A War based on a lie  

PM Rudd made a decent speech explaining the withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq yesterday, saying there was no point continuing a war based on a lie.

THE withdrawal of Australian combat troops from Iraq reopened old wounds yesterday, when Kevin Rudd accused the Coalition of taking the nation to war based on a lie. In a terse statement to Parliament, the Prime Minister said the Howard government had embarked on the mission using abused intelligence and "without a full and proper assessment" of the consequences. Supporting the war without approval of the United Nations had set a dangerous precedent and undermined the international system, Mr Rudd said.

Brendan Nelson wasn't happy about this, complaining about weapons of mass destruction, Islamic terrorism and all sorts of other phantom menaces posed by the disarmed, secular dictator of Iraq at the time (now conveniently long dead courtesy of the death squad he was handed over to after his rushed trial, which had somehow avoided going over his worst crimes, possibly because of the inconvenient issues presented by naming his accomplices).

In honour of this little outburst, Crikey celebrated Dr Nelson's little bout of inadvertent truth telling last year, when he noted that the war was about oil.

A year, almost, in the thinking of Brendan Nelson.

July 2007 (as reported by the ABC):

Dr Nelson confirmed the Government viewed Australia's involvement in Iraq as partially driven by the need to secure oil supplies ... "The defence update we're releasing today sets out many priorities for Australia's defence and security -- and resource security is one of them," he said. "Obviously the Middle East itself, not only Iraq, but the entire region is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world."

June 2008 (yesterday in fact):

The heinous events of 11 September 2001 divided the lives of many Americans into two halves: that which had been lived prior to September 11 and everything that would come after. What then happened was that the United States realised that September 11 was the escalatory event of more than a decade of increasing terrorist attacks throughout the world principally but not only against America interests, from the attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993 to the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the attack on the USS Cole, the Marriott Hotel bombing, the Russian parade ground bombing and many other incidents. By September 11, clearly that was enough.

The United States and its allies, then looking out throughout the world for where future terrorist attacks might subsequently come, looked no further than Iraq. The decision was made by the United States and the United Kingdom—both of which asked Australia to consider participation—to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

Oil had nothing to do with it. Oil which, of course, will always be cheaper under a coalition government. Oh and by the way it's Tuesday night, which will explain the 500-metre queues of aging Commodores and Taragos by your friendly neighborhood servo. You've been warned. Ignore this advice if you live in Western Australia.

Crikey had another entertaining column on the saga - Iraq Withdrawal Sparks Only Polite Outrage From Nelson

Parliament took some time out from the petrol debate yesterday -- although, toward the end, even the Opposition chucked it in and began asking about something else. Question time was preceded by statements from Rudd and Nelson on the Iraq withdrawal.

Rudd commendably took the opportunity to get stuck into the previous Government over its participation in the attack on Iraq. This should never be glossed over or forgotten -- the Coalition took a considered decision to commit Australian troops to an illegal, immoral and, as it has turned out, plain stupid attack on Iraq, and Simon Crean, who was Opposition Leader at the time, copped plenty for leading Labor in opposing it.

Five years and literally uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqi dead later, a Labor Government is withdrawing our troops and the best the Coalition can do is mumble about the job not being done. ...

More impressively, however, Nelson did what only Dick Cheney has so far been willing to do -- link the war on Iraq to September 11, talking at length about "the heinous events of 11 September 2001" and how it explained the need to remove Saddam Hussein (and can everyone in public life please look up how to pronounce "heinous", because none of you ever do. If in doubt, watch the end of Kentucky Fried Movie for an excellent discussion of its pronunciation).

Don’t dismiss Nelson’s link out of hand. This is the bloke, after all, who as Defence Minister in the previous Government declared that Australia should stay in Iraq because of its oil.

Which, at the very least, gives the lie to the Government’s claims that the Coalition did nothing about oil prices during its time in office. On the contrary, it actually went to the trouble of joining in a war over oil. It’s just that it was a miserable failure.

One more from the Iraq front, with George Monbiot giving neocon John Bolton a taste of the life of Henry Kissinger after he no longer had the official protection of being part of the US administration - wondering if he'll be nabbed for war crimes whenever he visits a foreign country.

AMY GOODMAN: John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, escaped a citizen’s arrest Wednesday night as he addressed an audience gathered at the Hay Festival in Wales. Security guards blocked the path of columnist and activist George Monbiot, who tried to make the arrest as Bolton left the stage. Monbiot planned the action, because he says Bolton is a war criminal for his role in helping to initiate the invasion of Iraq in 2003 while he served as US undersecretary of state for arms control.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, I made my intention clear to perform a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton. I wrote a charge sheet detailing exactly the role that he had played in launching a war of aggression in violation of international treaties, which is a clear violation of the Nuremberg Principles. And I took a dossier of evidence down to the local police station. I asked them to act on it. But when they failed to arrest Mr. Bolton, I tried to arrest him myself, and I tried to get up onto the stage as he was leaving it. And I called out, “John Robert Bolton, I am arresting you for the charge of aggression, the crime of aggression, as defined by the Nuremberg Principles.” But I was caught by two very large security guards and pulled out of the venue very quickly.

AMY GOODMAN: How does a citizen’s arrest work?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, under an act of Parliament here, the Serious Organised [Crime and Police] Act, a citizen has the right to arrest anyone that they suspect to be guilty of a crime who would otherwise get away from the scene or escape without being arrested, and to hand that person over to the police. Now, there is a proviso which says that if—you can only act in this way if the police are unable to act to arrest this person. In this particular case, the police were able to act and had chosen not to do so. So, had I succeeded in arresting Mr. Bolton, I would have put myself on the wrong side of the law.

AMY GOODMAN: John Bolton has also been criticized for calling for US strikes on Iran. Earlier this month, the New York Times published an article, based solely on unnamed sources, suggesting the Lebanese group Hezbollah is training Iraqi militants inside Iran. Hours after the article was published, this is what John Bolton had to say on Fox News.

JOHN BOLTON: I think this is a case where the use of military force against a training camp or to show the Iranians we’re simply not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do, and then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, George Monbiot?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes. Well, John Bolton has the position that any and every country of which he disapproves should be attacked, and then we work out the justification for that attack later. He was one of the signatories of the letter sent by the Project for a New American Century to Bill Clinton in 1998, saying that we should attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. And he had one justification then, he had a different justification in 2003, he has a different justification today. It’s very clear that with Bolton, as with Bush, as with Cheney, as with Rumsfeld, the urge to go to war came first, and the justification came second.

Now, when you look at the main instruments of international law, you see very clearly that waging a preemptive war where you are not in an immediate crisis of self-defense is a crime against international law. In fact, the Nuremberg tribunals described it as the supreme international crime. And it was for that crime that most of the Nazi war criminals were convicted. And that is exactly the crime that Bolton has conspired in committing.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happened to Jose Bustani?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, Jose Bustani is a Brazilian diplomat who was head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. And in 2002, Bustani offered a way out of the impasse between Iraq in the United States. He said, OK, Saddam Hussein won’t allow the UNMOVIC inspectors in, primarily because UNSCOM turned out to have been infiltrated by the CIA, and so the successor organization UNMOVIC was viewed with intense suspicion in Iraq. Bustani said, “I can solve this problem for you by bringing Saddam Hussein into the Chemical Weapons Convention and then launching inspections of my own in Iraq, and therefore we could have a peaceful resolution to this crisis.”

Immediately, the United States swung into action against him—the delegation led by John Bolton—and demanded his dismissal as director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, failed at first and then threatened to withhold all its dues and to destroy the organization altogether, whereupon the other nations, led by the United Kingdom, went along with the US delegation and agreed to sack Bustani.

Bustani later took his case to an international labor organization tribunal and was completely exonerated of all the complaints which the US had leveled against him. And the only one which seemed to remain was that he had tried to prevent war from being waged with Iraq. And so, far from seeking a negotiated settlement to the issue of the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, John Bolton ensured that anyone—Bustani’s attempt to ensure there was a negotiated settlement was, in Bolton’s word, “tanked.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, George Monbiot, where you go from here? You didn’t—were not able to arrest John Bolton in Wales. Did he know what you were attempting to do?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes, he does. And he’s actually made a public statement concerning it. I would urge anyone who is in a position to do so to try to exercise a citizen’s arrest of any of the primary authors of the Iraq War. And I’m talking about Bush—that makes it very, very difficult, but it’s—there’s a higher chance obviously when he ceases to be president—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, and over here in the United Kingdom, Tony Blair and some of his cabinet ministers. And I certainly intend to try to carry out a citizen’s arrest of either Blair or one of the other senior architects of the war here in the United Kingdom.

And what I found from this instance was that even if you don’t succeed in carrying out the citizen’s arrest, you are able to focus a great deal of attention on the issue and to ensure that people do not forget. This is not an ordinary political mistake which was committed in Iraq. This was the supreme international crime, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Those people were not killed in the ordinary sense; they were murdered. And they were murdered by the authors of that war, who are the greatest mass murderers of the twenty-first century so far.