The Age July 3, 2004

by Shaun Carney

Monday evening brought good news from Iraq. The bringing forward of the handover of sovereign power from the provisional authority to the interim regime by two days was a clever move. It was creative and smart, and could well have saved a lot of lives, given the likelihood of an orchestrated campaign of terrorism to coincide with the original handover date of June 30.

According to many of those who continue to trumpet the correctness of the decision by the US, Britain and Australia to invade Iraq, opponents of the war - I admit to being one - are not supposed to be happy about any peaceable development in Baghdad.

Opponents and sceptics of the invasion and occupation continue to be characterised as enemies of freedom, even as doppelgangers for terrorists. Anyone who questions the strategies of the Bush White House is told that there is a stark choice: you are either with us and everything we do or you are siding with evil.

Should you reject that particular formulation, you will then have a label applied to you. No matter that you simply tried to make up your mind based on the available evidence: you will either be a member of the left-liberal establishment or a peacenik. That means you are weak.

You will then be accused of being stupid, with no understanding of history. The way to do this is to be portrayed as someone who has failed to learn the lessons of the lead-up to the Second World War (translation: you're an appeaser) or the Cold War (a fellow traveller).

And, of course, you will by definition be reflexively, blindly anti-American. The imputation here is that you would rather that America failed in every endeavour, including the establishment of a free Iraq, and have the world overrun by terrorists, than see it have one success.

It is an absurd notion, especially when you consider just how wrong the pro-war crowd has been. The premise of the war turned out to be wrong. The occupation was comprehensively flubbed, something that historians will measure in blood.

No decent-thinking person wants anything but success for the new Iraq. But it is those who got this war so wrong who must be held to account.

Having found myself thoroughly unconvinced by the assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that he had links with known terrorist organisations, and alarmed at the consequences of a military invasion without United Nations sanction, I did not support the decision to go to war. It apparently follows axiomatically, therefore, that I want the new Iraq to fail.

My view, formed in the first few months of last year, was that rescuing the Iraqi people from Saddam's tyranny did not bear the same urgency as the need to find Osama bin Laden, and to crush al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah. Going around the world fighting an expensive war to save one group of people when you are under attack from enemies with no conscience and no regard for their own lives did not, and does not, seem wise or logical to me.

In any event, I believed that the Saddam regime would have - in the words of the man who devised the "shock and awe" military strategy, Harlan Ullman - collapsed under its own weight.

Some people did actually manage to reach an anti-war position after starting out with an open mind and then reaching a conclusion based on everything they could read and lots of discussions with people.

Sure there were a lot of overheated, silly claims being made by people against the war. But those who doubted the White House and its fellow coalition members were not the ones who went into a war that has cost many thousands of lives arguing it was about one thing (saving the world from Saddam's WMD in order to strike a vital blow against terror) and came out of it arguing that it was about something else (saving Iraqis from Saddam).

Nor are they the ones who refuse to accept responsibility for trumpeting a conflict that has created an expansive new theatre of terrorism, where recruitment to the anti-Western forces is apparently rampant. Some estimates put the number of Iraqis and imported fighters who make up the insurgency at 100,000 - almost two-thirds of the post-occupation military force.

For everyone, either pro- or anti-war, the best thing that could have happened in the past year would have been that some WMD were discovered. That would have given an undeniable sense of legitimacy to the invasion.

It would also have gone a long way to compensating for the incompetence that characterised the occupation, from the looting of Baghdad, to the sacking of the Iraqi army, to the surrender of Fallujah, to the sanctioned bestiality at Abu Ghraib, to the violent criminality that is now a part of everyday street life in Iraq.

Unfortunately for all of us, instead we have a situation in which those who plumped for war are becoming more aggressive with their assertion that those who opposed or even questioned the Iraqi adventure are encouraging "the terrorists".

I am willing to do a deal with those who make this assertion. I will accept that at least one terrorist or terrorist sympathiser will take comfort, even if it's only momentary, from hearing that some Australians maintain an anti-war stance, if the pro-war crowd can take responsibility for what they have helped to create.

In return, I just want to hear one pro-war advocate admit that the monumental mishandling of the occupation has needlessly cost many Iraqi and American and British lives. And that it has created a serious terrorism problem where before none existed.

These seem to me to be indisputable facts.

I am happy to be corrected but I did not, before, during or immediately after the war last year see or hear any advocate of the invasion predict that there would be a do-or-die showdown with terrorists or any sort of organised resistance going on in Iraq by the time the handover of sovereignty took place.

What I kept hearing last year was that those who doubted the strategy of Bush, Rumsfeld and Co were weak and dumb, that the occupation would probably not last beyond the 2003 calendar year and that the liberators would be greeted enthusiastically by Iraqis.

The message then was that it would be a cakewalk. The doubters turned out, to a reasonable degree, to be right. So what do the pro-war advocates now say?

They pretend that the murderous, expensive mistakes of their arrogant White House heroes have not happened and now say that the doubters must decide whether they are on the side of the terrorists or the Iraqi people.

And they do not deal with a fundamental truth. The initial premise of the war turned out to be false. If integrity and accountability count for anything in human endeavour, that has to have some importance.

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Letter to the Editor

Sean Carey (Opinion, Saturday) complains that he has been typically labelled "a member of the left-liberal establishment" because "fighting an expensive war to save one group of people when you are under attack from another ... did not, and does not, seem wise and logical" to him.

He assures us that "many people took that position after starting out with an open mind and then reaching a conclusion based on everything they could read and lots of discussions with people". Just as he open mindedly opposed overthrowing the status quo in Iraq before the war, now with complete consistency he upholds the status quo of the new Iraq that resulted from that war. Indeed, he says "no decent-thinking person wants anything but success for the new Iraq".

Sean is "willing to make a deal". If opponents of the old status quo are willing to admit that they were wrong, he is willing to admit that supporters of the old status quo were wrong. Why not? After all he now supports the new status quo. But he fears we are no closer to a resolution of his being labelled a member of the left-liberal establishment.

I reluctantly concur.

Albert Langer

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