inhabitant of the Lodge, would be any more solicitous of human rights and protective of Australian identity in response to such a crisis. Though it is important to examine the conduct of political leaders, my purpose is to see how robust our democratic processes are in finding the right balance. To examine how informed and committed we are in insisting that our politicians do not diminish fundamental human rights in the name of national security.
At times of national insecurity, there is an increased need for citizens to trust their political leaders and those leaders are likely to feel acutely any criticism of their discharge of that trust. There are lessons for us, without our canonising or demonising, any particular political actors.
The United States now claims the prerogative for unilateral action, not only in making pre-emptive strikes against imminent threats, but also in taking preventive action to destroy a prospective enemy’s capacity to become a threat. Bush claims a mandate for ‘deal(ing) with those threats before they become imminent’. The bottom line for Bush with Saddam Hussein was: ‘the fact that he had the ability to make a weapon. That wasn’t right.’
The invasion of Iraq was consistent with the previously published neo-conservative agenda of Mr Bush’s key advisers. Regime change in Iraq was a centre-piece of their agenda. Our own Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO) told our parliamentary inquiry into the intelligence operations preceding the recent war: ‘We made a judgement here in Australia that the United States was committed to military action against Iraq. We had the view that was, in a sense, independent of the intelligence assessment.’
When tabling the unanimous, all-party report, the government member David Jull told Parliament of the Committee’s conclusion ‘that there was unlikely to be large stocks of weapons of mass destruction, certainly none readily deployable.’ We did not go to war because there was an imminent threat to our security. We went to war because the Americans