Frail Egos and Sandpit Colonialism: Australia, the United States and Invading Iraq
Photograph Source: White House photo by Paul Morse – Public Domain
Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard is in the news again. The release of Australian cabinet documents from 2004 – a supposed treat for historians of Australian history each new year – has been given a typically modest, calm and boringly anodyne treatment in media outlets.
One topic featured should have caused continued sharp intakes of breath and stirs of indignation: Australia’s participation in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Led by the United States with clinging support from the United Kingdom and Australia, ostensibly to disarm Saddam Hussein’s regime of biological, chemical and dare it be said, possible nuclear weapons, was a crude example of buccaneering, criminal adventurism. It was illegal, lacking the approval of the United Nations Security Council. It was almost certainly a crime against the peace, a higher offence developed by drafters and judicial authorities during the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1945-6.
The words of US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, delivered in his opening statement to the International Military Tribunal in November 1945, are all too pertinent. While Nazi Germany is the target of his address, the US-led coalition can do just as well as substitutes: “That attack on the peace of the world is a crime against international society which brings into international cognizance crimes in its aid and preparation which otherwise might be only internal concerns. It was aggressive war, which the nations of the world had renounced.”
This vast hinterland of venality, incompetence, and indifference to international law – the very sort of things countries such as the United States and Australia hyperventilate over when concerning adversaries – should have received more comment. The issue of Iraq in the 2004 cabinet release receives some mention in David Lee’s rather skimpy overview, perhaps unsurprising given that he occupies the position of National Archives of Australia Cabinet Historian.
In a comment to Guardian Australia, however, Lee makes a suggestion that should make the blood of service personnel and Australia’s citizenry boil. “The balance of evidence we’ve seen from the cabinet records from 2003 and 2004 indicate that weapons of mass destruction is not the casus belli – the cause of war – for Australia, but rather Australia’s desire to strengthen the US alliance.” Put another way, the commitment was, as have most Australian commitments to war been over its short history, a matter of impressing others.
The released documents do reveal that the Howard government, through its National Security Committee (NSC) of key ministers, had approved the deployment of forces three months prior to the official authorisation of Australia’s involvement on March 18, 2003, and began planning for it from August 2002 onwards. This meant that Australia, along with the US and UK, had long given up on getting a UN Security Council resolution authorising an invasion, let alone waiting for the findings from ongoing UN weapons inspectors.
This hideous sense of a chugging, unstoppable train to war is evident in the admission on the part of Australian Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, that the WMD issue was scratchy at best. A January 10, 2003 oral briefing on the efforts of the UN weapons inspectors drew a rueful observation: “there was no confidence that the inspection process would uncover clear evidence of continuing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programmes”.
On February 10, 2004, the NSC met to discuss the release of a public version of a review by the Department of Defence of Iraq operations. The advanced deployment, above all else, had to be kept secret from the public, described in the minute as “the specific issue of public handling of when ADF action in Iraq commenced”. This had an added urgency, given that the Bush administration had, by January 2004, conceded that launching a war to disarm a state of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been without merit. The Howard government not only risked having its mendacity exposed, but its competence questioned.
Showing that old dogs (and dogmas) are beyond learning new tricks, Howard remains unmoved and unenlightened by his role in this bloody affair. Last November, ahead of the release of the cabinet papers, he merely admitted to being disappointed by the failure of US intelligence assessments he refused to question. He still “tenaciously” maintained “that the decision was taken in good faith, based largely on what was called a national intelligence assessment.”
When considering such assessments, the former PM continues to prove slippery. “I knew from earlier examinations that there had been a failure to find stockpiles, in other words, the physical weapons, although there was plenty of capacity through programs to develop them rapidly.” When a failure to find something is paired with the capacity to develop it, its absence becomes irrelevant. The capacity to develop a weapon becomes the equivalent of hypothetically having it.
As if hearing the sound of a distant arrest warrant being rustled up in The Hague, Howard concludes that, “We were wrong, in fact, but not maliciously.” Like the fate that was to cruelly befall so many Iraqis and those in the broader Middle East, such a claim lacks legs, arms, or any limbs for that matter. It is also impossible to reconcile with the hardboiled zealotry that marked Washington’s desire to redraw the Middle East in a fit of forced democratisation.
The journey into Mesopotamia was a blind mission of assumption and presumption: the instant, easeful discovery of WMDs in the possession of a madman previously feted by the West; the creation of a transitional authority without hiccup, despite a wholesale dismantling of the Baathist state. Neither eventuated. The invaders were sandpit colonialists, poorly costumed to reenact the glory days of European empires in the Middle East with trimmed forces and smaller budgets. What makes Australia’s own involvement even worse, was that the reason to go to war lay less in an international security threat than a weak ego and reputational yearning: to be cringingly worthy to Washington.
Far From Ignorant: The European Union,
Arms Exports and Israel
January 3, 2025
Photograph Source: Ank Kumar – CC BY-SA 4.0
While international law can, at times, seem an ephemeral creature, vulnerable to manipulation, neglect and outright dismissal, its strictures can surprise. The evolving body of law stripping back the immunity of heads of state for gross human rights abuses, the potential complicity of third parties and powers in aiding such heads of states and their armies, are salutary reminders to politicians and officials the world over: mind your obligations, abide by your duties.
Few more onerous obligations exist in this canon than the prevention and punishment of genocide, as outlined by the United Nations Genocide Convention. While claims that it is taking place against the Palestinians as a feature of Israeli policy have been dismissed by the United States and a core group of ministers in the European Union, the human rights fraternity are increasingly convinced: genocide is, and has taken place, in Gaza.
Even if genocide were not ultimately found to be taking place by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the South African lawsuit against Israel, the broader scope of war crimes and crimes against humanity would be hard to rebut, from policies of deprivation and starvation, to the hefty civilian death toll.
This makes the continued arms sales to Israel not only problematic, but potentially criminal in a secondary liability sense. As with the United States, the EU adopts a preferential approach to Israel on the issue of imposing arms embargoes, leaving the matter to individual member states. In no small part is this due to the EU being Israel’s second largest arms supplier after the US. The European External Action Service’s COARM database reveals that between 2018 and 2022, EU member states sold arms to Israel to the value of 1.75 billion euros.
As reported in Al Jazeera, certain states – Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belgium’s Wallonia – have made chirpy announcements on suspending arms transfers to Israel, though these have been tardily followed up. In any case, the measures are only temporary or partial in nature, a form of decorative diplomacy.
While the European Union dithers and stalls on responding to this subject, despite the ICJ’s interim rulings that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide, bureaucrats have been busy. The EU special representative for human rights, Olof Skoog, has been particularly prominent in this regard in penning a harsh assessment of the conflict for EU ministers ahead of their November 18 council meeting. This was intended to inform debate about a proposal by the then EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell on whether political dialogue should be suspended with Israel. Borrell had hoped such a decision would bring pressure to bear on Israel to adhere to international law.
The move encountered resistance, with Germany promising ahead of time it would oppose it. Little surprise, then, that the ministers eventually opposed Borrell’s suggestion, along with any move to ban arms sales to Israel.
Skoog’s assessment, obtained by The Intercept, runs the whole gamut of evidence on the warring conduct by Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah since October 7, 2023 when the Hamas-orchestrated assault killing of 1,200 people precipitated the current, unceasing phase of conflict. The origins of the paper are found in a request made in February 2024 by Spain and Ireland to the European Commission on whether Israel’s military actions in Gaza violated the human rights provisions of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
In October, the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was still waiting for a response. “The European Commission must respond once and for all to the formal request by two European countries to suspend the association agreement with Israel if it is found, as everything suggests, that human rights are being violated,” the Spanish PM told an event held in Barcelona.
With the European Commission refusing to entertain the matter, Skoog was commissioned by the European External Action Service to conduct a review. This led to an initial assessment in July, one that was subsequently updated in November.
Skoog takes Hamas and Hezbollah to task but lashes the Israeli Defense Forces for failing to adopt a sterner, more discriminating position between civilian and military objects. “Given the high level of civilian casualties and human suffering, allegations focus mainly on how duty bearers, including the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), have seemingly failed to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians and civilian objects against the effects of the attacks, in violation of the fundamental principles of IHL [international humanitarian law].”
As with a burgeoning number of reports, legal submissions and the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, the “dehumanizing language” used by Israeli officials vis-Ã -vis Palestinians draws special attention. “Incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence – such as that made in statements by Israeli officials – constitutes a serious violation of international human rights law and may amount to the international crime of incitement to genocide,” Skoog notes.
On the subject of arms sales, the suggestion is made that export licenses be denied in cases where “there is a clear risk that the military technology or equipment to be exported might be used in the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law.”
From the standpoint of culpability, this is significant. As Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister and secretary-general of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 reasons, EU ministerial ignorance can hardly be pleaded in this case were the ICC to find Netanyahu and Gallant guilty of violating International Humanitarian Law. “The world now knows that they knew they were in breach of international law because they were explicitly told so by the EU’s own special representative on human rights. History will judge them harshly. And perhaps so will the ICC.” Lawyers across Europe are already drafting their briefs in anticipation, even as reputations get shredded and people continue dying.
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