Last month the Prime Minister, John Howard, embarked on a whistle-stop tour of the frontlines in the war against international terrorism. Within days of his return from brief visits to Afghanistan and Iraq he delivered a speech marking the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
The speech will not go down as one of Howard’s greatest. But it is not that it was lacklustre that is of real importance. What matters is that it illustrates something about the sort of debate on Iraq we are having in Australia. In his speech Howard asked his critics to put aside their objections to the original decision to invade Iraq and instead to "consider the situation we now face and the stakes involved."
It is a line the Prime Minister has run before. And it is an attempt at shifting the focus of the debate from the decision to invade to what the Prime Minister called "our obligations to help the Iraqis." By shaping the debate in this way Howard is attempting to reposition himself on the moral high ground.
Those who continue to carp on the original decision, such a position suggests, are not only engaging in a stale argument, but worse, they are letting the Iraqis down. Yet while there is no doubt that we now have obligations to Iraqis, it should also be clear where responsibility lies for their current predicament. Our obligations stem from our role in creating havoc in the place.
This is not to say that the Iraqis were living in peace before Howard and his fellow hawks invaded. Iraqis had long been living under a brutal dictatorship. But the situation that Iraqis now face is the result not of Saddam’s regime but of the decision to invade and the consequences that have flowed from that decision. It was Howard and his colleagues in the US and Britain that unleashed this thing.
When Howard points to the devastating implications of a "premature withdrawal of coalition forces" while failing to take responsibility for his part in creating the problem, he is engaging in clever obfuscation.
The opposition leader has played right into this. Kevin Rudd’s emphasis on the withdrawal of Australian troops has meant that Australia’s debate on Iraq is shallow and parochial.
Rather than focussing on the real issue—the fate of the millions of Iraqis now living in desperate insecurity and the destablising repercussions for the whole Middle East—the debate in Australia continues to revolve around when Australian troops should return.
To be fair, the Prime Minister spoke of his "concern and distress" about the continued "violence and suffering" in Iraq and of a "bloody, chaotic problem." But it is language that does more to obscure than clarify the nature of the problem.
Nowhere in his recent speech—in which he quoted at some length a number of military officials who had made comments favourable to his argument—was Howard able to convey the extent of the tragedy that has befallen Iraqis.
The International Committee for the Red Cross last week reported that as a consequence of the conflict in their homeland, many Iraqis are unable to access adequate food, clean water or health care. Vital infrastructure, including power, water and sanitation systems remain in a state of disrepair.
And then there is the violence. We all know from the daily news reports of suicide bombings killing scores of people. On Thursday, the Iraqi Parliament, a building that is located within the maximum security Green Zone was bombed, killing up to eight people.
There is also another sort of violence that permeates Iraqi society and that is less widely reported. As part of the vicious sectarian conflict that continues in Iraq, large numbers of civilians are being killed and tortured, including by ‘death squads’ with links to the government.
A report by the United Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq published late last year noted that "7,054 civilians were violently killed in September and October 2006, with almost 5,000 in Baghdad alone, most of them bearing signs of torture and killed as a result of gunshot wounds."
The bodies of the victims of this violence are often dumped on the city streets, a practice that is reminiscent of Latin America’s so-called dirty wars. According to one newspaper report, there is a street in Baghdad in which so many corpses have been left that it has become known as the Street of Death.
It is almost impossible to imagine the sort of fear and insecurity that pervades the daily lives of individuals and communities living in such conditions. The situation is so dire that Iraqis are fleeing their homes and their homeland in extraordinary numbers.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, since early 2006 more than 700,000 Iraqis have fled their homes for other parts of Iraq. In early 2007 it was estimated that the numbers of the internally displaced were being added to at a rate of 50,000 per month. A further 2 million Iraqi refugees have sought refuge in neighbouring states and in 2006, Iraqis were seeking asylum in Europe at a greater rate than any other nationality.
In comparison to this reality, the debate over the withdrawal of Australian troops is completely incomprehensible. For Labor, there are political points to be scored by appealing to a policy of ‘bringing our boys home’ and chastising the government for its apparent failure to have an exit strategy from Iraq.
For the government, the question of troop withdrawal keeps the debate focused narrowly on the present without any reference to the circumstances that got us – and more importantly, the Iraqis—here. That Howard and the supporters of the war in Iraq are seeking to assume the moral high ground in the current debate ought to be beyond the bounds of logic.
The failure of the media and the opposition to return again and again to the moral responsibility that the Howard government has for the disaster in Iraq might also reflect something of the state of Australian political culture. It is further evidence that we do not have the ability to have a sustained and serious debate on the things that really matter.