by John Howard
On 18 April 2003, Beazley told the Age, ‘I was glad to see Saddam removed, and I am hopeful it will ensure at least one problem area in weapons of mass destruction is removed.’14 In November 2003 Rudd wrote me a long letter, after visiting Iraq, with suggestions for additional Australian involvement. He wrote, ‘Now that regime change has occurred in Baghdad, it is the Opposition’s view that it is now the responsibility of all people of goodwill, both in this country and beyond, to put their shoulder to the wheel in an effort to build a new Iraq.’15 No mention there of pulling out our troops. He wanted more resources for Baghdad.
Rudd was hedging his bets. Several years later, and before the surge had begun to turn things around in Iraq, Rudd would allege that Iraq had been ‘the greatest failure of national security policy since Vietnam’.16
George Bush was immensely grateful for our support. As a way of indicating publicly how he felt, he invited Janette and me to spend a weekend with him and Laura at the family ranch in Crawford, Texas. We were to be joined, as guests at the ranch, by Condi Rice as well as Laura’s mother, Jenna Welch. It was a most enjoyable stay, which gave an added personal dimension to the already close relationship between us.
Janette and I joined the President on Air Force One at Travis Air Force Base, near San Francisco, for the flight to Texas. The three of us discussed a whole range of political issues, including the challenges as well as the benefits of having so many politicians in the one family. It was obvious from this discussion just how important the Bush clan was to the President’s whole life and motivation.
The last stage of the journey was by helicopter, and during this ride Condi Rice remarked to me that George Bush and I agreed on many things. I said that one area of disagreement would have to be gun control laws, where the sort of action I had taken after Port Arthur could never even be contemplated by an American president.
She thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Prime Minister, as a black girl, growing up when I did in Alabama, something my father taught me early on was how to use a gun.’ It gave an entirely different perspective to the issue. Thankfully it was not something that young Australians had had to grapple with. In his book about Condoleezza Rice, Twice as Good, the journalist Marcus Mabry describes graphically how the black community of which the Rice family was part had, for a time, to establish their own vigilante groups to afford protection, due to the indifference of the local police.
Condi Rice is a remarkable and highly talented person. The story of her success despite the adversities which her family had to endure is quite inspiring. Of the African-Americans who have risen to very high office in recent times, none endured quite the raw brutal segregation of the Rice family in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1950s and ’60s. She belonged to a tight, loving family whose constant emphasis on the critical role of educational attainment was the key to her success.
As well as socialising there was plenty of work over the weekend. The President invited me to sit in on his daily CIA intelligence briefing, and, later on Saturday morning, we had a full bilateral discussion (which covered many topics unrelated to Iraq) followed by a joint news conference outside the well-televised Crawford barn, complete with the ‘first dog’, Barney. During our formal meeting Bush made it crystal clear to me and his advisors, including Bob Zoellick, the Special Trade Representative, that he wanted the free trade negotiations between our two countries finished by the end of the year.
There was a lot of resistance from within the American system to the very notion of a free trade agreement (FTA) with a developed country such as Australia. That morning in Crawford, Bush decreed that it would be otherwise with Australia. I knew then that, all things being equal, we would achieve the FTA.
After Texas I went to New York and saw Kofi Annan. We talked about the United Nations’ role in Iraq. He needed a tested figure to head up the UN mission in Baghdad, and I recommended Sergio de Mello, the urbane Brazilian diplomat who had been the UN man in East Timor. Annan appointed him to the post, and a few months later he was killed in a terrorist attack on the UN headquarters in Baghdad. Whenever I think of that attack, I recall the recommendation that I gave to the Secretary General, and feel just a touch responsible.
Then it was on to London to see Tony Blair, who had just reached his 50th birthday. He was not to have much of a celebration. At the end of May, straight after visiting British troops in Iraq, Blair was confronted with the BBC report claiming that Downing Street had ‘sexed up’ a detail — the ‘ready in 45 minutes’ assertion — in the intelligence dossier published the previous September. The British Prime Minister was dogged for months by this issue, which turned into a nightmare in July 2003 with the suicide of the scientist Dr David Kelly.
A judicial inquiry, headed by Lord Justice Hutton, concluded that there was no justification to the allegation that the Blair Government probably knew that the 45-minute claim was unfounded. Hutton also concluded that the dossier containing the 45-minute claim was issued with the full approval of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, the agency having ultimate responsibility to assess the quality of intelligence material.
Despite this emphatic exculpation of the Blair Government by a respected and totally independent jurist, and the appalling behaviour of the BBC revealed by the affair, the perception remained that Tony Blair had deliberately distorted the intelligence case over Iraq. The British press gave Blair a torrid time over Iraq.
As the weeks following the combat phase in Iraq turned into months, two issues began to haunt the Government. No WMDs were found and, worse still, violence within Iraq began to escalate. With the growing insurgency came increasing American casualties and, inexorably, support for the war in the United States began to erode, but only slowly at first. A similar pattern emerged here in Australia, but it was less intense. Most of our troops had come home.
After the regime was toppled I thought that it would only be a matter of time before some WMDs were found. I had believed the intelligence which pointed overwhelmingly to Iraq possessing at least chemical and biological weapons. I and many others were to be disappointed. After months of the most intensive search possible the Iraq Survey Group, essentially put together by the CIA, reported that it could not find stockpiles of WMDs. There was plenty of evidence of WMD programs, but no actual weaponry itself. In other words, Iraq had the know-how and the capacity to make the weapons, but no stockpiles of weapons themselves.
This gave a lethal political weapon to our opponents, and they made the most of it. In the process they ignored the fact that, prior to the military action, they too had accepted the existence of WMDs. The truest of the true believers on the Labor side had been none other than Kevin Rudd. He had boldly declared that it was ‘an empirical fact’.17 So far from feeling constrained by that assertion, he would later go on to claim that I had taken Australia to war in Iraq based on ‘a lie’. The implication was that I had in some way faked the intelligence. Similar attacks were mounted against George Bush and Tony Blair.
To illustrate the force of the intelligence on which I and my colleagues, as well as Bush and Blair, had relied, I quote from the National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) of October 2002. This document, made available to the Australian Government as well as the US Administration, was declassified on 18 July 2003. It contained the following key judgements:
We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade. (See INR alternative view at the end of the key judgements).
We judge that we are only seeing a portion of Iraq’s WMD efforts, owing to Baghdad’s vigorous denial and deception efforts. Revelations after the Gulf War starkly demonstrate the extensive efforts undertaken by Iraq to deny information. We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD programs.
Since inspections ended in 1998,
Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; in the view of most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.18
An NIA is a distillation of the views of all of the intelligence agencies, including, of course, the CIA. It is the most authoritative intelligence statement in the US system. The key judgements of October 2002 had not been made up. They had not been invented or coerced out of officials to satisfy political needs. They were professional conclusions which had to be treated with the utmost seriousness.
The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) is the intelligence unit of the State Department. The alternative view of INR referred to in the judgements related to the claim that Saddam had tried to source uranium from Niger. The State Department believed that this claim had no foundation. Using entirely different intelligence sources, the British SIS (MI6) believed that Iraq had approached Niger for uranium. My reference to this issue, in one of my speeches, was based on the British advice, not the American. Subsequent parliamentary inquiries in Britain have concluded that this intelligence was correct.
The language of the NIA was sharp and direct. The agencies did not hedge their bets. The stark language of the key judgements presented a strong intelligence basis for the decision to take out Saddam.
Nonetheless, as time wore on, and no stockpiles of WMDs were found, the embarrassment became intense. The mounting violence only made matters worse. In time it would become the more nagging problem. Failure to find WMDs was an acute problem but if, in other respects, the post-invasion period had gone well, with a relatively smooth pathway to a more democratic future being in prospect, failure on the WMD front would have been less damaging.
The frustration for the United States, and especially George Bush, on Iraq lay not in the original decision, nor in the military operation. That decision was right and the military phase was well executed, with low casualties on both sides. The real failure of American policy over Iraq lay in the breakdown of the post-invasion arrangements.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that more troops had been needed to keep order in the post-invasion phase. This mistake was compounded by the decision to disband the Iraqi Army. That army, minus its senior Ba’athist leadership, could well have been deployed to help maintain order in the wake of Saddam’s removal.
The post-invasion chaos and the failure to find stockpiles of WMDs led to a decline in public support for the Iraqi operation in Australia.
This mattered tremendously in both the United States and Britain, due to the large ongoing troop presence from those countries, especially the Americans, who sustained painfully high casualties over four years. Over 4000 Americans have died in Iraq.
Nonetheless, the accusations of faking intelligence were hurled thick and fast at me. The claim that I had lied about or deliberately manufactured intelligence was palpably absurd, deeply offensive to the intelligence agencies and in no way supported by the parliamentary and other inquiries, conducted later in 2003, into the pre-war intelligence. I believed the intelligence assessments; so did George Bush and Tony Blair. We were not presented with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That never happens with intelligence. ONA said in its submission to the parliamentary inquiry, ‘ONA said in a report of 31 January 2003 that there is a wealth of intelligence on Saddam’s WMD activities, but it paints a circumstantial picture that is conclusive overall rather than resting on a single piece of irrefutable evidence.’19
The DIO, which provided regular reports as well, largely agreed with the substance of ONA’s assessments, although its language was sometimes more qualified. Still, taking as its foundation the track record of non-disclosure, obfuscation and downright deception by Iraq, DIO, in its submission to the same inquiry said, ‘… DIO consistently assessed that Iraq probably retained a WMD capability — even if that capability had been degraded over time. DIO also assessed that Iraq maintained both an intent and capability to recommence a wider WMD program should circumstances permit it to do so.’20
These statements, made months after the invasion, and when it was increasingly apparent that WMD stockpiles would not be found, scarcely support the criticism that there was insufficient evidence before the Government that Iraq had WMDs, let alone the more disgraceful allegations of dishonesty and manufactured intelligence.
As well as the parliamentary review, there was an inquiry conducted by Phillip Flood, a former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Amongst other things, he found ‘no evidence of politicisation of the assessments on Iraq either overt or perceived’ or that ‘any analyst or manager was the subject of either direct or implied pressure to come to a particular judgement on Iraq for policy reasons or to bolster the case for war’.21
Flood went on to say that assessments ‘reflected reasonably the available evidence and used intelligence sources with appropriate caution’. He said that the obverse conclusion, that Iraq had no WMDs, ‘would have been a much more difficult conclusion to substantiate’.22
Late in 2003 Mark Latham, who had attacked George Bush over Iraq and more generally, surprisingly defeated Kim Beazley for the leadership of the ALP to succeed Simon Crean, who had been pressured to go. Given Latham’s volatile temperament it was only a matter of time before he got himself into trouble over Iraq. This happened on 22 March 2004, when he told Radio 2UE in Sydney that if he won the election he would bring the troops ‘home by Christmas’.23 This was a sign of bad judgement on a delicate issue. He, and others in the Labor Party, failed to realise that many Australians who opposed our going into Iraq nonetheless were of the view that having gone there, we should stay and complete the job. They did not want us to cut and run.
With the failure to find WMDs, and the mounting violence inside Iraq, the issue began to become a negative for the Government. The political question was how much of a negative? A growing number of Australians were reaching the conclusion that it had been a mistake to have gone in, but that did not mean that they favoured pulling out before the job was finished.
The centre-right government in Spain was spectacularly defeated on 14 March 2004, several days after a horrific attack by an al Qaeda-inspired terrorist group on a train in Madrid which killed 191 people. Under Jose Maria Asnar, that government had supported the invasion. Many argued the train attack was a reprisal for Spain’s support of Bush, and the election result punishment of the defeated government for having backed the Americans.
The latter proposition was more problematic. Despite signs that the attack carried an al Qaeda imprint (within hours of the attack the director general of ONA had informed me that he believed that, at the very least, it had been inspired by al Qaeda), the Spanish Government tried to blame the attack on the Basque separatist group ETA, which had been engaged in a long-running terror campaign designed to win autonomy for the Basque region of Spain.
The Spanish public did not buy the ETA argument. They thought that their government was being manipulative. Also, it did not help that Asnar himself, who had been the architect of Spain’s Iraq policy, was retiring at the election. The impression was created that the Spanish Government was walking away from its Iraq policy.
The defeat of the Spanish Government had an unexpected and most regrettable consequence in Australia, involving the federal police commissioner Mick Keelty. Interviewed on Channel Nine shortly after the Madrid attack, Keelty said if it turned out that the Madrid attack was the work of Islamic extremists, then ‘it’s more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and others took on issues such as Iraq’.24 That comment directly challenged the view of the Government that involvement in Iraq had not lifted the likelihood of terrorist attacks in Australia. For Spain read Australia. The commissioner knew our position. He was not commenting operationally. The ranking terrorism advisor in Australia was Dennis Richardson, head of ASIO, who shared the Government’s view.
When it became known that Arthur Sinodinos, at my request, had
telephoned Keelty to discuss the handling of the issue, the media came in hot pursuit. I was accused of heavying the commissioner on an issue vital to Australia’s security. The public liked Keelty, and over the next two weeks there was a wave of support for him. He contemplated resignation, but after a long discussion I persuaded him to stay at his post. That was a huge relief, as he had done splendid work in many areas, and we enjoyed a positive relationship. In different ways the AFP had prospered under the Howard Government. I was quite distressed to have been seen at odds, publicly, with a man I both liked and respected. But he had been out of line. It was not his patch; he was not possessed of information denied to others and, importantly, he had never expressed a different view on Iraq from that of the Government to either his minister or me.
That much of the media support for the commissioner was really a proxy attack on me was made clear four years later, when it turned savagely and unfairly on Keelty over the Haneef Affair.
Iraq continued to echo in the political ears of governments which had contributed to the Coalition. The result in Spain had unnerved a lot of people. My Government would face an election in a few months, ahead of either the United States or Britain. There was intense interest in both countries about what would happen in the Australian election.
On the night of the 2004 election George Bush and Tony Blair rang to congratulate me on winning. I took both of their phone calls whilst I was still at the Wentworth Hotel in Sydney, where I had gone to deliver my victory speech. In fact I had only just finished my speech when the Bush phone call came through. He was genuinely excited about my win. Not only was there full-blooded centre-right partisanship in his reaction, but our close personal relationship gave the moment a special edge. To cap it all he would have his moment of truth with the American people in just under a month. If I had lost, that would have fed directly into the US campaign and could have acted as a real circuit-breaker for his opponent, John Kerry, who was campaigning hard against Bush’s policy on Iraq. Bush was ecstatic. He saw my win as a good omen.