"Reasons for keeping troops in Iraq don't stand close analysis"

- By William Maley, "Canberra Times" Wednesday, 31 March 2004, Opinion, page 21.

Website note: I had been itching this past week to get myself into the so far generally superficial contributions to the public debate sparked by Latham’s "Australian troops will be home by Christmas" promise. With many other urgent tasks on my plate now, I did not have time to address this properly. Now Bill Maley has brilliantly done it – his piece below in the Canberra Times opinion page is the best analysis I have seen of how this issue should really be looked at in context. Maley covers all the important bases –his piece says it all. Thanks to the "Canberra Times".

TK 31.3.2004

"Reasons for keeping troops in Iraq don't stand close analysis"

-- By William Maley, "Canberra Times" Wednesday, 31 March 2004, Opinion, page 21

 

William Maley rebuts the arguments against Mark Latham’s proposal to withdraw troops from Iraq this year.

Mark Latham’s promise to bring Australian troops home from Iraq by Christmas highlights some of the complexities that can arise when middle powers are led by major powers such as the US and the United Kingdom into situations more challenging than leaders in capitals such as Washington and London appreciated properly.

Mr Latham's intervention has triggered a torrent of overheated rhetoric from the Prime Minister, as well as from some hitherto obscure back- benchers and assorted media commentators. Unfortunately, this has largely been at the expense of the careful analysis that the evolving situation requires; yet if ever there were a situation demanding level- headed appraisal, it is that in Iraq.

Some arguments can be put aside readily. The claim that Mr Latham's position adds significantly to the danger to Australian personnel in Iraq deserves short shrift; by far the greatest danger to Australian troops arises from their being in Iraq in the first place. If anything, a force that is slated for withdrawal already is a less attractive target than one deployed for an indefinite period, since it is more plausible for spoilers to claim the credit if they can precipitate the latter's withdrawal. Mercifully, Australian casualties have been avoided so far, not because Australian forces are not a target but because they are well protected, and "softer" targets are available in the form of US infantry and in far greater numbers.

A further argument is that the withdrawal of Australian forces would undermine the position of the embryonic Iraqi administration, to which the coalition proposes to hand "sovereignty" on July 1. Again, this seems somewhat far- fetched. Although Australia's formal duties as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 will come to an end with the hand- over of "sovereignty", the withdrawal of Australian troops would not imply the cessation of aid to Iraq.

Development funding to assist different spheres of Iraqi society might well prove a more effective way of helping ordinary Iraqis than the various services that Australian military personnel are providing, beneficial as they may be. Indeed, if the new Iraqi authorities are in such a debilitated position that the departure of 900-odd Australians would affect their position seriously, one can query legitimately whether the handing-over of "sovereignty" should be going ahead at all. The result could be a regime even less robust than the "sovereign" regime of South Vietnam in 1965.

This brings us to a key consideration, which the Howard Government is unlikely to admit but of which all serious commentators would be aware: that Australian troops - apart from those providing protection for Australian diplomats - are in Iraq not primarily to assist the Iraqis in any practical sense but to aid the Americans politically.

Their importance is a direct product of the limited support by the wider world for the intervention; if the US cannot retain the support of even one of its initial coalition partners, how can it seek credibly to shift the burden of what has become a very messy occupation on to the United Nations and the international community? This is a problem entirely of the Bush administration's own making.

As Dr Hans Blix has remarked pointedly, there is "something strange about the argument that the authority of the Security Council could be upheld by a minority of states in the Council ignoring the views of the majority". Further, the failure of the much-touted Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" to materialise, while apparently a laughing matter for President Bush, has naturally made many states wary of believing Washington's claims or following Washington's lead. In adopting a skeptical position, Mr Latham may find that he enjoys the support of many thinking Australians.

This might seem to exhaust the range of relevant arguments but one other has surfaced since the Madrid bombings and been deployed in Australia by, among others, the loquacious US Ambassador: that a withdrawal of troops could create the appearance of a win for terrorists.

A grim answer to this is to be found in part in the devastating testimony on March 24 of Richard Clarke, a heavyweight hitter in the area of counterterrorism, that "by invading Iraq the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism".

Those armchair warriors whose own obsessions have produced this unhappy outcome are poorly placed to dispense patronising instructions to others on how best to block the use of terror. In any case, for those with long memories there is a further reason for approaching the "win-for-terrorists" argument with great caution.

It is essentially that it is a new version of the disastrous argument put forward in 1966 by President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk to justify their position on the Vietnam War: that to disengage would create the appearance of a victory for the "communists". Ultimately, after much additional bloodshed, a different US administration abandoned the field. If Iraq turns into a real quagmire - something over which Australia has no control - the same thing could happen there too, although probably in stages (this is what some observers have called "cutting without appearing to run".) At most, the "win-for-terrorists" argument should be but one of a number of considerations taken into account and, if the continued Western presence is handing a strategic advantage to extremists, the fact that the withdrawal of some forces might be interpreted by extremists as a tactical victory should not be a decisive barrier to that step. When one has dug oneself into a hole it is a good idea at some point to stop digging.

There is one final matter on which Mr Latham's position is almost beyond dispute: the gulf between the Howard Government's rhetoric over Iraq and its exit from the main theatre of the war on terrorism, namely Afghanistan - a country where there was and is solid domestic and international support for an Australian presence, and where even small numbers of troops can make a difference. This retreat mirrored precisely the US's own lamentable loss of focus, which has permitted the recrudescence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda as threats to Afghanistan's stability. If the Government is serious about aiding a war against terror it will follow New Zealand's lead and send a provincial reconstruction team into the Afghan countryside.

Professor Maley is Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University, author of The Afghanistan Wars (2002), and co- editor of From Civil Strife to Civil Society: Civil and Military Responsibilities in Disrupted States (2003).