Tony Kevin comments on current situation in Iraq and on Mark Latham’s 7 April 2004 foreign policy speech at Lowy Institute

- Radio interview with Param Berg for his " Interesting Times" current affairs program on Byron Bay radio station Bay FM 99.9, on 8 April 2004 (transcribed tape by TK)

 

(The full text of Latham’s speech may be read on Margo Kingston’s Webdiary at smh.com.au )

 

Berg: Last time I spoke to you it was in connection with the SIEVX and the drowning of over 300 refugees. Today I want to mostly pick up on your views regarding Australia’s participation in the occupation of Iraq …

You said in a recent email newsletter "John Howard is yet again perversely going out of his way to put Australian troops in Iraq into the gunsights of those insurgents militarily resisting the US-led occupation of their country". How do you justify, "Perversely going out of his way"?

Kevin: Well interestingly, a few days ago , right in the middle of the rather phoney argument as to whether our troops should be brought home by Christmas, Howard announced that an Australian Army officer Major-General Jim Molan would play a key a key role in coordinating the fight against Iraqi insurgents; that Major-General Molan would take up a position later this month as deputy for operations in the multinational force coalition. "He will be the most senior Australian officer in Iraq. He will be responsible for planning missions to find and destroy terrorist cells, to patrol areas from which anti-aircraft missiles may be fired and to provide protection to the Iraqi and coalition community". ["Canberra Times, 2 April 2004].

There was very little comment on that announcement, but I call this leading with Australia’s chin. We actually have a very small number of troops in Iraq, just a few hundred, they are there mostly as tokens. But here was Howard once again, jumping up and saying "Shoot us, shoot us, please". By putting a senior Australian Army officer into such an apparently senior role for the maintenance of the coalition occupation of Iraq, John Howard is really almost begging for Australian troops to be attacked in Iraq.

Berg: John Howard apparently sent senior ADF planners to Florida in mid-2002 to help the US armed forces plan the Iraq invasion, and ordered Australian SAS troops into war in Iraq from 18 to 20 March 2003, before the war was declared. Are those things the Australian people should reasonably accept?

Kevin: It is well documented that those two things happened. "The Bulletin" ran a major story in early 2003 that Australia had shoehorned its way into the planning of the Iraq invasion; from the middle of 2002 we had sent Brigadier Gillespie a senior ADF officer and other officers to US Central Command in Florida to help the US plan the invasion and to plan for a very specific Australian role in it. That role was obviously pre-planned well in advance. The first SAS regiment pre-deployed to the Middle East in January from Perth. They were going there to train for a specific operation which, it was discovered much later, was a pre-emptive strike into Western Iraq some 36 hours before the expiry of the 48-hour Bush ultimatum.

I don’t know whether it was always intended that they should start fighting before the ultimatum expired. But that is certainly what happened, and it is certainly true also that John Howard and the Defence Minister Robert Hill misled the Australian people and Parliament that our war was starting on 20 March 2003 when the 48 hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to leave power expired. But in fact we sent in our SAS to engage in active combat – not just to pre-position but to engage in active combat, to initiate active combat - 36 hours before that time.

Berg: So how do you feel about that?

Kevin: I feel two things. I feel it’s gravely dishonourable and I feel it’s dangerous. Because it puts Australia in the position of a country that has dishonoured laws of war that go back centuries. One of the basic laws of war is that you don’t start a war before you declare it. Certainly in war, surprise tactics are legitimate once a war is under way. But the idea of a surprise attack launched on an unsuspecting opponent before you declared the war – it has been regarded for centuries as abhorrent. And yet our troops – through no fault of their own, because troops have to obey orders – were ordered to do that. And the responsibility for that rests with the cabinet of Prime Minister John Howard.

Berg: Do you feel that Mark Latham’s avowed Labour policy of bringing the troops home is possible, and will the Australian people accept that, or is it fairly defined as cut-and-run?

Kevin: I personally would like to see every Australian soldier in Iraq come home tomorrow. So troops home by Christmas for me is going part of the way but not as far as I would like to go. But Mark Latham has to work within the bounds of practical Australian politics, and we are talking here not about logic, not about analysis, but about a whole complex set of emotions out there in the community, about loyalty to alliance commitments, about our need for a great and powerful friend – all those things that go right back into Australia’s subconscious almost.

Latham has to work within a very narrow frame. I’m very glad we are having this interview today rather than last week, because I have had the benefit of reading Latham’s foreign policy speech yesterday in the Lowy Institute, and I find that a rather brilliant reconciliation of what is desirable and what is politically practicable

Berg: You have stated that John Howard is exploiting our Australian values, and our naïve decency, utilising phrases like: staying the course, seeing the job through, standing firm, not cutting and running. You said, "Howard plays those national values like Herbert von Karajan
conducting the Berlin Philharmonic". What is your interpretation of those values, how do you think they should be applied in this situation?

Kevin: Can I expand on that a little bit? The first thing we will have to understand about the US-led occupation of Iraq is that it is illegal. They should not be there in terms of the United Nations-based international security system. And we have to keep reminding ourselves of that, because all of the rhetoric that is coming out of Howard and Downer and so on, about not cutting and running, staying the course, standing firm and all of that. That all applies if one were doing something that were internationally legitimate. But we are engaged in an internationally illegitimate occupation of a sovereign country whose people want us gone.

One has to keep telling oneself that, because there is no legitimate Iraqi government that is saying "please stay here and help us". We haven’t even got the figleaf that we had for much of the period in Vietnam, that we were defending a legitimate South Vietnamese government against a North Vietnamese invasion. What we have got in Iraq now is a situation where two out of the three ethnic communities, the Sunni and the Shia, have both made it absolutely clear that they want US occupying soldiers gone. There is no United Nations basis for US occupying soldiers to be there. We are part of an illegal activity. So that is the first point.

The second point is that Mark Latham has to find a way of distancing himself from that ugly and unlawful situation without being so, as it were, rejectionist of the US alliance that the Australian electorate will reject him. And he is working within very sharp sensitivities here.

So what he tried to do yesterday was to put forward a model of an Australia that is not compliant, that is not a supine mercenary partner, but an Australia that has self-respect, that makes its own decisions and so forth. The strongest card working in Latham’s favour is the very strong campaign being waged in the United States by John Kerry. Because if John Kerry, who clearly is not happy with the present Bush policies on Iraq, gets up in October, that makes all of the rhetoric of Latham’s alleged anti-Americanism and Labor’s alleged anti-Americanism fall down in a heap. Because how can one be anti-American if one is actually agreeing with a lot of the things that the man who may be America’s President in October is saying? So that’s a very strong card in Latham’s favour.

But he does have to watch his own rhetoric, he has to make sure he is not boxed in by the Howard news-spinners as anti-American. And I think his [Lowy Institute] speech yesterday, which merits careful reading, is a good attempt at doing that.

Berg: Do you think there’s a real debate going on now between Howard and Latham on the Iraq War, or is it somehow a mirage, where the debate is allowed but only within a pre-defined and limited range? Would you be wanting to raise any extra points in this debate?

Kevin: Well certainly I would, and I have already raised some of them in this interview. I would like to see a stronger Labor addressing of the point that the occupation is in itself illegal.

I would also like to see a stronger Labor addressing of the point that you can’t really slide from this illegal occupation into a legal UN peacekeeping or peacemaking mandate in any easy way that I can see. It is rather like the Irish joke about the chap who was lost and asked directions from somebody on the road, and the answer was, "Well if you were trying to get to that place I would not start from here". To start from an illegal occupation and to try to reshape it into a legal UN-based peacekeeping mandate is incredibly difficult.

I think, because I have a certain respect for the maturity and wisdom of the Iraqi people - they are one of the great cultures of the world, they go back millennnia, these people are not stupid - I would think that if every foreign occupying soldier got on a plane tomorrow and left Iraq, there would not be anarchy. I think the Iraqi factions and ethnic groups would very quickly set about finding a solution for themselves, and if they needed outside help through the United Nations they would ask for it.

But I think that if Kofi Annan and if the UN Security Council system make the mistake and allow themselves to be seduced by Washington into thinking that they can somehow take over the occupation and make it legitimate, that would be a grave historical mistake.

I would like to see Labor getting into those areas but I suspect that it is simply too complicated for the Australian electorate to handle. And therefore I think that the debate, as it is being conducted at the political level, will continue to take place within fairly narrow confines.

Berg: What is your opinion on the level of debate re Iraq in the national mass media in Australia? Is it getting smarter or dumber?

Kevin: Dumber. 70 % of the Australian national media will of course say what Rupert Murdoch wants it to say. One can discount this for a start. The other 30% has a very short historical memory. I am disappointed by the number of eminent commentators who don’t appreciate the significance of the Vietnam comparison.

The Vietnam comparison is entirely appropriate, because just as in Vietnam, patriotic rhetoric designed to tug at Australian values and self-image is being used to obscure the real argument. Anybody over 45 in the electorate, and that’s something like half the electorate, remember the way that rhetoric was misused in Vietnam to make us feel that it was somehow cowardly to get out of Vietnam. There is a wonderful proverb, maybe by Barbara Tuchman from "The March of Folly", that "persistence in folly is no virtue". I would like to see that stamped on every news editor’s desk in Australia, because to persist in a bad policy just because one has a feeling "Oh well, one should not cut and run, it is not Australian " is folly.

Berg: Any final comments?

Kevin: Yes – a little advertisement for myself – I hope people have read my essay on Australian foreign policy in Robert Manne’s book "The Howard Years". I tried there to sketch out a philosophy of Australian foreign policy, what it might be and what unfortunately it is at the moment. It really plugs into some of the ideas that we have been talking about here today.

My website, which puts up various articles and commentaries that I am writing both on SIEV X and other matters, is [usual prefix]tonykevin.com. Thank you, Param.